Now that I’ve had a chance to play with Google Wave a bit and to hear what other people have to say about it I’ve noticed that a lot of people are disappointed and it seems to me that they have missed the point.

Google Wave is a platform, a framework, an infrastructure. It has a front end, but that’s not really what is impressive about it (which is a good thing considering the complexity and bugginess right now). What is amazing is that Google has developed a real-time communication framework that can work in a federated environment. Why is this cool? Because it means that I can use it at work behind firewalls, at home for my family and personal projects, set it up at school with the right privacy to comply with child protection laws and also participate in it publicly on Google’s servers or anyone else’s I prefer. And it will still work in real time, across these servers transparently to me or securely within them. It won’t be “a Wave clone” that I have to beg everyone else to sign up for. It will just be Wave on a different server. All my contacts can be shared and my communications flow as freely between them, or I can create a walled garden. The choice is will be up to me.

People aren’t getting it right now because they’re expecting the beta to all be about polishing the User Experience. But it’s not about polishing: it’s about defining. This is similar to the introduction of Microsoft Surface: here is a great big flashy table with a powerful computer in it that responds to touch. At first exposure it sounds awesome, but what can you do with it? How will people be most comfortable interacting with it? What practical tasks can it facilitate? What fun can be had with it? The potential is there, but the only way to really know how it should best be used is to have a lot of people attempt to interact with it, without preconceptions, to figure out what the natural ways to interact with it actually are. There have been a lot of surprises as more and more people are able to play with it. A whole new set of gestures and user interface elements have been developed for Surface and refined as more and more people actually use them. I had the opportunity to participate in part of that process and it was fascinating.

I see Google Wave’s release as very similar to Microsoft Surface’s. There is a really powerful back-end underneath the UI that is capable of some amazing things, yet there haven’t been enough people exposed to it for the development team to really know the best way to provide efficient interaction with that engine. I think that is the purpose of the closed beta, to figure those things out. But people have these unrealistic expectations based on the misuse of the whole “beta” concept that what Google has is just a tiny step away from being ready for release to the world. That’s just not the case. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a ton of potential in Wave, and, to those of us out there than can appreciate the magnificence of the accomplishment of the platform that Google Wave is built on, it is very impressive indeed.

To all you fellow beta testers out there: give it some time and give Google some feedback and you will see Wave become much more intuitive to use (as well as less buggy and more performant). Developers will build alternative clients and more and more widgets for it. Waves will become just one more format for communication that we won’t even think about, we’ll just use in the way that’s most appropriate for the type of communication we need at the time. There will be “client views” for particular tasks based on who you are communicating with and their accessibility. If they’re offline you will use an email-like view to compose messages to them. If they’re online, you’ll use something more akin to IM or Twitter. All the stuff that is currently confusing and gets in your way (scrolling down huge waves just to find the new messages) will be fixed to no longer clutter your experience. And you will eventually be able to customize your client to make it even more efficient for how you want to receive your information, not just how you create and share it. These things will come as more people are exposed to Wave and see the potential and write their own solutions to the new problems that are becoming obvious now that there are enough other people to interact with on the service.

It’s new, and in closed beta. It’s not fair to write it off as “over-hyped”, especially when the hype has been coming from people who were interpreting screen shots or didn’t really understand that Wave is a new platform and not really a new UI to “fix the problem of email” or become the next social media magnet site. Google let us beta testers try it out to figure out how we’re reacting to the new communications capabilities Wave’s framework offers. Give Google the feedback they need to make it better for everyone.

Wave offers us a new way to communicate digitally that is adaptable to our immediate situation and needs. Wave is not out to replace Twitter, Facebook, IM or email: the point is to render them obsolete. That will happen without a lot of protest once someone figures out the ulitimate client for the already amazing platform Google has built… it will just seem natural.

Yes, I love Evernote. It is my newest obsession, and I just posted about how I think it has the potential for greatness. I also mentioned that there is still much room for improvement in Evernote’s offerings. I have been impressed with how quickly the development team puts out releases and new features so I am sure that they already have a roadmap for 2009 of enhancements. But I would like to propose a feature list of my own, some of which I am almost certain are already planned, but a couple of others they might not have thought of that I think could make a huge difference in the adoptability of the application.

1. Sharing notes with users and/or groups:
This one is a given… lots of people have been asking for it, so I’m sure it’s on the high priority list. Being able to share your Evernote notes or notebooks with other Evernote users in native format so that you can collaborate through your Evernote clients would open up a whole new realm of uses for the application and attract a lot of new users who would be interested in that feature-set by itself. It might also push a few more people over the fence in migrating from Microsoft’s OneNote and even SharePoint. This won’t be easy to figure out from a user interface design perspective, nor a security architecture design perspective, and I am very anxious to see how Evernote will implement it. But the payoff would be a big one for them so I hope it comes soon.

2. Expanding the monthly bandwidth allotment and/or allowing you to choose your data storage location:
Two related ideas here… Now that Premium subscribers have the ability to store any type of file in their notes as attachments, it makes sense to use Evernote as a single place to keep all your files and data. If that’s the case, then 500mb a month is not going to handle it for a lot of people. Either Evernote needs to allow you to “seed” your notes with a one-time upload of all your relevant files (for a one-time fee according to bandwidth) or allow you to pay more to up your monthly allotment. As an alternative, it would be nice if you could choose to store your data in a 3rd party data store like Amazon S3. That way, Evernote could offload the storage overage to another service, and you would also have even more control over your data. Evernote could be responsible for making it easy to link to that file wherever it is (and let’s face it, Amazon S3 really needs a good client anyway!).

3. Better note formatting control
There are several aspects I think are important here, and I understand the limitations of the XML format that Evernote has chosen to represent notes in, which, like most XML schemas, is intended to be very generic and define the content, not the presentation. However, this is a consumer application and consumers want things to be pretty, and because attractive things are more usable, it makes sense to offer the users some formatting options. Here are three features that I think would improve user experience a great deal:

• Canned “themes” for notes or note content: a predefined format for a content type. A good example here is code snippets, which are most readable in a mono-spaced font and, even better, with color coding for specific keywords and operators.
• The ability to add tables and other HTML formatting structures such as super and sub tags and definition lists. This could be done via the WYSIWYG editor Evernote currently uses or, for more advanced users…
• The ability to edit the HTML structure of a note. Technically it’s XHTML, but sometimes editing that is the only way to really “clean up” a note’s formatting, especially notes that are clipped from the web and get kind of crazy with the hidden (ie, unable to delete from Evernote’s editor) paragraph tags and other formatting. It would be nice to be able to just go in and simplify the HTML without having to battle the editor.

Here are a couple of features I want and think would put Evernote over the top, but which I’d be surprised if they’re considering…

4. Linking and embedding notes:
Before I found Evernote I was a TiddlyWiki addict. I was totally enamored with the javascript implementation of micro-content in a wiki-like HTML based data storage application. One of the beautiful features of TiddlyWiki is that you can create a link from one tiddler (the term for note) to any other tiddler. You can create tiddlers that are basically catalogs of other tiddlers and you can also embed tiddlers in other tiddlers. The embedded tiddlers can be displayed as full or partial content, in tabs, or in collapsible panels. It is a very intuitive way to navigate and organize your data. If Evernote took TiddlyWiki’s example and gave users the functionality to treat their notes as micro-content, it would finally be a contender to OneNote in the actual functionality of taking and organizing notes (which, ironically, is not currently Evernote’s strong suit!).

5. Extendable clients (let us make plug-ins!):
I am sure that every Evernote user has their own list of features they’d like to see the development team focus on. Releasing an API is a great step in offloading some of that development effort from Evernote’s developers, since now you can develop your own client for Evernote. The problem is that most people don’t want to develop a whole new client. The Windows, Mac, and iPhone clients already do 90% of what most people want and need, but they’d like to add another feature. Mozilla figured this problem out a long time ago by allowing people to develop plug-ins for their web browsers. If Evernote could make their clients able to integrate with plug-ins, they would open up a huge amount of possibilities. It would generate customer loyalty by giving people their pet features faster. It would generate geek-cred by letting developers bling out Evernote with their pet projects. And it would potentially offset even more development effort from Evernote’s team and allow them pick and choose the best new stuff to integrate into future releases. A win-win for everyone.

Finally, here are a few more nice-to-have features that don’t need much explanation:

• The ability to edit notes (especially todo checklist notes) in the mobile web client
• Notebooks that can be nested
• An app for the Android G1
• The ability to comment on public notes (why not make Evernote an alternative to a blog??)
• The ability to specify tags when adding notes via email and/or specify auto-tags when email received from particular address.
• The ability to encrypt a whole note, and a whole notebook
• PDF preview thumbnails on the web client (especially public notebooks)

That covers my main Evernote feature wishlist. I would love to see some of these things added to Evernote in 2009 and if they are they will make an already great application even more awesome. If you have other ideas please leave them in the comments, or if you are on FriendFeed join our Evernote Addicts group and post your thoughts.

Update [01/01/2009]: I recieved a newsletter from Evernote with some promising information. Looks like I might get a few things on my list, especially #1:

Dear Evernoters,

Thank you for making 2008 a great year for Evernote! I wanted to let you know about some of the things you can expect from us in 2009. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Think of it as our top New Year’s Resolutions, except unlike my resolution to learn the harpsichord, we’ll actually get these done!

….

Ok, on to the plans for ‘09:

1. Sharing and Collaboration

The public notebooks functionality that we launched in 2008 was a timid, first step in our ambitious plans for making Evernote a great tool for sharing your memories and collaborating with your friends and coworkers. In 2009, we’re going to greatly expand what you can do with your memories, documents, files, photos and anything else you throw into Evernote. If you’re the social type, we’re going to grow up from being your external brain to being a telepathic-mutant-super-brain, but with good manners. Of course, you’ll always have the option to keep any or all of your info totally private.

2. More Mobile Phones

We’ll be adding new Evernote native clients for a bunch of popular mobile phones. Right now, Evernote works great with iPhone or Windows Mobile devices. All other types of phones can use our mobile web and email interface ( http://www.evernote.com/m ), which is good for reading notes, but not as slick or full-featured as the native clients. If you’re hankering for the full Evernote experience on your favorite phone, there’s a good chance that you’ll get it in 2009.

Hopefully the Android G1 is on that list of phones to get Evernote clients this year. Exciting stuff!

The email also included the generic

4. Even Better Desktop Clients
6. Third-Party Apps
7. More Premium Features

Any of which could encompass some of my other requests above… so I’ll just wait and see, and cross my fingers.

Over the past few months I have become an addict of a service called Evernote. It was originally created a few years ago as a note keeping application as an alternative to Microsoft’s OneNote and other similar software. In mid 2008, Evernote’s creators revamped the application so that it kept a duplicate of your note data on their web servers and automatically synced the local copies of the notes. Subscriber data is accessible both via the Evernote web interface and the local machine client, which can be installed (and synchronized) between as many computers as the subscriber wishes.

The Evernote team has added a feature recently to premium subscriptions allowing the attachment and “in-note editing” of any type of file. I think this is the step that may make Evernote the first full realization of Cloud storage for mainstream consumers, and may put them on the road to be to personal data what Google is to public data.

For years now we’ve been told that it won’t be long until our digital life is completely “in the Cloud”, and that’s been something I have anxiously awaited. The Cloud means different things to different people, but some of the basic definitions include the ability to store our data somewhere decentralized so that it is accessible from anywhere that has an internet connection. I have always visualized the implementation of Cloud storage as relieving me from worrying about where my data is, or whether it’s safe and backed up, and being able to access it wherever I am on whatever device I am using.

The promise of the Cloud:
There are several ideas that come along with the Cloud storage promise such as -

• agnosticism about what type of data (and metadata) we’re storing
• redundancy (automatic backup or sync with multiple stores) of our data to ensure consistency
• the ability to share our data with others and control what’s shared and how
• the ability to easily store any data that we create immediately
• the ability to easily search for and retrieve that data when we need it again
• the ability to interact with our data from any platform as long as it has a pipe to the Cloud

Until now there hasn’t been a single service available that addresses all of these issues. There have been plenty of products and services that provide partial solutions which are divided among the lines of the type of data (and metadata) they allow you to store, the format of the data and/or the method of access. There are 3 main categories of these services and most of them cater to specific types of data:

Online file storage/sync/backup/sharing:
Amazon S3, Dropbox, Mozy, Carbonite, Flickr, YouTube and lots of other services to store our data in the Cloud. They offer services for packaged data (files) to backup from your PC, synchronize multiple computers, store and share data online or any combination of these things. Some of them (synchronization and backup services typically) do things in the background so you set them and forget them. Others are cumbersome to use (Amazon S3) but provide more flexibility in how your data is stored and retrieved. And some only allow you to store specific types of data (Flickr, YouTube) which, while allowing more focus on the content and communities around it to develop, is inconvenient for the individual because your data is spread around multiple services. Services that are data type agnostic usually don’t allow you to choose what metadata you want to store with your files or group related files for intuitive retrieval, while the file-type specific sites generally do.

Bookmarking:
There is copious amounts of data on the internet, but it is all transient. Websites, blogs, discussion boards, aggregators: there is terabytes of data being created on a daily basis for us to consume. Many people spend a good part of every day wading through that information to find pieces that are relevant to them, and it’s a natural idea to keep a copy of that hard-won data once it’s found. A multitude of services are available to create an archive of links to that data so that you can find it again such as Del.icio.us, Diigo, Ma.gnolia, Clipmarks and others. These services have popularized the idea of tagging information with metadata to make it easier to find and share with others. But they are flawed in that they don’t save copies of the data you find, or if they do, only parts (the non-binary parts). When the source goes away, your links become worthless.

File Systems and Databases:
Since most software is designed to consume data from files or data sets, file systems and databases are still the most popular ways to store data. Cloud storage will eventually be a major factor in making dependence on particular flavors of operating systems to manipulate your data irrelevant. And it’s been coming for a while… In 2003 I attended Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference. The attendees were presented with visions of the next version of the Windows operating system that would offer users file storage built on top of a database. Of course that never materialized, but the idea is still a great one. The advantage of databases is that they can be set up so that with indexes to search them quickly. Data structures can be defined to store data and metadata in the way that makes the most sense for the data itself and relationships between the data defined. The data itself is not constrained in a way that it is by storage in a file system file and the user has control over what metadata is stored and how the data is organized. Cloud storage, because it is a service that runs on a web server somewhere lends itself to being a large database with all the benefits a database offers. Currently most people keep the majority of their data on local hard drives, and are subject to all the limitations that imposes.

So we’ve got Cloud services and products, what’s the problem?
As much as some of us take advantage of online file storage and bookmarking services, they have yet to appeal to the majority of folks in the mainstream. To use them effectively generally takes a lot of time, discipline, dedication, effort and, in some cases, technical knowledge. Most late-adopters don’t want to have to learn how to use something, they just want it to work and work intuitively. And if it doesn’t make their life easier in the short term then it’s not something they’re going to use.

But now we have Evernote. Evernote is the first comprehensive realization of Cloud storage that is intuitive enough for mainstream consumers.

What is so great about Evernote?
Evernote covers all the bases of Cloud storage:

• It doesn’t care what kind of data you put in it, it supports any file type as well as raw text.
• It is storage online and an automatic backup of local files.
• It is available online and offline.
• It allows you to edit your from “within” the application (even files, when opened from the interface).
• It is a bookmarking system that allows you to organize all your data with tags and retrieve it via search or browsing.
• It keeps a full copy of any data you find interesting on the web that you can capture through a bookmarklet.
• It allows you to structure your data in a free form way, and keep meta data about the data with the data.
• It allows you to share your data with others, either in bulk (through public notebooks) or in batches (exporting notes).
• It is accessible from clients on platforms that people interact with almost constantly which makes it available to gather your created data from wherever you are and whatever format the data is in.
• It is extendable through it’s developer API so that third-party clients can be written against it to manipulate your data from even more platforms and combine it with other services that you already use to collect, create or modify data (with the ability to auto sync with those services).

This is the promise of the Cloud - being able to access and store any data you have from wherever you are whenever you want.

Evernote isn’t perfect. Currently the full Cloud storage enabling features are only available to paid subscribers, and subscribers can only upload up to 500mb a month (storage is unlimited once the data is uploaded). There are some improvements to be made in both the features to create data within Evernote and to share that data with specific people, but the team is continually releasing enhancements so the potential is there to be the one-stop Cloud storage application.

If Evernote addresses the ability to store more data in subscriber accounts they could have a chance to become the biggest player in the consumer Cloud storage market. With nearly 2,000 notes and 100s of files in my notebooks in a few months, I am already addicted to Evernote, and riding high in that Cloud. I don’t plan to come back down and I think that many others will be joining me and the other more than half a million new Evernote subscribers in 2008. If they build their user-base quick enough, offering a very addicting service that quickly becomes indispensable, in a few years Evernote could become just as important as Google in people’s daily lives.

omg, I just thought of something. I prefer to communicate with people at my own pace. Online, people tend to state their points / bottomlines in a more organized manner, kinda cutting the BS small talk out of the way? So, perhaps, I may be an extrovert-introvert? - Mona N.

I’ve seen a lot of conjecture on FriendFeed (and elsewhere) recently from some of the more active participants in the realization that they spend more time interacting with their “friends” on FriendFeed than in meatspace and in many cases seem to enjoy those interactions more than otherwise. Despite the fact that many of these people are just now realizing they feel this way, I don’t really think this type of behavioral bent is new. It’s just become more apparent because FriendFeed’s combinations of features is the first that’s come along in a long time that enables that behavior extremely well. It fulfills a need for a lot of us and that may be one reason why it’s so successful. It may also be one reason why FriendFeed might never be mainstream in the near term but eventually (it and other tools like it) will be the defacto standard communication protocols in an emerging evolution of the introvert.

Dissection of a meatspace introvert:
The majority of the people in the world don’t feel connected with other people unless they spend time with them in person. The majority of time that human civilization has been around the only means of communication was face-to-face (verbal and non-verbal). When you aren’t good at that real-time, direct, intense type of communication it’s not an easy world to live in. Introversion is really just a lack of being comfortable with meatspace communications. Introverts seem to withdraw because it’s much easier to avoid looking like a fool if you remove yourself from situations where you have to communicate directly with others. But that doesn’t mean that introverts need connections with other people any less.

A brave new protocol:
Introversion can be “cured” by changing the protocol of communications. With the emergence of every new communications technology networks have sprung up and virtual communities have formed. Before the telnet and BBSes on the internet there were HAM radio networks and previous to that there telephone switchboard operators who chatted when the lines were free and even earlier there were social networks of telegraph operators who would “chat” with each other when they weren’t relaying official communiques. These steps enabled the emergence of a new kind of relationship between people, a connection that though asynchronous and virtual is just as real and prolific as extrovert connections in meatspace.

FriendFeed, the enabler:
Channels such as FriendFeed (and even Twitter) give introverts an incredible amount of control over their connections with other people and lack of that control is what is intimidating about meatspace interactions. Introverts feel very comfortable (sometimes even more comfortable) with those connections being virtual because it gives them control of the intimacy of their interactions to a very high degree. Interacting on forums like FriendFeed enables that control by allowing them to handle communications…
…when it is convenient…
…at a comfortable pace…
…with no penalty for slow response…
…with no penalty for avoiding conversations that are uncomfortable, uninteresting or not useful…
…to deal with other conversations in the priority they prefer…
…and the ability to carefully craft their interactions to make the highest impact on those with shared interests.
They become adept at deciphering context that would normally be transmitted in meatspace by verbal inflection and body language. They become proficient at multi-tasking and participating in many different conversations simultaneously on different topics. They find that there are many more connections out there for them to make than they’d hoped for. Once they’ve dipped their toes in those waters and found them pleasant, they jump in the pool with full extroverted abandon.

An evolution:
Social-media introverts are training themselves for the future. We have found our place in the world. We are the ones suited for a future where the standard is that virtual connections will outnumber meatspace ones. We are the early adopters who test the limits of each new offering to see if it will give us an even better way to handle these connections more efficiently. This is why something can generate so much buzz within the “early adopter crowd” but remain out of the mainstream.

There’s a few assumptions that I think we take for granted that’s lost on most people: 1) privacy is an illusion, 2) we’re all interconnected, 3) we spend an acceptably large amount of time online. No matter how true those sound to us, for most people, there’s a lot of pushback. Which is why, when Facebook goes crazy with the privacy restrictions, we go “what the hell” when the rest of the world goes “thank god.” So I think anything that appeals to privacy, close networks, and saving a person’s time online is going to go over hugely with mainstream people. I think to ignore one for the sake of another is the wrong way to approach it. - Mark Trapp

Because the mainstream (by definition, the majority of the people in the world) are extroverts who are comfortable with the slower pace of meatspace. Is that to say that all early adopters are introverts? No. But since meatspace introverts are naturally drawn to these new opportunities for communication and more likely to actively seek them out it stands to reason that the majority of early adopters are meatspace introverts.
The introverts of the world have found their medium and as the pace of information generation continues to grow expanding the need for enhanced communication we will eventually be the norm instead of the oddity.

A conclusion:
So, all you fellow meatspace introverts out there in wonder of your new-found extroversion in social-media, consider yourself blessed that you’ve got the natural inclination to not only handle but enjoy those relationships. The world is changing and it’s about to be our age. We have the capacity to thrive on the virtual connections that so befuddle those people who are limited to meatspace interactions, and, barring any disasters that throw civilization back to pre-technology, your virtual interaction skills will be the skills necessary to be successful in life from this point forward. Enjoy your new found status. It’s about time the introverts had a chance to shine.

I think I know what FriendFeed is really all about, and it’s simply brilliant.

For those who have been following the conversations about noise on FriendFeed you know that many people (including me) have been asking for the ability to create filters to solve the problem. Some people have even suggested that the solution will be the Semantic Web or that FriendFeed is already a step in that direction. I think FriendFeed’s creators have even more ambitious plans.

FriendFeed is going to be an intelligent agent.

The setup is perfect. FriendFeed is gathering all of our attention data. It’s just a small leap to analyzing that data and finding patterns of usage for each FFeeder. Then it’s just another small step to apply those patterns to incoming data, both as filters on streams we subscribe to, and as alerts on streams that we don’t. It’s like reverse web site analytics: instead of analyzing what lots of people find interesting, it’s finding what’s interesting to a single person.

FriendFeed’s founders are from Google. They have experience with finding interesting things in large amounts of data. Search, from one angle, is simply gathering data from many sources, extracting what is relevant within a context and then prioritizing the results by ranking. It seems as if the same type of algorithms that are used to determine page rank with search engines could also be used to determine what’s interesting to us in the pool of our attention data.

At FriendFeed is each user is a context and ranking is a result of attention. With page rank, every link to a site is a vote for its contents. With attention rank, there is a chance to be even more precise because there can be negative votes as well. You’re voting on what’s interesting every time you participate and even when you don’t.

Votes Up:

• Contributing content (big)
• Creating or joining a room (big)
• Subscribing to someone (big)
• Creating an imaginary friend (big)
• Commenting (big)
• Liking (minor)

Votes Down:

• Leaving a post in your stream untouched (minor)
• Hiding (big)

The more you participate, the more you share about you and your interests, the better the agent will be able to work for you. All of these votes reveal keywords and context about what’s important to you and what’s not. And you’re constantly generating that information.

So what’s the big deal? It means a pleasurable, efficient, speedy, personalized experience consuming social media with little wasted time digesting noise. The uses could be to filter your stream (no more noise), find people who are similar to you (expand your network), find content you might not have noticed that you would like (information discovery), and even customized advertizing (that you’ll actually appreciate)!

FriendFeed’s founders have most likely learned yet another lesson from their old employer. Google has set itself up to be the gateway for the bulk of the world’s digital information. There’s a lot of power in that. FriendFeed is setting itself up to be the gateway for our attention. We’ll become extremely reliant on it to do the grunt-work of filtering and alerting us to what’s important to us. It will become a service we can’t live without.

And it will be a profitable service as well.

FriendFeed as an intelligent agent can also be a recommendation engine for products and services through tracking how often people with similar interests to you, or people you subscribe to (and generally trust), recommend them. But the most lucrative profits will come from extremely well-targeted advertising. If a FFeeder mentions he’s looking for a new camera, all the sudden he could be presented with offers from camera retailers for exactly the model he’s mentoned. As long as FFeeders participate and announce they are seeking something FriendFeed will deliver advice and ads of relevance. We won’t even mind we’re being advertised to because it will be useful and timely for us. Adding Amazon Wishlists is already a feed option. What if you received a coupon any time something in your wishlist went on sale? Would you be annoyed or appreciative? And what advertiser wouldn’t want to participate and have such a high probability of sales resulting?

It’s even possible that FriendFeed could share revenue with FFeeders based on their influence in resulting sales, giving a cut to the influencer in a model similar to Squidoo. Will they? Probably not, considering there’s possibilities there for abuse by spammers, but maybe. That could even help alleviate the issues many bloggers have with the conversation being diverted from their blogs to FriendFeed. Bloggers could still make money by producing good content that way.

Why do I think FriendFeed is going in this direction? There are already hints in what features they have and what features they don’t (besides the obvious aggregation features):

• Stats for the top 10 people you find most interesting and who find you most interesting are already available. It’s logical to keep expanding on that.
• Only offering Like and Hide on posts simplifies the voting system. Offering a starred ranking system would just confuse things.
• They haven’t offered advanced threaded comments or a full blogging platform and probably won’t. Again, more simple to implement a voting system without these things, and they would be distractions from hooking 3rd party streams into the service. It sets up the impression that FriendFeed is the place to go to consume and attribute information instead of create it.
• Rooms are an awesome way to get people to both cast a vote with their attention and also add context to any content. If content shows up in a room it’s most likely related to the room’s subject.

Maybe this is all just a pipe-dream of mine, but if this isn’t FriendFeed’s developers plan after all then it should be. The potential is there, not only for providing a service that so many people would benefit from, but simply to make a nice profit. I have great expectations.

A lot of people seem to be wondering about the wisdom of Google buying YouTube with it’s legal problems and how it potentially competes with Google Video but I think those two issues are relatively irrelevant from Google’s perpective. The acquisition of YouTube doesn’t surprise me too much, mainly because YouTube is the prime place on the web where people are uploading video content. It doesn’t really matter that a lot of that material is copyrighted because bringing YouTube into Google’s holdings as a premier content collector fits in very nicely with Google’s mission:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Everything Google does, especially the stuff that makes people scratch their heads, ultimately falls back to that statement. This is something people need to realize and something I’ve noticed for a while now. Think about it: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information…” They want it all.

What’s the best way to get it all? Make yourself the gatekeeper. Supply the best (or buy the best) tools to create content or collect content and people will gladly support you in your mission. Google Pages, Base, Spreadsheets, Notebook, Calendar, even GMail are all about letting you create content on Google’s servers. And they buy tools like Writely (now “Google Docs“) and SketchUp because, again, it’s a way for you to create content directly on their servers. If they can get you to create content on their servers then it makes it infinitely easy for them to slice, dice and organize that information however they want. And if they can’t get you to create content for them, then the next best thing is to be the biggest archive holder (enter YouTube).

What most people think Google is about, namely search, is just a means to the end of their mission. Possibly even a secondary means, if you step back and look at the big picture.

Why is it so important to organize all the world’s information? We all know that information is power. If you can put yourself in the position of being a gatekeeper of all information, being a portal, being an oracle, then you’ve got an extreme of influence over the world. People potentially become dependant on you for their lives to work smoothly and you become indispensable. What company wouldn’t want to be in that position?

I like Google, mainly because I drink the kool-aid about how cool and useful the tools they provide me with are. I use them every day and yes, I am very dependant on them. But every now and then I hear the little voice in the back of my head whispering that I hope they uphold their motto “Don’t be evil.” as fervently as they seem to be pursuing their mission. The rest of the time I just sit back and admire the genius of it all.

I’m probably late to this outrage party but I finally got a chance to put some thoughts together on the “Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006″ HR 5319 IH bill. I wrote up a FAQ about it, and I thought I should also post it here, being the nature of this blog.

I am very disappointed by the passing of that bill. It shows an utter lack of understanding by our lawmakers on the implications of the technology they’re trying to regulate. I don’t think that children should necessarily be participating in MySpace from school, but what makes a site that’s purely about socialization different from a site that has good and potentially educational information needs to be more clearly defined if there’s going to be a Federal law restricting it. Under the loose definitions in the bill, any site that has user profiles is a socialization site.

Nearely EVERY site that has any kind of account system, where you must provide credentials and log in to access content has a profile associated with your account. This includes nearly all the useful sites for children to gather information or teachers to provide as resources such as news sites, forums, sites specifically FOR teaching children like Brain Pop, and even Wikipedia!! Most useful and relevant information on the web is now authored daily or hourly by user participation. What qualifies as a “chat site” anyway? What sites are left but those that don’t change frequently and have static content? Static information is old and obsolete.

I’ve already experienced a situation similar to this that was preventing me from doing my job. I am assigned at project at a government agency currently and needed to use Google Groups to research answers for development problems I was having. Google Groups search is one of the most useful tools available to find information like that (much better than the general Google search in many cases) since there is a plethora of technical forums on the internet. The agency had websensed Google Groups because you could potentially have a social group there. I had to beg and provide much justification before they’d make an exception for me (fortunately they did). Just because a site can be used for social purposes does not mean that there isn’t good and useful information to be found!

The problem is that many of the senators who passed this bill (most likely) know that its preposterous. It will be difficult or impossible to enforce in a reasonable manner because the definitions of “chat site” and “sites with profiles” are too broad-reaching: it will require exceptions to be made on a case-by-case basis. They know this, but they voted on it anyway. Why? Because come re-election time they don’t want their opponent to put an add on TV saying “Senator X voted against a bill that would protect YOUR CHILDREN from SEXUAL PREDATORS!!!”. That’s the only reason. The whole system is set up so that they can’t vote any other way if they want to stay in office. Personally I find this a glaring flaw in our political system. The rest of them voted out of ignorance about modern technology, but what can you expect about a group of sheltered people in their mid 50s or later? They live in such a different reality tunnel from the rest of the world. We desperately need a group of people who understand technology that can counsel Congress on it’s implications. People who understand that the internet is not, in fact, a series of tubes!

Here’s the deal, folks: we can’t protect our children from everything. If they grow up thinking that the world is a nice, friendly, puffy, happy place they will be ill-prepared for real life. They need to be taught early how to look out for danger, and guided (not shielded) away from it. Its a parent’s job to do that at home, and a teacher’s job to do that at school. But we can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. We need to make sure that our children have access to the wealth of information on the internet for their education, as much or more than we need to set up “protections” that only complicate life for schools and make their job much harder.

Ray Ozzie (MS CTO) gave an interesting presentation this morning about incorporating the functionality of the standard clipboard into the web. Deemed “Live Clipboard” he showed us examples of how it could be used to transfer structured content on websites between websites and between websites and Windows applications.

The interface itself is a modified text box which looks like a button. If there is structured data on the web page, the user can click the button to copy it to the clipboard. The first example was copying event data from Eventful to a sample website. The “pasted” data showed up already formatted into fields as it was on the Eventful site. It is stored as a modifed version of CFText in the clipboard so that it can be created in the same structure that it was copied from. Transfering the copied event to Outlook was just a matter of pasting it into a new event.

Ray then showed how he could paste profile data from his MySpace blog to his profile on Facebook as a “live link” that would be automatically updated if changes were made to the MySpace profile.

Finally he gave some interesting examples with Flickr: One-click copying and then pasting an image directly into Windows explorer as well as pasting an entire Flickr feed packaged automatically in a subfolder. A special file was created in the feed folder which would allow the feed to be continuously updated as new items are added.

While definitely a cool idea, Ray admitted it will take wide adoption to make it really useful to most people. It requires both the inclusion of a script on participating sites and the use of specialized microformats that the data will be wrapped in.

Ray said Internet Explorer 7 will have some of this functionality already built in when it is released. He has more details about the concept and the microformats necessary to support it on his blog post.

This could be extremely helpful for synchronizing information between sites that you have a presence on, for creating automatic downloads of files as they become available (using the updating RSS feed to Explorer) and just to make it easier to maintain your personal data both online and offline. I can see potential, if there’s enough momentum to actually implement it on a critical mass of websites.

I’ve been thinking about the Geek Divide after Pete’s post yesterday on it (from which I found Scott Karp’s geek qualification list list that inspired me to create my own).

This is a subject close to my heart, being what I am. But I often wonder, why can’t everyone just be geeky?? How come everyone doesn’t get excited about new technology? Why does the world have so many oblivious, uninterested or just plain ludditious people in it?

Yes, I am firmly entrenched in my little reality tunnel, but I often honestly wonder how people in this day and age can even avoid being geeky. I think it’s an age thing. Maybe things just move too fast for most folks over the age of 25…

I believe that most of the kids 16 and under will be geeks by default. Exposure to computers, the internet, cell phones and gaming consoles for their entire life can’t help but make it so. And it doesn’t phase them that it changes wholly in a matter of months. From their perspective, that rate of change is a normal part of life. And I think that’s a good thing because the rate of change is only going to accelerate.

TAD and I were very entertained by two “popular looking” high school aged kids at the Apple store the other night that were playing with an iLife on an iBook and had to call their friends on their cell and tell them to come see all the awesome stuff it could do. That never would have happened even 5 years ago. Every time we go there are gaggles of teenage girls ohhing and ahhing over iPods and cameras and laptops. It’s become fashionable to have geeky tendencies.

So maybe I’m biased (of course I am), but I’m thinking the Geek Divide, being more of an age issue, will resolve itself as the younger generation matures and starts becoming financially independent. These kids are used to putting time and effort into the things they use, they’re willing to endure the pain of the complexity over lack of features that most of us early adopters willingly go through now and they’ll take it for granted that it’s part of the experience. The issues that people have been talking about lately with “commercializing” Web 2.0 offerings will eventually just kind of fade away.

I’m not saying that “commercializing” isn’t important because it is, especially right now. Usability and feature value should always be major factors in the development of applications. Currently, and over the course of the next few years, the Geek Divide will still be a large chasm. But, I think that the level of user sophistication is going to go up radically after that. We’ll just have to be conscious of the needs of the geek-deficient and hold their hands until then.

I’m on an informatics kick lately. I’m working on a new PIM system that I’ll proably blog about soon but I’ve also been thinking about bookmarking. I am a compulsive bookmarker. I save almost everything. And most of the time I save it more than once depending on what it is because there’s not a single bookmark service that provides everything that I need. So I’m going to ask for one today!

If you’re a developer out there that wants an idea to work on to build the better bookmarking site, this post is for you!! If you’re a bookmarking service user like me, and you have suggestions for features that I didn’t ask for, please leave a comment! Hopefully someone will take a hint and build the ulitimate bookmark service and everyone will be so happy that all the world’s problems will be solved and we’ll live in peace forever after. Well, maybe not. But a better service would be nice.

The Basics

Listed to avoid forgetting the obvious, these are features/abilities that already exist in many if not all of the services out there right now.

• Save a URL with a title and description (duh!)
• Tags may be associated with the bookmark (hierarcy is dead!)
• A page listing all my bookmarks in archive
• Filter my own archive by my tags
• Search my bookmarks by description text and tags
• A page that ranks bookmarks by popularity
• A page that lists the latest public bookmarks
• Subscribe to my archive by RSS

The Not-So-Basics

These are abilities and features that are either not as common, or that I’ve seen in some services but not others. Here’s where some differentiation begins.

• Store private bookmarks
• Store a copy of the page privately so that if the site goes away you have a personal copy of the info
• Store parts of a page instead of or as a supplement to the whole page: to clip parts of a page
• When saving a bookmark, choose whether to store a copy, the clip, just the url or any combination of the three.
• Store optional keywords. These differ from tags in that they have words or phrases that are specific to that single bookmark to help you find it later. If you’re a tagger and you have hundreds of tags that you’ve only used 1 or 2 times, those are really keywords. Having keywords would help us unclutter our tag clouds. Tags are for generalization and classification, keywords are for uniqueness.
• The save post page should have an easy alternative to typing for me to be able to add tags to my post, a suggestion feature maybe, clickable tag list
• Search on text in your saved copies (full text search of the bookmarks, in other words)
• Limit the scope on your searches to entire user base, just personal, and search “within” a tag
• A public API to write programs to manipulate my archive
• Subscribe by RSS to any and all bookmark lists (mine, tag filter, searches, popular, latest, etc).
• A way to easily “copy” a bookmark on any page of the service site to my own archive
• A page with “suggested” bookmarks based on bookmarks that I already have that people who bookmark the same things as me have bookmarked that I haven’t
• A page with a list users who bookmark a lot of the same things that I do as a suggestion to subscribe to them because we have common interests
• Export my archive in an XML format that contains ALL the data that is in my archive
• Export my saved pages in a zipped format
• Sort my archive listing by Date or Title (alpha), or by the domain of the url.
• Create “groups” of users to share/suggest bookmarks with
• Subscribe to another user’s bookmarks
• Subscribe to tags
• View a bookmark’s history (other subscribers and their comments)
• Other users may comment on my bookmarks
• View all comments and descriptions for a bookmark/url (mine and other people’s) on one page
• Create topic lists/directories of bookmarks that others can add to and comment on. Different from groups of users…
• Rate my bookmarks

The Killer Features

Here’s where your new service will stand out from the pack (and it’s a large pack!)… These features are either rare or I have never seen anywhere. Offer these and you will have the edge on all the other services out there.

• Storing copies of the IMAGES from a bookmarked page! This is my number 1, absolute need to have requirement for a bookmarking service that I have only seen one place offer and it was a personal storage site, not a bookmarking service. Services that currently store copies of pages only store the HTML. I NEED THIS!! There’s no other way to preserve picture tutorials and inspirational website design type pages.
• When storing a bookmark to the first page in a series, a way to easily associate the rest of the pages in that series with the original bookmark (instead of necessarily creating a new bookmark for each page in the series). Saved copies should include the whole series, and the link should only show up once listed in my archive even though it points to multiple pages
• Enter markup into the description field: to be able to add links and lists in HTML format to the description
• Search by root url. If you want to see all the links you have for cnn.com, for example.
• A page for a bookmark to view my rating, the average rating of the same url for the people in my user groups, and the average rating of all ratings for the same url across the entire user base
• Create personal notes. This would just be a convenience, basically a bookmark post without a url, but something you can add a title and tags to.
• Create a native post automatically on my blog with the items that I have bookmarked that day
• Create a native post on my blog for every bookmark I save with a tag that I specify (allowing me to choose what items get posted to my blog instead of just the full day’s posting)
• Filter my bookmarks with tag queries (AND/OR/NOT/Like)
• Choose what delimiter I want to use when typing in tags: if I like space delimiters, or commas or semi colons, or whatever… or just have the UI be smart enough to parse them however I enter them as long as I am consistent with what I use
• Meta tag my tags. I want to be able to set up tags to be for source, object type, for, action, etc. Not sure how to do this easily, but it’s my wishlist so I can ask for it anyway
• Allow linking to files and resources other than web files, such as files on my computer, so that I can add descriptions and tags to these files and find them easily (these bookmarks would automatically be private since they’d only work if you were on that computer)

Anyone got any other great ideas? I’ll update this list as people suggest things that I like! And if someone out there decides to build this PLEASE, for goodness sake, let me be an alpha/beta tester!!

I’m excited about Microsoft again!

I used to be a total Microsoft advocate. I used to have long debates with people (including my husband) about why Microsoft was not an evil company and why I’d rather be an Microsoft developer than the other choices available. Having worked almost exclusively with Microsoft technologies for 12 years now, I was always impressed with the way they’ve treated developers, and with the quality of tools they provided, with the response to feedback in development and with the technology innovations that seemed to come out at a pace that was invigorating.

But for a while now I have been disappointed with Microsoft (to the point of actually starting to learn things like Ruby on Rails). Vista is delayed and stripped of much of the stuff that was going to make it worth upgrading to in the first place and Live.com doesn’t seem to offer anything groundbreaking or disruptive.

Times have changed and I’ve felt like Microsoft is missing the boat with the internet, moving way too slowly and focusing on the wrong things. The emergence of the not-well defined “Web 2.0″ has ushered in a much faster pace for innovations. New, facinating and useful applications are springing up on the web within mere months of conception and many of them are challenges to Microsoft’s software and general relevance to our “digital lives”. And apparently I’m not the only one who’s feeling this way…

As Nathan Weinberg says:

Basically, everyone, both people working at Microsoft and outsiders, agrees that MS gets outdone by three-person startups that can be more nimble, more reckless and more innovative.

Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft has now caught the clue. I first noticed on Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog:

Simply stated, Microsoft sees that software is increasingly moving to the Web, just as the Web becomes a completely immersive, two way experience for more and more people. With the Internet becoming a major force for the democratization of information, tools, and resources, it’s triggering a revolution in the way that we live our lives. This revolution is dramatically shaping how “we create, share, and refine anything that can be digitally encoded, be it news and information, artistic forms, scientific breakthroughs, personal communications, economic transactions, and, yes, even software,” according to the Live Labs manifesto.

What is the “Live Labs manifesto“? It’s the vision and statement of purpose for Live Labs, Microsoft’s attempt to catch up with the web that’s leaving them behind. I didn’t pay much attention to Live Labs at first because I was underwhelmed with the Live.com offerings so far. But reading Dion’s article and the several others he has linked now has me interested.

Live Labs will be a start-up environment within Microsoft. Seeded with talent from Microsoft Research and MSN, they are also hiring new, fresh talent to bring in ideas from outside the box. Live Labs will intentionally not be using the established methodology and protocols for Microsoft’s internal product development and the focus will be on getting concepts fleshed out and presented for testing (beta releases) and refinement as soon as possible. There will also be some academic grants offered for developing search technologies (assumingly to compete with Google), but I think the “incubation” projects will be more successful.

One thing that I found very intriguing was this statement in the manifesto:

The long-term mission of Live Labs is far more ambitious, may take decades to realize, and necessitates that we extensively partner outside of Microsoft. We wish to generalize the virtuous cycle to the rest of society: empowering people to create in whatever domain they chose, facilitating the exchange of any digital artifact, and cultivating communities of all forms to the benefit of all.

What kind of partnerships outside are they referring to? Non-Microsoft platforms? Open Source projects or languages? W3Consortium or other standards bodies? I wish that there were more details.

Live Labs will be an interesting experiment and I hope that it will be successful. I’m just glad to have something to be excited about again!

Interesting news from Yahoo today:

Yahoo! Inc., one of the first Internet search companies, has capitulated to Google Inc. in the battle for market dominance.

“We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google,” Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.”

While the news itself isn’t very surprising, its refreshing to see Yahoo actually admit publicly what most people already knew. It proves that Yahoo’s managers aren’t quite as dense and self-deluded as lot of big companies management these days and it probably indicates that we’ll be seeing some potentially interesting and disruptive offerings coming from them soon. At the very least, it shows that they’ve realized they need to change their focus, but the effects of that realization have been apparent for a while now with some of the things they’ve debuted in the recent past.

My prediction is still that Yahoo is going to go for any area that’s not under the direct line-of sight for Google’s mission to “collect and organize the world’s information”. And I still think that community and socialware is going to be their saving grace. Now the next concession for search should be coming from MSN… But that’s one article I never expect to see.

I just found a soon to be released piece of hardware that supports my hypothesis that Operating Systems will be irrelevant in a few more years. Lexar is coming out with a new USB drive that will let you install and run your software directly from it using some custom software of its own.

The software, PowerToGo, lets most existing Windows applications run unmodified from the flash drives, Lexar said. The goal is to let users carry their PC environments, including browser settings and instant-messenger clients, in a tiny thumb drive.

…The software will be developed as an open standard, and the Lexar products will be compatible with “most consumer and electronic mobile devices,” according to a company statement.

How cool is that? (more…)

A lot of people have been speculating about what makes a site “Web2.0” and I have been putting together my own conception of it. I think that what is different about Web2.0 sites is not necessarily the content, AJAX, novelty, domain names with dots everywhere, or rounded corners and gradients. Instead, the most successful candidates are (a) extremely supportive of the two main purposes of interacting with the web and (b) incorporate two new factors that don’t exist on pre-Web2.0 sites.

The two behaviors people exhibit when going on-line are either gathering information from or contributing information to the web. Gathering is both searching for information and storing it so that you may find it again later. It is a selfish thing, all about consuming and using info for your own needs. Contributing is about actions such as blogging, participating in forums, commenting, collaborative filtering, and sharing content like photos and videos. It’s all producing and sociality.

I made the suggestion a while ago that Google = Information and Yahoo = Community, but you could also interpret that as Google = Gathering and Yahoo = Contributing. I ran across another Google/Yahoo comparison that implied that gathering and contributing are opposing behaviors and there is even a gender bias for one over the other. In my opinion the gender difference is mainly in which behavior you believe will benefit you the most on a personal level.

But, the behaviors are not exclusive of each other. I believe that they are flip sides of a coin and the best sites support them both at the same time. Useful pre-Web2.0 sites (such as Google and Yahoo) already cater to these behaviors in various degrees, but that’s just not enough. What makes a site Web2.0 is two factors that have really been the catalysts for the changes in our expectations of interaction with a service on the web: Metadata and Portability.

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While looking for an interesting conference to attend this Spring, I found an article debating the usage of Flash over AJAX. Regardless of the technologies that will be used it had a good point in the last paragraph:

One thing is certain: the days of when people dismissed Internet clients as hopelessly inferior to native Windows clients are past. Everyone now understands that very sophisticated application functionality can be hosted in the browser, using its native capabilities plus some downloaded code. Applications should no longer be thought of as having a single runtime location: the Web allows them to execute co-operatively in real-time on the client and one or more servers. “It’s almost a new class of applications that’s fully on-demand and fully leverages the desktop,” Bill Appleton told me. “We’re really using both ends of this pipeline very effectively.”

I totally agree. Eventually the majority if not all applications will all be browser-based, server-hosted (loosely connected through web services with XMLRPC) but will still offer rich, user-friendly experiences that we’ve traditionally taken for granted from software that runs locally on our hardware. The evolution of web technologies is going to reach a point very soon where all that is important is having some hardware that can run a web browser to host these applications.
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