Exactly because Worpdress is now so full featured and polished, the development team is going to take a development cycle of three months off. Not to sit at the beach and look at their final product, but to improve all the things around the platform, such as the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… Sounds like a smart move to me.

I’ve just updated to 3.0 which all went smoothly and am looking at the backside of Thelonious right now (all their updates are named after jazz legends). It looks very similar, but just a little cleaner and fresher. Other improvements are the updated default theme and the incorporation of WordPress MU (Multi User) into the regular version, which lets you administrate multiple sites. For more information on the new version check out their video below.

Via Techcrunch

If you already have a twitter account with a group of friends you have hand picked, then you probably also enjoy reading the links they’ve sent. Now Twittertim.es works really easily in managing and displaying the links from your friends. It’s a really cool way to see what is hot with your twitter friends right now. The only thing you have to do is log in with your twitter account and Twittertim.es goes crunching. Interestingly this takes about an hour, but then they have made a personal page for you. What you see is a page with stories which are linked to by your friends, or your friends’ friends. Where Feedly uses Google Reader shared item counts to rank news, Twittertim.es uses the number of times your friends posted something on their twitter accounts.

Another cool features is that you can view someone else’s page. Mine can be found on twittertim.es/tobiasverhoog. So you will not see a page with links by me there, but links from my twitter friends. Go to their homepage to also see a couple of example pages from some better known internet journalists such as Tim O’Reilly or Jeff Jarvis. You can also watch a video tour there.

Finally, pages by Media Sources and pages based on Twitter Lists are nice ways to explore more news sources. View a page of Wired or The New York Times or one based on links of the twitter list “Tech News People” curated by Robert Scoble. You don’t need to first make you own page to view these pages.

It’s clear that it’s very interesting to view news based on what your friends are reading and sharing on their twitter accounts. It’s funny that in the screenshot I just took for this article the piece on the new version of Digg is on top, because I think this is what news aggregators such as Digg and also Feedly need. Recommended news from your friends, added up by popularity and displayed in a convenient and clear way.

It’s the image of a dog on a colorful background giving you (often bad) advice. It’s only when you start to realize how these images and the whole meme was created you might view it as art. But more like the kind of art that won’t be recognized for it until 500 years from now someone digs up a computer server from the nuclear wastelands and thinks this is the way we express ourselves in the beginning of the third millennium.

Just have a look and try to see what I mean. These came in existence in the same way the marble season started on your school in the past. There is never any coordination or manual but it appears anyway. I have to give a small warning though, many of these are rude, insulting or otherwise politically incorrect. Make your own with the meme generator!

Advice Dog has many spin-offs: Courage Wolf, Foul Bachelor Frog, Socially Awkward Penguin, Technologically Impaired Duck and my favorite, Philosoraptor.

If you still don’t believe it’s art then look at the following video. It’s of an unrelated meme, but shows very nice how that originated, from a computer glitch to many people creating their own version and hundreds of thousands of people watching the creations.

Do you have a cool Tumblr blog or do you have any favorite ones you follow? Or do you know any other ways to share images? (I have also tried vi.sualize.us which is more like visual bookmarking and also pretty cool)

The idea is not just a gadget blog where authors tell you what to think of something, but a more social experience. You can sign up for an account and add gadgets to your profile that you want or have. After this you can review them and of course read other reviews and discuss all the new shinies. I haven’t spent a lot of time there yet and as it has just launched the community has to grow. You can connect with my at my profile. But it is that community that has the potential to make this big. It looks like a great way to stay on top of the latest things and show off your new gadgets. If only they found a way to add that new plastic Taiwan smell.

Please Say Something – Full Length from David OReilly on Vimeo.

A troubled relationship between a Cat and Mouse set in the distant Future. Winner of the Golden Bear for best short film at the 2009 Berlinale.

Written, Directed & Produced by David OReilly, Sound design & Voice synthesis by David Kamp, Sound design & Music by Bram Meindersma. Distributed by Future Shorts.

Online the motto should change from “All the news that’s fit to print” (since 1896 the NY Times‘ motto) to “All the news that’s fit to link”. In what way will you find and display the interesting pieces of news and articles? How the online content is created is another story and out of reach of this piece. Dave Winer, webpioneer and developer is always experimenting with new things and very interested in the future of newspapers and news.

He has made a personal newspage with a list of links to articles. These links are shared on his twitter page where people can click on them. The links are shortened with the service of tr.im which enables Dave to see their clickcount. The list is ranked by the amount of clicks, which creates a democratic news site. It’s true that the subjects are picked by Dave, but the clickcount determines where each article stands.

Some of his other experiments are also interesting. He started 100twt, a page with the tweets of the 100 most followed twitterers. I think that mostly was to show that these are not the most active or interesting people on twitter. A good example is Oprah who still ocassionaly updates, but her latest interaction is from april 25th. And even that wasn’t with a fan, but with Hugh Jackman. Also included in 100twt are pages of the people working at Twitter and the NY Times. This way you can see how the company deals with the medium itself and how reporters use it.

Another way to use a similar system is Friendfeed. It’s not only possible to use the very extended search feature to find the most discussed and interesting entries of certain friends or topics, but it’s also possible to view a page with the “Best of Day” entries from your contacts that have received the most “likes” or “comments”. I like these experiments to discover interesting news and articles!

This results in the following example gems:

• it makes me sad, the more I have success the more people don’t like me…. - by @iamsammis
• Went to the gym this morning. As I left, everyone said I was the best! – by @serafinowicz
• ok poop is coming out. – by @leto75

Logging in and voting can be done just using your twitter credentials. Let me know if you’ve found anything interesting on www.tweetingtoohard.com

via Mona on Friendfeed

As I said the site is your main hub for all of your online communication needs and this has only improved since today’s redesign. It’s very versatile (it can be used in many ways) and very powerful (you can add an extract a lot of information).

One way of using it is just like twitter, but then with many more possibilities of adding images, videos and links to your messages. So forget about twitpic, mobypicture, powertwitter and other services like URL shorteners and unshorteners, because you can all add it to Friendfeed. Another way of using Friendfeed is by having a great overview of all of your contacts online activity in one place like blogposts, flickr photos, vimeo videos and digg and youtube favorites for example. On the other side it’s a nice way to collect all your own things and display them in a nice centralized way.

But enough introduction. I’m just telling this because I am enthousiastic about it and think Friendfeed could easily replace twitter, facebook, myspace and other social networks. You just have to know how and take some time figuring out the site. To see the new design in action go to http://beta.friendfeed.com. You can find my profile on http://beta.friendfeed.com/tobiasverhoog.

The most interesting changes since today are:

• All the pages are real-time now. (This can look imposing, but there is a pause button and with the right filters and lists this becomes very usable)
• You can send contacts direct messages. These are regular posts, but the receiver gets a flag in their received messages list. This is what I was missing to have it replace twitter. I have to give it some more tryout time and of course my twitter contacts have to make the jump)
• In the design the person from whom something comes is more emphasized than what source it came from.
• There is a (modest) profile page.
• Filtering and searching has changed and improved. This requires some more time to figure out and setup, but after a while you can perfectly tune the site to your needs.

There are all sorts of large and small changes, that above all have to make the communication and sharing with your contacts easier. It’s a bit more like a real-time chatroom. For more elaborate reviews go to Techcrunch, Scobleizer, Thomas Hawk and the Friendfeed blog itself. These blogs have already gotten a preview last friday. They had only forgotten to invite yours truly. It’s a disgrace…

Difficult Joe

I would like to introduce Magnetic Joe. It’s my favorite game on my ipod touch and ofcouse the iphone. Joe is a purple ball who, despite what his name suggests, isn’t magnetic all the time, but only when you press your finger against the glass somewhere. Joe is pulled to the blue magnets that are spread out in the 2D mazes which he has to cross. There are also parts which Joe can’t touch. This results in a simple and addictive game, of which the difficulty level reminds of old games on the NES and 286 pc.

A free iphone game

Other good news is that it’s a completely free game, while it’s a complete app. So it’s not free lite version or a demo, no just more than 40 levels of Joe for free. I’ve got my ipod touch for a while now and I have to say the app store and installing apps works great. But it’s too bad that most of the free apps are just a sample of paid apps. The makers of Magnetic Joe have already made some money on a Nintendo DS version and some other games and it seemed a nice way to them to introduce the game to ipod touch and iphone users. Magnetic Joe 2 and 3 are also being made, but those probably will cost money.

Screenshots of the gameplay

To give you a better idea of the mazes that you have to guide Joe through with your touchscreen, here are some screenshots. Magnetc Joe can be downloaded in Apple’s app store.