Jejak Kicau by Jibone

What’s your real name and why jibone?

My real name is J. Shamsul Bahri. That is how it is on my I.C. and birth certificate. Just ‘J.’ Which was partly why the nickname ‘Jibone’ was given to me by friends during my school days. That name have become my IRC nick and almost everything I register online.

What do you do professionally?

My ‘day job’ name card says that I am a R&D Engineer for System Consultancy Services. A system integrator type of company. I do some software and web programming. This job pays the bill.

Other stuff I do is I write and maintained several webzine/webblog. Jiboneus.com starts out as a personal blog now it’s a Webzine about arts, music, films and technology. Another recently launched website is WirawanWeb.com, it’s a webzine about all things web, from silly memes to serious stuff like online privacy and Internet censorship.

I am adopting the term Webzine because well, the term ‘blog’ these days refers to politics and personal stuff. Beside I am inspired by the whole ‘fanzine’ subculture, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanzine

On my free time I like to play with web APIs. I call it my ‘web experiments’, Jejak Kicau is one of it.

What inspired you to create Jejak Kicau?

You remember the movie X-Men (not the latest one), where Professor X goes into the room Cerebro and he could ‘listen’ to the thoughts of others all over the globe?

Well, either we realize it or not, we are all putting our thoughts on the Internet – Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, photos and videos. Imagine if we could take a look at what’s on the minds of most Malaysian.

For the Bersih event, we could see half of it wants a fair and clean election while the other half are complaining about the traffic jams.

What inspired you to create Jejak Kicau?

I’m not sure about the goal, this is just a pet project playing with web APIs. I do have plans to include Facebook status updates via their public Graph API and other stuff from other social networks if there is a way to access it.

It could be a useful socia analytic tool tracking trends across different types of social network, or just a toy for tracking hashtags.

Share 1 thing you liked / learned from this project?

1 thing I learn from this project.. today, almost everybody have a handphone with a camera with Internet access. News no longer comes in a pre-package format. Tools like this brings the news straight to you as it happens. I’ll let you decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

What was your goal for this project?

Editor: It’s been so experimental that Shamsul told me there wasn’t really a goal to this as of now.

Lastly, what now?

There are a few enhancements I want to do.

1. Shorter URLs resolving to the long format, maybe with a title in it.
2. Include Facebook updates in the mix.
3. Twitter streaming API for better updates.
4. Smooth some of the rough edges.

I plan to put this up on a public github or something, once I clean up some of my embarrassing codes that is.

So I guess that’s all about me and Jejak Kicau.

Editor’s Note

I’ve always wanted to feature Malaysian heroes of our Internet for their driven ideas derived from inspirations or aspirations. This is one of them. Please contact me if you’ve a pet project you’d like to share and I hope you like this enough to make it permanent.

SuveryMonkey Acquires Wufoo Forms

On April 25, SurveyMonkey announced in a press release they’ve acquired the form creator; Wufoo.

What is SurveyMonkey?

As the name partially describes it, without the monkey, it’s a web-based online survey creator. Some familiar brands using the service is Facebook, Autodesk, Campbell, Samsung and others.

What is Wufoo?

Because I use wufoo, I’m going to talk a little more about it. Simpleet started using Wufoo in 2009 when I learnt about it from…I don’t remember. But ever since Wufoo was created, it’s been really easy to use and I’ve followed it grow very quickly in the past 2 years.

From pure form creation into now being able to accept payments and I believe, even create surveys. Plus, Wufoo now integrates with popular service providers like CampaignMonitor, Mailchimp, Highrise, Freshbooks, Salesforce and others.

What MonkeyFoo now?

Okay. It may not be the brightest of titles. Anyway, I suppose this was the quickest way for SurveyMonkey to leap forward and offer more than just survey creation. After all, Wufoo already integrated with many services.

Google Offers Beta is Out

The group purchasing market opened by Groupon, with Living Social behind their tail are now both being pitted with newly launched Google Offers.

Good news for them though is Google Offers is in real beta and only available in selected areas. Quick side note, why I say real beta is because some solutions prefer to keep saying they’re in beta to communicate the meaning, they’re forever in development or improvisation.

In Malaysia, many Groupon clones have sprouted to claim their small part of the growing market for cheap deals. Just search Groupon clone and you’ll find a ton of out-of-the-box versions.

But let’s see what Google has to offer.

PostPost: Personal Facebook Aggregator

PostPost is plain awesome! It’s like taking the old Project Petaling Street and turning it into my daily newspaper, somewhat.

After logging in with your Facebook account, it collates (so canggih word) your feed from statuses, videos, images and links into a gallery. In their own words:

See what your friends think you should read in less than 30 seconds!

The layout too is really sweet as it caters to both common resolutions and wider devices. However, the only annoying behavior I felt about the website was the auto-loading of articles when you scroll to the bottom.

This should be a case study for user experience because they don’t have a main menu on the top and I’m unable to use the links in the footer because of the auto-load. At least, a sticky footer would’ve made the footer links more accessible.

Nonetheless, now I’m thinking why blog aggregators didn’t move towards this way. It would’ve been fantastic!

Votes are Open for Lowyat.Net T-Shirt Design Competition

It’s been about 1-2 years since Lowyat.Net organized a T-shirt design competition. Further supporting the community this year, they’re offering a generous RM5000 cash prize to the grand winner. Don’t play-play!

Cast your vote now

This year the rules were a little more flexible. They allowed modification of the mascots; red hair boy (no idea what’s his name) and devil boy. However, I’m surprised a number of designs with the new character designs didn’t make it into the finalist. Pity.

Well, out of all the designs, this one was my favourite.

In addition, I left the suggestion in the t-shirt thread to promote the voting activity further, Lowyat could consider giving away a t-shirt to every random 50th vote.

What are you waiting for?! Vote for your favourite Lowyat.net T-shirt design.