Grow your followers from 2325 to 27487... and then WHAT?

This goes to all of those "affiliated" or "follow me on Twitter and I'll get ya 20000 followers more".

I started to get bored of all those noisy followings on Twitter, Friendfeed and other networks by people who don't even care about what I'm saying. Yeah I know it's become a kind of a sport, like "how much followers do you have on X? What? Dude, I've got a few hundreds more!"

So, now what? Got rewarded with an olympic gold medal or hit a jack pot? I bet at least 80% of those 20k followers do the very same thing: follow anybody to get more followers. Doesn't it sound ridiculous? This is not the same as email spam where even 1% could get you finally hit it.

Now, that reminds me of nothing but a simple Pyramid, a "non-sustainable business model". Just a very few people at the very top of that pyramid made a couple bucks but that's it. Wake up people. I thought we were past this.

I don't want to complete any survey for 5$, follow a ridiculous Adwords seminar or do an "extra money" of that kind. The next "affiliated" follower goes straight to a blocked users list.

Total reset

Ok... Where do I start? It's been over a year now!

It's funny though. Few times a month I'd ask myself: "Why am I not wring anymore?" It's not like I had totally nothing to say. Probably, just wasn't in the right mood.

Anyways, a lot of things happend during last year. I finally realized DataPortability project didn't work for me. I was really disappointed. For a lot of reasons, which I can't say are all facts. Some of them are just my assumptions. But for one I can tell you I didn't like how Chris Saad was supposedly leading the group at all, and sometimes it really seemed like he was just using DP project to promote others he was involved in.

I gave a few lessons of Salsa dancing here over Barrio Latino school. It was a hell of an experience. I usually teach a little bit of Software Engineering every year at the university I work in but, teaching to dance is something much different from computer science :)

In the winter season I went snowboarding hereabouts a lot, especially in December. It was a lot of fun.

Lately, I've been working on some new projects. One of them is called Pinkr. I'm really excited about it. Ever heard of Nokia Sports Tracker or Garmin Connect?

Basically, there are two components that work together: an application for mobile device (well, a cell phone) and a web application, the server-side. The mobile app, leveraging GPS, can store or otherwise transmit (over an internet connection) your current location. Based on that data and a couple of more parameters, the server-side app is able to compute the instant mechanical power you produce during your course of run or biking, how much calories you've burned and other metabolic info. All that in real-time!

Pinkr is different from others in that

• there are more sophisticated formulas involved;
• you don't need a special device or a particular cell phone, just about any mobile that can run J2ME application;
• all is happening in real-time so can be used for on-line training, monitoring, etc.

I can't say more right now as we are refining our goals and strategy but I think I'll be posting a lot about Pinkr later on.

My picks of the year so far? WolframAlpha and Google Wave. Both have totally blown me out.

A couple of things though.

• Too bad at WolframAlpha they have statistical data about the United States only but I'm almost sure they're already working on extending it to other countries.
• During the Google Wave demo I might've missed it or they didn't talk about a bridge between SMTP and Wave (or whatever they'll name it) protocols, but I think it's doable fairly easy.