gali

I’ve been out of touch for a while, but I’ve recently been pondering picking up where I originally intended to start with this blog, and look at a few technologies I’ve come across online.

I recently started keeping up with Leo Laporte’s TWIT podcasts, with its very American technology content with accompanying chatter. While it is very much put together from a US of A perspective, they do make nods to us over here in Europe where its relevant, and he and his guests genuinely seem to be having a good time. Anyway, they have a habit of mentioning technologies, software and links that inspire my curiousity. Since I’m often out and about while listening, and don’t want to be distracted from the podcast too much, I note things down on my trusty N900 to look up later. Given this usually inspires only 2 or 3 items per podcast, I suspect that these may be a source of many posts on here in the future, given my current track record of posting at least. It’s certainly more manageable than trying to put up content covering everything I think is cool on Engadget or Gizmodo…

The first, small item I want to mention is gdgt.com, which seems like a pretty cool idea, at least for gadget lovers out there. It’s also worth noting that it’s the brainchild of the previous founders of the two major aforementioned technology blogs…

Gdgt (GDGT? gdgt?) is something of a social network for people and their gadgets, and that’s about it. You’ve got your normal list of friends and a profile as with any other social site, and it’ll let you hook into big names like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail to find more friends automatically. What it then does is give you the ability to add gadgets to your profile, under the categories of “Have”, “Had” or “Want” to represent your relationship to this gadget. Personally, I somewhat would have liked a couple more categories – notably “Used” and “Have Access To” to represent those I’ve played with, or those that are owned by family/housemates living in the same building – or that are available to me in my workplace. That said, I suspect they were aiming for the tried and tested intention to keep things simple.

The site then goes to offer you the chance to discuss and review gadgets (whether they’re linked to your profile or not) and to look up the gadgets your friends have against your name. There’s also a news feed, which seems to display news about random gadgets, and a ‘features’ page which seems to contain blog posts and news updates from those behind the site itself.

The site very much feels like it’s just starting up still. The functionality they have in place is solid, and just about unique enough to stand out in the world of social networks. There’s a lot they could do in the future too, which would be great as long as they keep it simple. Ideas that sprung to mind off hand included:

• Finding other users with the same gadget(s) as you? Perhaps the ability to search based on an overlap of a specific number of gadgets, 1 – n (where n is the number you have on your profile). Connecting this up with a location based search would have a lot of potential – I’d love to know how many other N900 or Gigabyte T1028X owners there are in my corner of the world, for instance.
• It would be nice if the news feed could be (optionally) toggled to only show news about gadgets you have on one of your lists (either all of them or specifically). There’s a lot of news about the next iPhone appearing, and to be honest I’m not that interested at the moment.
• Going a step further, the site has some awareness of manufacturers behind devices. It would be cool if the site’s news feed could offer me news specific to them, so I can see what’s coming up in the future. After all, Nokia just announced the N8, and there’s no sign of that on there.
• It’s nice that users can ‘like’ news posts and rate gadgets, and that you can get a view of what’s popular as a result, but it would be nice to develop this on the social side a bit more, giving me more feedback from my friends, or from others in my corner of the world. I imagine they could pull out some really interesting figures about what gadgets are used where as their membership builds up…

Of course, the site is still in beta, so there’s a long way for them to go yet. I just hope that they can get some distance along that road before someone else comes along overtakes them.