A Matter Of Degree

xobni - five minutes and I was hooked

I learned about xobni from a colleague last week, and downloaded it today.  Xobni ('inbox" backwards) bills itself as "the Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments" and / or "a more socially aware email environment."  I would prefer to describe it as "the free Outlook tool with addictive metrics."  Once it started analyzing, showing me, for example, who among my contacts is quickest to respond to me, I was fascinated.  Then when it gave me the option to send said contacts their stats, I was hooked. 

The design is bright and appealing (maybe a little too appealing - compared to the bland light-blue-and-white Outlook color scheme its orange, black and purple tones make it difficult to look away or ignore the pane) and I found it user-friendly and intuitive.  After eight hours I'm thinking of my correspondents in terms of their xobni rank ("Yeah, he's my number three") and trying to figure out imbalances ("Why am I sending her two emails for every one she sends me?").  It interfaces with LinkedIn.  It bubbles-up attachments.  It threads conversations.  It hasn't broken anything on my pc, although the comments on this post about xobni's business model indicate that it may cause problems with FireFox.  For my setup, there is no downside and a tremendous upside.

I would rave more, but I've got to go reply to an email from my #1.

Twitter as Headline News

I just had an insight about why Twitter is good.

Another friend of mine just started blogging, and as I subscribed to her blog in my blog reader, I was dismayed at the prospect of adding one more stream of information to the pile that I already don't have enough time to post comments on, or even read.  I'm glad that we all have the means to publish our journals, our photos, our videos, but my ability to keep up with it all won't scale.  I can't even find the time to read the national news most days.

But I do read headlines.  And if I could get a daily digest of my friends' and colleagues' lives and insights, on a single page, 140 characters at a whack, I would read that religiously. 

It shouldn't be an aggregate of their recently-published blog or photo titles; that wouldn't be the same thing.  I don't want to read text that describes or refers to other content.  I want exactly what Twitter asks for - "what are you doing?"   

FriendFeed gets close, and I like the image thumbnails, but all the different kinds of information in one pile slows me down - e.g. I don't want to mentally filter out everyone's del.icio.us links while I'm looking for the meatier stuff.

I never thought I'd be advocating a Max-Headroom-style blipvert in the place of real content, yet here I am.  I can't keep up with unlimited information.  Sign on to Twitter and help me out?

Excellent free file sync tool for Windows, from Microsoft

Today I was looking for a file synchronization tool for my PC and found SyncToy, a free tool from Microsoft.  The user interface is clean and attractive, and the tool is really easy to use.  I tested a sync from my laptop to a LaCie external hard drive, and was very pleased with the results.  I'm a little surprised they didn't call it SyncPoint, but no complaints!

New Web 2.0 Visual Arts Site - Pixish

Just launched - Pixish, a site where people who need creative work and people who produce it can find each other.  I like the concept, but will they be able to get enough designers & other commercial folks to come here instead of scouring Flickr for images to use?

 

The beginning of the end of Flickr?

Enden er nær!, originally uploaded by le petit danois.

Much commotion and protest on Flickr over Microsoft's takeover bid of Yahoo. Link to Wired article... I have no opinion yet although I did join the "MICROSOFT: KEEP YOUR EVlL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR" group to which I was invited over the weekend...

Great web interface for viewing detail

A co-worker turned me on to this - betsyjohnson.com has a great interface for viewing details of the clothing they sell.

When you view the page for any item, for example this dress, and place your mouse cursor over the image, a grid appears behind the arrow, and a new image window appears at right that shows a dynamic closeup of where the grid is positioned over the main image. 

This code may be in use in other places on the Web but this is the first I've seen it. 

11/28/07 - The Gap has it too; it's mainstream.  I still think it's cool.

Jargon is born: electronalize

Heard from a client this week, I hereby define: electronalize

Main Entry: e·lec·tron·a·lize

Pronunciation:  \i-ˌlek-ˈträ- nä- līz\

Function: transitive verb

Date: 2007

1 to convert to electronic form.

One documented use found on the web:

 

I have seen the future, and it is a table

I've been thinking a lot about Microsoft Surface - yes it's cool, but is this really the way we want to go?  Even when the price has come down from $10,000, will I ever want one in my house?  My tendency when using computers and gadgets is to want to beam files and information directly to other people's computers and gadgets; not to have to go find a connection point where we can interact and collaborate.   (MS article about Surface with some real-world use cases)

Then my brother sent me a link to the reactable.  Now here's a futuristic table I can get behind.  It's like a hybrid of a theremin and a Kaos pad - but better.  It's not in production yet and the Music Technology Group does not quote a price, yet I find myself wanting one in my home IMMEDIATELY.  (Probably this is more of an indicator of my personal style than about the coolness/usefulness of the technology itself.  At any rate, enjoy the demo:)

Passing this along - Jott - Mobile note-taking and hands-free messaging

Jott is a free service that allows you to call a toll-free phone number, speak a message, and have that message transcribed & e-mailed to yourself and/or others.  You can set up keywords to identify the groups or individuals you want to contact, so that you can identify them with just one word when you make the call.  Jott's website describes the service and some use cases very cleanly and simply; click the "See how" links on their home page.

I learned about this from the Clutter Diet Blog and I'm planning to write the next Great American Novel this way.

Metadata Tagging – a call for standardization

I'm hearing a lot about how the generation that's currently entering the workforce is going to be more supportive of knowledge management concepts than the generation going out, because the young workers will already be familiar with wikis, blogs, tagging, bookmarking, and profiling.

To support this evolution, I plead with developers to come together and adopt a standard for tagging. We've gotten to a place where users feel confident that they can use basic search language standards such as Boolean operators in most search engines; I'd like to feel the same level of confidence when tagging data online. But right now the rules vary from site to site, and if I want to get my tags right I have to remember where I am and what to do. For example, here are the tagging rules for some of the web services I use every day:

Flickr – space-separated, double quotes can be used to join words together in a single tag.

Del.icio.us – space-separated. Multiple-word tags need to be joined with a hyphen or underscore. Commas and quotes become part of the tag.

Blogger – comma-separated. Quotes become part of the tag.

I can try to keep a mental matrix of which sites use which rules ("If it's Blogger it must be commas!), but if (when) I make mistakes, it's going to affect the integrity of my tags, and by extension the integrity of others' search results.

Please, let's have a standard. I don't care which one. I just want to spend more time searching, learning, and tagging, and less time going back and re-doing all the tags that sorted to the top because they start with ".