Music, my day saver

Didn't get that much sleep last night due to my newborn baby and FIFA 2010. This morning I was in this bad mood which happens easily when I don't sleep enough. After surviving breakfast and other, I finally got in to my car.

I stopped for a second to think that this shouldn't be the way to start the day. There must be a way to turn the day around. I plugged my phone to car stereos and started go through my music collection to find something to cheer me up. I picked upped something that I know has made me smile previously (new Katy Perry) and started the way to work.

It really works. Music has lot of impact to mood. I bet there are studies about this, but at least my own experience is that this works. When I'm heading to play some sports, I have music to get to me prepared, when I want to concentrate at work, there's a music for that also.

I'm just happy that I was able to turn my morning around. Maybe the Finnish morning sun had some effect too..

World cup time!!

It's nice to be a Finn at World cup time. We've never made to play the games, so you can just enjoy the games without this stress about how well your team is playing.

What I've always done is to pick up the teams that plays the pretties football and have the most interesting players and live through the matches with those favorite teams. This kind of gives this little feeling to matches, but still you are not that disappointed if your selected team doesn't win.For me this is perfect way to enjoy the games.


I haven't received my sport magazine for this week with hopefully the world cup extra, but with first look here's my favorite's:

Netherlands - Just due the players with amazing attacking capabilities like Sneijder and Robben.

Chile - Haven't seen any of their games, but stories tell that there will be happening a lot when these guys play.

Spain - Winner candidate number one in my paper.


Argentina - Amazing players, "amazing"coach. Anything from disaster to finals.

Whole Group G - Toughest group plus North-Korea which no one knows much. All games can be really interesting.

Eagerly waiting for kick off.

Facebook, Ning, Grou.ps...

I've been following quite closely this discussion about Facebook privacy controls and people quitting and thinking about quitting Facebook. I have to admit I'm one of those who would like to really control what part of my web me is visible to all and what is to only my friends.

For me Facebook is kind of a collection of people who I've bumbed into during the years. There's a people as "my friends" who in real life I might not even say hi, since I've not seen them for a so long time.

What has happened few times is, that someone is asking to accept me to be their friend and I really don't recognise from their name that who is this person. Then the next thing I do is, check mutual friends, and from that list I often realise what is the context I should this person. And often I do accept the invitation. For me, Facebook really isn't that personal.

With my offline life friends we have set our own social network. First it was in Ning, but then they decided to ask money for it, so we change to Grou.ps. I think this excellent setup, then I do have lot more of control with whom I share what. I truely recommend to give Grou.ps a try if you are fed up with facebook privacy changing every month.

Latest trend - letting others know your credit card usage

In short time I've run in to 2 different services which offers it's users possibility to share their credit card purchases with your friends. Those are Swipely and Blibby

Eventhough I'm always thinking about security, somehow this service makes sense. Social media's are going to direction that people want to let others know about every step they take, so this makes it even easier.

Cool kids and wannabes can try let every one easily know that they are visiting hippy places or buying cool stuff.

Let's see how this takes off, but I would guess quite well.

Here's ad from Swipely:


Swipely from Swipely on Vimeo.

Web reputation as currency

I happened to run in to Whuffie bank (http://thewhuffiebank.org/). It's an interesting idea of earning currency (Whuffie) by being active in  social media. It currently supports only Twitter. Somehow it feels like quite an "american idea" of more is better, but still it got me thinking that could it actually work.

Easy way to say someone have influence for example in Twitter is to look at amount of followers. Still in current days, it's so damn easy to start "following" someone, but then discard everything from this same person, if you are not interested. I atleast am not that active Twitter user and I atleast miss most of the stuff people are tweeting about.

Whuffie tries to tackle this problem by counting how much people re-tweets someone's posts. Whuffie has also some balancing factors that those who tweet too often or always just re-tweets would get lower score, but overall it's about who story is being told forward.

Reputation as "free-ticket" has so far been the privilidge of actors, athletes and other celebrity. Now this tries to bring the same to social media actives. Also this tries to bring reputation as a visible number. It's ultimate way of saying I'm cool and you're not. I wouldn't be wondered if you could soon buy (with real money) someone to retweet you and get your whuffle number up.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic to see it actually work as a currency, but certainly it will work as indication who are influencers in social media and who are not. Also, I could easily see that for people with high Whuffiebank balance, will be asked to try out many cool stuff, so that they could make it viral if it is good.

I guess I need to get the book the idea came from to understand it bit better: Cory Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen