All Things

I just left a comment on Rex Hammock’s blog rexblog, where he questions whether Marc Andreessen is right to say the demise of the New York Times is inevitable.

It’s probably safe to assume the Times will end up quite different from what it’s been in the past, which very well may upset a lot of folks, but that’s not to say it’s a doomed enterprise. I see two key issues to their survival: how willing are they to embrace new technology (& kill off the old when necessary) and - as I’ve already suggested - will they aggressively look for ways to combat information overload?

Marc Andreessen’s blog is certainly one of the best, nevertheless I’m not so sure it’s wise to write off the NY Times. They appear to be one of the few old-media companies that really seems to get the first requirement, embracing new technology, especially in the time since they became an early adopter of RSS.

Since then, they’ve added some video, made their content free, and now become an investor in Automattic (purveyor of WordPress). Besides, they’ve got a great global brand.

I recall someone arguing about a decade ago that as technology improves, most all colleges (as with textbooks) will end up using lectures by just a few star professors from top schools, that the internet would effectively raise the value of the top “global” brands, while lowering the value of most local brands.

I’m not sure if this is correct, but if so, it might seem to likewise apply to top media outlets, provided they were aggressive about adopting new technologies to spread their content. At the same time, all media players need to be looking hard at how to better package/deliver/archive their content, so that users can access and recall it as efficiently as possible.

Otherwise, the entire media biz is going to have a hard time growing, as we rapidly reach a limit to how much more information we can absorb in this new attention economy.

Business Week Senior Writer Stephen Baker has been soliciting comments for an upcoming story on blogging/web 2.0, and his summary of the responses so far is pretty much on the money.

My main concern, as noted earlier in Twitter & Taking Info Overload Seriously, is that information overload has ALREADY become a big problem, is rapidly becoming worse, and few media folks (or anyone else) are taking it seriously.

I remember back when USA Today started publishing, how it was criticized for publishing in a short-article format. Comparisions were made to TV news, with accusations of dumbing down complex issues. Some feared it would be the beginning of the end of serious journalism.

Well three decades later, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are still cranking out in-depth articles. These are now available to anyone in the world with internet access, so those fears were certainly exaggerated.

Nevertheless, while both have been aggressive adopters of internet technologies and online presence, they - and other media - may struggle financially if means aren’t developed to help us better find, track, and consume the information we need, and then suitably record/re-publish it. This is a critical business concern for the publishing and advertising industries.

While USA Today-type capsule summaries are one way of dealing with information overload, we also need to be able to manage effectively more in-depth information sources, too. There really is a rapidly-growing stream of valuable, specific content being produced now, and we’ll never really be satisfied with any solution that simply restricts, without helping us access, more of this content than we can currently.

Indeed, the continuing growth in the number of channels of information is staggering. We’re going to need powerful tools to manage that. There’s much more to be said about this, but what we really need is a vibrant conversation about how best to handle information overload. What’s the crux of the problem - how do we define it? What kinds of tools would be truly helpful?

Here’s the comment I left on Steve Baker’s blog:

Information overload is a BIG problem, and I’m amazed how little that reality has registered with most people and with journalists and other media folks.

The answer isn’t simply read less, because the availability of quality, specific and useful information (that you need or really want for your job, life, etc.) is exploding.

What’s missing are powerful tools to help us manage this information in a convenient, non-redundant and timely manner.

Information is coming in - and in the case of bloggers, flickr users, etc. going out - from so many directions that organizing/integrating all that is going to become a big aspect of social networking, and computing/telecom in general, in the near future.

Dana Blankenhorn has posted an interesting article discussing how open source software is being divvied up among top software companies (IBM, Google, Microsoft) in a way reminiscent of Japanese keiretsus. She argues that only these three seem to have the “size, scope and ambition” to play in this space, though Sun also continues to seek such a dominant position.

According to the article, in American usage “keiretsu” has become a term describing a much looser form of business association, with one large company and a number of smaller ones beholden to it in various ways. The Mozilla Foundation’s dependence on Google would be a good example, a relationship of substantial ties between independent entities.

Years ago, I was thinking open source might end up being its own “keiretsu”. Nevertheless, I guess it was inevitable that it would instead end up fragmented and mostly beholden to big companies. Blankenhorn cites the examples of IBM-Red Hat and Microsoft-Novell as other instances of such ties.

On the other hand, if these big companies do things right, open source software can advance and still end up producing a thriving ecosystem. IBM’s relationship with the Eclipse Foundation is a prime example.

It seems that key to the whole process is how a Big Co. views the software product lifecycle. If it accepts that functionality gradually will become commoditized, it will view open source as the likely end-point for most proprietary software. Such a strategy/outlook will result in the Big Co.’s typically releasing the source after some years/decades, with the intent of building still-proprietary software and services on top of it.

IBM did that with VisualAge (now Eclipse), and has also worked hard at promoting the open-source Linux operating system. On the other hand, Microsoft seems to want to milk its Windows operating system forever, which makes it hard to play well in the open-source world.

While it may seem wasteful, companies such as Apple have shown that a steady discarding of old technology can do a lot to promote innovation. I keep waiting for more companies to follow their example.

Evidence continues to mount that “creative destruction” is indeed a key process in a healthy economy. Peter Drucker argued that companies ought to continually make way for the new by killing off old products, rather than waiting for the market to do it for them. Henry Ford’s reluctance to part with the Model T, and its nearly destroying Ford in the process, is the classic case study on this.

With software, however, there’s a difference, since many software products are foundations for other systems (software or hardware), or integral to the use/retention of valuable data produced by them. For this reason, it’s not as simple a matter to remove a program from the market. Software may be used for many different purposes by different customers. Some may be able to switch quickly to new products, but others would incur great cost.

Consequently, it seems inevitable that users are eventually going to demand some kind of protection from software vendors - or else from government regulators - that a software product’s source code be made open source if the product is abandoned. At the least users would be protected, and possibly the product might see further development by others (WordPress, successor to b2, is in some respects an example of this).

More interesting, however, are the more state-of-the-art open-source projects such as Linux and Eclipse, that promise innovation and a product that is “built right” for the future in a platform-agnostic way. Knowing that a software product will be here to stay, because the source is available, seems to be such a strong draw that many of these best-of-breed projects have been able to attract top talent to contribute, often on a volunteer basis, as well as substantial support from Big Co.’s such as IBM.

For the software industry to thrive and not just reinvent the wheel, we need strong and viable foundations to build on. If these Big Co.’s are willing to kill off the revenue streams from their old software somewhat before it dries up, their code may well retain importance, or even grow in dominance as Eclipse has. This can offer a strong foundation both for services and for additional products higher up the stack.

Moreover, it will produce an overall healthier software industry ecosystem, since the underlying code will continue to be developed, increasing the value of it and everything higher up on the stack, due both to stability and to greater innovation.

Mashable and others have been reporting that the venerable Classmates.com site is now about to do an IPO (initial public offering), at a valuation of $125 million. Started in 1995, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore says Classmates deserves credit for being the first social network, begun two years before the now-defunct Six Degrees.

While it may seem old, dull and boring to the digerati types (and it’s not Facebook), Classmates might still be pretty interesting to average users, if they are smart about making the right enhancements. I like Classmates; they continue to be slowly but steadily adding folks from my school classes. I’ve only communicated with a few, but think the site still fills a viable need (I’ve had virtually NO success locating anyone my age - 44 - on Facebook or other networks yet), and they’ve got the market share/critical mass to make it work.

As others have noted (generating considerable controversy), the big social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook appear to be attracting different sorts of users. While Facebook is now pulling in a lot of older technically-inclined users, the large bloc of non-technical older Americans is pretty much being left out. Obviously Classmates is too specialized to serve all their needs, but it’s the kind of simple and inviting format that would likely appeal to a lot of average folks.

My main complaints are with the pricing and the speed of the site. Classmates needs more functionality to be free and to get away from the True ads, which seem to be their main advertiser. I suspect if the site were faster to navigate and search, folks would spend more time there. Monetizing a site nowadays with AdSense, etc., generally isn’t too difficult, so I don’t see why they couldn’t offer more free functionality and still be viable.

Of course, any school-oriented site should have plenty of ways to generate well-performing ads (though even Facebook doesn’t seem to have succeeded at this, yet), but I suppose Classmates could also keep their paid subscriptions. In the several years I’ve used Classmates, I haven’t seen many people going this route, because you have to pay so much up front just to try it for a short time.

If sites like Classmates are going to have a paid subscription model, then they should by all means offer a less costly middle tier (above the free tier) and segment their market between those who don’t mind paying $20 or more to try out a site that may (likely) disappoint vs. those of us who aren’t willing to risk much until we know we’re going to get our money’s worth!

As with any social network, the key is users returning to the site on a regular basis (Facebook’s strength). Classmates is good about sending weekly emails announcing new members from your classes, but the site is slow to load and navigate, and when someone does try to communicate with you, you can’t even see it without paying a considerable amount for a subscription.

Obviously, basic communication features should be free. Maybe subscriptions could add the option of a blog page or other customization, the opportunity to have a page for that particular class, etc. There are so many possibilities, the site ought to be worth $125 million, considering the number of users (50 million) that they’ve signed up.

A few other ideas for added functionality (maybe some of this exists already but could be enhanced and made more visible):

• Stores for sale of school related merchandise (shirts, stickers, etc.)
• Alumni association pages. My high school’s alumni association has become much more active and is now even conducting a campital campaign to raise money for improvements! With the internet, these activities are much easier to do, and a site like Classmates provides a key ingredient - finding and keeping in touch with people.
• As I’ve written about elsewhere, it’s still VERY hard to locate your former teachers, and Classmates already offers this functionality (membership for teachers, etc.) but it’s almost completely ignored. They need to make a push to sign up teachers, which I suspect would stimulate a lot of other interest, and maybe a fair amount of free media coverage.

As I hinted at above, I find Classmates interesting in part because it’s so different from the sorts of things that the Silicon Valley crowd get excited about. The Valley folks have brought us a lot of good things, but also have some huge blind spots. A large part of the country is moving MUCH more slowly onto the internet, and there’s still not that much available on the net for for folks who didn’t grow up using it.

Classmates isn’t Facebook, but I really believe that there are still a lot of great business opportunities on the net for serving older folks (which, as far as the internet goes, is pretty much anyone over 35). Even though they have a lot of disposable income, many of these users are still fearful of doing too much, of making purchases online, etc. Sites that seem stable and “safe” have a certain appeal that a wild and woolly site like MySpace could never offer.

Since I posted my Initial Thoughts About the iPhone, Dave Winer has described his experience after four weeks, and it’s not too favorable:

iPhone, month 1

He describes, for instance, how he couldn’t quickly retrieve a phone number from an email and return a call, and is generally unhappy with the iPhone’s email function, as well as its touch-screen keyboard.

Worse, in an interesting observation Winer notes:

“It also seems we’re going to have a long-term discussion over whether it makes sense to have a “mobile web” or take the iPhone trade-off, more effort to use its web (lots of scrolling and pinching), but making the whole web accessible, mobile sites or non-mobile sites. I think what Apple has attempted is noble, but it’s not going to work. The screens have limited resolution, and even if they didn’t, even if they could cram a billion pixels into every square inch, there’s the limit of how much detail our eyes can see and how big our hands are.”

It does seem that some people’s eyes and fingers fit the iPhone’s diminutive size better than others. I’ve long felt that the trend toward ever-smaller devices is a mistake. Early in the Treo’s development, when Palm (or probably it was still Handspring) was eagerly describing how wonderful it was that they were going to make it yet smaller, I got frustrated enough to write them about it, but to no avail.

If the iPhone starts to falter, it will be in no small part due to its form factor, and maybe then handheld device makers (besides Blackberry) will finally start to listen. Many devices, especially phone devices, are TOO small, and keyboards are important to a lot of folks, especially for texting and email, and must be gotten right. Some users seem to like the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard, but clearly it’s not for everyone.

Winer, who’s been involved with Mac software since the early days with the ThinkTank and More outliners, and seen both the good and bad sides of Apple, concedes that “the iPhone is much prettier than a Blackberry and feels better in your hand. I’m not mocking Apple for that, style matters, esp in a personal device.”

He figures that “the iPhone, if it attains success, will reach it the way the Mac did, after the initial fatal flaws are removed, in the “iPhone Plus” or whatever.” Indeed, a lot of folks seem to have forgotten that in 1984, initially Mac sales were good, but soon stalled after the early adopters (including myself, even though I’m not usually such) bought theirs. The original Mac was not really a very useful machine until the memory was bumped from 128K to 512K.

I’m sure that Apple is already working to fix many of the first-generation iPhone’s deficiencies, and will do it faster than Apple did in 1984-7 with the Mac. Nevertheless, the question remains whether they’ll be open to more radical changes - such as a bigger device with a bigger screen and real keyboard - which may be necessary to pull in a lot of the Blackberry’s users and other folks no longer in their twenties.

Internet Duct Tape (formerly EngTech) has an interesting post about proper use of categories and tags in WordPress. Eric says:

“One of my first and longstanding complaints of WordPress is that it does not understand the fundamental difference between tagging and categorizing. Categorizing is like taking all of your socks and putting them into drawers based on colours. Tagging is like sewing a little label on your socks that says when you bought them, how to wash them, … Categories add organization and tags add semantic information. A category can be a tag, but if you use your tags as categories you’ll eventually have a right old mess.”

This is an interesting question because in my experience, there’s never just “one” right way of organizing or presenting information. To find an appropriate way to organize something, you must consider the use and the user.

The goal with tags, categories or whatever scheme is to organize the information in a way that you or another familiar user can find everything, while presenting it to a new user in a way which allows them to easily assess what all is there and then navigate through it to access what they’re particularly looking for. Consequently, I think it depends on the blog how many categories or tags are appropriate.

In my WordPress blogs, I use multiple categories with each post, so I guess that means I’m using them like tags, not true categories. This and my other Blogsome (WordPress) blog, RealCurrents, each have a few dozen categories, used like tags, but it’s not too hard to scan them all as they’re listed on the right side of the page.

My personal blog Light Side on Live Spaces is only allowed one category per post, but that’s OK for a simple blog like that, though I still find myself wanting to add a category every once in a while. If I had a lot of photos on that site, then I’d certainly want a good tagging system, however.

Closer to the other extreme is my aerospace blog (currently still on Xanga), in which I like to note all kinds of esoteric things and so have close to 200 tags,

http://www.xanga.com/AeroGo/tags

so folks can look up specific aircraft, certain famous individuals, manufacturers, etc. This tag cloud really functions more like an index.

For those who want to use categories more properly, as unique groupings, Eric’s post links to an interesting and fairly lengthy discussion by Lorelle VanFossen, Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags. She says that

“In the simplest of terms, I think of categories as the table of contents for your blog, a kind of general outline that directs visitors to general topics that you blog about. Tags are more like the index page of a book, a list of key words people will use to search for specific terms.”

She also includes a helpful discussion of how limiting yourself to a small set of categories can help you focus and really think through the purpose for your blog. Nevertheless she notes that she ended up including one category as a sort of “catch-all”, giving it a vague name, “Web Wise”.

Regarding tag clouds, I’ve noticed several ways of presenting them on various sites, typically with the more popular tags in larger type. While that’s a good idea, many times the tags are organized in a rather unhelpful way. I even saw one site where they were in a spiral!

For a site like AeroGo, where it’s likely that the average user is not looking for one of the top 10 tags, it would be better if Xanga presented the tags not only alphabetically as currently, but also in orderly columns, as in a book’s index, though keeping the varying font sizes. This might be overdoing it for many sites, but it would be interesting to see an experiment on a big site like Flickr of several different tag cloud presentations and the resulting click-through rates.

Like Google’s simple but (truly) helpful index, I wonder if on a lot of sites an alphabetical, index-like tag cloud might produce better results, though a simple tag module added to a page wouldn’t have room for all that. In any event, as the “semantic web” becomes more of a reality, I suspect more detailed tagging systems will gain value and prominence, as they help users drill down to the specific information they’re looking for.

Jane Quigley has posted on her blog Setting Contexts a quite positive report of her first two weeks with an iPhone, declaring that her 8GB iPhone has exceeded all her expectations. In particular, she notes “iPod sound is … a definite step ahead”; “While the keyboard was a little challenging at first, I was a pro after just a couple of days”; and that “battery life … has been great”.

While there are apparently already well over 100 iphone apps available, she lists some of her early favorites, as well as some other resources. The ones Quigley recommends include Mockdock, PocketTweets, gOffice, Meebo, and Ta-Da. Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s already a new GTD (Getting Things Done) app for the iPhone, iNozbe, as well.

The iPhone launched to a tremendous amount of anticipation, and even a funny video by long-time Mac & Palm author (and tech journalist) David Pogue. Despite the hype, it seemed that most all the initial user feedback was, indeed, similarly positive.

Now we’re starting to see some detracting reports. Some think usability issues will make the iPhone unsuitable for business. That raises one of my own questions - how good is the iPhone, actually, as a phone? It’s one thing to just try calling, but what happens when you’re busy - can you use it easily one-handed, or while driving, or is using the iPhone about as bad as texting while driving?

There’s also the question of whether the iPhone (without physical keys) will satisfy teens, young adults and anyone else who’s a texting addict. I’m certainly curious about the practical usefulness of the keyboard, probably what I most miss in my current Palm handheld. If Apple does succeed in making a good (not barely adequate) touch-screen keyboard, it will be a major step forward in interface design.

Now to my own impressions. I’m not in a hurry to jump to the iPhone, but have spent maybe 10-15 minutes on it a couple of times. It’s clear that I’m getting a little better on the keyboard, but am not yet convinced I’ll really get good at it. It was really surprising, though, that the horizontal keyboard isn’t available for all the applications.

That said, I’m sure there are a number of improvements Apple will continue to find to better the keyboard experience. This is where thinking about the little details, an area where Apple excels, can really pay off. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of such features are already there waiting to be discovered. GeekSugar has already noted one tip for speeding up punctuation.

The second time I used the iPhone, it slowly dawned on me that what I really miss isn’t so much the keyboard, but the mouse. Just editing URLs in Safari was quite annoying. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but the keyboard layout didn’t seem to help much for editing, either. On the other hand, the multi-touch screen works quite well for navigation, but you can’t really get the full benefit of it when browsing the web on the slow Edge network.

One thing that surprises me is how little discussion there’s been of basic Palm functionality on the iPhone. Does the iPhone come with apps that can replace the basic Palm Datebook, Address, To-Do and Memo functions, and import their .pdb files?

There has been a lot of discussion about whether the iPhone will run OS X applications (and presumably Mac apps like Excel). Right now the answer is apparently no, but I don’t see why Apple couldn’t set up some kind of partitioning or something on the iPhone that would make that work, while still protecting the reliability of the phone and connectivity functions.

Perhaps the real hold-up in such a scheme for running OS X apps is memory, and with more flash memory will come OS X as well. Certainly, 4 or even 8GB seems to be an awful limited amount of memory for a multi-function device that’s also supposed to be a media player. With the way flash memory prices have been falling, waiting for a bump up to 16GB (at least) would probably be a good idea. Apple has a long history of introducing computers without enough memory, and I suspect the iPhone is the latest example!

Obviously, the Palm and Mac compatibility are important issues for current Palm and Mac users like myself, who are looking for a handheld device that really moves forward the “handheld computing” part of the equation as an important part of moving to one unified device. I expect the iPhone will satisfy these needs, as well, given time.

While the iPhone as a beautiful gadget and interface is itself rather compelling, perhaps the main question, really, is how long will it be before there is an equally-compelling must-have application that drives the second wave of its sales?

I wrote last fall about how Apple Needs Better Support for Mac Printer/Scanner Problems. Thankfully, it appears Apple may be aiming to invest more in printer functionality, as it has reportedly acquired the rights to CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System.

My previous post described how I’d continued to see occasional problems with printers on OS X, noting a particularly difficult problem I was having at that time with my HP 1320, that ended up taking up more than a day of my time and several weeks to get resolved. I still get fairly regular hits from Google searches for “hppostprocessing” error messages, so if that’s you, check out the comments to the previous post.

One of my main complaints involved the lack of diagnostics. While Mac OS X printing support through the Printer Setup Utility is fairly automatic, when there is a problem, there’s virtually no diagnostics to help you sort it out. I’d hope that improving such diagnostic support would be a priority for Apple.

Besides that, I’m still noticing various little quirks with printing on OS X (and am still running 10.4.8). Usually these aren’t showstoppers, but the system is doing something unexpected, which makes you wonder if there are lingering bugs. The bugs do occasionally bite, as they did the other day when everything kept printing with my 2 pages/page preset, regardless of what I entered in the print dialog (restarting resolved that).

As I wrote before, I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist”, who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. The Ars Technica article does suggest that “The purchase could also be a good thing for CUPS, since Apple’s support for the project could lead to further improvements (if Apple chooses to release them) and to more pressure being placed on printer manufacturers.”

In any event, it’d be a lot more efficient for Apple and the peripherals folks to get together and iron things out, before millions of users have to scratch their heads - and then bang them against the keyboard in frustration.

Astroprof’s Page has an interesting discussion of the difficulties of science journalism.

I think the quality of science coverage is improving at many of the major newspapers at least. As Astroprof mentions, Mark Carreau has, for example, done a good job for the Houston Chronicle. Perhaps it’s a positive outcome from the Challenger tragedy, but it seems that about that time many of the media outlets here in Houston started giving a lot more attention to manned spaceflight. The “main” industries in Houston have long been oil & gas and real estate, but for quite a few years now space has also been accorded that sort of status by the Chronicle and several of the TV and radio stations.

An experienced, knowledgeable science reporter is hard to replace. I subscribed to Science News for years, but after Dietrick Thomsen and Jonathan Eberhart left, the physics and space coverage were just not the same. I doubt most publishers have the means to get into a bidding war for the limited supply of top talent, and no one could expect a relatively new science journalist to be able to match their reporting.

One of the problems with science and tech journalism is that folks in these fields often expect journalists to do all the work. Such a mindset would seem ridiculous in politics, where there’s whole staffs of hacks feeding carefully-crafted sound bites to the media and identifying “talking points” for their candidate’s every appearance.

Businesses likewise spend vast amounts on marketing and public relations, but most researchers, and even technical staff inside many businesses, somehow don’t seem to think these functions are part of their job. Of course, a lot of engineers, scientists and programmers aren’t that good at communications skills, or just plain don’t like to talk about themselves, but somebody in these research groups and engineering departments needs to take up the role of communicator, so the outside world can understand the value and needs of their efforts.

Journalists are under a lot of pressure with the kind of deadlines that most of us couldn’t even imagine, so it’s only smart to realize they’re going to need some help. That’s one of the things I’m trying to do with some of my sites, particularly AeroGo (for aerospace and engineering education) and RealCurrents (for current events), in which I’m trying to provide important but little-known background information and to point out things deserving more attention (which I generally categorize with the tag “Press Coverage Holes”).

Where there are failings in science/tech journalism, beyond just ignorantly trying to cover a field the reporter knows nothing about, I’d say that one of the biggest problems is that of naively swallowing pronouncements from big research groups without knowing what is going on elsewhere. We saw some of that a few years ago, for example, with some coverage of the Human Genome Project, that focussed too much on the government research, ignoring Celera Genomics’ private effort that ended up getting done first.

The result is that journalists are often lacking in understanding about the overall policy and business aspects of research, and consequently end up focussing too critically on superficial technical aspects. We saw that just this past week, when many media outlets were talking about the possible abandoning of the International Space Station, due to computer problems - what was a rather remote possibility, technically, while saying not a word about how NASA’s busily going about building a station they expect to abandon anyway, not too many years after completing it.

It seems to me that journalists ought to be a little easier on programs that suffer technical glitches that are really just part of the normal course of research & development, but be discerning enough to realize when an effort has really lost its way or when a policy has serious unresolved issues. With so much needless technical criticism, a lot of R&D managers are understandably gun-shy about the press, which just perpetuates the disconnect to journalists described above.

I ran across a post, The Attention Crash on Steve Rubel’s blog Micro Persuasion. In it, he argues that the real danger isn’t another .com financial bubble bursting, but rather individuals hitting a wall of information overload:

“We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.”

I agree that there’s still a lot of life left in this tech deployment cycle. At the same time, I’m amazed that the media and society at large still don’t seem to be taking information overload seriously.

There’s been such an explosion of both work and leisure information, not to mention creative tools, games, etc., yet you don’t notice many people outside of the GTD blogging community talking about it. We obviously are going to need some more sophisticated tools than just raw RSS feeds, and these folks seem to be about the only people seriously exploring that. There’s so many GTD-related productivity and project management tools, that I’m having a hard time getting them all sorted out.

In other words, we need a lot of innovation in order to develop tools for handling information overload, and so we should be seeing a lot of experimentation taking place. Right now most of that is happening in the GTD community. I think we should also expect to see a variety of tools tailored to particular individual styles. That’s an area I’ve done a great deal of research in, and hope to see its application to innovative productivity tools.

Beyond GTD, Twitter is clearly generating some of the loudest buzz currently, mainly as a social networking site, where it seems to have great potential. A lot of folks have criticized it as the worst example of pointless info overload but I think Twitter, or something like it, could actually be a tremendous tool to help deal with overload, both by making inputs timely without interrupting (using the web interface, anyway) and by forcing inputs to conform to a quick summary so you can judge whether it’s worth a further look.

Of course, most folks don’t get that yet. I see tweets saying “This is great” and just a link, giving me no idea what it’s about. Others send out a half-dozen or more pointless tweets a day, clogging up my friends page. Some news sources such as the New York Times, commendably quick to get on board, nevertheless send out the same update on multiple channels. All this “noise” reduces Twitter’s usefulness, but even in just the six weeks or so that I’ve used it, I’ve already seemed to notice a certain sort of evolution going on, with many (not all) folks starting to effectively pre-screen their tweets and limit them more to ones that would actually be helpful to others.

I think eventually we’ll see people going to multiple accounts (”channels”?), one with personal info and more security, another with interesting links (as Robert Scoble has already done with his Scoble’s Link Blog), and another with updates from all one’s own blog posts, important comments, etc. The last purpose is how I’m primarily using my own Twitter account, aeroG, at present.

The main point is that Twitter, as with so much of the web, is a grand experiment being done on a huge scale, and it’s likely to evolve rapidly in the coming year or two. If Rubel is at all correct, then we should expect to be seeing a lot more of these tools coming along shortly, to help us sort out not only our increasingly complex lives and connections, but also the huge flood of information that increasingly threatens to overwhelm us, or at least to drown out the truly valuable information tidbits that these tools should help us to find and track.

I started out writing this as yet another comment to my earlier post about Twitter, but think I’ll make it a separate post. In any case, here are two good articles about serious uses of Twitter that I found from a post on the Setting Contexts blog:

The Top 5 Ways Smart People Use Twitter

What Twitter Means for Marketers

Regarding the 5 uses in the first article, I’d add:

1. Marketing & Communication: It’s interesting to just look at Twitter and quickly see what so much of the buzz is about. I do think there’s a good chance of picking up on tech or consumer trends much quicker, if you’re listening to the right folks. A good tool for finding those “right” folks is an obvious key add-on to the service.

2. Microblogging: Not everyone’s brain works this way, but for me there’s a lot of times I want to throw out a random thought, question or link that might be of some benefit or deserving of further investigation (e.g. by a journalist). I’ve added my Twitter account to my Technorati blog list, so now there’s a somewhat decent chance these thoughts might get discovered, though Twitter does need an automatic ping function.

3. Business Networking: I’m hopeful about this; I do well in one-on-one conversation but don’t stand out in a crowd. There’s a lot of folks I’d like to connect with that I’ve never had an immediately compelling enough reason to do it, though it would probably be beneficial for both sides.

4. Breaking News & Getting Scoops: I got this part as soon as I saw the CNN logo on Twitter. Unfortunately, I don’t think most news outlets have figured out how Twitter could drive traffic to their sites. As with RSS, the NY Times is at the forefront of this.

5. Streamlining Your Electronic Inboxes: I’m really hopeful that Twitter can help to reduce the email onslaught, since reading a Twitter update is so instant. I made a suggestion about this, for example, to Kristin at French Word a Day last week, as I thought it was an excellent example of a daily email service that could benefit from a Twitter update.

As I noted before, I expect we’ll see a whole lot of other uses emerge for Twitter, since in essence it’s a whole new basic form of communication. Here are a few more interesting examples of Twitter applications I’ve found recently:

Austin Weather

Kansai Train Announcements

French Practice

Interesting Links Forwarded by Robert Scoble

Twitter Timer

Also someone reportedly found some help after a car accident: Thoughts on Twitter.

Finally, with regard to the second article mentioned at the beginning, there’s this interesting assertion: If Markets Are Conversations, Then Twitter Is Money.

I’ve been reading about the rekindled Microsoft/Yahoo talks; perhaps it’s a good sign. It just seems so obvious that Microsoft doesn’t yet understand the internet, and so inevitably can’t really take it seriously enough. It’s got a dozen years of half-hearted efforts under its belt and not much to show for it, other than the dominance of Internet Explorer, which continues to slowly lose share to Firefox.

A BBC report quotes one analyst, Matt Rosoff, as saying, "I do not understand what Yahoo would get out of the deal, including that there are people there who don’t want to work for Microsoft." Well, that really says it all!

Nowadays, there are a lot of people who are trying to get away from Microsoft. After 27 years of being their customer, and 23 years of using a Mac, I’ve learned to pick and choose their offerings, rather than just drink their kool-aid and swallow the whole enchilada. I don’t at all want them to go away, but it would be really nice if they would be honest with themselves, accept what their true strengths and weaknesses are, and stop trying to be all things to all people, in order to keep most all the pie to themselves. That strategy is just not working anymore, and after years of disappointments, the reality is starting to be generally acknowledged.

As I’ve noted before, I thought MSN Spaces (where I have my personal blog) was one of the better things they’ve done, but they’ve made it increasingly Windows-centric as the Live Spaces rollout has continued, which has made it clunkier and more difficult to use, at least for non-Windows/IE users. I don’t expect Microsoft to be Apple, but after all their years of vaunted usability testing, they still don’t get basic design principles.

Everyone knows that Toyota’s cars aren’t that stylish, but they’re well-made, and Toyota (as it has recently) will put the brakes on to ensure a consistently high-quality product. Microsoft isn’t going to have the style of Apple, but they need to develop some decent processes like Toyota, so they can produce a quality product that meets customers’ needs.

Quality is a long-view strategy. In the short run, Toyota sells a bit fewer cars because they last longer, but in the long run, they sell a lot more, and pretty soon even more than GM. Bill Gates once said that his favorite business book was Alfred Sloan’s My Years With General Motors, but the days when one company could dominate a global market and put out mediocre products, in a strategy of planned obsolescence, are long past.

At least Microsoft is reaching out to a company that has some insight. I’ve always thought Yahoo was a bit clunky itself, but they are innovative and do understand the potential of the internet. Maybe Microsoft is at last acknowledging that they don’t get it, and that their culture needs to change.

I suggest that they start by returning to a more inclusive strategy on their online offerings. Don’t automatically expect users to be running all Microsoft software (e.g. IE and Windows), and so don’t penalize users who are using some MS software, just because they aren’t using all Microsoft software! In an era of open source and global markets, all that strategy will do is ensure that eventually no one will be using any Microsoft software.

Microsoft has to accept that they can no longer expect to get the whole pie, except for the crumbs, and that they better be glad for whatever share than can get, without coercion. They still have a lot of talented people; if they revitalize their culture and get their processes right, they could still do really well, and I hope they manage to pull it off.

I’ve been reading about the Twitter instant-messaging/social networking site for a while, and decided to finally check it out. My screen name is aeroG, and you can go there to see some of my initial annoyances, some of which have been resolved. After a few hours of messing with it over the last couple of days, here’s my early assessment:

Twitter is asynchronous instant messaging for adults.

While my teenage daughter is glued to AIM, etc., much of the time, I can’t hardly get her to check the emails I send her. I guess email seems way too slow for her. Email seems just about the right speed for me, because I don’t have a boss who’s expecting instant answers all day long. In any case, there are some times where a faster pace is useful, but I’m usually juggling other stuff like most adults.

Twitter might well be a good answer for this need, and it seems to be growing in popularity, at least for the moment. After working with it a little while, I can see that it has a lot of potential for news alerts (BBC, CNET and CNN, for example). You’re also supposed to be able to get a weather forecast, but as you can see on my page I haven’t gotten that to work yet.

I don’t know for sure if these pages are run by the media sources themselves, or just somebody copying (plagiarizing?) their news, since the updates are spotty. BBC seems to be the most frequently updated, but none are working at anywhere near their potential.

I’m surprised media outlets aren’t jumping all over this; it seems like a great way to generate traffic to their news sites. It would sure be nice to have all the latest updates from both the news sources and people you want showing right there on your Twitter page, and it would go a long way toward ensuring that folks kept using Twitter themselves on a frequent/regular basis, which is the idea.

That said, I can’t help thinking that there are going to be some serious privacy issues with Twitter. For example, I didn’t expect to see my full name displayed on my page, after I had to choose a screen name. Worse, when I tried to edit it, their system wouldn’t allow it. Maybe I can live with that, but I don’t see why users shouldn’t have control over that as with all the other social networking sites.

Obviously, if someone wanted to stalk someone else, their Twitter page would be the first place a stalker would look. You can set it private, but there certainly needs to be much finer control over privacy aspects of the site.

Despite these weaknesses, Twitter seems to have enough capability (it works to/from phones and IM services as well) to have a great deal of potential usefulness. I wrote how Xanga quickly evolved from a writing platform (reportedly its intended use) to a social networking site, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some so-far unforeseen application becomes the primary use of Twitter as well.

Well, I just signed up for Socializr. I thought that maybe if I signed up right away, I could get a page with my first name for the URL. It turns out I was right, though it remains to be seen if the site will amount to anything.

Socializr was started by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, so I guess it’s sort of like Friendster 2.0. I haven’t been too impressed with Friendster 1.0 which, of course, was the big social networking site (along with LinkedIn) before MySpace came along.

It seems kind of late to be starting another social networking site, but then none of the ones so far are all that fantastic, with the exception of Xanga, which continues to improve steadily. Xanga’s problem is that it’s being abandoned by teens for MySpace and Facebook, and has yet to be discovered by most adults (its original target audience), to which it is really better-suited.

Of course, by the time Google came along, there were already a lot of search sites, and it wasn’t obvious there was any room for another. The main problem with these networking sites is that they need to find a way to allow folks to have a lot of connections, without being deluged by junk and redundant groups, etc. (I noted before on my Xanga site AeroGo that there are over 500 astronomy blogrings, for example).

If a site can actually help you connect to people with similar interests, who want to connect (rather than just show off or fool around), then it could prove valuable for personal or business use. They have to for sure move past the collecting friends paradigm, though.

I can’t really tell much about Socializr yet, but I still think there’s a lot of room for innovation in the social networking space, and it would be nice if they can move things to a higher level.

Thanks to reading blogs such as Dave Winer’s old Scripting News, I learned pretty early on about Google, and was taken by the simplicity of their search page, which loaded fast. This was quite unlike most sites of the time (around 2000, I believe), which were smitten with portal mania, trying to serve up everything on their home page.

Google is still a mainstay for me, though it’s beginning to show its age, such as in the area of blog search. Another site that’s become a constant resource of late is Wikipedia which, despite its imperfections/potential inaccuracies, is often an even better place to start a search than Google. Unfortunately, sometimes their main page doesn’t load as quickly as I’d like, even at broadband speeds, so I began wondering if they, too, had a simple search page that could be bookmarked in place of the main page.

I didn’t see any obvious link to such a page on their main pages, but after experimenting a little came up with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=&fulltext=Search

This just gives you a simple page with an empty search box. Of course, I guess you could change the “en”at the beginning of the url to your language of choice, and see if that works, too.

Now my WP button on my Safari bookmark bar is set to this, so whenever I need to search Wikipedia, it’s right there.