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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