Yesterday I came across an interesting experiment, it appears some kind fellow has publicly released a loaded Starbucks card, and he’s just letting people use it at their convenience. People can get free coffee, people can give free coffee. It’s pretty intruiging, and it’s called “Jonathan’s Card“. The guy (Jonathan Stark) even set up a website, twitter account and API around the idea. For all the details check out the site: http://jonathanstark.com/card/.
As much as I hate to admit it, I drink Starbucks… rather often. So I went to try and use this experiment at my local ‘bux, but everytime I got there, the card was empty! Not only that, but it took so much time to check the balance (via the twitter stream) and then flip over to my photos app, find the photo of the card, and scan it- by the time I had done everything what little balance was on the card, was gone. So I thought, this can be better.
Using the APIs provided by Jonathan, I’ve created “Coffee Check“. Coffee Check is a bare bones web app designed to do one thing, check the balance of Jonathan’s card. If there is cash- you get the card image right there, and don’t have to fumble through switching apps, swiping through photos and so on. If it’s empty… it’ll let you know, and may just prompt you to add some cash to it . Very bare bones, but functional, and targeted toward mobile users (should work on any browser though). Make sure to add it to your home screen (it has a pretty iOS home screen icon and everything). Now all you need to do it press the icon from your home screen and voila! Enjoy
I’m stooped in code right now refactoring the entire code-base for http://snipt.org in preparation for some huge new features, but I came across this and had to share. A ~45min Q/A with Conan O’Brien on Google campus. Needles to say- it is very funny. Probably some of Conan’s best internet related comedy yet.
Alot of my fav people over @tcbn have been getting on the Twitter train, which I highly encourage as tcbn2.0 may feature some solid twitter integration [hint]- more on that later. At first sight twitter is a strange and confusing place, and can really leave you wondering “wtf is this?”. Well, here are my tips for new users to jump right into the twittosphere instead of just walking around the edges in confusion. Oh and make sure to follow me and follow the tcbn twitter account too!
One more thing, post a link to your twitter account on your blog or website, its how I have found most the TCBN tweeps, no one is going to find you if you don’t advertise just a lil
This week Digg released their “Diggbar” which also seconds as a URL shortening service. What this means for the end user… or more importantly the content generating users whose content is submitted to digg by other people is that- now Digg is stealing your traffic!
Mashable was quick to give Digg the ole’ reach-around, making it sound so soft and cuddly! But the truth is that Digg is milking traffic from other sites, without their permission at all. How much traffic are they stealing? Enough to boost their 20million unique visitors by about 20%. On top of all that (as if that isn’t enough) they also inject ads into the diggbar frame, so they are stealing views AND revenue from the sites that are shared via their shortened URL.
I could go on for ages about how much that sucks for the sites losing traffic and ad revenue to digg, or about how crappy shortened URLs are for the web, or about how the diggbar is killing SEO for sites framed by it, but luckily someone has already done that for me.
I’m pleased to announce Snipt.org the twitter-based code sharing service is growing into much more. Today the Snipt.org API was released along with a number of other features including an AIR App, AS3 Library, and Wordpress Plugin (which I’m using on this site!). Hopefully we will see some cool implmentation of the API in the near future (Textmate hint hint). To check out all the goodies head to Extending Snipt.org.
. Very bare bones, but functional, and targeted toward mobile users (should work on any browser though). Make sure to add it to your home screen (it has a pretty iOS home screen icon and everything). Now all you need to do it press the icon from your home screen and voila! Enjoy 
