I’m hoping the writing will tire me out enough for me to sleep, and also because I thought I’d share what’s on my mind – which is, coincidentally, the same thing that’s preventing me from sleeping.

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Since my last prophetic success (LOL), I’d like to make a few more social media predictions (which aren’t so far removed from my own technological wish-list, actually):

1. Tit for Tat:
   A Facebook app that goes through your friend list, discovers what privacy settings people use on you and apply those same settings back on them.

   Sounds like childish pettiness, I know, but look at it his way: we’ve reached an age in which information can be valued – or priced.

   Hence, if Entity A has more information about Entity B than the converse, Entity A has greater leverage and Entity B stands to lose out.

   Now, answer me truthfully: would you rather be Entity A or Entity B?

   Precisely.

   And knowing how some of our information on Facebook has the potential to make or break us, it’s only fair for information to be shared in as fair a manner as possible.

   I’m as sure as hell not going to trawl through my Friend list to figure out privacy settings for each individual ‘Friend’, so an automated process to do this would be nice.

2. Mute function and Timeline for Twitter web client:
   These are actually quite low-level ideas, but I think they’d really make Twitter better to use in the long run.
   • When I’m using my Mac at home, I have Tweetdeck which works great in terms of muting stupid people who tweet about inane things.

     However, I don’t always use a Twitter app that has this function which means there’s a lot of noise I have no way of filtering out.

     I’d unfollow these people, but I think it’s rude, so I’d rather just mute them – similar principle to that of Tit-for-Tat, I guess.

   • Twitter needs a timeline in the same way Facebook has one, just so we can re-discover all our ‘old-but-gold’ posts and marvel at how intelligent (or alternatively, how juvenile) we used to be.

     Until we started working and turned into our parents.

3. Google Tunes:
   This is different from Google Music in that it works like a normal Google search.

   Instead of a textual input, however, you SING or hum a tune to your computer or Siri or what have you.

   The Google Tune search then scours its ginormous database to find the name of the song you’ve just hummed, thereby saving you many sleepless nights of having an earworm run through your head endlessly.

   This is especially helpful when you can’t Google the lyrics because you don’t, for the life of you, know what the lyrics are – but you know the tune to the chorus very, very, very well.

   Tragicomedy aside, it’s possibly the highest-level idea of the lot, because it’s very close to the concept of what Web 3.0 is envisioned to be like.

Let me know when these things come about, or better yet – if similar products already exist.

(Some background context here: I don’t normally listen to the radio, local or otherwise, because I don’t like 80% of the music that is played, the advertising jangles are lame and the DJs’ banal chatter annoys me. But Virgin Radio was different – the songs played like my iTunes playlist, the advertisements were creative and the DJs at least displayed some degree of intelligence.

This also meant that I was introduced to new songs which I’d like too, which was good, because it helped me keep my knowledge of music fresh and relevant. But I was rather sad when the station stopped functioning, and I kind of lost interest in listening to music between then and now. No more, though!)

Anyway, I don’t know how I didn’t know about the change earlier (or maybe it never occurred to me to check), but better late than never, I guess. If you want to listen to Absolute Radio too, point your brower toward this link and click on ‘Listen Live’ to find out the ways in which you can listen to the station.

To reiterate my point about the music: they’re playing “Patience” by Guns N’ Roses now as I conclude this post.

Our pet peeve is not being to get an early enough headstart because of the lack of a proper notification system. The current technology we use is Windows i.e. we look out of the window in the I & E room where we’re seated and guesstimate when it is we should leave.

Bad jokes aside, we also make use of the NEA’s Local Weather portion of the website quite a bit. But being the humans that we are, pulling the information from the website can be quite a hassle sometimes.

So what does one do? In an age where humanity’s kinship with that of electric currents has long been recognised (i.e. we follow the path of least resistance, LOL), ‘push’ technology comes into the picture.

Presenting to you, ladies and gentlemen, the Weather Widgets for the Mac OS X Dashboard!

The best part is: it didn’t require much technological know-how, just an awareness of Safari’s Web Clip feature in Leopard. For the real Windows users: no worries, there’s something in this for you too, cos I’m a very inclusive person You might wanna try this Singapore Rain Map Yahoo! Widget, or keep your eyes peeled for NEA to develop its RSS notifications, which you probably might be able to convert into an SMS notification… Somehow. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Anyway, he says he’s been using Google Reader to read my links. At last count, there were three subscribers to my feed – so I’m guessing the other two subscribers are Dr Ashley Tan and Mr Andrew Chong. Right?

Google Reader via kwout

Kar Wee was also asking where I get my links from and how I post them up. It’s also related to Google Reader – this post should explain everything. Google Reader rocks, but my readers rock more!

(via)

By the way, I may have been the one (or at the very least, one of the people) who provided the tip-off about the story… And believe it or not, it was through Twitter. Here’s the chronology of tweets with some background information:

Twitter / Laremy Lee: Back at NUS now for India … via kwout

I posted these, and other ‘web’ tweets using tweet.sg when I returned to NUS for the India Trip exhibition thingy.

Twitter / Laremy Lee: Also, just found out that … via kwout

I learnt about the expulsion from Zee, who was “one of the KR guys” I met. I’m not going to comment too much on the punishment, but let’s just say that I believe it’s a fallacy for every action to deserve a punitive reaction, especially one of this measure.

Twitter / Direct Messages via kwout

It took a sharp-eyed journo who’s very in tune with the workings of social media to spot my Tweet, and before long, the reporters were on their way.

Twitter / Sent Direct Messages via kwout

Twitter / Direct Messages via kwout

So ladies and gentlemen, if you ever need an example about how collaborative Web 2.0 technologies are, and the potential for these technologies, here’s a classic one for you. Cheers, and have a great weekend.

P.S. My reply:

Twitter / Sent Direct Messages via kwout

It’s not something I normally do, but until I figure out what’s my comfort level with students stepping into what is a private space to me, I’ll have to impose a hard and fast rule: no student adds to my Facebook account under any condition whatsoever.

But don’t be sad – I still consider you my friend in real life okay… Just that you have to call me Sir. Hohoho!

The trainee teachers at Saint Gabriel’s Secondary have been using the I & E (Innovation and Enterprise?) Hub on the third level, far, far away from the staff room, which is on the second level.

It means that we have the room to ourselves most of the time, which is quite a good thing, since all the other trainees are fun people too, so we share many good chucks and food.

But it also means that we are suffering from a dire shortage of LAN access points, which translates to a semi-Internet famine, where five people share two cables (one person is using M1 wireless broadband).

SO HOW?

Dunch worry – I have the Mac, so I is having the power. I’m using the Internet Sharing function to act as a router for everyone else *cough* Windows users *cough*. We had some hiccups initially, but everyone has fair use of the Internets now, so all is well again in Trainee Teacher Land.

Instructions to configure your Windows computers to connect to the Internets from Mac computers here, courtesy of Google which found this original forum post.

It fits my needs because I read a lot of stuff using Google Reader, and I like to share what I read with people, but find the whole copying and pasting of links very laycheh. So far, have only been able to port my ‘reading lists’ into my Facebook feeds, but haven’t been successful in automatically porting it into my blog feed – until now.

Hope you enjoy reading my shared items, or if you blog and use Google Reader too and have been looking for something like this, hope this has been a useful discovery for you too!