all hail the shag

Dave Winer had it right when he said the internet is cyclical. We seem to be in an interesting cycle here where what’s old is new again. Two cases emerged for me today.

1) rssCloud – a 2002-era concept re-tooled for today as an alternate to the “company-owned” content pub/sub models (think Twitter). This is interesting, but I’m wondering what is going to happen around scalablity. I really like the idea; it allows publishers and consumers to get more real-time and its opt-in, and doesn’t require any retooling (maybe a plugin or a few SW updates). Wordpress just announced support for it on the WP.com platform. I just installed the plugin on this blog so I can push updates to an rssCloud too. No idea WTF I’m talking about? Read the primer here and here.

The whole intent, according to DW>  “The idea is to deliver news faster, without relying on a single company to do all the work.” This is a good idea, and holds to the democratic intent of the free internet, but at the end of the day its going to be companies (ok, maybe not a single one) that will likely foot the bill for the cloud servers that power a large-scale rssCloud. DW has set up one up graciously, but he’s paying for it. Wordpress will run one but they’ve probably got a few hundred extra servers lying around at this point. Google may jump over from pubsubhubbub or whatever and put up an infinitely scalable rssCloud server. Once again, we have a content ecosystem dependent on one (or a few) companies. Its in these companies best interest to provide the server component, but then its not truly democratic as those who own the servers has the data and can, potentially, control the traffic (which was part of the problem rssCloud was looking to address).

Ironically, the reason this is old/new is that this is all coming on the heels of the “RSS is dead” meme that is running rampant currently. People, RSS is NOT dead, not by a long shot. RSS-based business models may be dead, but RSS was never really meant to be more than what its namesake describes it as – a content syndication protocol. It was not a market or a business onto itself (big props to Feedburner for proving otherwise!).

2) Toolbars – After noticing a nice toolbar on feld.com, I started poking around a bit and have now been made aware of at least two companies who have site/blog toolbars in beta. The one on feld.com is Wibya, and another is extendy. I’ve got the latter installed here for a week to test it out. I’ll run wibya also once I get an invite. Both of these are footer-based toolbars that provide some nice functionally and stay out of your way. Let me know what you think or of there are others out there. Customization will be key, but so will overall usability and elegance. No one wants to put an ugly toolbar they can’t modify onto their site.

At Filtrbox, we added an article-sharing toolbar (think diggbar or facebook sharing bar) a few months ago to better facilitate content sharing and I’m seeing more and more of these pop up. Why are they coming back? Well, thanks to Twitter, Facebook, link-shortening services, and the like there is more and more value in providing quick access to sharing good content. Plugins, sidebars, etc are getting more and more clunky, crowded and require more space. It will be interesting to see if this round of toolbars stick around. Browser-based ones are tough, but site-based ones may be a more elegant solution and more interesting from a business standpoint. (Why? It’s the data, stupid!)

Next thing you know, desktop apps will be coming back. Oh snap – they just did!

info overload, startups, tech bits filtrbox, rsscloud, twitter

Almost every day it seems a new service or mashup for Twitter comes out. Some will stick, others won’t. That’s the great thing about the internet is that everyone gets to try!  Twitter has reached a point of critical mass now where mining the data and the trends around what’s happening on Twitter is as valuable as the messages themselves. I use twitter for both business and personal pursuits, and have tried a ton of the apps and services that have come out. Here are my favorites;

• Twhirl – AIR based desktop client – there are lots of other desktop clients but I like this the best because it includes URL shortening, retweet, finding users, etc. Its the most feature rich. Tweetdeck is cool too but is short on some of the key features. Since I like to have at least two accounts open at once (arinewman and filtrbox)
• search.twitter.com – a great way to find mentions of anything specific in the twitter stream. At Filtrbox, we’ve taken the twitter search API and integrated it into our media monitoring service so you can set up the searches once and receive daily emails with any new mentions from ANY twitter user (as long as their stream is public). You can also turn these searches into RSS feeds in Filtrbox, but I digress…
• Tweetie – the best iPhone client I’ve used so far. I’ve tried twittelator, twitterific and others and found this new entrant to be superior for a few reasons. Its fast, stable, simple, supports location/photos, multiple accounts, following others, trending topics and saved searches. Totally worth the 3 bucks. Here’s one of the menus… 

 

• Monitter – a cool web UI for search.twitter.com – its pretty basic but enables you to set up a bunch of searches and see the stream of tweets. I don’t use it that much because its an app that requires constant attention, which is impossible. Its on this list because its a great demonstration of the value of the twitter search API.
• Filtrbox – (disclaimer – I’m a founder and President) – a powerful and cost-effective online news and media monitoring service that does keyword-based persistent search across online news, the blogosphere and social networks (twitter and Friendfeed). If you want to track brands, companies, people, hot trends, or any specific topic across all types of online media, Filtrbox is awesome. It supports twitter via the search API, and you can receive emails every day listing all of the mentions on Twitter. You can also post articles the system finds directly to Twitter from the web dashboard. Rather than checking search.twitter.com all the time or running manual searches, its sort of a set-it-and-forget-it thing…if there’s a mention, you’ll see it. With its trending and coverage reports, you can keep track of who on twitter is talking about things you care about. 
• MediaOnTwitter  - a wiki, and overall good resource that identifies what media outlets are on twitter and how to find them. Check out the US page to get an idea…http://mediaontwitter.pbwiki.com/United States

There are a ton of others out there, but these are my faves and what I rely on. Let me know what I missed or what you like better!

filtrbox, info overload, iphone, tech bits filtrbox, iphone, social media, tweetie, twhirl, twitter

I was doing pretty well for awhile. The whole Inbox Zero thing was working for me, even though its mostly BS. I managed to stay on top of the inbox clutter for about 4 months. Then something happened, some increase in busy and decrease in time, and inbox zero faded into the rearview mirror like a geriatric in the slow lane. My inbox is now at 1400 messages. This works for some people but not for me…I can’t help but feel I’ve dropped the ball on 1400 items somehow. 

I keep thinking I’m going to get the time back, or that I should just wipe the whole inbox and admit defeat. In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to recover and process 300 messages a week of the backlog. Most get deleted, some require responses. I have noticed a 90/10 rule in effect also – 10% of the emails require 90% of the time to deal with. The other 90% of the emails are easy to file or delete.

Update 12/08 – My inbox still has 1k messages in it. I am still hoping to get back on track over this winter holiday and start 2009 with an empty inbox. We’ll see. I’m losing confidence this will happen. We’ll see.

info overload email, InboxZero, info overload

When the #motrinmoms thing blew up recently I added the keyword as a Filtr to my Filtrbox account. After skimming the results for a few days and noticing the volume of conversations were dying down quickly wanted to see what that would look like visually. Here’s a graph for the last 15 days…

Net-Net: Don’t piss off mommy bloggers…ever. I wasn’t even tracking tweets with this account and there were 60 posts on this topic in a single day.

filtrbox, info overload filtrbox, motrinmoms

I was doing pretty well for awhile. The whole Inbox Zero thing was working for me, even though its mostly BS. I managed to stay on top of the inbox clutter for about 4 months. Then something happened, some increase in busy and decrease in time, and inbox zero faded into the rearview mirror like a geriatric in the slow lane. My inbox is now at 1400 messages. This works for some people but not for me…I can’t help but feel I’ve dropped the ball on 1400 items somehow.   

I keep thinking I’m going to get the time back, or that I should just wipe the whole inbox and admit defeat. In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to recover and process 300 messages a week of the backlog. Most get deleted, some require responses. I have noticed a 90/10 rule in effect also – 10% of the emails require 90% of the time to deal with. The other 90% of the emails are easy to file or delete.

Wish me luck…

info overload email, InboxZero, info overload

I’m at the Defrag conference today with lots of other folks who care about “accelerating the ah-ha moment!”, according to the conference. Really, this conference is all about putting meaning and context around the insane amount of information available online. What I care about, even more, is how we find the RIGHT information in a timely and painless manner and deliver that in a way that is effective.

I just saw a screenshot-demo for a product called Sxipper, the current version holds your passwords but I already use 1Password for that. The new version brings a vast amount of meta-info to the browsing experience – this is being called a “flow app” and I think it has promise (think “adaptive blue” for social info).

As I listen to the discussions, there is an underlying conversation around doing better filtering, separating information, dealing with information overload, and finding the value in all the info. Of course this all is very much related to Filtrbox’s mission and is why I’m here.  There is much we can (and should) do at Filtrbox to deliver valuable meta-information around the content we discover. Presenting the right meta-info without just amplifying the noise problem is something we are focused on. It will be interesting to see if “flow apps” like Me.dium or Sxipper can figure out how to do this in a more streamlined manner. I don’t think sidebars/sidecar browser apps are it. For me these are too distracting and make the problem worse, even though the info they provide is helpful.

What is clear to me is that as smart as we humans can be, and no matter how good and intelligent we try to make the filters and the software, there is, and will be a NEVER-ENDING quest for the better, smarter filter.

Although humans can be predictable, the brain is not a binary system, and predicting what we care about or don’t care about at a given moment is non-trivial. When the information and its profile is contstantly changing, and the attention, interest and focus of the mind is changing – finding those patterns programattically is a “holy-grail” mission. Lets see how far we can get…

filtrbox, info overload, startups "information overload", defrag08, filtrbox, me.dium, sxipper