As an investor in a number of companies that do stuff with RSS (NewsGator, FeedBurner, Technorati, and Judy’s Book) and fan and active user of others (e.g. del.icio.us, FeedBlitz, SixApart) I’ve been seeing a lot of “this sucks, that’s great, that sucks, this is great” blog posts lately, but rarely do I see anyone decompose what’s actually bad or great and explaining why. Occasionally there’s some stuff from an end-user perspective (especially whenever Google rolls something out), but I’ve been surprised by the general lack of technical depth and public debate. Ok – maybe I’m reading the wrong feeds – but I’m trying.
While I’m a nerd, I’m on the investor side of the equation instead of the engineer side of the equation. As a result, I’m always looking for the analog of the thing I’m experiencing – “what – in the past – was like this thing that is now happening that can provide insight into what the future is going to be like?” I spend a lot of time thinking about this with regard to RSS (and blogs, user-generated content, online advertising, content organization, search, tools, platforms, trendy buzzwords to try to describe everything, and a preponderance of VC investors diving into an area just to get bets on the table.) I don’t pretend I necessarily have a clue technically (ok – I pretend, but I don’t have a clue) – but I know enough to be able to play around with things, look at what I think is going on under the hood, and make (at the minimum) provocative suggestions (often wrong, but at least provocative) about what I think is happening.
Personalized RSS feeds is one of the issues that hit me in the face recently. In the past few weeks, I’ve subscribed to a few RSS feeds that were personalized just for me. Specifically, when I subscribed, the URL that ended up in FeedDemon / NGOS (the aggregator that I use) had a unique identifier at the end. If I subscribed a second time (pretending I was a different person), I got a different unique identifier and ended up with two feeds. This is distinct from a feed that I’ve customized such as a delicious tag feed that is still a generic feed that presumably multiple people will subscribe to if they use the same parameters that I do.
Now – I believe that RSS feeds that are personalized for a particular subscriber’s preferences will become an important tool in the content syndication world, just as static html gave way to CGI, cookies appeared, or broadcast opt-in email (Dear Sir:) evolved into narrowcast (Dear Brad:). However, I think the early attempts at brute force personalization by assigning unique feed URLs as a means of tracking subscribers can cause several problems.
Fundamentally, the approach that I’m starting to see appear results in a false sense of a true subscriber count via personalization (presumably one of the goals of personalization is to get an accurate subscriber count), doesn’t scale for the aggregators, the subscriber count quickly diverges from reality as people search for or share feeds, and it’s hard to redirect your subscribers correctly if you decide to do something different later.
There’s got to be a better approach.
Stephen Wolfram has accomplished some remarkable things in his life, including creating Mathematica, a very successful private company called Wolfram Research, a set of amazing mathematics web sites including The Wolfram Integrator, and an overwhelming tome called A New Kind of Science which I intended to read last summer but instead just stared at it each day.
Now Wolfram brings us Ringtones (well – WolframTones). If you ever wondered about the math behind ringtones, now is your chance to play around and create your own ringtones using “simple programs from Wolfram’s computational universe, music theory, and Mathemetica algorithms.”
Nerd heaven.
Wired Magazine has a great article this month on Tim O’Reilly. The first time I heard Tim’s name was in 1994 at NetGenesis when GNN appeared on the scene. I remember when it was acquired by AOL for $11 million and I thought to myself “holy shit – there could be real dollars in this Internet stuff.” I’ve never spent any time with Tim, but the article reflects the way I think of him and the business he’s created.
Wired also had a short fetish review of the super-bitchin Optimus Keyboard. I’m ready for about five of these when it finally ships.
Dave Jilk passed on this article by Dominic Humphries explaining why Linux is Not Windows. The analogy that starts off the article is perfect:
Linux <=> Windows is like Motorbikes <=> Cars: Both are vehicles that get you from A to B via the roads. But they’re different shapes, different sizes, have different controls, and they work in fundamentally different ways. They are not freely interchangeable. They have different uses and different strengths & weaknesses, and you should pick whichever is appropriate, not pick one and expect it to do everything that the other can do.
This is not a screed on why Windows sucks, or why Linux is great. Rather, it’s a very thoughtful article on the differences between the two.
A few weeks ago I wrote about web design mistakes. One of the things that stuck in my head was that Google (and now Microsoft and Yahoo) have trained us to use a [blue black green] design. It’s interesting to run into sites that use search and observe how I react to either (a) this design or (b) a different design.
Today I saw a demo of Indeed.com which was positioned to me at “the Google for job search.” A quick search for jobs for firemen in Colorado brought up that [blue black green] thing. In contrast, when I looked for jobs in Colorado in delicious (no fireman jobs, so I had to drop that tag) the [blue black green] UI was now [blue light_blue red_highlight]. My brain definitely reacted differently – on the Indeed site I knew exactly what to do based on the colors; on delicious I had to think a little (not much) harder.
It’s well known that Google AdSense performance varies dramatically based on how they are incorporated into the site (position, background color, foreground color, size). My instinct is that this applies to the UI format that search is presented in as well.
Now – I’m not a huge fan of the [blue black green] UI – it doesn’t take a lot of effort to come up with something that is aesthetically nicer. However, given the zillions of people who have had their “search behavior” trained by Google (and Yahoo and Microsoft), it seems like paying close attention to this UI is important.
Steve Rubel has a good article up that answers the question “What is enterprise RSS?” There was a point in time where people talked about this thing called “SMTP.” Now – it’s just “email.” Wouldn’t it be fascinating if the same thing happened to the thing called “RSS”?
The Milestone Group just published an interview with me in their quarterly newsletter. I answer questions such as:
Watch out The Great Carnack, may you rest in peace.
Have I mentioned lately how much I love my Verizon BroadbandAccess Wireless Service (EVDO)? As I sit here in Boston’s South Station waiting for the late night train to New York, I marvel at how I used to exist on this planet without this.
Clive Thompson has an outstanding article in today’s New York Times called Meet The Life Hackers. He describes the problem that affects so many people today – the complete overload of digital information and interruptions that makes it difficult to get immersed in any project for an extended period of time.
Rather than simply describe the problem (which is where so many articles like this end), Thompson frames the issue as one that has been popularly called the need for “continuous partial attention” (coined by Linda Stone in 1997). He then goes on to describe great research by Mary Czerwinski and Eric Horvitz that directly address this issue.
I’ve ranted in the past about how stupid my computer is. We’re going to see a dramatic transformation in the way our computers “help us” over the next 20 years as more of this research begins to be embedded in the core technology that powers our “personal computing infrastructure” (pci). In the same way that information systems and computer technologies have increasingly developed layers of abstraction, I predict we’ll start to see a similar abstraction layer between us and the rest of the universe that is trying to communicate with us digitally. Instead of forcing us to be the ultimate router and arbiter of the priority of information (and interruption), our pci will learn how we work, gradually augment how information gets to us, and ultimately automate much of the information flow and our response.
We’re already seeing this in some very simple applications. An extremely useful example is the automated elimination of spam. Now – if we could turn these same spam elimination systems – which work automatically in the background (e.g. I use Postini and spam simply disappears – I never think about it anymore) – into “email prioritization systems” (e.g. spam has priority=null, email from Amy or my mother has priority=immediate, email from my partners has priority=high) where the priorities are automatically tuned by my pci based on my behavior things become more interesting. Finally – add one more layer of abstraction – my pci knows when I am ready to received different priorities and presents them to me only when I’m ready (e.g. I always get interrupted by Amy or my mom, I sometimes get interrupted by my partners depending on the thing I’m working on, but it always comes at the top of the queue, etc.) – and you’re really getting into an interesting zone. Of course, delivering it one time on the appropriate device (computer, cell phone, television, carrier pigeon) in the right location is a key part of this.
Once you extend this construct to all digital communication and interaction, you start to get some interesting things happening. Which – of course – is only the beginning of the real transformation. It’s going to take a while, but the way we do things today – and the way our pci works – sucks.