revjim.net

March, 2010:

same thing it was the last time you asked

Mar 30th, 2010
by Jim Reverend.
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Child: What’s that?

You: An Apple.

Child: What’s that?

You: A Knife.

Child: What are you doing?

You: Cutting the apple with the knife.

*30 seconds goes by*

Child: What’s that?

You: AN APPLE!

If you’ve EVER been around any children under the age of 5 then you’ve, no doubt, witnessed or been a part of a conversation just like this one. Despite knowing exactly what you’re doing, what you’re doing it to, and why you’re doing it in the first place, they ask you about it. Maybe you’ve been around the block a few times and you’ve learned to roll with it. Or maybe it drives you further up the wall of insanity with each passing day. Either way, it makes one wonder, why do children do this?

The answer, much like the answer to most of the things kids under age 5 do, is simple: they are imitating you. As a species, human beings learn by watching and imitating. This is why kids like to put on yours shoes, eat what you’re eating, drink what you’re drinking, watch what you’re watching, do what you’re doing, and play with whatever thing you happen to have in your hands.

I know you are probably thinking, “but my kid has never seen me question someone else like that! Why would I ask someone a question I already know the answer to?!”. But consider, carefully, the fact that your child is a “someone else” too.

Imagine your kid is playing with blocks in the middle of the living room floor. It’s quiet, you’ve been doing some chore, you’ve just finished, and you want to interact with him. “What are you playing with?” Blocks. “What are you building?” A Tower. “What color is that block?” Green. “How many fingers do I have up?” Three. “What color is your shirt?” Purple. “What’s this a picture of?” A Caterpillar. “How do you say Hat in French?” Chapeau.

Ah ha! You knew the answer to every single one of those questions, didn’t you? Well, close enough. The reason why you asked them and whether or not you should is another topic altogether. But at least now you realize that it isn’t the genetic predisposition of our children to annoy us to death that causes them to ask such questions. They are asking because they’ve learned that this is what people do. And they’ve learned this because that’s how you act toward them.

Buzz: The New Kid in Town

Mar 26th, 2010
by Jim Reverend.
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Less than a month ago, Google unleashed a new creature into the wild: Google Buzz. In an already crowded room full of social media giants, why would Google even bother? In part, because they are Google. Webmail already existed before google released gMail, and yet gMail has certainly taken its share. But also because Buzz is just unique enough to stand on its own.

Buzz is like Twitter in that it’s easy to use and by default open and public. It’s like Facebook in that you can share more than just a status update. It’s like Tumblr in that each of the different types of things you can share is formatted in a way best suited to it. It’s like Loopt in that you can publish your location as well.

It’s different than all of these in that it does these things in a way that is easy to understand, integrated with the gMail experience, very mobile capable, and built using a hybrid of open standards as up and coming protocols to tape it all together.

Will it let you do something that you couldn’t already do? Not exactly. Just like  gMail, it’s about making an existing experience better, not about making something altogether new. But, I’d argue that, even at one month old, it does a lot of things better already. Of course, it has some room for improvement too.

To understand what is better about it, you really have to try it. But it can be compared and contrasted with other services.

Take Twitter, for example. When it comes to making a status update, typing text into a box is typing text into a box. There’s no “better” or “worse” about it unless it can read our minds. Google hasn’t announced that feature, yet. However, Twitter was built around the age of the the text message, SMS. And while SMS is still widely used and isn’t going away anytime soon, smart and capable platforms (like iPhone, Android, and others) make SMS seem archaic in comparison. The 140 character limit of a Twitter status update is an example of this. As a PRO, Buzz has no such limitation. As a CON, however, Buzz is not capable of being delivered to your mobile handset by SMS.

The use off Twitter has sort of evolved though. It’s initial use case — a sort of global, opt in, mobile connected chat room — is no longer all it is used for. While it’s usage patterns have evolved, the service really hasn’t. People now include links, and hash tags with many of their Twitter updates. Even with URL shorteners getting shorter and shorter, a link takes up about 19 characters. Include a space separator, 5 characters for a hashtag, plus the hash and a separating space, and you’ve used up 27 characters leaving you only 113 to write commentary. This means that Twitter is being used less and less for new content and more and more for passing around content written somewhere else.

With its lack of character limitation, Buzz is better suited for sharing links and various media with commentary. Even without commentary, Buzz does a better job simply because, in Twitter, a link is still just a link. In Buzz, smart display features kick in to highlight photos, embed movies, and play audio.

Tumblr is an interesting service in that they were one of the first to realize that due to trending usage patterns, Twitter was, literally, dying for feature enhancements. They took the idea behind Twitter, stripped it of its SMS roots, and added new display features for the most commonly shared media types. They gave users the ability to embed and customize, tacked on comments and group blogs, and added features to allow for sharing and searching amongst one another. What was born was a beautiful, feature rich platform for sharing both thoughts and links to interesting things.

Tumblr pretty much stopped right there, but maybe that’s enough. As an engine for publishing short form thoughts and links, in a manner that allows you to express your own personality in look and feel, it is one of the best. Buzz doesn’t come close to the customization and embedding features Tumblr provides. And though Tumblr only allows two protocols for integration with other services, they are the most commonly used protocols: RSS and ATOM.

Since Tumblr, other services have come out with a slight twist on the feature set. The most notable of these is Posterous. While it lacks some of Tumblr’s customization and rebroadcasting features, it adds additional points of outgoing integration– Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, to name a few. However, it doesn’t allow for any incoming service integration at all. And it’s preferred method of interaction is plain ole email. This means that there probably won’t be “an app for that” and you probably don’t need one.

Buzz’s greatest competition is Facebook. Compared with this social networking giant, the biggest differences are lock-in and open standards. Buzz relies, as often as possible, on open standards. This means that, as long as the site you wish to connect it to is using open standards, there is little to no learning curve or development required to get the two to integrate. Facebook, on the other hand, requires an application to be developed for it specifically suited to that integration task. The difference is subtle and, because of this, I’d argue that, right now, Buzz is closest to Facebook in it’s realized feature set.

Buzz has the strong, technical upper hand between the two in that it is more open and encourages interoperability. In fact, someone else could, tomorrow, invent a Buzz-alike service and, right out of the box, it would play nice with Buzz allowing content to flow back and forth between the two with little to no effort. Also, being integrated with gMail, Buzz has the potential of competing with Facebook’s user base. However, users, in the end, don’t care about this. What they care about is the answer to this question: who and what can I connect with RIGHT NOW? And, at least RIGHT NOW, between the two, Facebook wins.

But know this: Buzz is a force to be reckoned with. It doesn’t have everything right on the first pass. Not by a long shot. But if it continues to maintain technical superiority over Facebook, while adding new features implemented elsewhere (like Tumblr and Posterous and Twitter) and not currently present ion Facebook while maintaining its influx of users, it won’t be long before the two are neck and neck in who and what can be connected to. And at that point, Buzz might just take the lead.

To get a feel for some of these services, check me out there.

twitter: revjim (status updates)
twitter: revjimweb (automated updates from all my various blogs)
facebook: Facebook
tumblr: revjim
posterous: Now, Daniel! (status updates)
posterous: Life of Daniel (a log of interesting communication)
Google Profile
Google Buzz (all of my sites fed in along with some original content)

Location Sharing and the Missing Feature

Mar 10th, 2010
by Jim Reverend.
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Location Sharing is a hot topic amongst mobile enthusiasts and social networking fiends. With new and improving services like FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and Latitude, there are a lot of options.

Each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses from the Checkin-centric services like FourSquare and Gowalla, to the real-time location based services like Latitude, and hybrids like Loopt. But, in every case, one important feature is missing.

It’s nice to be able to let people know where you are. Real-time location provides that and, with tenacity on the part of your contacts, can even indicate if you is currently in transit. But if your friends don’t find out where you are until you get there, it often makes it difficult if not impossible to actually meet you there.

What these services lack is the ability to indicate the intent to arrive at a particular location and even an estimated arrival time. Instead of checking in at my local pizza place when I get there and finding my friends showing up just as I’m leaving, I should be able to, instead, check in my intent to go to that establishment at a certain time. Then my friends could contribute their mutual intents and then our paths would be highly more likely to collide.

A truly smart service could even indicate when a person was in transit and where they were in transit from based on either real GPS data or their last check in location.

I’m sure someone will build it. I’m just waiting to see who. Until then, I use Foursquare and Latitude, each with different purposes and neither really providing the most useful service.