Jottin and reqall

So I've recently started using a couple services to facilitate my mobile lifestyle. "Jott" and "Reqall" The basic premise of both is that you call in to a special number, apply some voice commands, and then you get speech to text conversion with some additional functionality to produce emails, blog posts, calendar updates, todo lists etc. As I understand it reqall's been around longer, but I find as I start using twitter more, the extensible nature of jott will probably win me over. After all, the command can be used to interact with nearly any simple RESTful service. I'll post back with how well they've worked out for me.

The train cometh

I am soooo freakin happy that this could go forward. The commuter's dream of fast train from SF to LA might just actually happen read the gas2.org article for more.

Sweetwater festival atl

Bonsai sandals-most comfortable flipflops evar

Friend Network Pr0n

So if you're a regular reader of this blog you'll know I love infoporn, especially when it's network maps. Facebook now has a couple applications that will traverse your sets of friends and see how they're interconnected, or produce Venn diagrams of them based o various attributes.
As you can imagine, I love this and would like to see linked-in offer this kind of functionality because raw multivariate data analysis is interesting, but well supported by big data analysis tools (like TIBCO Spotfire). Community network analysis tools that import from social networks are hard to come by. I'd also like to see the ability to generate some better graphs of my friend network ( like the facebook friend wheel, only in a 3d space where I could rotate it and move nodes to see how people are interrelated as well as add wighting for the quality of the connection like orkut used to allow. Then you could start to do some really interesting personal network re-engineering/planning.
Another interesting thought that came out of this, and discussions with my friend Nina, was a discussion of how facilitate connections between sparsely connected groups of friends, or attempt to prevent Worlds from Colliding! (said in exasperated jason alexander voice). These will have to be explored later and with more subtlety