Recently, with the guiding hands of Steven Troughton-Smith and James Padolsey, I’ve been dipping my toe into the ocean known as Mac OS X app development. I’m a complete and utter newbie to computer programming, but I have a great idea (or at least an improvement on an existing idea) so I’m delving into the unknown territory to see what happens.

Grab Up was a fantastic application for Mac OS X (a promised Windows version has still, after 6 months, failed to arrive) that allowed users to take a screenshot on their computer and have it automatically upload to the web, eventually leaving a URL of the image in the user’s clipboard. It’s supposed to be simple and easy to use. So why am I writing in the past tense?

Towards the end of 2008, Grab Up was acquired from its original developer. Since the acquisition the service that Grab Up provides has declined significantly. The new owner has switched hosting accounts a total of 3 times since the start of the year, meaning all previous grabs have been lost. The domain expired, was bought buy a squatter and all of this went unnoticed until someone tweeted to the new Grab Up owner. The service is frequently down, goes over their bandwidth allocation and can be more hassle than it’s actually worth. The URLs that Grab Up provides are long winded and unnecessary. Grab Up seems to be dying a slow and very painful death.

As I’m sure you’re aware, this leaves a fantastic gap in the market for a competitor. Step into the spotlight TinyGrab. Keyone Productions, the company of which I’m a founding partner in, is putting the facilities in place to create a fantastic image uploading and hosting service. For various reasons I can’t go into too much detail about the plans for TinyGrab, but keep your eyes on TinyGrab.com and this blog for exciting news soon.

Chris Leydon.

Twitter is the social network that half the world is going crazy about right now. The British media can’t seem to get enough of social networks, such as Facebook, but Twitter appears to be the favourite of the month. Hardly a day goes by when the BBC doesn’t have an article on their Technology News site where they don’t mention Twitter.

Just incase you have been living under a rock for the past few months, here’s a bit of background behind Twitter. Twitter is an online social networking application that just asks you one question, “What are you doing?”. The premise behind this is to keep those who want to know what you’re up to, informed. As it has once been described, Twitter is what happens between blog posts and emails.

In all honesty Twitter has been around since 2006, it’s only recently that the traditional broadcast media has cottoned onto it. A few months ago some celebrities, such as Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross began to use the service; with their media influence there has been a sudden explosion of interest in Twitter. This fresh explosion in the social network has unearthed the age old question that has been plaguing Twitter since its initial conception. How on earth is Twitter going to monetize?

Personally I hate the word “monetize” but I think it’s perfectly apt for this post. “Monetize” is a word that’s been floating about since the .com boom of the late 1990s. Business men and women see a new technology and start to wonder how they can make money out of it, how they can “monetize” an existing technology or service.

Usually, with online social networks and services, the typical way to monetize is through selling premium rate advertising on the network or service. Many current social networks already adopt this form of funding, in fact advertising is pretty much the biggest element that’s keeping the internet a float. Google makes money out of advertising, Yahoo supposedly do, Microsoft are attempting to, Facebook is leaning in the direction of selling advertising and many blogs and podcasts have adverts littered throughout them (although not THIS blog, for various personal choices).

The general feeling amongst the online tech world is that Twitter shall eventually follow the rest of the crowd and monetize using advertising. Current suggestions of how Twitter could implement advertising include displaying targeted adverts, that pick up on key words or traits, in between tweets on a user’s personal stream; very much like Google does with their search results (which leads onto another rumour about Google buying out Twitter). However many feel that this will disrupt the way Twitter works and that it wouldn’t really be an effective way of monetizing the system.

Twitter is unique in the fact that it has one massive obvious way that it can make money. People implement Twitter EVERYWHERE by using Twitter’s extensive API. The API that Twitter provides means that third parties can create applications that integrate with the social network. Whether it’s to build a simple Twitter desktop app, to analyse stats, or a plethora of many other possibilities, the Twitter API allows a third party to do this. So many people are coming up with exciting and fresh ways os using Twitter, through the API, that a single way to monetize Twitter seems to have appeared.

Thousands of dollars a day are poured into Twitter to keep it functional. Their server farms require electricity, cooling, security. They have to pay their engineers and keep their shareholders happy. A few months ago Twitter was struggling to meet with the demands of their ever expanding audience; servers were failing left, right and centre and the service became awfully unreliable. However, very few people were actually logging on to Twitter.com and actually using the site. The increase of traffic was coming from third party applications making use of Twitter’s API.

An interesting solution to monetizing Twitter is to charge for the use of their API. If Twitter were to start charging developers to access their API, Twitter might have a viable financial solution on their hands. An entire universe of third party applications that make use of the Twitter API exist, it’s part of the reason why Twitter has managed to survive when other similar social networks haven’t. Twitter integrates with everything and has become an incredibly powerful tool. It seems incredibly silly not to start charging for API access, now that the network behind Twitter has built up. Other companies and services are making use of the API, which is currently losing Twitter money. This would also be an effective way of avoiding charging users of Twitter for accounts. To me, it all seems perfectly logical. I have no idea though how much, or how, one would charge for API access; it’s just an idea.

Chris Leydon.

Fairly busy week.My Internet & HTML Technology assignment deadline and exam were this week. the exam was incredibly easy, I scored 97% which let’s face it isn’t bad going really; the assignment as perhaps the trickier task of the two.

The assignment was to create a website based around the streaming technologies that the BBC use on their websites. I had to create the website from scratch using a WYSIWYG, if you know me, or have seen my work, you know that I’m fairly capable at this kind of thing. The hardest thing about this assignment was simply the content; the BBC don’t REALLY use that many different streaming technologies, at least not that many up to date ones. They still use Real Video and Windows Media for their news reports, as an example, instead of Flash.

In the end I used a theme that I created for v.4.0 of the Keyone Productions website and customised it to fit my needs. If you want to take a look at the finished site, head on over to www.chrisleydon.com/bbc – I’m quite happy with my work.

I have one more assignment and one more exam left before I finish Uni for the year, the exam is on the 28th of April and the assignment needs to be in by the 2nd of June. My final assignment is for Audio Processing; I have to create an original piece of music and then write a report on the process, pretty much the same thing as last time – apart from this time we’re using Reason instead of Cubase.

I’ve taken this weekend off from working; I know that this isn’t a good plan but I feel as though I deserve it. Next week I’ll be working on Reason and the technical report. If I have some spare time I might even pop around once again, write a post and give you an update.

Chris Leydon.

All I actually seem to be doing today is typing. Don’t get me wrong, I love to write and type, but there are some days when all you do is one thing and you just get a little fed up of it. However on the other hand I still love it, after all I wouldn’t type otherwise. I have no need to write or type this post, but yet I am.

Most of my day today has revolved around getting the latest Podzone out, which it is by the way – head on over to www.thepodzone.net to download it… Although this morning, whilst recovering from a splitting hangover, I headed down to the Doctors surgery to be informed that I need to get an Ultra-scan to make sure that I don’t have testicular cancer.

My goal for the end of this week is to get v.4.1 of the Keyone site live and functioning correctly. v.4.0 of the site seems to have died in development hell, I’m not too sure why, but it seems as though it will never see the light of day; pity really, but to make sure that its memory lives on I’ll stick a screen shot of it on this post.

As soon as the Keyone site is up and running I’ll modify it to fit the needs of my Internet and HTML assignment; I’m pretty sure that plagiarising work that you’ve already created is allowed, although I’ll get that checked out.

Chris Leydon.