Phew

Incredible how quickly stuff spreads. I've seen this before with new launches, but it still never ceases to amaze me. A week ago, searching google for "stufflinker" returned one result. Now it's three pages - and the stats are starting to show it...

Anyway. Tonight I changed some cookie settings, made a few tweaks to an underlying script or two, usual geekfodder. Also made a small but significant change to the display script for incoming messages - now if your SMS contains commas, the script will parse them into the tab view as a boolean "OR". In other words, if you stufflink "banana, train, xml" then it will get passed to each tab as "banana OR train OR xml". It seems to work well, but as always, let me know what you think.

Boring but necessary

Well, it's far too nice a morning to be sitting in front of a PC, so I'm off now...Have just completed a database upgrade and all the irritating but necessary code fiddlings that came along with it. End result for users: nothing has changed...

It often strikes me how strange it is that techy types work for days on end in order to carry out some kind of obscure back-end update and what we hope and pray for at the end of the day is that no-one will notice...

And with that thought, I'm off to get a coffee.

Starting to happen

Stufflinker launched into private beta a week ago and all the initial signs are pretty exciting. Friends who I'm asking to demo the site seem to get it - and also find it useful, which is certainly two steps in the right direction.

One thing that I've always found kinda reassuring about the concept is that I actually use it myself all the time as well. If I'm out and about and need to remember to do something, or see a website address that I want to check out, all I have to do is send a text and that's it - stored.

I've been working on a couple of bits of functionality which should improve the site: there is now an extra tab on my mobile stuff for Amazon (which means if you save a title or author/artist of a book, CD, DVD etc. then you now get a context tab with images through to buy on the site). I also had a quick crack at an eBay tab before getting royally fekked off with the extremely painful process you appear to have to go through to get their API working. I'm sure I'll try it again when I'm less tired and it'll all be easy after all...

The other thing I've been playing around with is the provision of widgets and RSS of both mobile messages and web links. Seems to be working ok, but I need to think a bit harder about the public/private settings for these to make sure it all works coherently...

I'll put a "we want" and "I've done" list on the developer pages of stufflinker shortly - please feel free to use the contact form to suggest further improvements.

Last, and actually the most important thing of all - I'm starting to get quite a lot of traffic and emails through the site. It has been on the MOMB - see http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/invitation/stufflinker as well as BuzzShout - see http://www.buzzshout.com/listing.php?name=stufflinker - two of my favourite websites for tracking new launches. So cheers, guys..

Texting levels reach record high

The Mobile Data Association (MDA) announced that UK users sent 3.3 billion text messages in May, according to the BBC today.

Now, I'm a big fan of the new technologies like mobile barcode scanners and the like, but it seems obvious to me that text messaging is still (and will remain for some time) the communication of choice among the vast majority of mobile users.

Hence (caution, sales pitch alert) why I believe stufflinker is such a good idea: Take a technology that people are already very comfortable with, and then gently expand the boundary of their experience so that it encompasses new, less familiar territory. Call it experience expansion if you like...

Actually, now I think about it, this is similar to the bunch of thoughts I had while at the recent Content 2.0 conference. It was a great conference, and I don't think there was a word there which I disagreed with (actually, not true, but nothing I'm going to write about here..) but the thing which kept digging at me was that we were blatantly a room full of geeks trying to get stuff across to a world full of tech novices. Most people I talk to in the real world don't use social software, haven't heard of Flickr, don't give a crap about what an API is.

What am I getting round to saying? Well, basically...

• I think I've built the beginnings of an interesting application which - literally - my mum will use
• I am very much up for all that APIMashabilityRSSOpenstandardsness and will be building technologies onto the system which do this as time goes on - keep an eye on the developers section of stufflinker, at www.stufflinker.com/sl/developers
  
• I want to test stufflinker with non-geeks in preference to geeks, and try and find ways of bridging the techgap. If you want to get involved - particularly if you're a non-geek, but really, if you're anyone, please use the contact form to request beta access to stufflinker
  

Private beta opens

Well, at long last I managed to iron out the creases late last night and I can now to announce that the Stufflinker private beta is now open. The site is still very much a work in progress, but the core functionality works now: new users can join via SMS, and existing users can of course log in and manage both their mobile and web stuff.

With this early release, the following are among some of the features available (but only when logged in):



Detailed listing of mobile messages which click through to a tab enabled web linker










Recently added web stuff using the stufflinker bookmarklet








Tag Cloud of "my web stuff"









If you want to help me test the site, please use the contact form. Thanks!

stufflinker begins

Stufflinker has been on my idea shelf for a while. Maybe 3 years, if you include all the thoughts I've had about saving ideas.

The basic premise hasn't actually changed very much: People have ideas, lots of them. We also see lots of stuff out there in the world which helps these ideas along. Usually, especially if you're me (ie. memory like a sieve), these ideas go into the mix but the detail can get lost.

So the idea is this: why should I be limited to bookmarking when I'm at home. Why can't I make notes while I'm out and about? Why can't I use the most ubiquitous device I own - my mobile phone - and use it to keep track of my ideas?