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.

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly, will let us connect without surrendering our privacy. We call these computers ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your facebook profile, tweets, anything. We are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automagically integrated into every seed.

diaspora is the birth child of four NYU computer science students: Daniel Grippi, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Raphael Sofaer and Maxwell Salzberg. It is currently hosted on Kickstarter and the software will be released at the end of the summer under aGPL (Affero General Public License).

Here are some key features coming to diaspora this summer:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• Complete PGP encryption
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

Privacy

Since the start of this year, a lot of stuff has been going on around privacy on the web. I think that privacy is an integral part of the web as we know it and this is why I believe diaspora is so important right now. Especially now that social networks are even more centralized. I really liked it when I read this regarding diaspora.

We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive.

ReadWriteWeb refers to diaspora as an ambitious undertaking to build an “anti-Facebook”. Though I am not sure if diaspora will ever manage to be a successful “anti-Facebook”, I am curious to see what will happen to this initiative by the end of this year.

Read more about diaspora here.

So, we decided to take the janky script we’ve been using to generate static HTML tweets for posts (like the one you see here), polish it up a bit, and make it public. And if tweets really are the new quotes, this should come in handy: Blackbird Pie.

Just go to media.twitter.com/blackbird-pie/ and enter the tweet url that you want to use to generate your static HTML tweet. Moreover, the code generated there seems to be sufficiently customizable and when you paste it into your site, the tweet will pick up some of your styling. Shorter code and better timestamp are coming soon, too.

We’ll likely tweak the appearance of these tweets over time as we get feedback and bug reports – so do drop us a line at @twittermedia.

What do you think?

Open Web Foundation The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

Two years later, Facebook launches OpenGraphProtocol.org under the Open Web Foundation Agreement. Now that’s what I call interesting!

xAuth is an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web.

Meaning that toolbar vendors, like Meebo, can now take advantage of this new open platform in order to provide a better user experience to the users. Specifically, users will be able to see social elements only from the social networks that they are actually on. This could lead to fewer HTTP requests that are usually necessary to recognize every potential online service. In addition, xAuth gives the users the option to decide which services pass data to sites through xAuth using the HTML5 methods window.postMessage and localStorage. In other words, the user has complete control of this exchange of data that takes place between the service and the site. This one strongly reminds me of a talk by Aza Raskin titled “You-Centric: The Future of Browsing” which I strongly suggest you see it. The whole idea of complete control of your data hovers around most of Mozilla’s projects like the latest Contacts.

As for the social toolbars, I personally am not very fond of, probably because I do not like the current implementation of these toolbars. Though I have used them one or two times -and they seemed quite handy- I never liked them. I don’t like the way they show up and I don’t like the way the look like.

However, xAuth seems that it grabbed my attention. I am wondering, now that developers can actually grab that information about your social networks how this could help make experiencing the web even better. I mean, why do I have to be bombarded with all these sharing/like buttons if I haven’t even joined each particular social network? And the same goes for all these commenting systems like Disqus.

Moreover, this would be very-very-very interesting for all the mobile platforms out there. Providing a faster and a better mobile experience happens to be one big fcuking reason to support xAuth.

More information on xAuth here and here.

Update: Don’t forget to watch Meebo’s CEO talk with Robert Scoble about xAuth here.

Lockerz is an invitation-only website created to connect members through commerce, content and social networking. Once invited, you’ll be able to watch exclusive video, buy great products, discover new music, play games, and connect with friends. You’ll be able to do this all in one place, AND you’ll get rewarded for just doing the things you love. When you watch a video, play a game, or even log in, you’ll earn Pointz (or “PTZ”) Lockerz own form of currency. Turn around and redeem your PTZ for incredible merchandise, unique experiences and exclusive deals and sales.

Personally, I have to say that I am impressed. And this is one of the very few times that I am impressed by such kind of service. Not only by the quality of this service but also by its, almost hidden, business model. And here are a few reasons why Lockerz impressed me:

The name.

It is quite quite memorable isn’t it? And cool, too.

The logo.

The logo design and the typography used is reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally good. It is smooth and stands out.

The web interface.

I just hate it when I see Web 2.0 startups in 2010 using awful user interface because it feels like going back where using HTML frames was cool. Well, be sure that Lockerz is definitely NOT one of those startups. Lockerz’s web interface is quite attractive.

Everything else

From Lockerz’s favicon to that Lockerz Ceramic Coffee Mug, this thing is a top-notch product and you should give it a try.

It is quite interesting that a video web service like this suddenly feels so attractive for business. Lockerz offers a very attractive business model that wouldn’t surprise me if one day I find out that there are users out there spending many-many-many hours watching videos online. Oh wait a minute. This is already happening. Plus now you get to win a free iPod. ;)

So, did you get your pointz today?

Happy 5th birthday Firefox!

• inline display of video, images, and maps
• trending topics with context
• multiple account support
• photo upload
• groups
• muting
• drafts

Apart from that, Brizzly’s user interface is also as simple as Twitter’s giving you the option to choose between Standard (which looks like almost exactly like Twitter’s UI) and Wide view. There are also a few other minor things that you may be familiar with such as typing ‘j’ and ‘k’ to scroll tweets up and down.

Warning: After joining Brizzly, there is a chance you may never have to login via twitter.com again. :P

Here is an introduction to Brizzly, the new social media reader from Thing Labs. Enjoy!