I’ve just finished watching the live presentation by Microsoft Xbox at E3 on live streaming. Wow. I mean, a geeky, geeky wow! Watch the media briefing, and also consider how this technology can be applied to the “User Interface” experience not only in gaming, but in computers. Because this is coming to PCs – you can bet on it…!
In the meantime, look at my geeky setup that I had while the broadcast was taking place:
(Yes – I did specifically wait for the Halo: Reach logo to appear before taking the screenshot, because I am that much of a Halo fanboy.)
Highlights for me were…
Live streaming of the event to New York Times Square!
New Xbox 360 brand tweak (green wave thing)
Halo: Reach – almost peeing with excitement for this one…! 🙂
Scary tech – Kinect allows you to log onto Xbox Live merely by waving at it (facial recognition)!
Ahhh! Scary tech 2 – Kinect has voice recognition for Xbox Live navigation as well! Just say what you want to access, and it launches it!
“Xbox – pause”. “Xbox – play”. I’m going to be uttering this all the time when I first get my hands on Kinect!
Video Kinect – enabling consumer videoconferencing across both Xbox and Windows Live Messenger!
I like the neat weather status as part of the videoconferencing window, as well as shared video and web browsing!
Kinect also tracks you, so will follow you if you wander around the room! 🙂
Meh – ESPN on Xbox Live. Not for us non-American folk, I guess…
An aside – I notice that Charlie Brooker is providing Twitter updates as the briefing happens live!
Kinectimals – I’m sorry. Too… Cute…! (Yeah, I like Pokémon, so I’m going to like shit like this…)
Holy crap – the technology is cool… A 10-year old mutters “Go get your jump-rope”, and the animal avatar comes back with a skipping rope!
Kinect Sports looks far too tiring for a lazy, inactive person like me…
That’s scary! Ubisoft demo a game that scans your body metrics – height, waist size, arm and leg length, shoulder width, etc. The clothing-penetrating camera can be used for nefarious purposes…!
Holy crap – online car brochures taken to a whole new level with a pitch for Ferrari. You can “walk” around the car, view at any angle, and pick up technical specs by tapping on the appropriate part of the car!
Gaming interaction is about to be changed – some demos look like cheap novelties, but the new User Experience is genuinely exciting. And I can’t wait for this to hit the PC…!
This is a very neat way of showing some of the features available in Bing Maps – including the ability to create and share your own contributions, the ability to Tour in 3D (much neater in the US where a lot of the cities have 3D models on the map), and also the ability to mark waypoints with details and photos!
Microsoft have just released a new video which provides an overview of the forthcoming Windows Live Essentials “Wave 4” release – check it out below. A quick rundown of key features:
Invoke the power of dark magic and have Windows Live Photo Gallery automatically recognise faces and allow you to quickly tag your friends
Easily retouch your photo to show the shot you want – like all the best paparazzi peeps
Combine elements of several photos into one final photo, allowing you to create a group shot of yourself alongside Obama and Saddam Hussein
Use Windows Live Movie Maker to create “You’ve Been Framed” style home movies no-one wants to watch, and upload to Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere
Saturate the web with the same boring old holiday shots – upload your photos and movies to SkyDrive/Live Mesh, flickr, Facebook MySpace, YouTube and others
Even better – bombard your mates directly with e-mail with Windows Live Mail (or your own regular e-mail client) connecting to Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo! Mail and others, so you can e-mail entire albums without actually attaching them to your message (courtesy of SkyDrive integration)
Keep banging on about your uninteresting photos by using Windows Live Writer and blogging to Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, TypePad AND WordPress for maximum saturation
Use Windows Live Sync to store your photos in the cloud, so you can bore people anytime, anywhere
Are you a flash bugger with more than one PC? Use Sync to keep your albums, er, synced over multiple computers
Harass your entire social network by using Windows Live Messenger, which now combines multiple social sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn and many others into one dashboard
Seriously, though – the freeWindows Live Essentials download (not available just quite yet) is full of fantastic applications that help integrate your social networks, manage photos and videos, and sync’n’share content very easily.
Like Seesmic Look, this tool is limited to Twitter only. However, the interface is quite slick and the whole application is quite fast. I also like the “infinite” scrolling… 🙂
It has been just about a month since I decided to launch wholeheartedly into the social networking scene. I have discovered, very quickly, what an incredibly disjointed experience this whole social networking thing is.
I aggregate, consume and disseminate information through my Windows Live blog, SkyDrive Photo Albums, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. However, I’m finding it incredibly hard to integrate these disparate services together. Also, in the age of pretty user-interfaces, seeing web pages as ugly as the examples below is slightly disappointing:
This is a very nice Silverlight client that runs locally on the desktop (either Windows or Mac). A very slick interface – slick enough for me to actually make a video tour rather than write some meaningless text about the swish interface…
I also like the fact that you can configure Outlook-style notifications:
But… The spoiler is in the name – this is very much for Facebook only. So – a great replacement for the official Facebook web page, but hardly the social aggregator I’m looking for. Still – very slick and shows great promise if they can integrate it with Twitter, YouTube and others… You can download here…
Seesmic Look
Seesmic Look is another Silverlight client that can also run on the desktop. Again – it also has a slick interface, so I’ve posted up another quick video tour of this…
Like the Silverlight Client for Facebook, though, the Seesmic Look client is currently very limited as it only pulls information from Twitter… Back to the drawing board for me, but don’t let that stop you from trying it out yourself…
Spindex
Spindex was the first real “aggregator” I tested out. Released by Microsoft FUSE Labs (FUSE standing for FUture Social Experiences), it does not really knit content together in a traditional sense. The focus is very much on search and the connectivity of information – it searches through your various social networking interactions (in my case Facebook and Twitter) and brings to the surface common themes and trends. Again – best explained by a video:
I like Spindex, but it is very weird and sometimes illogical. Although it collates all the information I need from various sources, it presents this info to me in what it deems the most relevant to me. Being a logical, methodical and anal type, I like sifting through all my information myself and making calls on what I think is and is not worth my attention… Give it a shot and see what you think…
[Update: OK – it appears that the ordering of the links was not deliberately “illogical”. Spindex should interleave all my posts from Facebook/Twitter/others and order them chronologically, which makes much more sense. However, this currently doesn’t happen for quite a few folk… http://bit.ly/aw22rj A big thumbs-up to the Spindex team for responding so quickly – they’re now looking into the issue…]
sobees web
sobees web is an interesting technology application, but boring practical application. It is again based on Silverlight, and can be run on the web or on the local desktop. Like Spindex, it also uses Windows Azure in the back-end – which hooks into various social networks (in addition to Facebook and Twitter, I also find that LinkedIn is supported).
Unfortunately, it only appears to provide basic (and separately listed) feeds, as you can see in the screenshot above. It also only really handles basic text feeds well – the navigation of friends, events, connections and so forth is pretty basic and poor. And forget about viewing photos and videos – trying to access these just launches a web browser back to the web-based interface of Facebook et. all.
This is similar to sobees web – better in some respects and worse in others. Seesmic Desktop is another Silverlight application (seeing a theme here?). It does aggregate feeds and presents them in one list (see screenshot above). Like sobees web – this is it’s main (only?) strength.
Again – there’s not much slick interaction – it’s not easy to navigate your list of friends, quickly view photos, perform searches, etc. Having said that – I’d still encourage folk to try it out…
Closing Thoughts
Well – I have to admit that I almost wet myself when I came across the Silverlight 4 Client for Facebook – the interface is extremely slick, fast and intuitive. Navigating around is easy and the Facebook information is incredibly well-presented. The downside is that it doesn’t quite aggregate any other data at the moment. In an ideal world, this client would be expanded to support other social networks – add a sprinkling of the clever search integration in Spindex and I’d have the perfect client for knitting together my online social life.
Coming on the horizon, though, are further attempts to mash-up the social networks… Windows Phone 7 will bring this to the mobile phone in a far slicker way than any device so far, and I hear good things about the tight integration of social networks in Windows Live “Wave 4”, which is due out in the next few months… However, I’m personally really excited about the social integration within Windows Phone 7:
In the meantime, I’ll still struggle along with a combination of the Facebook and Twitter interfaces on the web browser and mobile phone, as well as using the Silverlight 4 Client for Facebook and Spindex.
Anyone else come across any interesting aggregators…?
Greece may be imploding as a result of its own financial meltdown. The UK elections are reaching fever pitch, with potentially one of the most exciting outcomes for over a century (especially if you’re pro-LibDem).
And I’m excited. Over my new toy… 🙂 Yep – my priorities are in all the wrong order again…!
Since it was announced at the start of the year, I’ve been waiting for the new Sony DSC-HX5V to become available in the UK.
It’s here, and I’m happy. I now have a newer, nicer, compact camera job that can get thrown around and used to capture much drunken hilarity.
Which is well-timed, as I’m down in Edinburgh this weekend for an evening of utterly irresponsible drunken “hilarity”. If I don’t end up in hospital having my stomach pumped, then the weekend is a failure.
My business meeting on Monday in Edinburgh should prove interesting… 😉
OK – so it might be a massive pile of marketing shite, and there’s no way I’ll end up as trendy (or as young) as the target market of the Microsoft KIN, but one of the core messages in the KIN reveal and launch really struck a chord with me. Given the collection of contacts I’ve built up over the years, and the fact that I’ve just now succumbed to the whole social networking thing (thanks, peer pressure) – it does have me thinking who are my Friends, “friends” and FRIENDS.
If you can sit through a pile of pretentious gash on how trendy (and apparently jobless) people swim in the social ocean, this quick marketing video nonsense encapsulates what I’m trying to find out for myself…
So… Where do you sit? And more honestly, would you actually care?!? 🙂
By slightly bastardising the title of the similarly named film, I think I’ve hit the nail on the head of this small social experiment I’m running on myself.
As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I think that the time has come where I launch myself wholeheartedly into the craze of social networking. As usual, I’m electing to do things slightly differently by attempting to mash my separate technical, professional and social lives together. Into the mix everything goes – family members, friends, business acquaintances, employees, the network of Microsoft folk I know – just about everyone that I choose to have an interaction with, basically.
This should prove interesting (if only to satisfy my own curiosity). Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that most people try to keep their personal and business lives at arms-length, and for good reason. I’m half expecting this little experiment to end in tears. There’s the risk that clients (and potential clients) will be shocked that their technical consultant embarks on some randomly outrageous drunken irresponsibility during weekends… Friends may wonder who this condescending business wanker is… Employees may possibly despair that their continued employment rests on such a flippant individual. And business partners and technical contacts may question exactly why they’ve chosen to network with this flaky personality…
This should definitely be an interesting experiment for me…
Let’s see where this goes – and whether it enhances or destroys any credibility I have in the circles that I play in… 🙂
Links to various social networks on the left, under StanYau+!
Thanks to Microsoft, we can waste yet more hours of our lives sitting in front of the PC watching these shows, furiously trying to recapture our student youth… Huzzah!
RandomStan 