Incremental Blogger

YANS--"Yet another news site" launches

It must be Tuesday (or at least it was yesterday), because there's one more news aggregator site online now. This one is called NewsPond. TechMeme, TechCrunch, Mashasble have the breaking news. After all, this is a "2.0" friendly site and that's where the 2.0 news usually is. Kind of ironic, isn't it?

Newspond is TechMeme-like in that it pulls together and ranks news stories and blog posts. However, unlike TechMeme it has a decidely un-Google-like design, comments, and many more topics than TechMeme.

While working on Thredr I can see how NewsPond came up with these design decisions to not only differentiate it, but also to try to make it more "attractive" and useful.

The UI really sticks out. A tad on the thick side, it makes you wonder if it's not time to forgo the "efficient" Google look and render pages more like magazines. Personally, it's not either here or there, but I wonder if that's what people want and expect now. Are the days of the light Google layout over? Me thinks not, but we'll have to see.

I do like Newspond's support for multiple topics. This is where TechMeme needs to go even further. A bit about this in a moment.

What about the commenting system? Good idea. I think it brings people back to Newspond--although again for me I don't find this the most useful. But I can appreciate it's social value. We are in the 2.0 era after all.

OK, so back to the issue of multiple topics. For those that have been following Bob and my work with Thredr, this is a big deal to me. This is why I started working on Thredr in the first place.

I love TechMeme, but unfortunately it doesn't give the level of coverage I want and need for the types of news I follow. In particular, I want to track the top conversations going on in the Tabletsphere. TechMeme has bits of this, but there's much more out there. So "necessity" being the mother of invention, I decided to write my own TechMeme-like conversation collector. It's still under development--as a part-time project--but I'm actively using it to track Tablet news and we've put it online (even in its unfinished state) so others can use it if they'd like.

Like Newspond and unlike TechMeme, thredr supports a collection of topics--which by design are fairly easy to expand. So far the topics thredr tracks include: All things Apple, Finance, Tablet PCs/UMPCs/OLPCs/MIDs/Surface, Photography, and the Microsoft developer community. We hope to be adding more topics down the road and even opening this up to others.

Some reactions we've gotten about thredr: It's look is too plain; too Google like. That's my fault. Bob keeps reminding me that this isn't 1999 anymore and to get with it. Yeah, you can tell I'm an engineer. I want to focus most on the content. But I get the point. I need to work on this. It's not all that obvious to me what it should be like anyway. I figure what's really needed in the design will bubble up. I'm kind of slow that way :-).

And personally, I like the thin look. It works really well on my iPhone, for instance, which has become one of my favorite ways to check for news on the go or even at home. I can check it in 15 seconds and then move on if there's nothing of interest at the time. I think this pattern is going to become more common for more people too. So I admit I've kept the design somewhat mobile minded.

People want to create their own sets of topics. I agree. That's the reason I wanted to work on this project in the first place. Bob is working on the pieces to make this happen. There's no ETA yet for this, but when he gets it going, we'll let you know.

What about comments or voting or some other social design? We haven't put in anything yet. Still thinking. Here's my problem with this. As soon as you have a commenting or voting system, you have to have a sign in process. Not only do I hate to log into yet another system, at this point I don't want to deal with any of that from an infrastructure standpoint. For now, it's all about the content. Tomorrow, maybe this will be different and we'll leverage readers to suggest, prune, merge, rank, split, and comment upon stories. That'll have to come later.

And one more thing. In Michael Arrington's comments about Newspond, I think he misses a big point as to why these news aggregators make sense. For those of us that digest lots of news, we often turn to RSS readers, however, the plain simple truth is that we quickly wind up with too much stuff to read and then stop reading altogether. I've heard this from many people. I'm guilty of this too.

What I find most useful is a digested view that gives me the "top" news stories of the day. TechMeme does this very well, particularly for Web 2.0ish type of news. I'm working on thredr to make it worthy in this respect.

What's so amazing to me is how many news aggregators are popping up. When we started thredr, it seemed like nothing was going on. Now it seems like a new one is launching every week. I wonder what next Tuesday will bring :-).

(By the way, if you do try out thredr, yes, I know the RSS feeds are broken outside of viewing them in Safari. I've been meaning to fix that. And yes, I know that there's no UI element to take you "back" to the home page. I need to fix these. Sorry.)

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com.

Why video should be a native video type

I want to revisit an idea I blogged about awhile back. I'd like to see video sharing/broadcasting/recording become an integral part of the OS experience--not just for computers, but for cameras, cell phones, and other digital devices.

A bit of background first. I was at a conference awhile back when I decided to take a picture of a session listing that was being displayed on some monitors. Simple enough right? Well sometimes the little things spawn ideas--and this one did.

As I was adjusting my position left and right to get the display in the field of view of my digital camera as well as to minimize glare, I realized I was going the long way around to capture something that was already digital. What was I doing? And it wasn't just me. There were others standing next to me doing much the same. Silly, I realized.

I thought: Why can't I receive a live, digital broadcast of what's on the display, right within my WiFi-based camera? Why am I capturing "over the air," if you will, rather than going direct?

The more I thought about this, the more I began to see that our graphics chips are throwing away a lot of opportunities for digital sharing of its content.

Now it's true, that there are apps, such as SharedView, VNC, and the like which are designed to share the desktop, but what if the broadcasting experience was provided as a standard in the OS? Camtasia, WebcamMax/Superwebcam, and on and on would essentially be built in with a complementary broadcasting and recording feature built into computers, MIDs, digital cameras, cell phones, and the like.

First, back to the camera capture issue. Record directly is my mantra. In this digital world, there's no reason to go over the visual spectrum.

So let's say I want to capture what's on my friend's computer. Right now you have to adjust all over the place to get the lighting just right--all along trying to avoid seeing yourself in the reflection. When you're recording on the go, this is silly.

What if instead, the person could (for instance), right click on their desktop and select from the context menu "Share Desktop" (or window or region or whatever). With this single click the OS would then appear as a thumbnail overlay on my camera (computer or whatever) which I could then select and record. I could record picture in picture or record to the whole frame, capture a single frame, capture a sequence of frames, or....or....or. Lots of possibilities here.

As I mentioned earlier, there are desktop sharing apps today, but what I'm advocating is that they become more "video" like with embedded content/command-and-control signals--with a two way option. With a common standard--not just a desktop standard--all manner of devices and apps could record the content--directly.

And once the content can be broadcast digitally, there's the whole world that you can broadcast to. Imagine.

So what I'd like to see is an open sharing and broadcasting standard that makes its way into connected devices.

Flash is already starting to show the value of a "video" standard on the Internet. Now we just need to have the recording part opened up. The reasons for locking down the content are holding back a natural evolution of devices that can share, broadcast and record live, interactive streams. It's not just the major studios that want to "broadcast." In fact, I'd argue that they are a small subset of all broadcasting that would take place.

So imagine you're at your next conference and someone is projecting a demo playing on their desktop up on one of several large screens. No more do you have to get just the right seat to get just the right shot of what the person is showing. Instead, they just have to share their desktop and broadcast its contents live directly to your camera or OneNote or whatever. Same goes for the doctor showing you your ultrasound of your unborn child or you MRI. Yes, you can share the files, but you can also share the playback experience with all the interaction...the sound....the movement of the pointer...and the content itself--all to your cell phone, MID, or laptop.

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com

Added permalinks and RSS feeds to thredr

This weekend I had a few minutes here and there to get permalinks working in the conversations collected by thredr. I also added a first pass at RSS feeds, although I see that I have a couple things to fix. These changes will have to wait till another day, since I have another project that's above this in the queue.

I also adjusted the ranking algorithm a bit to adjust for the age of the post. I think it's working better. Up to this point people were saying that older stories were staying too long at the top of the list.

Next up I need to improve the navigation. For instance, there are no links to get back to the home page from within the site tree. That's an obvious ommission. :-)

Plenty to do.

Googlebot is marking this site as spam

The Googlebot appears not to like this blog any more. Tonight, I see that Google is tagging this blog with a bit of doubt. It may be that I've been linking back over to my other blog. I don't know. Maybe it's something else. It'll be interesting to see how easy it is to clear this up. Either that I may be in denail that I'm really a spammer. Hehehe.

Alltop lists headlines from top feeds

Guy Kawasaki and the Truemors team released a new aggregator service today, called Alltop.com, which lists the top five most recent headlines from a variety of leading sites which are divided up into categories, such as celebrities, politics, and sports.

To me, the headlines are made interesting mostly because of the list of sites that are tracked in Alltop. Because the sites they include are quite active, they can give you a good snapshot of what's going on right now. There's more to it than that, however. In some ways, it's also a recommendation engine: "Here are the sites we think you should consider if you're interested in topic XYZ." I'm sure people digging for new, fruitful sites to visit will enjoy stopping by Alltop.

Now, all of this is different than what Bob and I have been working on with thredr. Our system leans more to a TechMeme-like strategy where the most "active conversations" or "threads" are brought to the top of the list. There's "editorializing" if you will in terms of which sites/feeds are tracked and what the ranking algorithm does, but other than that, like Alltop and TechMeme, it can run unattended. We're also reaching out to more content than just blogs and news sites. For instance, we're including YouTube videos and (as of now) a small set of forums.

Another difference with TechMeme (and it appears AllTop for that matter) is that we're focusing on smaller sets of content (micro-conversations), which brings up its own issues. Fewer feeds mean fewer connections, which can lead to more brittleness if not careful--or boring results. It also means the architecture can be quite different and in fact lends itself to other features which we'll be rolling out over the coming weeks.

I like the looks of AllTop. They're way ahead of what we've been doing and I look forward to seeing how it works out. We only have a development server running at this time and lots of code to write before we sleep. :-)

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com

Will Intel's MIDs be DOA?

Wired magazine takes a look at the forthcoming MID (Mobile Internet Devices) that will be hitting the markets this year.

Will the MIDs find an eager market? That's the $64,000 question.

The article points out that Intel is making great progress at creating PC-grade, mobile processors that scale down to pocketable devices. Intel is pinning great hopes on the Silverthorne family leading the way.

There is something very important that the article leaves out: The software. It's not just a matter of building a small device. That's only part of the problem. These are for the most part "sealed" units (from a hardware standpoint) and as such people are going to expect them to work as is--and work well. That means the software is going to have to be up to par.

You see, the big difference between let's say a MID and a Pocket PC is not just the hardware. It's the fact that a MID can run a full OS and full apps. However, it doesn't take much to realize that most apps are going to have to be tuned for these small devices.

From what I've seen (at CES, for instance), some MIDs will run a variant of Linux and some will run Windows. The question is which one will yield an experience on par of iPhone's OSX-lite?

A MID needs to be fast on, have easy access to apps, and boast apps out of the box that run well--really well (a browser tuned to reading on a small display, live maps, live weather, and so on).

Where's the initiative to create any of this? I don't see it. This means that the manufacturers are on their own which will mean spotty results and platforms that may be extensible, but will take work for third parties to take advantage of.

So I don't think the MIDs necessarily will be DOA from a hardware standpoint. It's going to be the software that makes a huge difference here. And once the software is "good enough" it's going to be a matter of whether the hardware and software blend together to make a device that really signs.

All this being said, if the prices are low enough consumers will be more acceptable of any flaws--at least the early adopters will. My prediction is that this is going to be an evolutionary product. We'll see.

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com

I should be working, but....

I'm checking out Yahoo's new live video service: http://live.yahoo.com. It's a product of Yahoo's Advanced Products team which according to their blog is a "small incubation team at Yahoo! -- our mission is to build stuff and launch it quickly, and respond to market feedback. Y! Live is a limited capacity release, so bear with us as and we may reach our limits in periods of high traffic."

Right now the video is only live. No recording. No video on demand.

For now these two missing features are quite unfortunate--at least for how I like using video services, such as UStream.tv and Mogulus.

There is an API and developer center than I'l lahve to take a look at. There might be something interesting here in terms of creating online, group, video events. Still looking and learning.

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com

Here we go again?

Is this going to be one more thing?

The Apple rumors mills are ablaze again. This time there's talk of an Apple event to be held at the end of the month. What might be announced? An iPhone SDK? Possibly. An Apple Tablet? Less likely. If there will be one, I'd imagine such a major announcement would take place at a larger company conference. This interim event would seem to be more appropriate for a smaller scale announcement.

Then again, this whole thing is a rumor--and we know how spot on these Apple rumors have been in the past: not very.

[Via www.thredr.com/apple.html]

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com

Top 10 reasons why twitter keeps going down

There's been much speculation over the last several weeks (or has it been months) as to why twitter keeps going down. Well, we decided to dig deeper to see what's been going on and through our extensive investigative reporting we've uncovered the real reasons for twitter's hiccups. And as you might imagine there isn't just one reason. There are in fact ten. Here they are:

1. Everyone knows that Robert Scoble has almost 5,000 followers on twitter. Well, it turns out that he finally decided to reach out to all his following friends in a meaningful way and send a thank-you tweet to each and every one of them. The result? Twitter tanked.

2. Not satisfied with his follower count, Robert Scoble then tried to add the five thousand and first follower. Twitter choked. Face it Robert, there's a hard limit on the Internet: 5,000 contacts is it. That's all you get. Period.

3. After being dissatisfied with twitter's limits, Robert decided to take his followers and go elsewhere. So he ran a script to export all his contacts. Twitter blew its stack.

4. You know that 140 character limit for tweets? Well, there's unfortunately an off-by-one bug in the code. It really can only handle 139 characters. Any more than that and you know what. Unfortunately, Dave Winer's Club140.org keeps hitting this nasty little gotcha.

5. You know that friendly little bird on the "twitter service is down" page? It's not simply a logo or graphic that some engineer threw together. No. It's a clue as to what really goes on behind twitter's server doors. Here's the low-down: It's a little known fact that actually twitter relies on a flock of parakeets to repeat each and every message users type to their servers. A speech recognition system captures each tweet and then relays it to its destination. Believe it or not. Why all the complexity? Security. By decoupling the message-handling servers twitter figures it's virus proof. Unfortunately, there's the avian flu. More down time.

6. Twitter goes Green, then red faced. Company executives decided that they'd join the race to a Greener world. First they contemplated solar panels to power their server farm, but this idea was nixed since Google has those already. Eventually the marketing team came up with a better idea: Peddle power. Employees now bike to work, lunch, breaks, and everywhere else on generator-equipped bicycles. The only problem? The extension cords back to the servers aren't long enough and keep coming unplugged. It's the little things.

7. Twitter engineers were so enthralled by the iPhone that they decided to build a distributed messaging network all out of iPhones. It wasn't easy. To get the computational power they needed, it took 1.4 million of those touch-friendly wonders. So now you know where all those iPhones went. Mystery solved. Unfortunately, the team is having activation problems, hence twitter keeps going down. Go figure.

8. Money. Yes, follow the money. In the Web 2.0 world you have to think different and twitter is. In a bid to raise more VC money they figure they need to create a need. And to that end, they are. They keep bringing down twitter to demonstrate that they need more money to keep it up.

9. People often say twitter is instant messaging (IM) on the web. Most people that use it say, this isn't so. Well, it's actually true. In fact, at its core, twitter is simply IM. More specifically, Twitter is built on top of Windows Live Messenger. And all those twitter-outs? It's not twitter's fault. It's Live Messenger causing the outages. Now you know.

10. It's my fault too. I'm so enamered with twitter, that I've been trying all manners of ways to leverage this most excellent tool. In fact, I've downloaded or run so many twitter clients, twitter aggregators, and twitter tools--searching for the ultimate set--that I've managed to overwhelm twitter more times than I want to admit. I'm so embarrassed. Sorry :-)

Well, there you have it. Twitter has been going through some significant growing pains, but as you can see it's only temporary. Everything is fixable. Good to know, because I have one more TechCrunch-certified twitter app I want to try...

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com

Conversation collector listens to more voices

Good news. The "conversation tracker" that Bob and I have been working on is now able to group news, blogs, and YouTube videos as well as--drumroll--"active" threads on Gottabemobile.

Here's a snippet of what it looks like:

As you can see in this snapshot snippet, a couple Gottabemobile forum posts made it to the conversation list--one on Inkseine and the other on Bluetooth headsets. Both are active topics on Gottabemobile. (The entry between these two forum posts is a YouTube link to a similarly active video.)

The idea is to collect up active forum posts that aren't necessarily linked to from outside bloggers or news sources. To make it to the list, the thread has to meet some criteria such as recent activity, a minimum number of posts, and the like. We're still working on what balance works best. We don't want too few posts, nor too many. And we want to give them the attention they deserve in the list by ranking them as high as reasonable. There's still more experimentation to do here.

So far, only Gottabemobile is supported. I need to do some futher tests to see if we can support other forums at this time.

By the way, two thumbs up to the Gottabemobile team for making their platform so accessible. Nice. You wouldn't believe the number of other tech forums I've looked into that have essentially closed door policies. Oh well, I guess they don't want traffic pointed their way. :-)

One of the other things we've been testing out is collecting and rendering online conversations for other topics, such as for digital photography, all things Apple, and finance. There's no magic to any of these micro-topics other than these are some the topics we or our friends actively follow. We figure, why not start with topics that we're interested in?

Here's part of one timeslice of Apple conversations, for instance, that we captured today:

And here's a snippet from a collection of digital photography conversations:

as well as a slice of the conversation that was underway today on a variety of finance blogs:

I have a friend that tracks finance blogs and news like a hawk, so it's going to be interesting to see if this turns out to be useful for him.

So what other topics are on the list? Like the ones so far, we have a couple in mind that make the most sense to friends and family, but hopefully others too. I've learned that to make a good conversation collector--especially for micro-topics--you need a fair amount of content with ways of easily measuring what might be compelling to people to look at. If links are one measure, then it means that people need to link to each other. If there are no links, then you have to rely on other criteria to get to the "hot" topics. As you can probably guess, organizing the content in the "best" way is probably an endless art.

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com

Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo

It's been long rumored and now it's finally happened. Microsoft has made a public, unsolicited bid for Yahoo, which you can read in this Microsoft press release. This press release by Yahoo states that the company's "Board of Directors will evaluate this proposal carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo!'s strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders." Of course they have to consider it; they have a fiduciary responsibility to consider offers like this.

This is a smart move, however, for both companies and employees and customers. And, yes, shareholders. But right now, I'm most interested in the customers, because that's what's going to benefit both companies in the long run.

In Microsoft's press release, I think Steve Ballmer has it right, "We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market," said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. "We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry partners."

It may sound like corporate PR talk, but this time around I think this positive positioning is correct. Here's how I see it:

Microsoft needs some help in the web world. Try as they might, the company hasn't been able to get its act together on par with what it can do and what customers would like to see and what its developers would like to see. It keeps getting biased by Windows and Office--which makes complete sense. They are, after all, hugely successful for Microsoft. But that's not where the market opportunities end. And that's where Yahoo comes in. Yahoo has for a long time been a fairly successful player in the online game. They have run into a rough spot and hence their stock has been going down and layoffs are on the way, but fundamentally they have some great web assets--Flickr being one of my most favorite. Microsoft can leverage its complementary assets--developer community, advertisers and the like to bring greater value to everyone.

Online, there's money to be made with more and better ads. Yes, more money. But customers will benefit because properties, such as the Flickr image sharing service can expand to integrate into other offerings--particularly from Microsoft's pool of products. And this model, which has worked for Yahoo can work in other areas two...if only Yahoo could invest more R&D. That's where Microsoft comes in. It has the money chest to make new efforts happen. And with Yahoo it hopefully can share some of its bay area engineering magic.

Now there are some caveats here. With Yahoo's slump I'm guessing some of the key engineering talent and know how has left. That may or may not be an issue. Yahoo also has a culture that's more open cube-like than Microsoft's "everyone gets a door" model. Structurally this may sound insignificant, but it's turf like this that ruffles people's feathers when change is on the way. Again, I hope in a Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition, that it won't scare away the people you really want to see work together.

I hope also this could mean we'd see more ink in the web. Wouldn't it be cool if Flickr supported ink directly for annotation? And if Yahoo could leverage Microsoft's developer model and ecosystem there's huge opportunity here. It's things like this that have me excited as a developer and as a user.

Who knows if this kind of mega-acquisition will be OKed by the regulators. If it isn't, maybe Yahaoo can get back on its feet, but then again I see clouds of Lycos on the horizon. Fingers crossed that the winds will keep them at bay.

Now if Microsoft would just buy twitter and integrate ink and media content there too I'd really be impressed. :-)

There's a bunch of coverage and commentary on this offer over at TechMeme. Well worth the read.

(Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com)

Next-gen Asus Eee PC won’t have touch reports Engadget

Who knows which rumor is true, but according to Engadget, the next generation Asus Eee PC will not boast touch. My money is on touch appearing somewhere in the Eee product line nonetheless. Call me a touchy-feely optimist.

Digitimes has more on this breaking news. Sure enough it also reports, that none other than AsusTek president Jerry Shen, has indicated that touch is being put on hold:

"Shen also pointed out the company's market research has determined that touch screen is not a highly demanded feature for Eee PC customers, and therefore it will suspend plans to include the option of a touch screen panel in the next generation of Eee PCs"

I'd add that the right kind of touch can make all the difference. In particular, Asus needs to go take a look at their friends over at Toshiba to see what touch they've included in their UMPC-like device. It packs many of the same gestures popularized by the iPhone, such as pinch and rotate. I'd expect these features to filter over to the Eee world too.

I'm guessing that cost is a concern, but think about it, let's say 4 million or so Eee's get touch--the cost is sure to go down. That's the kind of thinking that Apple has pursued quite well with its flash memory and now touch capabilities.

Then again, I can understand Asus being cautious here. They're probably just testing the waters with their toes.

Note: This blog has moved to www.lorenheiny.com

New "smartpen" details at DEMO 2008

The Demo Conference is about to get underway (you can watch a live broadcast here, registration required) and already the showcase businesses are talking up their new products. One such company is LiveScribe. They will be showing off their digitizing pen. Like other pens on the market, this one is built from Anoto's pen technology (requires special paper with microdots for pen alignment), yet it captures and synchronizes sound with your notes much as OneNote does. The pen, which is being targetted to college students and business professionals, will reportedly hit the market in March and retail for under $200.

CNet has more details here along with a video demo.

Will the LiveScribe pen take off? Possibly. I'd sure like to try one. I wonder if there are any specialty markets where this type of pen makes lots of sense? Bet there are.

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com

Robert Scoble on Davos

Robert Scoble: "Going to Davos is a career changing event for me. I need a few more days to really understand just how much it's changed me... It's not so much what I learned, but the relationships I made."

Watch this self-recorded video of Robert and you'll at least partially understand.

Note: This blog has moved to http://www.lorenheiny.com.