A few days ago we were granted commit access to the kick ass,  award winning Adobe AIR Twitter client Spaz.

We are delighted to be part of another open source project, and one that takes a new and innovative approach to web and desktop development.

The Spaz client is a cross-platform (available on AIR platforms) client that allows people to interact with Twitter in a whole new way. It’s great for both regular computer users in it’s ease of use, and heavy twitter users. For example you have different themes with Spaz but you can also override the CSS design to customise the app’s appearance.

The application supports markdown, it minimizes to system tray on windows, it has a URL shortening helper, retweet functionality, the ability to add favourites, the ability to delete messages, twitpic support, and much more.

You can of course go directly on Spaz’s website and read more about it and try it out

I had lunch with Eoghan and Paul from Contrast earlier today. We had some nice burgers in Bóbó’s — I’m still full. As we were leaving myself and Paul weighed up the pros and cons of tech companies offering that little bit more in recessionary times, and we concluded that companies that do so are likely to fare better in the months ahead. In a recession people expect a bit more value for their money.

OK, so this isn’t rocket science — it’s just a little bit of common sense, and it doesn’t apply solely to the web or tech industry, nor tough economic times for that matter. I think any company that doesn’t try to go that extra mile for their customers are failing to sufficiently differentiate themselves from the competition, and sooner or later that will hurt.
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In the last year, I’ve been lucky to be able to discuss the topic of leadership in a small start-up company with friends and industry peers alike.

I found that most people tend to either describe what a leader is, or what a leader does, usually based on personal contact with someone they regarded as a “good” leader. However, most seem to find it difficult to actually define what a leader is. Indeed, I can understand this, as there are many types of leaders out there and I think that generally how you tell them apart is not their skills, but what or who it is they’re actually leading.
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About two weeks ago I was uploading something to skitch.com and saw an inline button. So being a security person myself, I decided to try some XSS on their fields. 1, 2, 3, 4 tries done, I was able to load some of my javascript from a remote host and the nice thing is that this was a public URL. So for fun I sent the URL to a few friends. What that script was really doing was taking their cookies, writing to a file on my server and sending them back to the main page of skitch. So basically what people told me was that the link didn’t work, they were sent to the main page. In the meantime I was finishing my PoC by editing my cookie with their cookies. After about 10 minutes I had changed their first name and last name. (more…)

What do Digg and short URLs have in common? They are URLs, they are shared and used by many people. Why not mixing the idea of short URLs (Which has mainly arised because of the Twitter hype) and the ability to get people to share and publish URLs to the public like Digg?

So a few months ago I was discussing with a few lads about all this, and we decided to start on our own social network idea, with URLs. Basically one thing we noticed is that many many of the url shortening services had cool features like stats, custom urls, and at the same time you saw the power of Digg’s public URL hype idea. We basically decided that if we could make an URL shortening service that had most of the features of the other services in one place, and that if we could also add some value to this by bringing a “social-networking” aspect to it, it would simply rock!. Instead of linking people by their type of types of people, activities, technology interests, groups of friends, etc. we saw that there was an opportunity to link people by the type of urls they shorten but most importantly the context of those URLs.

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Since opening a few months ago, we’ve been faced with the recession. One thing we noticed and found important so far (and something we have been telling and helping our customers with) is that in times of recession it is important to innovate and come up with new ideas.

For instance small companies are confronted and struggling to get users at this time of the year (Not only in the tech and IT industry) but in all industries, and what we have been doing for a few months when companies come to us is quite simple, take what’s working, take what’s not working, flip it in all sides, find a new way and easier way of accomplishing the tasks you want done and go with it. There’s a term I heard from one of the lead developers from a VoIP company that I thought was well worded for the current economic situation: “Grow a pair and do it“.

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