Can’t think what to do with him though…
Today we launched Radio Pop, a social network around BBC radio. Its a project which has been around for over a year now and its great to finally get it out for people to start playing with. Listening to BBC radio through Radio Pop gives you some (hopefully) interesting information and what you’ve been listening to and what your friends have been listening to. When you hear something you really like you can ‘pop’ it - that’s Radio Pop vernacular for bookmark 
The Radio Pop site is about displaying your listening, your friends’ listening and everyone’s listening. Your profile displays your recent activity along side your favourite stations and programmes (or brands to be more specific). Here’s my profile:
It also displays what you’re currently listening to so anyone visiting the site can see what you’re up to.
At the moment, we’re not doing all that much with all this listening data but in the future we are looking to provide recommendations and personalisation (no self-respecting web app can be without them!) and perhaps more integration with other BBC services. In fact its a good point to make that Radio Pop would not be the service it is without our excellent BBC programmes catelogue which provides us with schedule data and unique IDs for every programme, series and brand. While we’re not using the data in interesting ways as yet, we set out to make Radio Pop accessible and extensible so you can use your data for your own apps and mash ups.
For example, here’s my profile (including what I’m currently listening to): http://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/fridayforward.xml.
And here’s my recent listening:
http://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/fridayforward/listens.xml.
Its also available as an RSS feed.
I built an example app using user profile data so you can tell your blog readers what you’re listening to:
Check out the API documentation for more information on our feeds. The blog badge is available from the extras page where you can find an OS X widget which allows you to listen to BBC radio through Radio Pop from the comfort of your desktop.
So that’s Radio Pop. But how does it all work?
Radio Pop is a Ruby on Rails application (because that’s where our experience lies) which runs on nginx with the fair proxy balancer module and memcached caching (because its needs to handle a large number of requests). We support OpenID for login (along side a standard username and password) as well as OAuth for communication between Radio Pop and any clients which post data to it (including the desktop widget). This means we have an input API as well as an output API, should you want to build an on-demand Radio Pop player…
Tracking your listening is done quite simply, through a ‘pulse’ sent every 60 seconds. When you change the station you are listening to or listen over a programme boundary, the pulses are combined into a single ‘listen event’. Once this happens it will appear on the graphs on your profile and in your listening history. When you stop listening (and therefore stop sending pulses) a listen event is created after 5 minutes of inactivity.
I should point out that a lot of the initial development for this version of Radio Pop was done by Mint Digital, who worked from our initial internal prototype. Thomas from Mint also advanced my Rails and nginx knowledge ten-fold. At least.
Please check it out, sign up and start listening.
In migrating my blog over to Wordpress and with the power of Apache redirect from my new hosting, I finally merged all my RSS links over to feedburner.
Behold! I suddenly have three times the subscribers I thought I had! And no-one has had to change the feed URL for my site either 
For those of you reading this through your RSS reader, hopefully nothing has changed. For those of you reading this at fridayforward.com: welcome to the all-new fridayforward!
A few months ago I realised I could (and should) do more with my web site and that my current hosting package simply wasn’t up to the job. I’ve moved to Dreamhost as they provide the features I was after at a pretty reasonable price and a 90 money-back guarantee if it didn’t work out. Reliability seems to be an issue with Dreamhost and I’ve already experienced some downtime, but we’ll see how we go. I now have shell access to my hosting which might kick me into playing around a bit more. I hope so.
The main reason I moved hosting was because Blogger simply wasn’t doing it for me and in order to migrate to Wordpress, I needed a PHP-enabled host. Migrating from Blogger was pretty straight forward using the importer (however I haven’t updated all the internal links) yet. The next step was to build my own blog template and that’s why its taken me about 3 months to final flip the switch. After a few failed attempts (and my MacBook dying, getting fixed and eventully being replaced) I’m pretty happy with the new look and if there’s anything you like you can check out the plugins I’m using on the about page.
I’m writing this post on my iPhone, using the new WordPress application. Like the vast majority of iPhone (and iPod touch) apps at the launch of the new app store, it’s a little light on features but brings some welcome functionality to my iPhone. I’m sure in the coming weeks it will be updated with bug fixed and additional features but I’m more concerned with the state of the phone’s firmware.
While it’s debatable whether apps crashing is due to the individual apps themselves or the underlying firmware, the OS itself seems less responsive and more prone to crashing than in version 1.1.4. When that causes me to miss a phone call, it’s a serious problem. It is supposed to be a phone after all.
In addition, Apple are putting a lot of weight behind the iPhone as a serious mobile gaming platform. However, when a crashed game will not restart, forcing me to re-install it and lose all my progress (damn you Super Monkey Ball!), I cannot put confidence in the device and so wouldn’t want to play longer, more involved games for fear of losing my progress. My DS allows me to simply shut the lid and my progress is saved until I open it again, it would be great if iPhone games could incorporate a similar feature, but I guess it’s still very early days for the platform. A more pressing inclusion is the ability to listen to the iPod app while playing any game. There is a hack to do it, but may be Apple should make it a requisite of the platform, like Microsoft do with custom soundtracks on the Xbox 360.
It seems Apple are on the case with firmware 2.0.1 and will be releasing 2.1 with some new features in the coming weeks.
Other than a small tidy up, I managed to write this post on the iPhone. Hopefully this app will force me to updating fridayforward more often
In the lead up to this year’s E3, Microsoft were touting that their press conference would be “game changing“. While I it wasn’t up there with Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone, fanboys around the world would have been shocked when Square Enix announced Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360.
The bulk of the presentation centred around the new Xbox Experience, integral to which is a complete dashboard overhaul. Microsoft have unsurprisingly chosen a different direction for the new dashboard interface to that proposed by the community but are clearly listening to Xbox Live’s now over 12 million members. Looking like a close relation of the Windows Media Centre dashboard, Microsoft do not hide the fact that the new Xbox 360 interface is aimed squarely at the living room family audience. The introduction of ‘avatars’ might be a natural extension of gamerpics but on the face of it look like Nintendo’s Miis with a few more polygons.
Identity and community have always been integral to the Xbox Live experience - something Microsoft has excelled at - and they are taking this further in the dashboard overhaul. An integrated 8-player party system means players can team up with their friends across games, media and chat. The idea of consuming media with your friends virtually is something many people have investigated (including me during my time at BBC R&D) and it will be interesting to see if the Xbox implemtation will work. I simply don’t use my 360 in that way so am skeptical at the moment but a cross-game party system should benefit casual and hardcore gamers alike.
It was a safe bet that Microsoft would continue to probe the newly expanded casual game market. Their challenge is making the Xbox 360 the platform of choice for everyone while keeping die-hard Halo fans happy. Not easy. But by stealing long-standing PlayStation exclusives from Sony, grabbing exclusive downloadable content from cross-platform titles and showing some awesome new Gears of War 2 footage, I think the Xbox’s core audience will see this as a strong showing too.
I’m sure its obvious to most Xbox 360 owners that the dashboard (originally developed by AKQA) is in need of a comprehensive re-design. There is simply too much content in Marketplace for the current format to work and de-listing poorly selling Live Arcade titles won’t really help. Having not spent any time with Sony’s XMB interface in the PS3 I can’t say whether they’ve done a better job but their redesigned PlayStation Store certainly looks a lot more inviting than Xbox Live Marketplace.
The Fanboy’s excellent take on what Dashboard 2.0 (or perhaps the ‘2008 Fall Update’?) could look like is probably a step too far for Microsoft but then there are rumours they may be developing something even more ambitious. Roll on E3.
The GTA IV hype machine continues to gear up for its release and Microsoft clearly want to make the most of what could be a USD400 million launch week. When the hype is this well produced keep it coming I say… but roll on Tuesday
