Since Facebook bought FriendFeed several months ago, there has been much lamentation by the FriendFeed community. Reactions from members have taken several forms:

1. Declaring their support for FriendFeed till the plug is pulled
2. Continuing to post and participate as if nothing has happened
3. Leaving “quietly” by just no longer using the service
4. Spending their time posting about how FriendFeed is dead and everyone worth paying attention to has already left

Reactions #1-#3 are appropriate to various degrees, but reaction #4 is getting old fast. It’s insulting to the people who are still using the service actively and insulting to the whole idea of online community, and I would like to see it stop. I’m mainly making this appeal to Robert Scoble because he is the most influential person who is kicking FriendFeed while it’s down:

<plea>
Please, Robert, I know that you’re disappointed in what has happened to FriendFeed and you feel like you need to take out your frustrations on something, but it’s time to take your own advice and leave quietly if you’re going to leave. FriendFeed may not serve your particular needs anymore but your needs seem to be very specific, decidedly not mainstream, and difficult to comply to. That doesn’t mean that FriendFeed is not a valuable service to others with different needs. You don’t have to leave, but there’s no point in making things harder for the rest of us who support the service by trying to hammer the nails in the coffin while we are still pushing up the the lid for air.

You are actively fulfilling your own prophecy by chasing people away from FriendFeed and inciting people there to unsub and block you so that your feed is less and less interesting. And then you are insulting the rest of us by declaring that all the geeks have left when it’s your own efforts in sabotage (or lack of in pruning your feeds) that are making your experience worse, while claiming that you’re trying to spur someone into action to be FriendFeed’s new hero. But we don’t have that knight in shining armor to champion for FriendFeed and return it to its former glory. If anything, you were the most likely candidate. Now we just want to be left alone to use FriendFeed the way we are comfortable to using it. It’s time to stop the abuse.
</plea>

Yes, FriendFeed’s future is uncertain, even with vague assurances that it is not going away any time soon from its founders. And yes, there are frustrations because of the lack of attention to bug fixes, performance and innovation that were so much a part of the early days of the service. But there is still a community at FriendFeed, and a pretty cohesive one at that. Maybe it is a community that has a lot more “fluff” than Robert is looking for but that’s because it best serves a purpose that is not something that he is focused on: making connections on a personal level.

It’s all about your intentions online. Most intentions can be grouped into 3 categories: knowledge gathering, broadcasting and conversation. There are many services on the web that can potentially serve those intentions. It depends on your purpose as to whether or not a service brings you value. Scoble has talked about a “chat room/forum” service type, there is also a “blog/micro-blog” type, and a “knowledge repository/collaboration” type. In some ways these cross over, but they also have distinctions that make specific tools more likely to serve them than others.

The web started out as knowledge gathering tools for building archives. Websites, wikis, link repositories like Del.icio.us, an untold number of file archives, search, RSS and all the tools that bring it to you like GoogleReader… All that is the heart of the web. There is little personal connection in knowledge gathering tools though some of them have “social” aspects. They are not about community, but about sharing and collating information.

Blogs and Twitter (and Twitter clones) are about broadcasting. You post and presumably there are people out there listening and who might react to your post through commenting. You control all aspects of your accounts and who you interact with and therefore you are exposed to a lot less noise, but you also have a very limited audience, unless you are already popular. This model works fine for people like Robert, who, no matter what tool he picks, is going to have a lot of people ready to comment on his posts. But it can be extremely unrewarding for people who don’t already have a posse following them around. A lot of people don’t care: the model serves their intent of having a “presence online” and they are not interested in much conversation, just putting their own views out there.

Can some conversation occur on blogs and Twitter? Of course… but the conversation is a lot more limited and a lot harder to follow (especially on Twitter). If conversation happens it is more like the discussions in a lecture hall or classroom where one person is guiding all the other participants and seems to be less personal because of the inequality of the participants and dictatorial position of the poster which invokes the Snafu principle. Real conversation is the exception, not the rule for broadcast mediums.

Forums are about conversation. They are a place for people with a common interest to gather and share information or just share a bond based on that initial connection. Some services even support “Friend of a Friend” (FoaF) features that easily connect you to others who may have similar interests. There is a lot more drama, a lot more noise, a lot more fluff to wade through on forums but you also make stronger connections. When you interact with people through conversation (more than 140 character snippets) you actually get to know them. And you become friends, even offline. That’s the power and appeal of forums to a lot of people. It’s what makes tools that support it, like FriendFeed, more valuable to people who’s intent is conversation than tools like blogs or Twitter. For people who are looking to make those kind of connections with others, to seek out people who “get them” and who they can share their lives with (because such people may not be available to them in their physical location), conversation services are the best tool to support that purpose.

The beauty of FriendFeed is that it can really serve all three intents, if you want it to:

• If you want to use it as a knowledge gathering and archive tool you can create your own private room and share posts to it, clip web snippets to it or store links in it.
• If you simply want to broadcast, then you can use groups and set them up so you are the only poster. Only invite people that you want to hear from. You can delete comments you don’t like in your threads. It’s very similar to a blog. Your experience will be limited to only the people who you want to interact with (who reciprocate). None of that pesky FoaF stuff, but all the conversation limitations that blogs offer.
• If you want to use it as a forum, just create an account, subscribe to interesting people, and you’re ready to go.

I’ve said before that FriendFeed is not dead, it’s just an orphan. I stick by that assessment. Yes, there is a void in leadership for it right now, but it will find it’s own way and grow into a nice, healthy adult (a productive citizen, if not a super-star), if only people will stop beating it over the head. I’m constantly reminded of the plague scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. FriendFeed is saying “I’m not dead yet! I feel fine! I think I’ll go for a walk”. So quit trying to throw it on the cart!

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.

As a slightly late Christmas present to other C# web developers out there I’m releasing a project I put together that is a reference implementation with everything you need to get started with the Evernote web API for .Net 3.5 in Visual Studio 2008. The project has several helper wrapper classes to make your life easier: one for OAuth authentication, one for accessing the Evernote User and Note stores and a base page to use on any .ASPX page that automatically handles the OAuth plumbing for you.

This code is released under an MIT/X license so feel free to use and modify it as you see fit. At the very least it should provide a good example and launching point for your own projects.

To get started grab and unzip this Evernote note export file:

Once you’ve unzipped the .ENEX file it open your Evernote client and go to File > Import > Evernote Export Files… and import the note. You’ll find a zip file with the project source code as well as illustrated instructions for project setup steps.

If you have any questions please leave a comment or contact me at EvernoteAddict at Donaghe dot com.

Enjoy!

Update - If you don’t have a premium subscription you may not be able to import the note since it has a zip file attachment… you can get the code here instead.

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.

I have been following J. Phil and Corvida on their quest to throttle the RSS feeder fire-hose a bit. I’d participate but I’m still starting from scratch: I’ve only been using an RSS reader for less than a month now and haven’t built my subscriptions up past 70 feeds yet.

That I’m not an RSS fiend would probably surprise some people I know. In general, I’m the source that a lot of my friends depend on to keep track of new technology and services on the web and I do a pretty good job, despite the fact that until recently I haven’t used a feed reader for more than 4 years.

How can any self-proclaimed geek and technophile possibly not be chained to a feed reader, you say? By burning myself out so well early on that I didn’t even have a partial interest in trying again. Back in 2004 I found Bloglines.com. It was exciting, cool, shiny, hip and kept me “in the know”. I subscribed to around 1K feeds within a few weeks in my enthusiasm. After a couple of months checking my feeds turned from fun to a major chore. Categorizing and labeling every feed and post to keep things organized (OCD, I know), “clearing” out each folder only to notice 10 more entries instantly pop up: I finally realized that it was completely stressing me out and quit the whole thing cold-turkey. I had associated the whole concept of RSS with that horrible overwhelming feeling and had no desire to use another reader again.

I couldn’t resist RSS entirely, though, and during my reader hiatus I subscribed to about 10 feeds (off and on) through an RSS to email service called R|Mail, which is now in the deadpool. When I realized it had died, I started using SimplyHeadlines.com instead, a service that emails you a daily summary of the feeds you subscribe to with it. The comforting bite-sized chunks of information, easily scannable in a few minutes a day made me feel like I was still informed, but, as a geek, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed that I didn’t use a reader.

Toluu is what got me interested in readers again. Since I signed up I have been discovering interesting new sites by browsing what other people are subscribing to. I like the idea of having a “home” for my list of feeds (OPML) as well. I started out importing my feeds from SimplyHeadlines, but the Toluu bookmarklet for GoogleReader kept calling me. I was pretty apprehensive when I first imported my OPML into GoogleReader but so far it’s been a good experience. To keep from getting bogged down again I force myself to ignore the folders and tagging and just scroll through new items. Starring things to come back to and sharing things I want to discuss on FriendFeed is quick and painless. GoogleReader is actually working well for me and that’s a relief. I feel some of my geek cred is now restored. I’ve dipped my toes back into the RSS ocean and I haven’t drowned yet. I’m not sure I will let myself subscribe to more than 100 feeds though: I’m still afraid of the overload.

So since I can’t really participate in the RSS Reset project, I thought I would at least list some of the feeds that I am subscribed to and am enjoying now:

Favorites for Web 2.0:

• Museum of Modern Betas *
• TechCrunch *

Favorites for Photoshop / Graphic Design:

• Smashing Magazine
• BittBox

Favorites for Web Development:

• Web Developers Depot
• Ajaxian
• John Resig

Favorite for Life:

• Lifehacker
• Unclutterer

Favorites for lolz and hmmms:

• Lolcats
• Billy Poobah Lives
• XKCD
• Indexed

* always subscribed to these even during my reader-less days.

I’m glad that Toluu pushed me back over to the not-quite-as-dark-as-I-remember-it side! I’m looking forward to seeing what gems J. Phil and Corvida unearth in their experiment. If anyone has any suggestions for things I might like in the categories above, please leave me a comment!

I’ve been inspired recently to resuscitate my months-neglected Twitter account as an experiment because I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion on various blogs and FriendFeed touting all the benefits of being active with Twitter such as crowdsourcing, socialization and meeting new people with common interests. Most of these posters list their favorite Twitter services in a “quickstart” guide and seem to heavily imply that it’s easy to get set up and quickly reap the benefits.

But the Twitter evangelists seem to be either social networking A-listers who generate massive, nearly instant audiences in whatever service they sign up with or they are people who spend several hours a day cultivating their networks by actively monitoring and responding to tweets and putting a lot of original tweets out themselves or both.

The problem is that Twitter can be a pretty lonely and discouraging service if you don’t have any followers and the people you’re interested in don’t follow you back. You can’t have a conversation if no one is listening to respond. How do you even reach out to people that you’d like to have conversations with if they don’t follow you? You can’t direct message them and there’s not even a guarantee that they’ll see your @replies. To be successful at Twitter you have to spend a lot of time making a reputation for yourself and hope that the people you follow notice and return the follow. Chances seem slim unless you put incredible amounts of persistence and ego stroking into it to capture their attention.

And that’s why Twitter won’t ever be mainstream. Early adopters are techno masochists but other people aren’t. We’re often willing to put in an amazing amount of time and effort into new services and put up with a lot of frustration from them with even the smallest amount of perceived benefit. But everyone else is more sensible. They don’t have the time or motivation to build a successful Twitter network, and they never will with its current implementation. I see some of the same problems with the social aspect of FriendFeed, despite opinions to the contrary.

I’m going to keep trying for a while, with some good advice on the how instead of the why, and see if I can get my tweets out of the echo chamber, but I couldn’t honestly recommend Twitter to my coworkers or family members at this point because I know they wouldn’t be willing to spend the time and effort to make it benefit them. I see value in the idea of the service. I think eventually, once we get filters and intelligent agents to be our attention guardians we’ll be able to have good two-way conversations without the whole follower/followee model. At that point, Twitter will just have turned into a framework or protocol, but obviously it’s going to be a while before that happens.

Maybe I’m missing something and the Twitter-ken can tell me what I’m doing wrong. Please feel free to enlighten me!

Otavo is a new collaborative information discovery and repository site that I’ve found myself addicted to recently. I heard about it on Pete’s review of the service on Mashable, and it sounded a lot like my favorite new community, FAQQLY, so I had to check it out. But Otavo turns out to be almost the opposite of FAQQLY. Where FAQQLY is a community site that encourages people to get to know people by asking questions and has the side effect of being able to gather knowledge and information, Otavo is about searching for information by turning questions into Quests and throwing in a bit of socialization on the side.

To participate, a Quest is created by a user that other users can subscribe to either to monitor the responses or to provide answers in the form of urls and/or comments. Otavo provides a browser bookmarklet tool called the Floster that makes adding links to quests when you’re surfing a relatively simple affair. Once you’ve joined a quest, you receive email notifications if anyone adds links to it. Otavo also provides points to members for actions such as creating quests, adding links to quests, posting on the forums and inviting others to join the service. Users can also create a network of buddies on the site and even keep a blog, but there is not too much of a social aspect beyond that at this point so isn’t a community as of yet. Otavo is a good excuse, however, for me to share some of the 3500+ urls that I’ve saved in Del.icio.us, Furl.net and a couple of other bookmarking services with people who are looking for that information. In fact, over five days of questing, I hit the #1 contributor spot mainly from adding links to other people’s Quests from my archives.

So while Otavo has a lot of potential, there are still some improvements that could be made, in my opinion, to make it even more useful, user-friendly and fun:

• Links on Quests should be rateable, so that it is easy to see what links were helpful to the Quest.
• Users should receive points if their links are highly rated.
• Users should be able to comment on links in the Quest in addition to commenting on the Quest as a whole.
• A way to easily import links from bookmarking services like Del.icio.us should be provided. I may have many relevant links that could be useful on a Quest but it is time consuming and cumbersome to go to Del.icio.us, open a link, open the Floster, copy my description and tags to the Floster and save, close the window and repeat for several more links. Maybe the Floster could recognize when you are on a Del.icio.us page and add a link next to your posts so that you could just click on the link to grab the information. Since the Floster is a DHTML/Javascript floating form on the page anyway, that wouldn’t be impossible.
• Points for creating a Quest should be removed or reduced. This only encourages people to create bogus quests.
• Points should be awarded to creators of popular Quests as they gain popularity. Popularity can be determined by number of people joining the Quest or number of links and comments provided or both. Possibly one point for each person, link or comment added.
• RSS feeds should be available for Quests themselves, users’ Quest lists, and possibly for the tags that links on Quests can be categorized under.
• Adding a link that you’ve already shared with another Quest should pick up the information (description and tags) that you shared before to save you the trouble of entering it again.
• Somehow, picking which quest to add a link to in the Floster needs to be made easier… Once you’ve participated in more than 10 Quests, the list gets too long to scroll through efficiently (the questions are too long to scan easily). Also, it seems sporadic as to whether the Floster “remembers” the last Quest I added a link to, and that has caused me to have to go move links around later that ended up on the wrong Quests.
• Quests with little participation should be “promoted” in some way to make them more likely to be picked up on. If they get buried under the popular Quests, then some of the “harder” Quests might be overlooked by the ones that are easy to answer and therefore popular. Possibly there could be a list of the least participated Quests to browse through.

Overall, I have found Otavo to be a pretty compelling service and if they will add some or all of the suggestions above, then it could really be outstanding and useful. Since its still new and only been in public beta for a short while, hopefully that means the Otavo team is still in the feedback and development stage and there is more to come. I’ll be watching as it evolves and trying to defend my status as King (Queen?) of the Quest hill!

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!!

Have you ever said to yourself, “Wow, I really love the way Gmail lets me put labels on my mail so that I can find stuff in several contexts, but I can’t use Gmail for my work email - all the boss man will let me use is yechy old Outlook”. You did? Really? Wow, me too!

Well all hope is not lost. You can have your Outlook and labels too. They’re just called “categories” instead. And with a little bit of configuration, script installation and modification, you can have very similar functionality as you get in Gmail, but on your local PC and without any scary contextual ads.

Warning: this may look like a lot of work and it is initially, but it was something that I really wanted mainly because I had trouble finding things in I had filed in all the subfolders that I used to organize mail previously. Search wouldn’t work because I had to search each subfolder individually leaving me to try to remember all the potential subfolders I could have filed a message in. I wasn’t able to find any 3rd party add-ins for Outlook that didn’t restrict me to only a single way to organize any message so I decided to hack it out myself. The set up was worth it to me, but may not be to you. If you’re ready to take the plunge, then at least you have a guide!

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