Instant message bots are all the rage at the moment. Twitter has an IM bot, Google has recently provided language translation via instant messaging.

For example, invite en2zh@bot.talk.google.com to be your friend on Google Talk and it will translate English text to Chinese.

There are 24 bots currently available: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. As some have guessed, this is a 20% project, and while machine translation isn’t perfect, we hope these bots can be helpful in bridging language barriers.

Seen via blogscoped.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

One of the great minds of the 20th Century passed away today. His visions of the future inspired me growing up and fuelled my interest in the sciences.

News reports are here and here.

Update: Economist article

I admit, I didn’t understand Twitter when it first came out. I still wasn’t sold on the second wave of popularity. In fact, the blogosphere never sold me on Twitter. So why am I now using it regularly?

Local.

It needed to be local for me. Once a few of the developers in my office started using it, I payed more attention to my own account. Now it’s more addictive than Facebook. Although for similar reasons.

The difference is that you can follow someone on Twitter without needing to establish friendship. Thus I can quote one of my heros:

duncan: I’ve decided I dislike using Twitter as a replacement for Chat. Chat’s TCP. I liked Twitter for being UDP.

The UDP/TCP distinction completely nails it for me. Twitter is all about broadcast. Chat is better for exactly that, chatting.

The whole status thing has been done before, the status message in MSN, the status in Facebook. The catch is that they are all walled gardens and require a two way relationship to be established.

The benefit of a low barrier to subscription to broadcast is that anyone can follow updates. This means that you hear things on Twitter before they get anywhere else.

It feels more dynamic.

It is the backchannel for the internet.

I’m sold.

(Hat tip to Tony for the selling)

I’m convinced that sync is a big thing. There are lots more players in this space, attempting to solve a simple problem: We use many devices.

My calendar has lived in Outlook/Exchange for many years, and our corporate IT policies has made it hard to re-use this data. Google and Apple, combined, made my day.

1. Google Calendar Sync - sync between Google Calendar and Outlook
2. iCal - subscribe to remote calendars
3. iSync - sync my calendar to my phone and .Mac

The final result is that I can manage my calendar on my PC, and view it on the web, share it with others, see it on my various Apple computers and have it updated into my phone.

The astute reader will notice that I can’t update my Outlook calendar with this setup. And that’s the way I set it, so I don’t risk corruption of Outlook.

When multiple services are sync’d together, like my calendar example, you start to have sync messages flying all over the place. Add in some other common data points, like contacts, email, bookmarks, etc, and it starts to get messy.

At an enterprise level, this was “solved” using an ESB. The solution in consumer space is for one sync broker to be the master. And this has led to a race to be the master sync point. Google, Apple, and Plaxo are all contenders.

Sync gives you the best of both worlds, access to your information in the cloud, while keeping it up-to-date on your desktop and in your pocket.

Competition in this space is a win for all of us.

From On Being a Photographer:

These basic principles are:

1. Photographers are not primarily interested in photography. They have a focused energy and enthusiasm which is directed at an outside, physically present, other. They bring to this subject an exaggerated sense of curiosity, backed up by knowledge gleaned from reading, writing, talking, note-taking.
2. The photographer transmits this passion in “the thing itself” by making pictures, therefore the subject must lend itself to a visual medium, as opposed to, say, writing about it.
3. The photographer must assiduously practice his/her craft so that there is no technical impediment between realizing the idea and transmitting it through the final print.
4. The photographer must have the ability to analyze the components of the subject-idea so that a set of images not only reflects the basic categories but also displays visual variety. Intense clear thinking is a prerequisite for fine photography
5. The photographer is aware that, like all difficult endeavors, to be good at photography requires an unusual capacity for continuous hard work and …

Good luck.

Brilliant book. One that I was drawn to by the sample chapter (pdf), and one I will read again.

If the discussion between David Hurn and Bill Jay was held today, it would be published as a seven part podcast. I’m glad that it comes as a book. This means it stays in my house for years rather than days.