First things first. Here is what you should do. Watch this awesome playlist. If you didn’t make it to get an invitation yet due to the limited field trial be patient. I tried sending invites to some friends but I got a message saying that sending email invitations will be enabled soon!.

Interface

Amazing, simple and usable. It’s addictive, too.

Privacy awareness

From the way Plus handles the profile url using the user ID to visibility levels following you everywhere, Plus takes privacy very seriously. There are simple settings for notifications, profile and privacy. And of course there is Google Takeout where you can save a backup of your photos, profile information, contacts, circles, stream posts, and Buzz posts to your computer.

Integration

As I said before, it feels like everything is coming into place. You will experience deep integration with Google products coming together. There is also an Android app which will help you take full advantage of Plus with Instant Upload and Huddle. By the way there are no ads, except for the Google Maps place pages transmitted via Google Check-ins.

So, are you on Plus yet?

On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”.

Not need to worry about access. IPv4 access will still be available. But you should know that IPv6 is designed to succeed Internet Protocol version 4. The new address space will support 2^128 addresses. To make things clearer, every person on Earth could get a-29-digit number of IPv6 addresses. That’s a lot. Why? Because we are running out of IPv4 addresses.

Taking advantage of this new Internet Protocol version could not only take care of our need for more IP addresses but also lead to great innovation. Imagine a world where you can control every device on your home remotely, let’s say from your mobile phone. Of course you can already do this. But this is something slightly different.

You can test your IPv6 connection on ipv6test.google.com. If you need a more technical take on IPv6 you should read RFC 2460.

When you click on a transit station or plan a transit route with Google Maps and there are delays or alerts related to your trip, you’ll now see “live departure times” (indicated with a special icon) and service alerts.

Lately NY unveiled a plan that goes by the name ROAD MAP FOR THE DIGITAL CITY. According to this plan, over the next three months, the City will unveil new partnerships with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr that will modernize and expand how New York City government communicates with New Yorkers. Another super important part of this announcement includes an open government framework featuring Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for City data. This means that developers will have access to city data that wouldn’t otherwise be available to them.

As the plan says:

Our goal in all of this is simple: Beyond presenting information to the public in formats the City determines and through applications the City builds, we need to keep making the raw data underlying these applica- tions open and available for developers, civic groups, and anyone else to build applications of their own. This is especially important as social networking technology continues to transform City government—and the way New Yorkers interact with it. And our approach is not only timely—it’s smart. This is, after all, the public’s information—and by making it available in as many ways as possible we can foster innovation and leverage talents beyond City government for creative solutions to tough problems.

Speaking of city data, this one reminds me of the live train map for the London Underground which was made using the TfL API. Just take a look at the data you can access through this API. From bus routes and stop locations to live traffic camera images and London Underground passenger counts.

I am thinking of a future city where every information is linked, parsable and exploitable. Let’s see how this turns out.

Now back to Greece. Back in June last year I tried contacting the company behind the Athenian suburban railway here in Greece, asking about the accessibility of its real-time arrival system information. Well, they shortly explained to me how their tracking and prediction system works but unfortunately this kind of data is not accessible to the public, at least for now.

Lastly, I think it is worth mentioning here that Taxibeat is live here in Athens, Greece. Taxibeat lets you find a taxi filtering by the taxi, the driver, the car or the distance.

ifttt works like this: ifthisthenthat.

Having thought about it for a while I came up with this task:

if New starred item in your Google Reader then Read later with Instapaper

So now every time I star an item in Google Reader, I know this will automatically send the item to Instapaper. Note that ifttt is currently in beta and tasks poll for new trigger data every 15 minutes.

To make things less confusing -while repeating parts of the documentation- here is a list of what could one potentially do with all this:

• Filesystem backups
• Efficient remote filesystem
• Decentralized sharing system
• Blog / photo hosting / Document Management CMS
• Decentralized social networking
• Import/export adapters for hosted web services

Reading the above things one could do with Camlistore -though all the potential uses of this product sound exciting- I couldn’t get my eyes of the “decentralized social networking”. Not just because it is written in bold, but because the concept of decentralized social networking seems to me so vital these days. Of course one thing that did crossed my mind while reading the words “decentralized social networking” was diaspora.

In addition, on a post about a month ago regarding Android platform versions, I mentioned  it would be nice to have a historical analysis of this data. I was glad to see that the latest platform versions stats came along with a nice stacked line graph providing a history of the relative number of active Android devices running different versions of the Android platform.

Each dataset in the timeline is based on the number of Android devices that accessed Android Market within a 14-day period ending on the date indicated on the x-axis.

It looks like that Android 2.x is taking over control. What version are you running?

The yellow pins are stations, the red pins trains. The trains move in approximately real time.

Apart from that you can also stalk all trains currently on approach to a particular station via this live train map.

Note that this was done in only a few hours at Science Hackday.