Mashed Articles

When I was about 13 years old, a rumour – one of those rumours whose origin is never really known – started to spread around our family. The rumour was that my grandpa was keeping all his money hidden somewhere in the bowels of his house rather than entrusting it to a bank.

I remember my cousins and I laughing sagely at such an anachronistic and quaint idea. Surely it was only people in children’s stories who did such a thing. I mean, come on – why would anyone be suspicious of banks? Why would anybody rather stuff their money into a mattress than entrust it to one of England’s many respected financial institutions? Err…

The tale of my grandpa’s natural distrust of major corporations has always stayed with me, and it struck me as a pertinent opener for this column, given the current war that’s being waged for your online identity. The reason for this is because that war – ultimately – centres on trust.

A few years ago, if someone asked you for your online home, the chances are that the more tech-savvy among us would have replied with a personalised URL. (If you were lucky enough to secure your name, it might have been something like www.danoliver.co.uk.) You had complete control over your own site, and that felt good. But these domains were simply silos of personal information, and a real effort was required from visitors to find it – they had to first remember that they wanted to visit your site, then recall the URL and TLD and then – God forbid – actually type it in!

When the social web got into full swing, there was a new way to connect online that enabled people to include you in their social circle. Rather than having to actively visit your site, people could integrate your stream into their social service of choice. Hallelujah!

Many sites and apps have come and gone, and the likes of Google and Microsoft are constantly trying – and mostly failing – to make headway in the social space. The current war for users is being waged between two relatively new adversaries: Twitter and Facebook. The times when you’d tell people to find you online via a personal site have been replaced for millions of net users by Twitter’s ‘@’ identifier, or a Facebook account. Both Twitter and Facebook want you to use them as the default way for other people to find and interact with you online, but they’re going about it in very different ways.

Twitter’s API is already widely used by developers wanting to build the service into sites and apps, and with the recent announcement of its new @anywhere offering, you will soon be able to integrate Twitter into any website with just a few lines of JavaScript (the likes of YouTube, Bing, Digg and Ebay are already signed up to use @anywhere). Twitter’s founder Evan Williams has repeatedly referred to the company’s mantra of ‘keeping things open’, and recent announcements certainly back this up.

Facebook is another story. The company is trying to create a walled garden, but it’s a transparent wall. By changing its privacy policy to recommend that users make their status updates and other information public – as it did at the end of 2009 – Zuckerberg et al are trying to ensure that the major search engines can pick up as much of what you’re up to as possible. There are many people who simply approved these privacy changes without thinking, and who are still unaware that any ‘privacy transition’ actually took place. This has led to accusations against Facebook of ‘nudging’ its members into more open privacy settings – in many cases without their knowledge (we’ve all approved pop-ups without actually reading their content beforehand, especially when they come from a trusted site). For many of Facebook’s users, who signed up on the proviso that Facebook was about building private networks, the goalposts have been significantly moved in recent months – in some cases onto another pitch altogether!

Now, there’s nothing to stop you following my grandpa’s lead, and eschewing the social behemoths that are Facebook and Twitter – more power to your elbow if that’s the way you choose to go. But, if like millions of others, you choose to promote yourself via one of these two platforms – and take advantage of the huge audience, reach, and ease-of-use they offer – then I have just one question for you: out of the two, who would you trust with your cash-filled mattress?

Go beyond updates, PC Plus reveals some of the weird projects that Twitter has given birth to.

Twitter isn’t just about telling the world what you had for lunch, any more than the phone is just a way of calling Mum. It’s a communications platform in its own right now, and you can do amazing things with those 140 characters – automatically generating content, serving up data on demand, sharing photos and much more. But what if you’re not feeling inspired? We’ve gathered together some projects people have put together through the medium of Twitter. Some are funny, some are useful and some are plain odd – but all are more interesting than a simple status update.

1. Read (or write) a book

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” One of the best known lines in all of literature, and there’s still 89 characters left. Twitter novels are served up in bite-size portions, and you don’t need any special software to do one yourself – just a manuscript and the ability to copy and paste. Get an intriguing introduction to a book by signing up for nothing but first lines, or if you fancy getting involved with an original Twitter story, check out We Tell Stories.

Some people have found another slant on the idea of Twitter books by serialising existing diaries. You can sign up for daily time-shifted entries from the likes of farm girl from 1937 and watch their lives unfold in quasi real-time.

2. Track the weather

As the winter chill froze the country earlier this year, many people were tweeting messages like ‘BA1 8/10 #uksnow’. What was that? It was a collaborative weather map that harnessed Twitter’s power to keep track of the UK’s current snow conditions. With everyone knowing that 2/10 meant ‘a few flakes’ and anything over 7/10 translated as ‘blizzard’, the map built up piece by piece as more and more people tweeted, giving a real-
time picture of which areas in the UK were experiencing snow. It may not have been entirely accurate, but neither was the official weather forecast, and this at least had the advantage of being interactive.

3. Kick the habit

Any diet or attempt to break an addiction benefits from keeping notes on your progress, and Twitter offers an easy way of reinforcing good behaviour. Get into the habit of tweeting important information on what you’re doing, and sneaking that chocolate bar/cigarette/entire black forest gateau becomes a much more public affair. Having an electronic copy of your intake also makes it much easier to work out how well you’re doing, especially if you need to count calories. For dieting, there’s Tweet What You Eat and for smokers there’s Qwitter. Compulsive auto-
tweeters may want to avoid these services, though: the only real hope for such Twitter addicts is for someone to sneak in and cut their internet connection.

4. Expand your brain

Twrivia is a daily Twitter-based trivia quiz. Follow @twrivia to receive a trivia question every day; each one is preceded by a 15-minute warning. The first five people to answer the question correctly score more points. There aren’t any prizes – it’s all about climbing the leaderboard and the fun of challenging your brain with a good trivia question.

Daily brainteasers in 140 characters or fewer. You can hit Google, but you won’t get in first if you do…

5. Change the world

As anyone who’s seen a hashtag spreading out and reaching people all across the world knows, Twitter excels at generating memes. Why not try putting that to good use by creating a Twitter-based petition? With Act.ly, you can pass around a URL and let people register their support in seconds. It won’t have the weight of a full postal campaign, but it should still work as a way of politely registering opposition to something you’re concerned about.

6. Monitor your friends

The dubious story of a best man rigging a newlywed couple’s bed with a weight monitor and tweeting their bedtime activities complete with stats on duration and frenzy may have rung every BS alarm ever created, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be done. Read the story and its claimed ending. If you’re unconvinced, why not break out a soldering iron and build something similar?

7. Become a spy/gangster/assassin

OK, not literally. MI5, Don Corleone and the Hashshashin may be on Twitter, but we don’t have their usernames. Instead, we’re talking about social games. Spymaster was the first game to make it big, with 140 Mafia and SNODS – currently offline following later. These games add a fictional layer to your existing contacts, which isn’t always popular with the people following you.

8. Give your household appliances a voice

Plants that tweet at you when they’re thirsty? Doable. Toasters that report when the toast is done? Old news. While the idea may sound silly, these ideas are a great example of Twitter moving beyond messaging. If you fancy doing something like this, you can even set up your appliance’s account to send you text messages. This means you don’t need to be at your PC to see what requires your attention, so the whole system should fit right into your daily life and existing phone systems. Handy!

Botanicalls kits let you wire your plants up to Twitter, letting you know if they want a drink, or are bored of hearing your voice.

9. Warn your loved ones

When disaster strikes, Twitter is becoming a vital communications system – as we’ve seen during the earthquakes in Haiti and the shootings in Mumbai. It’s also been used to warn friends about arrests in other countries and to get help to the top of a mountain. Might it save your life someday?

10. Kick up a fuss

Twitter has the world’s attention right now, and word spreads fast. If you’re a celebrity, it’s the perfect unfiltered platform, as film director Kevin Smith demonstrated when he complained about Southwest Air kicking him off a flight because of his weight. But the great thing about Twitter is that it doesn’t just give famous faces a chance to air their grievances to a wide audience – we all have a shot too. London blogger Robert Loch’s complaints about one club caught the attention of the tabloids, and stationery company Paperchase found itself in trouble after one artist found their work being used without permission and posted about it on the site.

11. Get things done

As easy as it is to waste time on Twitter, it can be helpful too. Sign up to a service like Remember The Milk and if you’re glued to Twitter all day long, at least you’ll be given reminders to be productive. They come as direct messages, so you’ll also get them via email, on your phone or however else you’ve opted to receive them.

12. Wash your 
mouth out

Here at PC Plus, we never ****ing swear. **** no. But if you’re having trouble minding your ****ing manners, ****ing head over to Cursebird to see how ****ing rude you really are. If the report fills you with shame, you can start ***ing your **** ***** out immediately.

13. Stream everything

For many people, Twitter is replacing the blog. You can post links to anything you like, but many services are making that process automatic. Tie Twitter in to Flickr and you’ll tweet about your favourite photos; add YouTube to post automatically about videos; and link up Xbox Live to share your latest achievements. If a service doesn’t do it automatically, there’s probably a plug-in somewhere. You’ll want to make sure it’s switched off for anything you don’t want friends to see, though…

14. See the world

Want to know what’s going on around the world? Visit and watch as tweets from every corner of the Earth pop up onto your screen. This is largely pointless, true, but it’s a great way to kill some time and see what everyone’s talking about.

15. Wear your words

Every now and again you find a tweet so perfect, so beautiful, that letting it slip into the archives would just be a crime. Why not get it on a T-shirt? At Tweetshirt come into their own – they show you your social graph in an easily sortable form. For clearing out the rubbish from your lists, try StopTweet.

17. Track packages

When you’re waiting for something exciting to arrive, there’s little worse than constantly having to log into the courier service’s website for updates. With TrackThis you can fire and forget, getting the latest news pinged straight to you. We hope every service offers something similar in the near future.

18. Interact with fictional characters

Not everyone on the internet is who they say they are, but some admit it. Hunt around and you can find Twitter accounts for every fictional character from Darth Vader and Superman to True Blood’s Sookie Stackhouse and Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother. These accounts aren’t usually official, and they occasionally get clamped down on – as happened with ABC when it found viewers tweeting as the characters from Mad Men – and tend to be parodies rather than actually trying to ‘be’ the Joker online. Still, they can be fun – as fans of Peep Show will have experienced when the ‘characters’ live-tweeted the newest series.

Get more involved with your favourite characters’ daily lives by following them on Twitter.

19. Build a bot

Want to create life of your own? Twitter bots are easy to create thanks to Botomatic. Using a simple rule-based system, you can build up a list of how you want the bot to behave when it receives messages and gets new followers. Then just give it a name and a description and unleash it on the world! These aren’t the kind of bots that can actually conduct a conversation with a human being, but they’re great at passing information on request or automating systems capable of posting onto websites. To see some of the bots people have made for Twitter, visit the Twitter Fan Wiki’s Bots page.

20. Thank someone

In the real world, you often thank someone by saying ‘I’ll buy you a drink’. This is another reason why Twitter is better than reality – with Foamee you can keep track of how many you still owe, and if anyone owes you a drink, you can redeem it without sounding like a grabby so-
and-so. You can offer people either a beer or a coffee and then mark the drinks as redeemed when your taste buds are satiated or your conscience is clear. If you want to receive a soft drink, though, you’ll have to stick with the old fashioned way of grabbing a free beverage – hanging around at the pub, letting whoever owes you a drink get a round in and then somehow slipping away right before your turn.

It’s high time you moved your PC into the 21st Century by making it television-capable.

Let’s face it: most of us are missing a trick. Who here ignores traditional broadcast schedules, opting instead to catch up on TV shows via BBC iPlayer, ITV Player or 4oD? How many of us have downloaded a digital boxset from iTunes or spent hours slumped in front of the computer monitor browsing funny videos and clips on YouTube?

The way that we watch TV has changed – so why shouldn’t the way we access TV change along with it? Why watch web-delivered content on your widescreen laptop? You could be enjoying it on that lovely big TV in your sitting room.

If the thought of reclining in your chair and flicking with ease between live Freeview channels, a film on your hard drive and that program you’ve been meaning to catch up on with iPlayer doesn’t entice you, maybe the thought of your wallet will. When you buy a TV, you want to get a good few years use out of it before upgrading again. But entertainment technology is advancing quickly, and that large flatscreen you purchased a couple of years ago is already looking a bit old-
fashioned because it’s not HD. If you want an HDTV, you’ll need to buy a whole new television. What happens when 3D models go mainstream? You’ll have to upgrade again. And let’s not forget the digital switchover, which is happening at the moment. If your set is incapable of receiving digital signals, you’ll have to upgrade, or at the very least buy a set-top box or two. Either way, your wallet suffers. But if you make a PC the centre of your home entertainment system, you can embrace new standards through software simply by upgrading a single component – which is far less expensive than replacing your whole set every time a new technology comes along.

You’re probably wondering where the catch is. If TV PCs are so wonderful, why doesn’t everyone have one? The answer is that PCs and the living room have had an awkward relationship over the years because of one thing: noise. But no more: new advancements in technology have produced quiet machines that still have the grunt needed to handle HD video streaming and more. If you’re not sure which components your ideal machine needs – or if you’re eager to build one to your own exacting standards – then you’re in luck. We’ve compiled a list of the best software that will bring it your PC to life. Trust us: you’re not going to look back.

Media Center

Windows 7 Media Center is one of the most polished 10-foot interfaces around, but in general the software has been slow to evolve. Ignoring the addition of native H.264 support in Windows 7, other improvements to the system have been mostly cosmetic: turbo scroll, faded menu overlays, a new album art display and a handy desktop gadget. Media Center could easily feel old-fashioned and behind the times, then, if it weren’t for the army of bedroom coders constantly beavering away to produce plug-
ins that enhance the core features. Thanks to them, Media Center even has its own unofficial app store.

Another reason that many people still don’t take advantage of Media Center – despite the fact that it’s pre-installed on most XP, Vista and Windows 7 PCs – is that the software is at its best when you have a TV tuner and you’re using it as a fully fledged DVR. The app is hardly anyone’s first choice for general video playback (that’s usually Windows Media Player) or streaming video (most people prefer direct web browser access), so it gets forgotten about. Media Center has always done a great job of cataloguing the photos, music and video on your hard drive, and this could be handy for TV PC users – but its internet TV integration has been lightweight at best. Where Vista’s version had a poorly populated Online Media section, Windows 7’s Media Center just adds an Internet TV option supporting WMV, Silverlight and Flash video. US users have access to a range of internet TV streams from the likes of CBS, Zune, MSNBC and MSN; but UK users aren’t so well served on this front.

Touch makes Media Center more compelling, but don’t expect it on your TV PC

It’s not all bad news, though: you can watch iPlayer and even iTunes content in Media Center. Sky Player is also available as a plug-in, offering access to various Sky channels for subscribers, including Sky Movies and Sky Sports.

The suitability question

To do away with the hassle of having to navigate around your PC desktop before watching TV , you can get your system to boot directly into Media Center on startup. In Windows 7, select ‘Startup and Windows Behaviour’ on Media Center’s Settings menu. Simply check the box next to the ‘Start Windows Media Center when Windows starts’ option. Easy.

Of course, you could argue that Media Center is a little bloated for a system like this one – and the cost of a Windows 7 licence will add an extra £150. That’s a lot to pay, especially when you won’t even be using the bulk of the OS on a day-to-day basis. It’s worth considering lighter-weight alternatives such as Boxee or XBMC; these might be better suited to an Ion-based system.

Media Center Alternatives

Microsoft’s Media Center faces stiff competition these days thanks to freebie software like MythTV, Mediaportal, Boxee and XBMC. MythTV has been knocking around since 2002, and the software provides some good DVR support if you’re building a PC for heavy-duty TV recording. Numerous add-on modules can add photo browsing, RSS feeds, Netflix integration and Slingbox-style placeshifting. Mediaportal is unashamedly Media Center-esque, but it has a limited appeal for TV PCs since it only runs on Windows.

XBMC is otherwise known as Xbox Media Center. What started out as a clever hack for Microsoft’s games console has now evolved into an “open-source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media”. There are versions for Linux, OS X and Windows. Using www.xbmc.org’s own guide, you can easily specify a minimal Ubuntu install before you add the software. XBMC can handle a huge array of video files, and playback can be accelerated using the Ion hardware. Usefully, XBMC can either launch a compatible player or function with a VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) modification to the software. It’s all there in the XBMC wiki.

Out of the Boxee

Another Media Center alternative is Boxee. This freeware media centre solution was born out of the XBMC code base, and it brings a social-networking edge to things. Boxee does everything you expect – it catalogues photos, music and video on your PC’s hard disk and makes them accessible via a sofa-
friendly UI. If you’ve titled DVD rips correctly, Boxee will pull in the background blurb from IMDB.

Boxee apps take things a step further, plugging you directly into third-party video-streaming services including Netflix, YouTube, BBC iPlayer, Last.fm, Flickr, Digg and CNN. Log into your account on the Boxee websiteand you can seek out people you know that are also using the software. Adding a friend to your list will show you what they’ve been watching or what they recommend.

Boxee offers plug-ins for all of the best video, music and photo-streaming services

Boxee is an ideal choice for an Ion-based TV PC, especially as the integrated media player supports hardware-assisted video decoding. Need a cutting-edge remote control to go with it? Type Boxee into the iTunes Store and you’ll find a Boxee Remote app that lets you control your Boxee-powered TV PC with an iPhone or iPod Touch. And if you don’t want a PC at all? At this year’s CES, D-Link announced the first Boxee Box, a dedicated hardware solution that runs the software silently.

Stream Your Video Elsewhere

Having a TV PC connected to your beautiful plasma TV is one thing; being able to watch it every time you want to is another. So what can you do when your partner wants to watch Glee or the kids are pestering you to switch over to Dora The Explorer? No, not go ahead and watch what you want anyway: instead, simply stream your videos to a more portable device. Yes, we know the whole point of a TV PC is to take away the pain of slumping in a hard chair – but it’s handy to be able to stream to a laptop should somebody else fancy watching something too. After all, not everything you watch needs to be viewed on a massive Full HD TV – and you can always take your laptop to bed for some comfort.

So consider the return of the portable TV. Not in the form of the 14in mini-telly of old, but in the shape of laptops, netbooks and Wi-Fi Internet tablets that you can cuddle up with on the sofa. For example, grab yourself an iPhone, iPod Touch or Apple iPad (when available) and, using the Air Video software from the App Store, you can stream videos stored on your TV PC to it. Family harmony maintained; entertainment still on tap.