Scripting News: There's a missing product (Scripting News)
Jonathan Deamer
· 5 months ago
In many ways, this is how I use Facebook status updates. I only follow real life "important" friends on Facebook, so while I'm happy to miss the river of news on Twitter, I don't want to miss anything that's said on Facebook. It's like a stream of press releases from friends - "I'm on vacation", "I'm going to XYZ Conference"...
Of course, there's the problem that other people don't view it as a utility of quite the same importance, leading to lots of status updates that I would actually happily miss :-)
dave
· 5 months ago
To make this idea work there would have to be social pressure on people to keep their updates at the level of an announcement. Maybe start with a calendar structure? Just thinking out loud.
Christoph Berendes
· 5 months ago
The "dopplr status aggregator" I imagined above is a partial answer - my verbose friends can feed in any number of updates, and I can get the short answer to "where's Dave going to be next Monday?" or "who amongst my buddies is going to be within 30 miles of Paris t the end of July?"
nakedjen
· 5 months ago
I shared with you, when you were here, that I just click your icon in Twitter and read everything you've said in the last few hours. Likewise, you're my friend on Facebook, so I see your updates in my feed there, too. What I've also recently done is gathered RSS feeds of those I really want to follow on Twitter. It's all rather clumsy, though. But, at least if I want to know quickly, I know where to go and how to gather the information. Still, because I'm not attached to my computer (and we both know how I am about a cellphone) I miss important updates of the folks I really want to know about. That is my fault, though, because, as I said, I'm not attached to my computer and short of having a carrier pigeon poop on my head, I'm not sure how you'd get my attention?
I do like where this is going. Keep thinking.
dave
· 5 months ago
90 percent of the confusion could be avoided if, in my case, people clicked on my updates and reviewed them before asking a question. Most of them are answered in the stream, but people either don't know to do that or can't be bothered.
A few minutes ago I got a text message from a friend in Copenhagen asking where I was. Arrrgh. Again, the answer is easily found in my Twitter stream or on my blog.
Our digital personnae are too scattered.
Benjamin David
· 5 months ago
maybe mobile push notification for twitter could part of an answer ?
also makes me think of some articles where people say they stop blogging to start a lifestream where their flickr, twitter, and others can be found on a single page
Benjamin David
· 5 months ago
another thinking, well more a state of what we have and what we don't...
- we have nice services and social networks to post photos, text, videos, statuses, etc... - we also have tools to put in one place all of these things, I'm thinking of services like tumblr or posterous - we have a lot of friends or people that follow us, but they don't all use all the services I use - i'm on flickr, vimeo, twitter, facebook, and some others but here in France most of the people I know just use facebook. For example, I hate Facebook Photo application and like using Flickr better. 90% of my friends are missing the photos I post on flickr, they are just on facebook, too bad.
It doesn't give any answers but hope it will help defining the problem
BillSeitz
· 5 months ago
I think, as you note, the real problem is that many people will not check the information available: it's more efficient *for them* to just ask.
I agree with you. It is clumsy and reading your post made me think of the pain (for me) of filing paperwork-bills, records, important docs. Sometimes stuff piles up, sometimes certain things are more important-tax time, and some needs to be discarded. I find that I have to clean up what/who I follow periodically because I change my focus, someone becomes boring or I just have too much and can't find what I really want. It would be great if there was something to make it less time consuming.
Kishore Balakrishnan
· 5 months ago
maybe your email address should be linked to a program (wave robot) that searches friendfeed (or another service - containing all your public content) and sends the results to the sender.. If the sender found the answer, maybe he will mark the wave as complete :-)
Kasper Retvig
· 5 months ago
Dave, I could be wrong but isn't this exactly what you can do with friendfeed? There you can syndicate all your content (twitter, facebook, your blog etc.) and then you can use the filtering capabilities to make sure that you never miss content for the specific people you were talking about. I'm sure how exactly you set this up in friendfeed but I'm sure Scoble can help you on that one ;)
Only problem is that you can't really force people to follow you on friendfeed this way so you may still get call from people asking you redundant questions ;)
One solution to this would be to redirect your phone to your answering machine. On the answering machine you could have the standard message that everybody should go to friendfeed to see if they can find the answer to their question... if not they should DM you. But then again seems slightly rued :)
tim
· 5 months ago
can't you just make a separate feed for your announcements? you could use whatever tools you like, but tag an entry as "announcement" and the "announcements" feed simply filters on that tag.
I will put such "announcement feeds" in a separate folder in google reader. when someone makes an announcement the folder will be bold. When I expand the folder the name of the person's feed will be bold.
am i missing something?
AndrewBurton
· 5 months ago
I'm pretty sure you just described a Personal Pop-Up Ad. I say that, because I don't think this is a missing product so much as it is a missing mindset. You want instant information, so you trawl for it, look for better ways to grab it from the aether faster. Other people...maybe not so much. I can give you own personal for instance:
Once, a couple of years before Twitter, I was in a book store trying to remember the name of a book. I didn't want to do a web search, because the browser on my phone isn't the best interface for deep searches. So, I text'd a message to LiveJournal, and a little while later I got a reply. I cannot recall if it was minutes or hours before I got a reply, but it was long enough that I never found the book. In this instance, I would have loved instantaneous attention from all of my friends, but even if I could have demanded it, it would have been irritating for them to have me interrupt what they were doing.
For people like you, who're always up for a headline, whether it be of global scope or individual scope, I believe apps like TweetDeck, instant messengers, and email responders are already these products. Until we can fork our personalities and do more than one thing at a time, real-time information will have to come in two forms: what we're watching for and what interrupts us.
johnr99a
· 5 months ago
Dave:
I agree with nakedjen. I use RSS feeds for people that I want to see everything they tweet. Google Reader is a little slow picking up the data but I never miss any of their tweets. However, the timeliness isn't quite what you seem to be looking for.
John Rigdon
Christoph Berendes
· 5 months ago
Part of the toolset is to aggregate and summarize status changes. If I'm right about how dopplr works, it would provide a partial answer if your tweets about going to Reboot would register with it. With that capability, and a "Friends of mine" list on dopplr, your Euro friend could get a quick answer to "who among my friends is going to Reboot?".
A key thing is that there is often a lag between when you (in this case) post info via Twitter and when one or more of your intended readers is open to it. Until the moment I decide to go to Reboot, I may not care to track who's going in any detail, but once I decide to go, I care deeply.
A second key thing is that I would want the up to date status, not the back and forth. If one of my friends had wavered about going to Reboot for days, and finally decided to go, I'd just want the "finally" status, not all the hemming and hawing. Location status updates registered at dopplr should handle that.
The next step beyond this is an über dopplr that aggregates not only location status, but also "here's what I need help on" status, etc.
Josh Fraser
· 5 months ago
EventVue is working to solve the first use-case you mentioned of knowing whether you are attending a certain conference or not. We've got a new product we're getting ready to launch that solves this way better than what you've seen from us before.
I'm not sure what a more generic solution will be. I try hard to look back through feeds / Google search before asking questions. I want to respect people's time and not waste it asking already answered questions.
Bill Erickson
· 5 months ago
There was a TechStars team working on a solution to this last summer ( http://peoplessoftware.com/ ). They pulled the plug on it, but I think the underlying problem still needs to be solved. Conceptually, what they wanted to provide was a way to mark people as "someone I want to intersect with" and then when you were both in the same area (city, conference...) it let you know. For example, I might mark Brad Feld as someone I want to cross paths with when possible, and if we both happen to be in San Francisco one day it would help us grab dinner.
Josh Bancroft
· 5 months ago
I accomplish this with a folder named "--ShortList" in my feed reader (the "--" makes it appear at the top of an alphabetical list). In it, I place the feeds that I never want to miss. Stuff that I always want to read. People who I want to stay in close contact with. The stuff I read first thing in the morning. It's worked very well for years, but I can see what you're saying about needing a more formal structure for something like this. Something good to think about and chew on...
stevegarfield
· 5 months ago
You're right, I just got a tweet last night asking if I was still in NYC. I had updated twitter, brightkite and foursqure that I was back in Boston, but the twitter had not seen any of that. I think they even messaged me through foursquarem which should have told them where I was.
I think the silos of the information of now need to be linked together like the instant messaging systems were supposed to be linked,.
Also, instead of duplicating the data everywhere, wouldn't it be nice if it could be normalized in one place, where other systems could then grab your status information?
Joe Cascio
· 5 months ago
Thanks to Steve Garfield, I saw your post. Please check out my post on a protocol I am developing called SLAP for Simple Lightweight Announcement Protocol. http://joecascio.net/joecblog/2009/05/18/announ... The key thing about SLAP is that it would work with any existing publication type, as long as it can be identified by a URI and the post by a permalink. Would love to get your thoughts on it.
Thanks, Joe Cascio
DoeNietZoMoeilijk
· 5 months ago
The problem with this "missing software" is that it'd have to work with different sources. As someone pointed out earlier, your friends and followers might not be using the same tools that you do, so part of the problem (and probably the hardest to solve) is getting this to *all* places.
For Twitter, it could be solved in two ways. One would be the introduction of "sticky" status messages (just like you can star them now). You could then filter those in the time line -- a little "show me all updates" vs "show me just the sticky ones". Technically, that's easy, but I don't know how easy it is to implement something like this on Twitter's scale.
Another option is using a hash tag and the ability to just search the people you follow, instead of the whole world. Again, a "show me all results" vs "show results within my following list only". In fact, that might make some searches easier, so I'd welcome that anyway. This isn't too hard either, but just like the extra flag, I don't know how much this would tax the Twitter system.
And that's just Twitter. How is this going to translate to other networks/tools? I don't know. A common API or something would be awesome, but given the trouble they have with agreeing on other things, I'm not holding my breath. And having The Perfect Solution for Twitter means nothing if all your friends are on Facebook, or just read feeds.
I do think that the second idea would be easiest to implement, since it doesn't really use additional metadata that could get lost in translation/aggregation. The search thing is solvable, if not by Twitter themselves then through an external thingy.
I think you hit the biggest issues yourself when you say "Our digital personnae are too scattered". They are, and not just ours, but our friends' as well.
CJ Bowker
· 5 months ago
You are definitely on to something. There is so much information that streams by on Twitter. I would love to know how much important stuff is never seen. The problem with your concept is that people's networks are too big. As you meet people and follow people it just adds one more stream feeding the river until you then reach the point where you're flooded with information and updates again. It's almost like you need a meetup group to be available where you can set a location and say how you have free time and see who's available. That might solve the 2nd problem. The first problem really seems like the person just didn't dig deep enough. The information was there. Is there a way to make people spend more time? Probably not, everyone is in a hurry.
MarinaMartin
· 5 months ago
I agree there's a missing product, but I disagree with your description of what it is.
Anyone is already fully capable of bumping up your status updates in terms of importance. I could stick your Twitter RSS in a priority folder, or have them emailed to me, or get them as SMS. Your friend asking if you were going to reboot clearly did not take advantage of these options, so presenting another option for making you high-priority in his information stream isn't going to help.
As for meeting someone in the airport, the odds are just as good (better) that someone random -- who does not have you in their high-priority stream -- would be there and have time to hang out. This seems like a job for a location-aware mobile app. Or (shocking!) starting a conversation with a stranger in the airport.
What I'd like on Twitter is the ability to mark select status updates as high-priority (say, with a ^ sign, which isn't used for anything except exponents). Friends could subscribe to all my updates, or just my high-priority ones, and I could have a separate view on my iPhone and a separate alert from Tweetdeck/Nambu for tweets marked important. (Will spammers take advantage of this? Yes. But I don't follow spammers.) Then those truly or quasi- important tweets ("I have an hour to kill at X" "Who remember the name of that book?") have a higher likelihood of being seen, but everyone (sender and recipient) gets a say.
Nick Johnson
· 5 months ago
It already exists, and it's called tripit (tripit.com). :)
All Comments
Of course, there's the problem that other people don't view it as a utility of quite the same importance, leading to lots of status updates that I would actually happily miss :-)
people to keep their updates at the level of an announcement. Maybe
start with a calendar structure? Just thinking out loud.
I do like where this is going. Keep thinking.
clicked on my updates and reviewed them before asking a question. Most
of them are answered in the stream, but people either don't know to do
that or can't be bothered.
A few minutes ago I got a text message from a friend in Copenhagen
asking where I was. Arrrgh. Again, the answer is easily found in my
Twitter stream or on my blog.
Our digital personnae are too scattered.
also makes me think of some articles where people say they stop blogging to start a lifestream where their flickr, twitter, and others can be found on a single page
- we have nice services and social networks to post photos, text, videos, statuses, etc...
- we also have tools to put in one place all of these things, I'm thinking of services like tumblr or posterous
- we have a lot of friends or people that follow us, but they don't all use all the services I use
- i'm on flickr, vimeo, twitter, facebook, and some others but here in France most of the people I know just use facebook. For example, I hate Facebook Photo application and like using Flickr better. 90% of my friends are missing the photos I post on flickr, they are just on facebook, too bad.
It doesn't give any answers but hope it will help defining the problem
Some solutions already available
* FriendFeed groups
* Dopplr
* http://search.twitter.com/search?q=davewiner+re...
Only problem is that you can't really force people to follow you on friendfeed this way so you may still get call from people asking you redundant questions ;)
One solution to this would be to redirect your phone to your answering machine. On the answering machine you could have the standard message that everybody should go to friendfeed to see if they can find the answer to their question... if not they should DM you. But then again seems slightly rued :)
I will put such "announcement feeds" in a separate folder in google reader. when someone makes an announcement the folder will be bold. When I expand the folder the name of the person's feed will be bold.
am i missing something?
Once, a couple of years before Twitter, I was in a book store trying to remember the name of a book. I didn't want to do a web search, because the browser on my phone isn't the best interface for deep searches. So, I text'd a message to LiveJournal, and a little while later I got a reply. I cannot recall if it was minutes or hours before I got a reply, but it was long enough that I never found the book. In this instance, I would have loved instantaneous attention from all of my friends, but even if I could have demanded it, it would have been irritating for them to have me interrupt what they were doing.
For people like you, who're always up for a headline, whether it be of global scope or individual scope, I believe apps like TweetDeck, instant messengers, and email responders are already these products. Until we can fork our personalities and do more than one thing at a time, real-time information will have to come in two forms: what we're watching for and what interrupts us.
I agree with nakedjen. I use RSS feeds for people that I want to see everything they tweet. Google Reader is a little slow picking up the data but I never miss any of their tweets. However, the timeliness isn't quite what you seem to be looking for.
John Rigdon
A key thing is that there is often a lag between when you (in this case) post info via Twitter and when one or more of your intended readers is open to it. Until the moment I decide to go to Reboot, I may not care to track who's going in any detail, but once I decide to go, I care deeply.
A second key thing is that I would want the up to date status, not the back and forth. If one of my friends had wavered about going to Reboot for days, and finally decided to go, I'd just want the "finally" status, not all the hemming and hawing. Location status updates registered at dopplr should handle that.
The next step beyond this is an über dopplr that aggregates not only location status, but also "here's what I need help on" status, etc.
I'm not sure what a more generic solution will be. I try hard to look back through feeds / Google search before asking questions. I want to respect people's time and not waste it asking already answered questions.
I think the silos of the information of now need to be linked together like the instant messaging systems were supposed to be linked,.
Also, instead of duplicating the data everywhere, wouldn't it be nice if it could be normalized in one place, where other systems could then grab your status information?
Thanks,
Joe Cascio
For Twitter, it could be solved in two ways. One would be the introduction of "sticky" status messages (just like you can star them now). You could then filter those in the time line -- a little "show me all updates" vs "show me just the sticky ones". Technically, that's easy, but I don't know how easy it is to implement something like this on Twitter's scale.
Another option is using a hash tag and the ability to just search the people you follow, instead of the whole world. Again, a "show me all results" vs "show results within my following list only". In fact, that might make some searches easier, so I'd welcome that anyway. This isn't too hard either, but just like the extra flag, I don't know how much this would tax the Twitter system.
And that's just Twitter. How is this going to translate to other networks/tools? I don't know. A common API or something would be awesome, but given the trouble they have with agreeing on other things, I'm not holding my breath. And having The Perfect Solution for Twitter means nothing if all your friends are on Facebook, or just read feeds.
I do think that the second idea would be easiest to implement, since it doesn't really use additional metadata that could get lost in translation/aggregation. The search thing is solvable, if not by Twitter themselves then through an external thingy.
I think you hit the biggest issues yourself when you say "Our digital personnae are too scattered". They are, and not just ours, but our friends' as well.
Anyone is already fully capable of bumping up your status updates in terms of importance. I could stick your Twitter RSS in a priority folder, or have them emailed to me, or get them as SMS. Your friend asking if you were going to reboot clearly did not take advantage of these options, so presenting another option for making you high-priority in his information stream isn't going to help.
As for meeting someone in the airport, the odds are just as good (better) that someone random -- who does not have you in their high-priority stream -- would be there and have time to hang out. This seems like a job for a location-aware mobile app. Or (shocking!) starting a conversation with a stranger in the airport.
What I'd like on Twitter is the ability to mark select status updates as high-priority (say, with a ^ sign, which isn't used for anything except exponents). Friends could subscribe to all my updates, or just my high-priority ones, and I could have a separate view on my iPhone and a separate alert from Tweetdeck/Nambu for tweets marked important. (Will spammers take advantage of this? Yes. But I don't follow spammers.) Then those truly or quasi- important tweets ("I have an hour to kill at X" "Who remember the name of that book?") have a higher likelihood of being seen, but everyone (sender and recipient) gets a say.