One of the areas I'm digging into right now is content curation, specifically on the Twitter platform. With the millions of tweets every day on Twitter I can't imagine how anyone can keep up with it all, or if they would even want to keep up with it all. Right now I have around 80+ people I follow on Twitter and I stopped trying to keep up with them months ago. I can't even imagine how people who "follow" hundreds of people derive any value from these folks.
For several weeks I tried to keep up with the tweets of the people I follow using lists and everything else Twitter (and Twitter clients) have to offer, but ultimately it was just too much. The things is, I do want to read the more interesting tweets and stay up to date with the people I'm following. I don't just follow anyone on my Twitter account, I try to hand pick most of the people I follow so that my Twitter stream is useful. But it's just too much... I'm down to a small list of a dozen people who I check regularly and everyone else just gets lost in the stream.
Anyways, not sure how much I can figure out, but I'm just toying around with the Twitter API and my personal feed to see what sort of information I can bubble to the top. I'm not trying to make a Twitter client or a Twitter service here, but I just want to get a handle for all the information out there and see what I can do with it.
APIs
I'm playing around with several different APIs during my spare time lately. I have a couple of concepts and ideas I want to explore and I just want to see what's available to me if I want to prototype and experiment. Some of the API's I'm playing with are: Twitter, Foursquare, Evernote, TweetMeme, Bitly and Facebook. The general areas I'm exploring revolve around content curation and social discovery.
40 hours of Pandora
Hmmm, I didn't realize that Pandora had a limit of 40 hours of listening per month:
I guess I could just pay the $0.99 they're asking for, but instead I think I'm going to take this time to play around with Last.fm and Slacker radio. I've heard good things about these services so I'm going to give them a spin and see how they stack up against Pandora.
I guess I could just pay the $0.99 they're asking for, but instead I think I'm going to take this time to play around with Last.fm and Slacker radio. I've heard good things about these services so I'm going to give them a spin and see how they stack up against Pandora.
Evernote: It's not just me
I guess I'm not the only one experiencing the "slow and clunky" side of Evernote. The top 10 search terms driving traffic to my blog:
Quick update 1: Just a bit under 600 notes to date. I've lost track of how many megs of data I have stored, but I'm still well under my monthly allowance.
Quick update 2: My Evernote iPhone app stopped working all of a sudden last week. Whenever I try to synch I see the following error: "Synchronization failed" (see below). Is anyone else having this issue? Update: I had to re-install the Evernote app to fix this issue.
1) evernote is slowThe latest Evernote client I downloaded (3.5.2.1764) is a bit faster than the version before it, but there's still a lot of room for improvement in terms of speed and responsiveness. Hopefully we'll get a snappier version soon.
2) evernote windows 7 so slow
3) "you're so slow..."
4) android fragmentation
5) evernote clunky
6) evernote site very slow
7) evernote slow at startup android
8) evernote slow to open
9) evernote slow windows
10) iphone android simplicity
Quick update 1: Just a bit under 600 notes to date. I've lost track of how many megs of data I have stored, but I'm still well under my monthly allowance.
Quick update 2: My Evernote iPhone app stopped working all of a sudden last week. Whenever I try to synch I see the following error: "Synchronization failed" (see below). Is anyone else having this issue? Update: I had to re-install the Evernote app to fix this issue.
Interactive TV Ads
I saw this ad last week on my DVR:
Have these been around for a while? Is this a Comcast thing or an industry wide change? This is the first time I saw an ad like this, so I stopped to interact with it. It actually wasn't that interactive, all I could really do was hit the 'OK' button to move through the inline ad. I haven't seen any other ads like this since then, but I think I like the concept. It was pretty unobtrusive, which I like, and if I wanted to receive more information about the product I could do so easily from my couch. If I didn't I could just ignore the whole ad and fast forward through it like any other ad. One thing I would suggest to Comcast in this case would be to change the delivery method of the coupon from snail mail to email. I'm pretty certain they have my email on file so they can just as easily email me the coupon so I can print it out immediately at home instead of waiting for it in the mail.
Have these been around for a while? Is this a Comcast thing or an industry wide change? This is the first time I saw an ad like this, so I stopped to interact with it. It actually wasn't that interactive, all I could really do was hit the 'OK' button to move through the inline ad. I haven't seen any other ads like this since then, but I think I like the concept. It was pretty unobtrusive, which I like, and if I wanted to receive more information about the product I could do so easily from my couch. If I didn't I could just ignore the whole ad and fast forward through it like any other ad. One thing I would suggest to Comcast in this case would be to change the delivery method of the coupon from snail mail to email. I'm pretty certain they have my email on file so they can just as easily email me the coupon so I can print it out immediately at home instead of waiting for it in the mail.
Google Buzz is not trending
One thing I've noticed about Google Buzz is that it's not being used that much to share stories from popular sites like Mashable and TechCrunch. If you run through the archives of these sites and look at the share counts, you'll see that Twitter is king, Facebook is a distant second, and Buzz is an even further third. Sites like Mashable tend to have stories that are shared a lot on social networks, and seeing the low number of people using Buzz can give you an idea of how Google is faring against Twitter and Facebook in the social arena.
Getting tired of location
Location, location, location. That's all I read about these days on the internet. With the SXSW festival going on this week and every tech company under the sun launching new location features it's all starting to get a bit tiresome. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz. Everyone is really banking on location being the next big step in social. Here's the thing though, right now 'checking in' seems so frivolous and silly. If I want people to know I'm going to be somewhere I'll tell them beforehand via email, text message or Facebook. I started using Foursquare this year and was checking in left and right at first, but now I hardly ever check in anywhere anymore except at Kellogg and Vision Quest (and that's just to defend my mayorships, which I know sounds dumb). Anyways, I know location will be the breakthrough product of this year's SXSW, but I wonder if that craze will really carry over into the general mainstream. Will 2010 be the year of location?
Creating solutions, finding problems
"Instead of looking at a solution first and trying to find a problem for it, look forThese simple words of wisdom were imparted to me by my computer science professors back in college. At the time I was working on an independent study course with some CS friends that involved the iPaq PDA's. We had picked the iPaq for our independent study project, mostly because it meant we would be given the device to play around with for most of the quarter. When asked what we were going to do with the iPaq's, we didn't really have an answer. We knew we just wanted to play around with these cool toys. We had no real idea what we were going to do but we knew we could find a problem that could be solved by this new portable solution. (We ended up cobbling together some "PDA in the classroom environment" type project that was eventually picked up by other students and converted into Pocket Classmate.)
a problem first and try to find a solution for it."
Sadly enough I still fall into this trap sometimes. For example, I really want to do something with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. I have a 'solution' in mind, the power of the crowd, but I don't have a real problem to address. I also like the idea of tying virtual goods to real world goods, but I can't really figure where this 'solution' would fix a real problem. Oh, did I mention there's a $750 3D printer that I really want to buy, for no reason other than wanting to play around with a cool new toy? Luckily I know enough these days not to move forward with these random ideas, but instead I file them away in my head as options to consider when I find real problems to attack.
Buzz buzz
So is the buzz over Google Buzz done already? Wow, that was pretty fast. Looking at my own Buzz feed, I see a lot of activity from my friends during that first week and now nothing at all. I guess everyone was eager to try it out but then lost interest in the service.
During the first couple of days a bunch of my friends started a couple fun random threads, mostly revolving around the "what the heck is this?" topic. I even used it for some real purpose during a group meeting at school. Our group was interviewing a senior executive via phone conference, and since we weren't all in the same location we needed a way to 'chat' with each other during the phone call to coordinate the follow-up questions. We decided to try out Google Buzz for chatting and to store interview notes. It actually worked out pretty well and helped the two hour event go by pretty quickly (the interview subject was a little dry).
I'm personally not a huge fan of Buzz. I like the technology and the features built into it, but I don't really like the fact that it's hooked up into my Gmail contact list. I shoot out emails to a lot of different people for different reasons and I don't necessarily want to build a 'social network' around some of those people. That's what my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are for.
There are tons of articles about Google Buzz out right now, but here are some of my favorites:
Pete Cashmore asks: What is Buzz good for? If Facebook is the local bar, and Twitter is the town square, where does that leave Buzz?
Erick Schonfeld talks about the privacy risks of Buzz: "The danger in creating an instant social network around email contacts, as Google Buzz does with Gmail, is that the boundaries between what is private and what is public are not always clear."
And easily my favorite article about Buzz: "Google and Social: Like Nerds at the Dance" by Matthew Ingram, detailing out some of the design flaws behind Buzz and the perils of asking engineers to architect social networking.
During the first couple of days a bunch of my friends started a couple fun random threads, mostly revolving around the "what the heck is this?" topic. I even used it for some real purpose during a group meeting at school. Our group was interviewing a senior executive via phone conference, and since we weren't all in the same location we needed a way to 'chat' with each other during the phone call to coordinate the follow-up questions. We decided to try out Google Buzz for chatting and to store interview notes. It actually worked out pretty well and helped the two hour event go by pretty quickly (the interview subject was a little dry).
I'm personally not a huge fan of Buzz. I like the technology and the features built into it, but I don't really like the fact that it's hooked up into my Gmail contact list. I shoot out emails to a lot of different people for different reasons and I don't necessarily want to build a 'social network' around some of those people. That's what my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are for.
There are tons of articles about Google Buzz out right now, but here are some of my favorites:
Pete Cashmore asks: What is Buzz good for? If Facebook is the local bar, and Twitter is the town square, where does that leave Buzz?
Erick Schonfeld talks about the privacy risks of Buzz: "The danger in creating an instant social network around email contacts, as Google Buzz does with Gmail, is that the boundaries between what is private and what is public are not always clear."
And easily my favorite article about Buzz: "Google and Social: Like Nerds at the Dance" by Matthew Ingram, detailing out some of the design flaws behind Buzz and the perils of asking engineers to architect social networking.
