adamyntium

Category: communication tools

  • All "friends" aren’t created equal! (why we need better relationship marking in social networks)

    I’m planning on quitting twitter.  Flickr—at least as a social site—is getting frustratingly unwieldly.  You know why?  Because pretty much all social sites like this treat all my friends, co-workers, acquaintances, online buddies the same, and it’s a big, stupid, completely off-putting mess!

    Sure, these services want to reduce complexity… they know that many folks may not want to take the time to put friends into groups.  And eventually, some really smart service is going to actually do it automatically for me (“Hmm… Adam only looks at Fred’s pictures once in a while, but he looks at Mary’s photos minutes after he’s notified of her updates…”).

    Look, I’m not an insanely popular guy.  But I have over 600 people in my personal contacts folder.  I regularly interact with tons people at work, and sincerely care (personally) about at least a dozen or two of ‘em (to the point where I want to see their travel photos, want to know when they’re excited or depressed, etc.).  But when people have “friended” me on Twitter or Flickr, I’ve often unselectively reciprocated… and now I’m just getting overloaded.  Too much info.  Too much info I do not care about.

    And this is where nearly all social services seem to get things wrong.  At risk of being callous, I could pretty much care less if a distant acquaintance is having an off day or just uploaded photos of his Aunt Elda’s wedding.  But I sure as hell want to know if my office mate is about to arrive at work grouchy or an awesome friend in a different timezone is having a rough week, and so on.  To the extent that social services of all types can eventually alert us to events and feelings that mean a lot to us, that’s a huge win.

    Flickr lets me mark someone as a contact, friend, or family.  That’s somewhat useful, but I’d say that these distinctions barely scratch the surface in helping me manage photostreams or viewing permissions.

    Facebook lets me mark someone as a “limited friend” (is that like “single serving friends” from Fight Club? :-P), but—again—that’s not all that helpful. 

    Why can’t I rank my contacts’ importance on a scale from 1-10… 10 being I want to know their every feeling and action and 1 being I don’t want to be bugged by any notifications ‘bout them unless they’re getting married… and to a hot celebrity.  Or in addition to / instead of degrees of that sort, why can’t I indicate that I want monthly digests of most my contacts, weekly digests of a few, and daily or even as-it-happens updates on my select group of best-friends?

    *  *  *

    And it’s not just what I want to know, it’s also about what I want to share.  There are very different things I want to share with my Mom, my recent-ex-girlfriend, most of my colleagues, my closest friends, my roommate, and so on.  I should be able to put my contacts into “share groups”—with easily check-box-able overriding options per shared item—and then quickly and powerfully indicate which groups I want receiving which update or types of updates.

    And, again, to the extent to which my preferences and habits can be algorithmically determined (albeit manually overridable) and designed to streamline my sharing and discovery choices, that’s super!  Facebook’s gotta know whose wall I post on most often, who I tag in most of my photos, and so on.  Surely it can make educated guesses on the strength of our ties.

    Oh, and just to make things more complicated… it’s not all about only the strength of ties… it’s about context.  Many of my colleagues and friends get excited about news about new geek toys or web sites.  Other friends are in my lindy hop (swing dancing) group, and many of them couldn’t care less about the newest Web 2.0 doodad.

    So I may want to share tech stuff with some friends, arts stuff with others, personal musings and rants with close buddies, and so on.  Complicated, yes, and likely with no absolute/easy answers.  But at least the social networking/sharing services could try a bit harder! 😀

    *  *  *

    So probably this week is when I’m gonna uninstall twitteroo and give up on both reading and posting occasional updates.  It’s not just a matter of signal vs. noise, which I lamented earlier, but the complete lack of any sort of targeting, grouping, etc.  There are days in which I really do want to read the blatherings of my fellow SEO/SEM/Search-engine geeks.  But some days I just want to know if a good friend is happy or sad.  Or if another friend finally bought her airplane tickets to come back to the States.  Right now, I can neither selectively broadcast nor read notes sorted/filtered by strength or type of ties.  And that’s jarring, frustrating, distracting, and whole ton of other negative adjectives.

    I’m not going to delete my Twitter account just yet.  In case it’s not clear, I think there are some compelling cases for this sort of thing… and I’m hoping that eventually the service will help me share and glean what my friends and I are “doing now” with greater granularity and thoughtfulness.

    And indeed, I hope other services eventually wise-up, too.  MySpace may be the most popular social network, but it is so (I’m confidently sure) only because of the obnoxiously strong power of the network effect, not because it really supports social sharing and discovery in an effective way.  The sooner other services learn that not all relationships are equal, the sooner the online world will truly help us manage and improve our (real, offline) relationships.

    *  *  *

    Updated on June 18, 2007:
    I don’t always agree with Robert Scoble’s take on communications and networking and I’m frankly displeased that he’s invoked “nazis” for something far from evil, but I nonetheless think he makes some excellent points (related to my rant above) in his blog entry “Social networks as “friend” Nazi (design flaws in Facebook, Jaiku, Twitter).”

  • Where is Adam (online)? My participation in and thoughts about various presence/sharing services

    In case you’re interested in stalking me and/or knowing what my thoughts are on various online presence / networking / bookmarking sites I have tried, here’s a (completely unscientific, wholly biased, unabashedly uncomprehensive, and generally of questionable use) list 😀

    FYI, I’m findable via my full name on the services below unless noted otherwise.  And sites owned/operated by Google are indicated by [g], as a brief disclaimer/reminder since I work for Google (but not on any of the
    products or product-types below).

    Social networking

    • Facebook
      – a social networking site which used to be used primarily by college students (perhaps still is) and is gaining fame and respect in new quarters

      It’s my favorite social networking service by far. I belong to the Google, San Francisco, Indiana University, and Northwestern University groups, and generally only add friends, co-workers, professional acquaintances I know decently well from meeting in person, and so on. I’ve actually found this to be useful not for making new friends, but rather for catching interesting info and fun tidbits and insights into my current friends’ lives. I am impressed with nearly all aspects of this site: the strong configurability of privacy options, the reasonably-clean and standardized views*, decent navigability, and overall utility. I haven’t really gotten into the groups, though, which mostly seem like exercises in humor and/or vanity.

      *This just in: According to Eliot on Wired, Facebook may be opening up its profile pages to widgets. Given the smart people I know that have recently been hired to work at Facebook, I can only hope that the service won’t be horrifically MySpaced (uglified to hell and made practically unusable). But hey, if things turn south, I’ll at least have people I can poke about it!

    • Friendster
      – one of the first social networking sites, now apparently a haven for lonely Filipinos.

      I have an account here, but almost never log in. Some nice integration, I suppose, but nothing that really interests me. The brash obnoxious ads are a turnoff. And regarding the demographic reference… it’s more a puzzled commentary on how various services (Orkut, Friendster, probably others) end up becoming so particularly popular in a handful of countries. I suppose much of this could be explained by the network effect (e.g., some popular Filipinos became active on Friendster, invited their friends…), but I can’t help but wonder if UI / User Experience interlaces in interesting way with cultural preferences and expectations. Put more pedestrianly… I wonder what it is about, say, Friendster that causes it to appeal so much to Filipinos? (and Orkut to Brazillians, etc.) I bet someone has studied this. Paging danah…? 😀

    • Orkut
      – a quirky social networking experiment by a Google engineer, now noted for its loyal userbase outside of the USA.

      Ah, not much to say about the service at this point. I no longer use it, but hey, many many millions of people around the world love it.

    • Multiply
      – What’s a total of seventeen users times practically zero awareness? Join this service to find
      out!

      Seemed interesting initially, but it was hobbled by a confusing interface and an anemic adoption rate. I think maybe two of my friends at most use this service nowadays.

    • MySpace
      – Just like what you’d get if you had a spastic monkey doing design, an evil genius devising navigation (how many ad views per simple action?), and a bunch of lemmings for fans.

      Aaaaagh! Make it stop. Make it stop! At least make it stop blinking-spazzing-playing-seven-clips-simultaneously and generally serving as an affront to aesthetics, art, common sense, and humanity. To
      preserve what’s left of my sanity, I prefer to view the success of this monstrosity as due purely to the network effect (it was an early entrant, everyones’ friends were on MySpace, yadda yadda). Anything else is just too depressing. And yes, I have an account here only so my surprisingly-less-enlightened friends will quit bugging me to establish one, so I suppose that makes me mildly hypocritical.

    • Tribe
      – Want to meet artsy, hippie, burning-man types? This is your scene 😀

      I like the threadedness of the message forums, but the site feels a bit cluttered and unfocused. Plus… again, sorry to bring up the network effect, but… most of my friends outside of the Bay Area are elsewhere online.

    Professional networking

    • Ecademy
      – The professional networking site that’s the non-American version of LinkedIn. But more
      expensive.

      Tried it once. Was annoyed at the apparent lack of any free level of service, so that was the end of that. I didn’t see anything about this service worth paying for that I couldn’t find via other online or  offline means.

    • Ryze
      – “Hi, I’m a stay-at-home marketer. Would you like to join the most amazing wealth creation
      scheme that combines hot dogs, Buddhist monks, and…”

      Used to use this professional networking service quite a bit, but now it feels relatively empty and multi-level-marketing focused.

    • LinkedIn
      – Like any other powerful tool online or offline; great if you use it wisely, potentially painful if you don’t.

      I like this service overall. I’ve not used it much for my own networking, but I have definitely been pleased to help others… pass along legitimate requests, and so on. The key is not treating it like MySpace (adding everyone who requests you to add them), but rather judiciously linking to people you trust and who trust you… ideally, folks you have professional ties with or can similarly vouch for.

    Resource sharing / reviewing / bookmarking

    • CitySearch
      – Big, colorful, commercial, and overstuffed site that features user-submitted reviews on restaurants, hairdressers, etc.

      Used to use this, but have moved over to Yelp, which seems — if not more accurate — at least more interesting, more entertaining, and slightly-less cluttered and commercial.

    • Del.icio.us
      – Lamely named social bookmarking site that’s been (sort of) superceded by more robust and feature-rich offerings and is now owned by Yahoo

      The geek “Web 2.0” (ack, I feel dirty already) crowd latched onto this early on, and I never quite got the appeal. Other services have offered considerably more features… of particular note, the ability to take a searchable “snapshot” of the page when it’s bookmarked for easier retrieval later. On the flip side, this site had (and still has) an admirably spartan feel to it. No ads (that I can see), and no clutter. For those who crave APIs, minimalist feature sets, and simple bookmark sharing, del.icio.us could still be a reasonably good pick.

    • Digg
      – Watch out, here comes the highly-opinionated and non-buying mobs! (is so! is not! yeah, well, your mamma was an SEO! LOLZ!!!!!!!1)Okay, so perhaps that’s a bit unfair. Digg was an interesting idea and still continues to surface some noteworthy or at least entertaining sites. But, as with many fine ideas, it’s been creaking at the seams
      due to its mass adoption and resultant oft-moblike/groupthink feel. Anyway, I no longer check this site with any regularity… not enough time, too poor signal/noise ratio.
    • Google Reader –
      An outstanding feed-reader that’s easy and fun to useSure, I’m biased, but after an unsuccessful first version, the Reader team’s got their groove goin’ on. Nifty keyboard shortcuts (hit ? to see ’em!), a pleasant UI, and the capability (which I sadly haven’t used yet) to make any of your tags/folders publicly-viewable. Now if they’d just combine this with a
      public-version of Google Bookmarks… 😀 [g]

    • StumbleUpon
      – A serendipitous and often wondrous way to surf the Web and discover cool stuffI shied away from this service for ages; I don’t have time to aimlessly “stumble” around the Web! But I’ve been slowly using it more, and finding it has useful features and unearths cool sites for me :-D.
      [My Stumbleupon page]
    • Yelp
      – Irreverent, sometimes painfully hip, but typically entertaining and often useful

      Want consistently unbiased and deeply thoughtful reviews of restaurants and other local places? Then Yelp may or may not be your cup of tea. But if you’re patient and have a good sense of humor, you can often glean quite a bit of helpful info about various places around town. The conversations in the Talk section can be surprisingly cathartic, friendly, and even useful. [My reviews]

    Photo sharing

    • Flickr
      – The most active and diverse photo sharing site I’ve ever seen, with a doggedly committed community-oriented management

      Sure, they’ve gotten a lot of flack after getting absorbed by Yahoo. Yes, like on any user-generated-content-site, there’s bound to be crap, controversy, jerk-offs, and so on. But that aside, Flickr undeniably has an astounding number of gorgeous, hilarious, and downright captivating photos taken by talented photographers as active members. And speaking of active members… the Flickr crowd is hugely loyal, passionate, and not shy :-D. [My photos]

    • Fotki
      – The skinnable and surprisingly easy-to-use popular photo site you’ve never heard of

      Sets within sets! While Flickrites are still begging for this, Fotki’s had it for ages. It also has journals and a bunch of other doodads that are done better elsewhere, but thankfully that stuff doesn’t clutter up the simple-yet-powerful photo interface. $30/year gets you unlimited storage and very cheap (and good!) prints. [My photos]

    • PicasaWeb
      – Jarringly basic and spartan for geeks, surprisingly easy-to-use for normal people (who just want to easily share their photos with their family)

      Want to join a feature-rich photo site with great sense of community? This ain’t it. But it’s reliable and — as a very nice bonus — you can upload your videos to be displayed within your galleries (Google Video style). Best hidden feature: use the right and left arrow keys to zoom through galleries and enjoy the pre-caching and the perfect-fit-to-your-display views. [My Photos] [g]

    • Honorary mention: Smugmug
      – I’ve never used it, but really like the attitude of its CEO and the intense, friendly customer-focus he has pushed throughout his company.

    Instant messaging

    • Trillian
      (my choice at home) – Offered in both a free and more-powerful $25/year version, Trillian is mostly reliable and amazingly handy

      No matter how much I try to convince all my friends to use Google Talk (“GTalk”), a ton of ’em still insist on sticking with Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, or — dog forbid — MSN Messenger! A few of them even still use their AOL accounts for e-mail; I’ve disowned those folks… but hey, I digress
      those other apps at the same time and having my computer grind to a halt, I use Trillian at home, which automatically logs me into all the networks and displays my buddies in a totally customizable and wonderfully compact single-column view. Downside? Sometimes connectivity to different networks is flakey. And though they promise a Web-based version Real Soon Now ™, it’s seemingly impossible at present to easily sync one’s Trillian account across computers, so your chat history gets split between your desktop and laptop and so on. But hey, one app to rule them all? Pretty damn useful!

    • Google Talk (my choice away from home) –
      Simple, great voice quality, usefully integrated into Gmail (and elsewhere).

      It’s lightweight, fast, and just works. I really like how chats are (optionally) archived in my Gmail account, so I don’t have to remember whether I e-mailed a friend or chatted with her about an upcoming party… I can do one search and know for sure that I forgot to invite her! [g]

    Other

    • Plaxo
      – “I’m updating my addressbook…” aaaaagh! Thankfully, Plaxo is much, much more than this.

      This is one of those sites despised by many geeks and, in fairness, journalists and other popular peeps who at least previously got deluged by the perfect storm created by clueless n00bs and a suboptimal viral approach pushed by Plaxo in the early days. With an improved emphasis on improving the existing network rather than wildly expanding it, Plaxo is now increasingly loved by millions of folks (like me!) who appreciate the service’s (mostly free) offerings. The core feature which I use and find invaluable is the sync’ing of my friends’ contact info into my various addressbooks. Plaxo has recently announced that their upcoming 3.0 version (ah, gotta love engineers’ creative naming skills) will also support
      Gmail addressbooks. w00t!!! Disclaimer: I was a contractor with Plaxo a couple of years ago.

    • Twitter
      – Look, I’m having a cheese sandwich! I just burped. I tat i taw a putty kat! i’m a twit therefore i am. Just got my cell phone bill, lemme open it up and… AAAAAAAGH!Twitter — the oft-stultifyingly boring but oh-so-Web-2.0-utility that lets you, uh, share “what are you doing now?” (“I’m picking my nose, but it’s really hard to do while typing…”) Maybe it’d be more
      interesting if I had more friends on it. Feel free to twit (?) me at http://www.twitter.com/thatadamguy.

  • Gmail user? The new "murder," er, "mute" function will have you crying tears of joy

    Lots of folks have noticed that five very cool new features debuted today in Gmail:
    1) Enhanced UI, with Reply and other handy features placed at the top of conversations.
    2) Notification when new messages have been made in the conversation since you started drafting your reply.
    3) Forward an entire conversation (all messages).
    4) Send chat messages to your friends using Gmail chat or GTalk even when they’re offline (the messages’ll be held for them).
    5) Get Gmail on your mobile phone with a rich app (not just slow Web pages).

    [Read more about these new gmail features]

    But what I have to share with you is even more deliciously glorious… especially for those of you who are on lots of mailing lists or who have boring (albeit perhaps well-meaning) friends who just won’t shut up.

    Friends, Romans, fellow GMail users… I introduce to you…

    MURDER!

    Oh wait, that’s not exactly right.  Officially, the new feature is called Mute Thread, or “Mute” for short.  Here’s how it works:

    THE OLD WAY:
    1) You’re reading some posts about the elections.
    2) You were once excited about reading this stuff.
    3) But at least one conversation is now on its 471th message.  You keep hitting Archive but the damn conversation keeps popping up every time someone makes a new post!
    4) You’re ready to tear out your hair.  The posters’ hair.  Your keyboard’s hair.  Er, keys.
    5) MAKE IT STOP!  MAKE IT STOP, PLEEEEEASE!

    THE NEW WAY:
    1) You get yet another annoying message in the same damn conversation that’s already been conversed to death.
    2) You press the ‘m’ key.  Unless a message is written *directly* to you (e.g., your name is in the TO spot), you’ll never see that message in your inbox again!

    In short, the Mute feature enables you to tell Gmail: “Archive this conversation AND all future posts in it… just have ‘em skip the inbox!”

    [See official Gmail info on Mute]

    I can think of only one downside to this feature at the moment:
    If you filter your discussion list mail into separate labels (say, “Prolific Politics List”) and already have those posts skip the inbox… then the M key will sadly have no effect.  It doesn’t remove labels, it just creates a “get out of inbox free”

    But that aside, I think this is a super-awesome feature, and one that—to my knowledge—is unique amongst major Webmail providers.

    So, go ahead, indulge in those high-traffic lists again.  And don’t hesitate to threaten any annoying poster, “Dude, if you write one more word about Rummie, you’re getting SO m’d!”

    DISCLAIMERS:  I work for Google.  I am not on the Gmail team.

  • International calling / SMS rates — Why so high?

    Okay, BLADAM friends, apologies for two rants in a row (in a sadly otherwise dry AdamBloggingSeason), but… why does T-mobile—an international company—charge so much for international calling, roaming, and texting?

    And Cingular—the only other American mobile phone company I know of that supports international roaming—has rates that are even worse, from what I gather.

    Anyway, on T-Mobile, the rates for me to call from the U.S. overseas are more than triple what I’d pay via a discount calling card or even AT&T Callvantage.  Calling from overseas to *anywhere* ranges from about $1 to $4 a minute for incoming OR outgoing calls.

    But what *really* gets my hide is T-Mobile’s charge for text messages sent to and from my friends in Europe.  15 cents each for me to send a handful of text characters, and 35 cents each to receive the same.  What the heck?!  I know, I know, this voluminous amount of data has to potentially pass through companies that aren’t T-Mobile, but still!  And no, T-Mobile’s varied texting-bundle plans do *not* include international SMSes.

    I’ve played with various SMS options online, but haven’t found any to be reliable for either sending or receiving text messages internationally.  Oh lazyweb, anyone know of good options? (other than calling up T-Mobile and telling them they’re provincial jerks for their usurious rates, which, I admit, doesn’t exactly qualify as a good option)

  • Bloglines, Newzcrawler… and the new Google Reader

    A few weeks ago, I already started transitioning all of my feeds off of Bloglines. Why?
    – It’s slow.
    – It’s down too often.
    – Reorganizing feeds (moving them to different folders, etc.) is worse than being stuck in a closet with Vanna White. Night after night after night after night.
    – It’s similarly painful to mark just a few articles in a feed as read or unread.

    I’ve moved over to Newzcrawler, a stellar newsreader app for Windows. Beyond just tons of cool power features, it also lets me pretty easily sync my feeds between my desktop and laptop using an external FTP site (okay, geeky, I know).

    * * *

    With that said, I’ve still been hoping to see some vast improvements in the online-reader front. Rojo seems to be getting better. And I’ve heard rumblings over other cool services as well. When I learned today that Google had entered this space, I was extremely excited. Please, I thought, give us another Gmail. Or Maps! 😀 If not for me, at least for my less-geeky friends whom I’m dying to get into feed reading.

    So far, alas, I’m rather disappointed in the Google Reader. I know it’ll get better, but for now, Googlers…

    1) It’s too cluttered and overwhelming.
    Hide some stuff. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but blog text blends into all the other text and I find it just tiring to spend more than a few minutes in Reader.

    2) No mouseovers?!

    3) Ambiguities
    Is “Read items” a description or an action? Okay, admittedly this is rather a nitpick, but it is a top-line link ;-).

    4) Search what?!
    When I see a search box at the top of the page, I expect to be able to search the content-in-context. In other words, if I’m in my Gmail account, I expect to search my mail. If I’m in Reader, I expect to search for a string in my read and/or unread feed items. From an expected user-action standpoint, what’s likely to be more common: adding new feeds, or working with the feeds one already has?

    5) Save me from overload!
    There’s no way to mark an entire feed as read. Or group of feeds.

    6) Why the weird quasi-breadcrumbs in center focus?!
    Why do I want to see “New Subscription” “New Subscription” article article article… Just show me new articles. If I want to see what I’m subscribed to, I’ll go to the Your Subscriptions tab! 🙂

    * * *

    Other quick suggestions/observations:
    – Add a space in “Subscriptions(#)” to make it “Subscriptions (#)”
    – Include a shortcut key to go to the pulldown menus. Actually, quit using HTML-style pulldown menus as action-triggers. It’s not good UI, IMHO, and it’s confusing when more than one says “More actions…” (plus with more than one on a page, that sort of makes it hard to use a keyboard shortcut)
    – Allow for the multi-selection (and from there, tagging) of feeds.
    – Include a feedback link directly on the Reader page.
    – Enable us to see ALL articles from a given feed in one fell swoop (ala Bloglines)
    – Let us easily sort, reposition, edit, and delete labels and sets of labels.
    – BUG: I unsubscribed from a feed, it’s outta my list, but I’m still seeing items for it.
    – Gimme feed icons, please! When I have 200+ feeds, it’s how I can most easily spot some of my favs 🙂
    – Dim links if they’re not applicable (e.g., dim the Page Up link if I’m already at the top)
    – I tagged an entry. How do I search for it by tag now? (I only see how I can filter feed tags)

    * * *

    Okay, let me be a LITTLE less of a jerk here and note what I *DO* like about Reader:
    – Keyboard shortcuts! 🙂
    – Ease of adding new feeds (by keyword, by title, by URL… very flexible!)
    – Nice how the filter narrows as I type! (but it’d be even nicer if ESC cleared it)
    – Pretty fast (excepting the short time earlier today when it was first released)

    * * *

    Anyway, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that Google rapidly works on this beta, giving it top resources… rotating in seasoned PMs / APMs, providing needed equipment for scalability and so on. For now, though, I’ll happily stick with Newzcrawler, and — admittedly grudgingly — suggest that my newbie friends start off with Bloglines for now.

  • Wikis will hit big time with Y! Whiteboard (another AdamPrediction)

    My prediction:
    Wikis have not yet hit critical mass, but they will by 2006 Q3 when I predict Yahoo! will unveil a well-integrated wiki feature called “Y! Whiteboards.”

    So what’s a wiki?!
    First, those in the un-know may be wondering what the heck a wiki is. Yeah, yeah, it sounds just as goofy as “blog,” but it’s worth getting to know.

    A wiki is basically an application on the Web that lets practically anyone edit or even create pages and easily link them together. Think of it as an extendable set of whiteboards, with all interested folks having handy virtual dry-erase markers and erasers. It’s a fabulous albeit admittedly not flawless solution enabling groups of people to collaborate on a particular topic or defined scope of topics.

    Okay, gimme an example!
    One of the grandest wikis of them all is Wikipedia, a massive free encyclopedia. Although not without controversies and challenges of its own, Wikipedia has inarguably grown up to be a valuable and impressive resource. And of course, it does have an entry on Wikis 🙂

    Or take my new humble wiki, “Lindy Hop Whiteboard Supreme.” A distinguishing factor of the (hosted) software I’m using is that folks using Firefox and IE can use rich-text controls to edit pages. Even so, though, I’ve found contributions to be few and far between so far. 😐 [Want to try it out? Play in the playpen :-D]

    So what does all of this have to do with Y!, and what on earth is a Yahoo! Whiteboard?

    I’m glad you asked, but first, this C.M.A. disclaimer:
    Before I spill all (my wild conjectures), let me clearly state up front that I have no insider Y! knowledge. I don’t work there, I know few folks who do, and they don’t tell me anything Y!ish anyway. So all of this is pure guesswork / passionate hoping :-D.

    * * *

    There are two things that have been holding back mass understanding and adoption of wikis, IMHO:

    1) AWARENESS
    Name a popular site appealing to non-geeks (e.g., ESPN, Disney, Google) that features wikis. Can’t do it, eh? And go ahead, ask your neighbor if they like playing with wikis. You’ll likely either get a blank stare or a slap.

    2) USABILITY ISSUES
    Translation from geek-speak: Wikis are generally painful to actually use. With most wikis, you have to learn “wiki markup” before you can author any nicely structured documents. Sure, many geeks’ll argue that making something bold is really simple, yadda yadda… but ask those same geeks to create a multi-level bulleted list or drag-and-drop in some photos, and they’ll excuse themselves with a “Wikis are just fine in plain text anyway!” They’re lying. It’s like the Web circa 1995; sometimes fun to look at, but contributing content is like getting a root canal. Without anaesthesia or a spell-checker.

    Additionally, many wikis require you to register before you can contribute. People tend to be sick of giving out their e-mail address to yet another site and remembering yet another password.

    * * *

    Yahoo! can change all of that, and I think they will. Here’s why:

    1) Y! has experience with rich-text controls and increasingly is getting good at mass-consumer usability niceties.
    Their new mail Web client is apparently fabulous, and based upon my experience with its predecessor (Oddpost), I believe it. Drag and drop deliciousness. Painless formatting. All good stuff for a wiki. Geeks will undoubtedly be able to optionally author pages in HTML; the rest of us can icon-click and shortcut-key our way to content-contribution bliss.

    2) Wikis are sticky
    Wikis tend to revolve around a specific topic, appeal to a specific demographic, and often illicit strong loyalty within group members. What does this mean? Well, for advertisers and, by extension, Y!’s beancounters, it’s a cash cow that members milk themselves. 🙂

    3) Y! gets integration… and oh, is there integration potential!
    Despite some glaring and frustrating resource allocation issues re: Y! Groups and related problems, I do think Y! has some good integration smarts. And imagine the coolness of a wiki, er, whiteboard (friendlier name) attached to each Y! Group, floated next to a Y! chat room, integrated into each Y!360 circle, included as part of one’s new Y! Mail account for access-anywhere notes, and more. Or, hmm… how about Flickr group integration? That could be fun!

    4) Y!’s large userbase will help facilitate attribution and accountability options.
    Want to start or edit a Y! whiteboard? If you already have a Y! ID, you’ll be good to go. And if not, well, that’s quite an incentive to get one, eh? I envision that Y! whiteboards will include a strong and flexible permissioning structure, including read, edit, create, and delete permissions based upon:
    – Y! ID (only these 8 Y! buddies can edit, but all can read…)
    – Y! group membership (only members of Foo group can read, and only Foo administrators can edit)
    – 360 affiliation (1st degree friend, 2nd degree, colleagues, best friends…)
    – Y! mail (only I can edit, anyone in my Y! address book can read)

    Plus the anti-spam possibilities are intriguing:
    – Reverse all edits by ID
    – Reverse all edits except for those from Foo group administrators
    …and so on.

    * * *

    With the acquisition of Flickr, I’m optimistic that Y! is seeing the
    ‘Online Community’ light, and I am hoping for great things to come from the big Y!.

    But why not Google? Or Amazon, Microsoft, AOL…
    I don’t think Google quite gets integration yet. And Google IDs aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as Yahoo! IDs. Lastly, I’ve been quite disappointed with Google Groups. In a nutshell (and to my surprise and disappointment), I just don’t think Google understands online communities or knows what to do with them. While the company’s community communications are steadily improving, it still seems to focus on and be good at tools that empower individuals, not groups.

    Amazon? That company isn’t brave enough to embrace open community communications yet. I heard rumblings about an Amazon Social Network a while back, but… well, I’ll believe it when I see it. Book reviews are pre-screened, Amazon.com badly botched its acquisition of PlanetAll (though admittedly that was 7+ years ago), and I just don’t perceive Online Communities and collaborative sharing in Amazon.com’s DNA at this time.

    Microsoft? Too much of a control freak. While they’ve been doing wikis as part of their developer section (Channel9), and quite admirably in many ways, I just don’t see them releasing such power to the general public. And if they did, it’d only work in IE… alienating about 50% of those folks who’d want to contribute to wikis in the first place. Robert Scoble, I encourage you to prove me wrong. 🙂 (I love that guy AND I love baiting him :-P)

    AOL? They’re a close partner of a company I’m doing consulting for, so I’m going to plead the fifth.

    * * *

    Any possible wiki-introducers that I’ve missed?
    And do you think I’m on the mark, or will wikis be forever outside the mainstream… a pie-in-the-sky idea embraced primarily by geeks with too much time on their hands?

  • A review of Google Talk: Not yet revolutionary or compelling

    As hyped in breathless news articles over the last few days, Google came out with their own IM (instant messaging) client this evening, Google Talk.

    VERDICT: Clean, uncluttered, intuitive, and rather unexciting in its current version.

    To be frank, I was (somewhat unfairly) disappointed with GTalk. Granted, it’s just v1 of a public beta, so I shouldn’t be so greedy, but… unlike with Gmail, I didn’t see anything that made me go WOW!

    Great voice quality? Sure, but Skype has already got that (and also already has a humungous userbase).

    Ad-free (at least for now)? Yes, but so is Trillian, the IM app I already use and love. Incidentally, the Pro version of Trillian (a very worthwhile buy, IMHO), along with other clients, can connect to the Google network. This is because Google is smartly and unselfishly running their chat service on the open source Jabber platform.

    And indeed, I’m having trouble seeing how Gtalk will gain traction for the time being. AIM, Yahoo, and MSN users really have little incentive to switch, especially since GTalk doesn’t (at least yet) interoperate with the big 3. Trillian users… I can’t see any reason why they’d switch, either. Skype folks? As noted above, I simply can’t forsee any defections.

    Let me sprinkle in a few positive notes, though:

    You can run an ’embedded’ form of GTalk within the Google Desktop sidebar. Exit GD, wait a few moments, then restart it. Click the little down-arrow at the top right, select ADD/REMOVE PANELS, and check off Google Talk.

    Google Talk replaces the current Gmail Notifier, and that’s handy.

    GTalk scans your existing GMail address book, and lets you easily find and invite others to GTalk.

    Oh, and there’s a puzzling little easter egg in the About dialog box. Click on the ABOUT link in GTalk (or the sidebar component), and you’ll notice this in light text towards the bottom:

    play 23 21 13 16 21 19 . 7 1 13 5

    Anyone wanna guess what the significance of that is? 23, undoubtedly, stands for the 23rd of August — the release day, but the rest…? Maybe it’s something that, if you can solve it, you get a Google job offer? Get cracking! 😀

    Anyway, I’m guessing (and hoping) that Googlers have a trick or two up their sleeve with regards to this new product.

    What are your thoughts on this?

  • Gmail: Do we really want a TERABYTE of space? (a.k.a. "Be careful what you wish for…")

    Gmail indicates a terabyte of space available.

    [See other BLADAM entries on Gmail… and also, as I’ve noted earlier, please do not ask me for an invite; I don’t have any to spare… sorry! – Adam]

    A number of Gmail users — including yours truly — have noticed that Gmail has seemingly upped the service storage limit to one terabyte. That’s right… 1,000,000 — one million — megabytes (compared to Hotmail’s two megabyte free storage limit, for instance). To put this into perspective… even if you got 250 e-mails each DAY (averaging four kilobytes each), it would take you about 2,739 YEARS to fill up this much space.

    Of course, there’s certainly the possibility that the new indication of a terabyte of space is a Gmail bug. Gmail is, after all, still very much in beta. But what if it’s not a bug? What if the terabyte storage limit is really, well, real? Would we truly want a terabyte of space? Or would this lead to more problems than benefits?

    Okay, those may sound like silly questions. After all, isn’t storage space like money… the more the better?

    Maybe not.

    I’m beginning to ask myself about the issue not only of diminishing returns (at what point does the space-race become a bore?), but — more importantly — whether such a huge capacity could lead to some unexpected challenges.

    True, Google search is excellent. But here’s what worries me as I think about the consequences of really dumping in and keeping many tens of thousands of even the most banal / temporarily-significant e-mails into my Gmail account:

    Let’s say I know I’m looking for an e-mail I got a few years ago from a woman named Jen. Or maybe Jenny. Or Jennifer. Something like that. And we were talking about going on a skiing trip together. When I have 200,000 e-mails in Gmail…

    – I have to remember to specify (“Jen” OR “Jenny” OR “Jennifer”) AND (“ski” or “skiing”) since Gmail doesn’t support partial word searches (though admittedly this isn’t different from what one must do now for this sort of search).

    – I may be deluged by false positives… e.g., notes from travel agents named Jen/Jenny/Jennifer, friends talking about going skiing with their fiance Jen or colleague Jenny, an article in the New York Times written by journalist Jen Smith talking about a bank robbery by someone with a ski mask, and so on.

    * * *

    Even in searching my own 2-gig-or-so Outlook e-mail collection nowadays with a fabulous search tool (“LookOut“), I find myself increasingly regretful that I didn’t throw away a lot of the newsletter e-mails, temporary “verify your subscription” e-mails, one word reply e-mails with a ton of quoting, and so on. Specifically, I’m starting to suspect that being a packrat — and, in particular, having the ability AND encouragement to support this habit — may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

    Don’t get me wrong. I still love Gmail and think that, overall, it’s a humungous step up from the miserly accounts one gets with Hotmail and Yahoo and so on. But at the same time, I wonder if people are prepared for potentially frustrating consequences of REALLY saving absolutely all their e-mails.

    What do you think?

    Added later the same day:
    Google, please don’t vengefully remove my terabyte of storage. I may be concerned, but I’m still greedy. And at my current rate of overall mail sending/receiving, I’d fill up a gig in 440 days! :O

    Added May 19, 2004 (the next day)
    Oops. Be careful what you diss; looking a gift horse in the mouth may cause the horse to kick you. Er, in this case, the extra storage has gone *poof*. Bummer.

    And wait… adding to the confusion… some of my friends still show a 1TB limit in their Gmail account. Hmm!

  • Google stole my idea for discussion lists! (an early review of Google Groups2 / Google e-mail lists)

    Okay, not really :-). But maybe I should go into fortune telling, because I had written about the newly released Google Groups2 Discussion List Service two weeks ago on the “What Should Google Do” group on orkut.com:


    Email Discussion Lists

    The competition is simply awful. Yahoo! inserts annoying banner ads everywhere and sometimes even full-page interstitials. MSN lists are awkward to set up and use. And Topica (free version) has suffered from poor reliability and over-ad’edness.
    Google could create a stellar e-mail discussion list service, especially given that:
    – it already is rapidly acquiring mail-related know-how from Gmail (anti-spam issues, smart threading, etc.)
    – AdSense can be even MORE targeted (and profitable!) on many if not most discussion lists, and Google has in fact already experimented with putting AdSense ads in e-mail newsletters.
    Overall, I’m excited about how Google could create some fabulous synergy with Google Groups (definitely in need of a UI overhaul, IMHO), Google E-mail Lists, and Gmail… really leveraging threading, anti-spam protections, and of course, search!
    What do you think?

    Well, given my earlier-written note above, you can guess what *I* think about it. It’s pretty damn exciting!

    However, a few things concern me:

    1) Will it stay banner-ad free?
    Google writes this on the Google Groups Help page: “Google Groups never displays pop-ups or banner ads.” Sounds pretty absolute. Note, though, that it doesn’t say that Google will NEVER display banner ads (or even the nasty interstitials that YahooGroups annoys the hell out of folks with). And given the fact that — to my disbelief — Google started including up to 50Kb in size banner ads on AdSense content sites, I’m not quite what to think about Google’s commitment to a streamlined user interface.

    Of course, I’m minorly hypocritical. I include some banner ads on my sites, including this one. But that’s my own personal choice. I’m not sure I’d want to see a banner ad on every Google Groups page :(.

    2) There still seems to be no protection against evil spam-bots harvesting Web addresses
    Unlike most standalone Usenet (newsgroup) readers, Google Groups2 (like the regular Google Groups) offers no way for posters to hide their e-mail addresses. Why does this matter? Well, as soon as I post to rec.arts.whatever with my coveted Gmail account address, it’s probably just a matter of days before one of those Godawful spammers uses a tool to scrape my address (and millions of others) off of Usenet postings… using them not only to send spam, perhaps, but also to sell as part of ‘spam address’ CDs, guaranteeing me bucketloads more spam in the future. Indeed, I believe it’s largely due to my earlier unobfuscated Usenet postings in the distant past that have resulted in a couple of my e-mail addresses getting several HUNDRED spams per day.

    3) Right now, the user interface doesn’t come close to matching the elegant simplicity of Gmail… or even various software Usenet readers.
    While tree-view is a bit more palatable, the default Groups2 view is functional but, frankly, a bit unwieldly and not something I’d want to stare at for any length of time.

    * * *

    With that out of the way, let me offer my assessment of some of the GOOD stuff I’ve found in my early testing:

    1) It’s fast
    Going from screen to screen is quick, and time-to-receive-sent-messages is darn fast, too (Google claims messages are sent within 10 seconds! Take THAT sluggish YahooGroups! :D)

    2) So far, sent messages are naked!
    I can’t imagine that this’ll persist, but right now, group mail is delightfully devoid of obnoxious taglines, and even ad-free so far!

    3) Rather rich functionality
    If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Yahoo! and Topica should be positively blushing right now. GG2 offers pretty much the core of those services’ functionality, at least in terms of e-mail options, though it lacks the extended features that YahooGroups offers, such as calendaring, file storage, and so on.

    * * *

    Will people make the switch? It’s hard to say. I’m guessing that many folks — understandably fed up with the flakiness and intrusiveness of the existing discussion list services — may strongly consider GG2. However, there are rather high switching costs in many cases. While Google makes it easy to import new subscribers (add OR invite… hmm… I wonder how they’re guarding against abuse with that!), many members will have to update their spam or general rules filters, and — more commonly — get used to a new interface. And those of us with e-newsletters may seriously have cold feet; I’ve already moved my subscribers from list service to list service (one folded, one became too expensive, and so on), and I am quite hesitant to once again drag everyone to a new home.

    Where I think GG2 has the most potential is in the creation of *NEW* groups, since there’s no user or moderator baggage to deal with. With similar feature sets and Google’s trademark reliability (except for AdWords :cough cough:), I see few reasons for anyone to start a list on anything other than Gmail.

    There are, of course, a few exceptions ;-). Here are some cases in which GG2 may not be the best choice for aspiring moderators:

    1) Branding is critical
    GG2 is NOT the right choice for most companies, who (IMHO) should really be sending out mail listed as from theircompany.com, or at minimum, theircompany.trusted-mailer.com. “Free” — no matter how pre-IPO fashionable — is generally less respected by customers who may expect an ad-free and custom communications channel from the companies they do business with.

    2) Your group isn’t ‘critical’ or ‘required’ or ‘differentiated’
    There are switching costs for members, as described above, and some may not wish to establish Google Acccounts, no matter how easy this is to do. As a result, some may bail out, preferring to stick with tried-and-true YahooGroups or Topica Groups.

    3) You make use of YahooGroup’s extended features
    If you maintain group files (photos, databases, FAQ’s, etc.) or use the calendar function or rely upon online-presence-detection (who’s online Yahoo), then GG2 is not (yet) the right choice for you.

    * * *

    With that said, I encourage everyone to give GG2 a try. You can create groups for free and with surprising ease… and so you now have new and spiffy tools to start the 387th Britney Spears fan club. On the other hand, maybe it’s best to follow the Google creed; Don’t Be Evil 😀

    * * *

    Want to talk about GG2? Feel free to post your comments here, or join the official (not run by me!) Google Groups2 Discussion List. Be sure to read through the GG2 info materials first 🙂

  • Gmail may not change the world… but will it substantively change the way we e-mail?

    [As I’ve noticed in my earlier Gmail commentary, I unfortunately do not have the ability to offer invites… sorry 🙁 – Adam]

    With all the coverage of Gmail (to which I’ve somewhat guiltily contributed), one might snicker that Gmail’s being positioned as something that’s going to change the world.

    Well, almost. 😉

    I seriously think that Gmail may substantially change the way people deal with e-mail… sending, receiving, storing… leading to some interesting and not-insubstantial behavioral changes.

    First, there’s the admittedly obvious possibility: that Gmail will acclimate users to archiving rather than deleting mail.

    But I’m thinking there may also be quite a few other ways that Gmail will change users’ behavior, assuming the service catches on widely and wildly, as I think it will.

    – Reduced quoting
    Since all previous correspondence is right there in plain (conversation) view, I think people may be more apt to eliminate the redundant quoting… especially if Gmail ceases adding this into replies (particularly Gmail-to-Gmail replies) by default.

    Why is this significant? For starters, it will help folks pinpoint what they’re looking for when they search through e-mails. Right now, with many folks quoting from the last bazillion e-mails in a thread because they’re too lazy to trim the quotes, their e-mails show up in searches when they may not be relevant… specifically, when the searcher was really attempting to pull up the original e-mail that they merely quoted!

    In contrast, when people are encouraged to trim their quotes or at least begin to see that quoting entire previous correspondences is unnecessary, e-mail searches will become more relevant, with fewer but more targeted hits. The haystack, in effect, becomes smaller, but the needle remains the same size 🙂

    – Greater sensitivity to the subject line
    On one hand, I think people may be reluctant to change the subject line in an ongoing conversation for fear of ‘breaking’ the conversation (I actually got hollered at by a friend for doing just that).

    But on the other hand, I believe folks may perhaps become more sensitive to the realities of both personal and public (discussion list) conversations floating to wildly different topics… and feel compelled to change the subject to split the conversation. Of course, Google’s implementation (or not) of conversation joining/splitting tools will certainly have an effect on all of this as well.

    Overall, I think that the proliferation of Gmail may encourage people to pay more attention to subject lines which, IMHO, is a great thing. Personally, I’m sick and tired of people talking about hiking shoes when the subject line is still unchanged from the first e-mail in a 38-note thread that started with “Best pocketable camera for the outdoors.” After all, I may be interested in one topic and not the other, yet loathe to either waste my time reading through everything or miss discussions that I’d want to peruse.

    Nowadays, it’s mostly us geeks who modify subject lines to read something like: “Hiking shoes (was: Best pocketable camera for the outdoors)” and it’d sure be great if others were as considerate… or even if Gmail helped encourage such changes! Ah, but I digress…

    – Lessened reliance upon HTML e-mail
    I’m assuming that Gmail will eventually support the creating / forwarding of HTML e-mail, but in the meantime, I’m wondering if people will be less apt to make use of HTML mails (creating in other clients, forwarding them in Gmail) due to the current lack of HTML e-mail support in Gmail.

    * * *

    What do you think about the scenarios described above? And how else might Gmail change the way people use e-mail?