On the future of geo
Geoloc services are about to go ballistic. Sure FireEagle, BrightKite paved the way, and now Foursquare and Gowalla are ready for a good ole fashioned cage match smackdown, we are clearly in the early stages of epic battle over the future of location-based check-in services. That's all well and good, but I think we are on to something MUCH MUCH bigger with geo. Here at Infinitely Meta, we are working on something quite remarkable when it comes to Geo-based services and "Real Time" and we will roll out this capability with our forthcoming release of FriendSpider.
Companies like SimpleGeo, SkyHook are providing the important plumbing we need to build new geo-aware apps, and are poised for stellar growth. Niche players now have an opportunity to tap into the geo-service landgrab and stake their claim. We are very much taking an active role in this phenomenon and look forward to exciting new capabilities.
Stay tuned,
Infinitely Meta Team
team@infinitelymeta.com
Is your app geo-aware? #friendspider #geofencing
Reclaiming my river
I want to own my data. All of it. Period.
Rather than relying on external sites, services and aggregators, I'm going to try and use my blog as the dumping ground for the meta I speweth into the river. I realize that there is no silver bullet or perfect solution for this, but I'm hoping that with a few new tools, APIs, services, and techniques, I can piece together a reasonably complete archive. Once I have the archive, I can continue work on the LifeSplicing Engine I conceived a few years back.

Just an early sketch from a couple years ago.
To start, I'm looking at the Lifestream WP plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lifestream/) to see how many services I can pipe in for free. For services, sites, and data sources that don't readily make themselves available, I've got a few ideas I want to try using some RSS/ATOM/OPML trickery to normalize the floe.
This is likely going to be a very messy, noisy, and disruptive exercise. Please forgive any unwanted noise I spill into the river and remember that you can always block/delete me from your social graph if I become too much of an annoyance.
Labor Day Weekend Projects
My day started at Zoka Coffee in the University District.

Coffee, breakfast, and some light coding / app config. Then bailed for home, which is where I'm at right now. As it's a holiday weekend, where many our out squeezing in one last extended summer weekend, I'm pretty well tied up with the reality that are my unavoidable deliverables. I've got no problem spending my weekend this way, as I know I am working hard towards something much bigger. So with that, here's a list of what I've got on tap this Labor Day weekend.
What are you all doing? @infinitelymeta me on Twitter or *Like* this post on Friendfeed to get in on the conversation. That's where I tend to hang out on socnets these days.
Happy Labor Day everyone!
Brian's Uber List
- New range/oven delivery for unit 2214 (one of my new tenants stove broke so I replaced it with this:

- Put out For Rent sign for my soon to be available 1BR apartment in Eastlake, Seattle WA 98102. It rents for $1400 and is the entire lower floor of an historic Victorian home that was built in 1908. An excellent spacious unit with great lighting. Email eastlakeassociates at gmail if interested or call 206.328.3379 and leave a message.
- Java/JSF/AJAX - I'm putting the final interfaces and code tweaks in place for a project that I've spend a quarter working on. Final interfaces in place, but still have 75+ line item bug list. Need to go code complete by Monday evening to begin FTP transfer of Development VMware image from one side of our network to an internal only host. Still have A LOT of work ahead of me to finish this project and go into team only beta next week with Public Beta (internal corp net) on Sept 8.
- Landscaping & trim to prep for fall. Luckily, I really enjoy this task. Especially when my 5.5 yr old nephew Logan joins me. He makes some pretty good coin and he's a GREAT helper.
- Working with my friend Thom, the Ichthyogenius on our latest project, Reef In A Box that we are looking to launch in the coming months.
- Working on the YTranslate.us engine. Coding in PHP/mySQL/Python/etc. Toying with new SMS gateway (thanks to Mona' Friendfeed post).
- Meeting with contractor on some fix-r-up-r projects for 3 of my apts in preparation for Fall/Winter.
- Looking for electrician to install some motion-sensor aware lighting in my back alley and in between my building to deal with my unwanted-persons-on-my-property challenge.
- Water changes & general maintenance on my 300 gallon reef tank.
- Prep/meet with GC on new reef tank project. Wait till you see what I'm going to build. It's gonna pop!
- Shade garden v2. Part of the landscaping stuff I suppose, but definitely worthy of mention.
- Replace fire extinguisher in common area to be in compliance with recent Seattle City Fire Department inspection.
That's all I can remember for now.
Gnomedex – mind blowing electricifying neural stimulation transends geospatial dimensions and teleports us to the fifth dimension
OMFG. I can't muster the energy right now to capture the energy, passion, class, & inspiration that is Gnomedex. Until I come down off cloud 9, here's where my attention's currently at.
Follow the Friendfeed conversation.
Top 10 Reasons I should get a free Techcrunch50 invite
10. Seattle is the new San Francisco
9. I've had breakfast AND lunch with Scoble.


8. I once strapped a camera on my head and pretended to be iJustine.
7. I got better Gadgets than Nik Cubrilovoic.



6. I got .flv video clips of Mike, Shel, Nik, Loic, & Calley talking all sorts of nonsense on Qik.
0. UPDATE: I had to unblock Jason McCabe Calacanis before I sent my @reply on Twitter.
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EaaS and Federated Clouds
I predict this will be the buzzworld du jour today and in the weeks/months ahead. "Everything as a Service". Makes perfect sense to me. Cloud computing, which really started to take off when Amazon launched it's AWS platform, is here to stay.
Today, Techcrunch broke the news that they alluded to over the weekend. Essentially, a partnership between Intel, HP, Yahoo!, and a few others to build a new cloud computing platform to allow developers and researchers to test the next generation computing model.
This is a very important development that holds promise for Infinitely Meta, and the engines that we want to build and deploy to the cloud. Our original plans were to leverage Amazon's AWS cloud and Google's App Engine (and related sites/services) as the deployment vehicle for our engines, but this new project may trump both Amazon and Google. Remember that we can't yet discount Microsoft, as they are also working on building their cloud under the Mesh umbrella.
As we continue to build our prototypes, we will likely deploy our engines to whatever cloud we feel will meet our needs. Most likely we will deploy our engines across all available clouds for the highest degree of fault tolerance and redundancy.
I find it VERY interesting that the last domain I registered was http://federatedclouds.com
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Check out Identi.ca. Open Source Twitter Clone
A couple hours ago Marshall Kirkpatrick over at RWW posted about Identi.ca, a new open source Twitter clone. Check it out here: http://identi.ca.
My profile is here: http://identi.ca/infinitelymeta
A few first impressions:
- Logged in for first time using OpenID. Worked great. Then had to create "local" account to get new profile/handle, etc setup.
- Adding friends is pretty easy. Basic search and follow.
- Timeline - posts up to 140 characters. View Personal timeline and Everyone timeline.
- RSS - Dave Winer says it sucks. Add /rss to any url and you supposedly get RSS.
- XMPP - I'm just setting this up now. Will see how well it works.
- UPDATED: URLs - No auto-tiny URL (yet). I sent @evan a feature request.
I also downloaded the source code here and am actively picking through it to see how well written it is. Would be great if this were the start to a framework for a microblogging socnet platform that can scale. I could really use such a framework right now for one of my "engines".
That is all.
UPDATE: There is a "Coming Soon" FAQ here: http://identi.ca/doc/faq
UPDATE #2: Some now thinking it can't scale due to sql table / schema design. http://identi.ca/notice/4085
A time for exploration
Welcome to the next phase in the exploration of some ideas that I and several others had just over a year ago. This is one of many new sites we will be bringing online in the coming weeks, and hopefully months. Hold on tight, things could get a little crazy again. We're going to try and build a couple of the engines I've so desperately wanted to code up and deploy to the cloud.
Please do keep in mind that I am only able to devote a very limited amount of my precious time to exploring these ideas for now, as I have a full time job in the enterprise software industry where I work as a Senior Systems Engineer for Software AG Inc., and also own/manage Eastlake Associates LLC, a commercial property management business in Seattle, WA.
Major props to @kibmcz, my stealth coding ninja from parts way up north for helping pull this stuff all together so quickly. Be sure to check out KComputer Zone for all the meta. Special thanks to Chris Pirillo for a truly stellar WordPress theme. Well done! Bravo.
Now that I've got this nifty new WordPress blog, I will be retiring (not deleting) my old blog which I recently changed from http://bdeseattle.blogspot.com to infinitelymeta.blogspot.com. Please also be sure to follow me on Friendfeed and Twitter, as they are where you can figure out all the other socnets I frequent.
And now the fun continues.
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Recent Posts
- On the future of geo
- It’s all about the numbers. Whoa.
- The elusive Yukon River salmon makes an appearance for the first time in several years.
- THE Rock.
- Who wants a couple FREE stickers?

