Darren Stuart's random stuff

nothing to see here

Nothing much going on today, Did some business admin and played with an idea I have for a music related site. Tonight I am going to work on one of my ideas that will make me money as soon as I have it working IE I can sell it to my current clients…

Really enjoying twitter at the moment just have to get more people to follow and get some feckers to follow me… 

a day of rss

Today I spent much of the day playing around with the techmeme leaderboard.

I wish everyone would just offer an straight text only rss 2.0 feed. Life would be easy then :p 

I have also spent far to much time figuring out how techmeme could work over the last 24 hours. I really find the concept interesting but I think that its a very server intensive process with far to many moving parts to simply clone.

I am really enjoying just playing around with web tech at the moment to see if anything comes up. 

something random

I am a Jimi Hendrix fan and the most random thing happened on my ipod touch.

I have loads of Jimi on my ipod and I had a track from the bbc sessions introducing Hendrix and that he was going to play a Bob Dilan song can you please come crawl out your window and then it was the next track which wasn’t that track but another live album playing all along the watch tower. At first I thought the announcer had got it wrong :p

 On another note, I have given up checking facebook because well nothing ever happens. I think people just login to check on what other people are up too or install the latest batch of annoying apps. I think facebooks users will cotten on to this and then move on to the next thing. 

I am currently working on stuff for my own adventures in the start up space….

another day, another year

Hello and welcome 2008 my new best friend of a year…

So it seems I’d better make some resolutions in public so that I might actually stick to them. Here goes my list….

1. Lose weight, last year I got fat and this year I plan to get, well a lot less fat. When your weight starts to affect your life you know its time to act and I have reached that point. Time to look at weight lose as a challenge not a chore.
2. Stay in business, yep I am still in my first year of business and have been lucky so far and hope to build it further next year.
3. Release some web apps that I have been working on. I have far to many web app demos that I have worked on but never released to the world. I am not sure why I haven’t, maybe its fear of failure or that I am to easily distracted by the next idea. That ends this year I am going to put them out there.
4. shave more, I have a massive beard right now that really needs to be got rid off. I don’t know how Gemma puts up with it.
5. Be a better husband, I am not sure how to be as I am the best husband Gemma has but I will try, maybe shaving more is a start :p.
6. Unplug some more, I tend to be attached to a computer of some form for far to often.
7. get out more, both in work and in my personal life, see above for reason :P
8. move, not sure where but somewhere, maybe the US, maybe europe or maybe just up the road but its something that needs to be done. 
9. last but no means the least, be happy.

what a year 07 was

Peter Stuart
31st August 1946 - 5th November 2007

I miss you dad.

playing with dashcode on the mac

I have been playing around with dashcode and messed around with the default rss widget and made one for the yc hacker news feed.

you can grab it here

I just wish the yc rss feed had the score and number of comments etc.

times they are a changing

Facebook apps are a pointless business

I really don’t understand why people are putting so much effort into creating businesses around Facebook. Ok, they have millions of users but lets not forget the internet as a whole has a lot more. It’s plain to see that the first movers in this space had huge advantages with the invite wild west and the new comers are screwed. 

The problem for people trying to break into this space is marketing. How do you spread the word of your latest and greatest? (Who the hell uses the app directory?) 

Maybe people with 5000 friends might just find themselves being able to pimp themselves out to app developers to install apps so others can see them.

There is another problem with the domination Facebook and the top app developers. These guys can pimp out their latest features and app’s with ease to masses and so if they decide to take on your app then its lights out.

I think Facebook should do a weekly spotlight feature (oh the irony I bet it would be an app :p) and pick an app thats got low numbers but is worthy and tell all the users about it.

I also have a problem with the business model for apps because for it to pay off you need a lot of users to get the advertising revenue. Its a shame that Facebook users don’t pay for anything. In fact why don’t facebook create a market place around facebook points like xbox live. 

Lets face it the gravy train has left the station for facebook apps, your not going to get any free marketing out of releasing an app these days and your not going to be able to use the system to spread it like a virus, So you might as well just start working on OpenSocial :p 

designdick.com goes live

Just launched a little project called designdick. Its nothing rude but a play on words. Its a site that will generate text for you to insert in your designs instead of lorem ipsum. The text is from the book moby dick hence the name.

you can find it here, 

Design Dick.com :: a Lorem Ipsum alternative using moby dick