Desktop Web Apps

I have very mixed feelings after reading this post on ReadWriteWeb. I agree with the conclusions, but not with the reasons.

Web Apps do not yet have the required trust in order to become mainstream. You only trust what you have in your hands, on your computer. A good point. There is a lack of transparency. With a browser based web app, you know your data is in the cloud. With a desktop based web app it is much unclearer where your data is stored. There is no need to know, location is transparent.

One of the reason mentioned is that Web Apps are not ubiquitous yet. We do not have access everywhere yet. a very good argument. I loven reading blog-posts, listening to music, looking at vidcasts, creating blog-posts, when I am forced to be offline.

I agree with the comment that ‘the browser is no place for multitasking’. Josh Catone wants to replace it with multiple browser applications, each application for a single web app, as is the intention with Mozilla Prism. As indicated in the post: ‘a browser is not for hosting applications’. Adobe AIR is already a much better approach, but it is not good enough. Real desktop apps are just much better. Just have a look at MarsEdit, WebNoteHappy, etc. Unfortunately there are now also bad MacOSX examples, such as net4mac, which is just a dedicated browser. Real Desktop Web Apps are based on API’s and not on parroting the corresponding web-pages.

For me it is all about the integrated experience between all the applications.

[Inspiration ReadWriteWeb]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • web 2.0
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Understanding mystrands

I created an account for the MyStrands service. They have an associated application that goes with it.

The service works around music. The application allows you start and stop music from the iTunes library. If the track is recognised the app shows recommended tracks. When the application starts it upload the iTunes library. I guess this is for the recommendations, however these only come after one has played something.

On the site a list of recently played tracks are shown. Also a list of recommended artists and tracks are shown. strangely it asks me whether I know artists that are already in my iTunes library. It should have known that. You can indicate whether you know tracks and artists.

As an aggregating service you can also view top tracks, artists, etc. And there are the standard community features. And finally there are Parties, which I have not chequed out.

Drawbacks are that I can not listen to recommended music, just teasers. And why RealMedia?

I am afraid that I stick with Last.fm, I do not see any advantages and see more drawbacks.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • audio
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ODP Viewpoints and Maps

I have been pondering the comments of @Downes on one of my previous posts. In the comments he says that any map is one-dimensional. I am not sure what he means by that, but I take it that he says that any maps lacks aspects. This reminded me of the viewpoints of the ODP Reference Model. These viewpoints are interesting as they intend to separate (separation of concerns) things and offer various abstractions.

Now back to my map. My map shows the relation between the Information Viewpoint (the MicroContent Types/Objects) and the Computational Viewpoint (Applications/Services). The Enterprise Viewpoint is not relevant here, as the intentions and goals of the user are unknown. The Computational Viewpoint covers the actions a user wants perform on the MicroContent Objects (create, read, get, publish, etc.).

In these two viewpoints we should not talk about protocols, API’s, systems, software, distribution of components, etc. In several of the PLE diagrams, I see all the Viewpoints mixed, resulting (at least for me) in an unclearer picture. Unfortunately this is also often reallife reality, users a confronted with all kinds of technological and engineering aspects and they shouldn’t be. Things should be more transparant.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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MicroContent map and PLE’s

@Downes saw my Microcontent Map and sees a parallel with Personal learning Environments. He points to one of his presentations. So I had a look.

I must say that I find the drawings a bit hard to grasp. What I take out of these drawings is that many components (systems, services, software, etc.) are involved, many type of contents (user generated, professional), content is distrbuted over multiple places, API’s, etc.

For me the problem with such diagrams is that they try to describe the world in a single image, on multiple abstraction levels. These diagrams are nice show the complexity, but I miss some internal logic. And that logic is what I am always looking for.

These (personal) MicroContent Maps are an attempt to attain some logic. Let me explain these levels:

1. Me - at the top-level is the user that consumes (toMe) or publishes content. The user also needs other functions to manage his content;
2. MicroContent Type - on the second level are the MicroContent Types, the various forms of MicroContent. One could add other file formats (documents, spreadsheets, presentations), etc, to this level, but I chose to limit myself to MicroContent;
3. MicroContent Applications - on the third level are the applications that are used to consume/publish individual MicroContent Items. I limited myself here to applications. One could add here services that one uses through a browser;
4. MicroContent Services - and on the third level one has the MicroContent Services that communicate with MicroContent Clients through either API’s or feeds (Atom/RSS);

Naturally there are things missing from these maps. They are limited to what I actually use for instance. I would like to add the distinction between API, RSS-based and embedded MicroContent for instance. I think I should add Browser-based services, such as Gliffy in some way.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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MicroContent Map

Inspired by Loic LeMeur post on his Social Map, I decided to create something similar for me. But I take a different twist, the MicroContent twist. I want to map for each MicroContent Type that i uses the corresponding clients and services. This comes in 3 variants: toMe, aroundMe and fromMe, i.e. MicroContent that comes to me, exists around me (local) and that goes away from me. It is tempting to describe what is possible, but I want to focus on what I actually use.

My toMe map:

The toMe-map describes the clients I use to get MicroContent Items from the Internet. This can be through a feed, embedded in a web-page / HTML-fragment or as free Items with corresponding permalinks. Some clients are closely related to a corresponding web-service.

The other clients are basically generic ones and not tied to a specific service. I guess the message is here that I do not like to be locked in into any service.

The fromMe map looks a bit different:

What it basically says, is that I use a private solution for publishing. Only for images and video I started using public services in order to lower the burden of my file storage. And I have no practical experience with events and audio publishing.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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Quotably can be interesting

Quotably creates threads from Twitter-posts. The idea is that by detecting and displaying the relation between tweets, one can follow conversations. And this is a very good idea as that is not yet possible at the moment.

This idea of uncovering threads has also been tried with blog-posts. With breaking comment-systems another solutions are required. One solution could be that instead of putting a comment in the comments part of a blog, one puts the comments in one’s own blog with a reference to the blog-item one comments to. So just add the link. There was a party that did this (don’t remember who). Problem is that there should be an unambiguous way to encode these referral permalinks.

Quotable tries to do something similar. There solution is a bit more easier, as they only have to worry about Twitter. I am not sure how one create good threads. By adding ‘@username’ one refers to another Twitter-user, which is a good begin. However it seems that one can not refer to a specific post of that user. It seems that one can only refer to the latest post. When I add the tinyURL of the post, it does not help.

So for the moment Quotably is a limited solution.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • blog
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MicroPulse thoughts

I had several thoughts when reading Martin’s MicroPulse proposal. It was not easy to get my head around it. I am not sure whether it is appropriate to respond on my blog, but here I go. The thoughts are a bit unstructured and low-level at this stage and are created while reading.

I am a bit reluctant in creating systems. There are already so many things around. But then I am not familiar enough with KnowledgePulse.

The concept of ‘Continuous Partial Attention’ is interesting. With all the information flowing towards our devices (thanks to RSS), we live in an information sea that is very close to us. The question is whether we will pay attention to that sea. If I look at Twitter or Jaiku, then there is a peripheral component. But there are also other examples reminding of radio.

On my platform I created such a sea. Thanks to Growl a small windowlet pops up in the right-top corner of my screen, with the latest tweet. This windowlet stays there for 1 second and dissolves into the background. I have a choice to look at it and read the message, or just let it pass. Information in this windowlet can come from a variety of sources, such as Twitter, Jaiku, last.fm and all kinds of other status messages from local applications. Think also of instant messaging clients, where you notice your friends login and -out. This kind of information flow is like being ‘next to the sea’.

Fortunately there is no attention grabbing. When I do not look at this local sea, then it will be lost, but nothing will be lost.

This is a bit different from beeps from the mail application to indicate that there is new mail, or indicators to show how much new mail, rss-item, etc you have waiting for you.

The idea of an application taking over when there is no foreground activity (afk), reminds me of a screensaver. This screensaver would then sequentially present new Items from the subscribed RSS feeds.

The Growl-messages could be ‘calls for attention’. It however depends how intrusive these calls are. At the moment it is relatively hard for me to react to these calls: I can not click on them, I have to see the associated application and put that application to the front.

As soon as you are going to react to impulses from the sea, you are going in. You are opeining your Twitter client, RSS-client, etc, and are going to read the information for real.

In the MicroPulse description also more intrusive examples of Micropulses are mentioned. I have to ‘click-away’ these pulses, the come back until I did something with it. It reminds me of annoying pop-up, pop-under windows, of bouncing dock-items, etc. All requiring me to change my focus from my current task to something else. I do not want to be overwhelmed by waves from the sea.

The micro-information loop tries to establish the relation between this sea and the user. This relation is determined by the interaction the user has with that information, i.e. the amount of attention the user awards to that information. As described, there can be many levels of (’moe’ tweets whether I like to play Mario Kart with him on the DS) attention.

A question is, whether this attention recording process must be something explicit, as described with the Flash cards.

The idea of a context dependent sea/radio is an interesting one. It might lower the information overload burden, it is no longer necessary to switch contexts. But then these tweets ‘out of context’ are also nice and offer the coffe machine environment.

I have mixed feelings on the recorder thing. I am all in favor, in fact I tried to set up something for my self with, blogs, bookmarks, etc. In reality I do not seem to benefit from it. I guess that this is just the state of art. Recommendation is still extremely lousy. But here seems to main challenge.

For the moment no comments on the system part, it all depends what you want to accomplish.

[Inspiration MicroPulse]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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TimeLine application

The TimeLine application by Bee Docs is an interesting application. It reminded me of the role of time in MicroContent, but hat should be a future post.

In TimeLine one can either import MicroContent Items or create one’s own. A TimeLine Item consists of a title, a date (or a date range), notes (optional), an image (optional) and a link (optional).

On creating a new TimeLine it is possible to import Items from the AddressBook (birthdays), iCal (a selected calendar), iPhoto (creation dates), iTunes (recently playes songs/albums), RSS/Atom feeds, System Profiler (recent Apple updates), Skitch and NetNewsWire (publish dates). And when Images are available they are shown on the timeline.

The timeline is one of the presentation modes for MicroContent. The other are the table, the grid and location.

All in all very interestying. Unfortunately I did not have a need yet for such visualisation. The application si a bit rough at times. I had a few stalls that required me to force quit the app. I would like to see the possibility to import events at a later stage and on the secondary timeline. And I guess there other Items that could be imported as well, a Framework to do this would be in place, although the generic RSS/Atom helps a lot. And I woulk like to see a zoom possibility, so that I can see the entire timeline in a single screen.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • type • event
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Micro-blogging with MoodBlast

With MoodBlast I am rethinking micro-blogs. This application allows the user to post to four micro-blogging services and can change the status in 3 IM-networks (and Facebook). I was already able to this partly with my Applescript.

MoodBlast also has some support for creating the message as well. Thus one can add information on music that is playing in iTunes, the weather, the latest favorite video on YouTube. It also supports some specifics of individual services, such as the location in Jaiku, video-links in Tumblr.

The app can also grab url’s from browsers and add them to a message. And this also results in a structured post in Pownce, very neat.

All in all this can very well be my main application. I only miss the possibility to upload to my own micro-blog. This is however solved with the introduction of applescript support. So now I can use MoodBlast in conjunction with Quicksilver.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client
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A look at Pownce

Thanks to some other services, I happened upon Pownce again. I already signed up, but I never had a deeper look at it.

At first it just looks like another micro-blog. The structure of an Item consist of just one field: the title. And I use Pownce in this way, as I post to 4 micro-blog services simultaneously. An Item (called a note) has a corresponding permalink, where one can also see the comment thread.

However Pownce is not limited to a micro-blog structure, it is possible to add more fields to a pst/item. The ‘link’ structure adds a field for a URL.

The ‘file’ structure allows you to add any file. If I add an image it will be shown in the note. A file can only be posted to friends.

And finally one can create an event. This structure consists of a title, a place, date/time and a real note. There is a corresponding ics-file for easy importing. Interestingly you can reply to such a post to indicate you will attend.

I get the impression that I can not edit a note. I already needed that feature a few times. I am also annoyed that I can not edit the recipients. I already made several errors due to that. I miss a RSS-feed, at least I do not see it.

Pownce is a bit more a communication service, as one can send a note to just a single friend, all friends or the public. I like the approach of Pownce to struture.: if you want more, just add a field. It is much more like wild MicroContent.

I do not think that I will use Pownce though. I only view MicroContent through feeds in NetNewsWire. Although I will continue publishing to Pownce. My usage will depend on the feeds and integration with my desktop;

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • type • blog • bookmark ,

pownce

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Friendfeed

I am trying to figure out the friendfeed service. The service allows you to follow MicroContent posts from friends, yourself and the world. However it is limited to those that subscribed and added their personal feeds to friendfeed.

When a user subscribes he can indicate the services that must be combined. The service supports twitter, amazon wishlist, delicious, last.fm, stumbleupon, flickr, etc (28 services at the moment). The service makes it very easy to add an rss-feed, you just have to specify your username. As they do not check the password of the corresponding service, you can just mix and match whatever you want. And in addition one can just add any other rss-feed, by typing the corresponding URL.

This makes it just a personal rss-aggregator just like Yahoo Pipes. Only the functionality is more limited, but much easier to use.

What the service makes interesting is that you can also find aggregated feeds of other users. And you can make imaginary friends for feeds of those that did not subscribe yet to friendfeed. I like this feature as you not have to do the aggregation of your friendfeed’s yourself. And this is an easy place to find them. Often I am not able to find all the feeds of someone as they are not readily published somewhere.

Naturally the problem is that you are already subscribed to a lot of information of your friends, so this only will double your information overload.

By the way, friendfeed republishes everything again as feeds, so you do not have to go to the site again.

Now I have to wait until all my friends subscribe, so I can aggregate their stuff. ANd in the mean time I create new subscriptions and new feeds for new services.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • mashing
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eBay and MicroContent

Lately , I started playing with eBay. Can you imagine that I never did anything with. In the mean time I already bought my first item. Naturally as I am not very fond of heavy web-pages, I started looking for clients that can support me in following auctions. I found GarageBuy and JBidWatcher. The first is a real MacOSX application and the latter is a Java app that has been ported.

First of all we have to look where we can find the MicroContent in auctions. The MicroContent Item is the auction itself, with the auction ID, current price, auction closing time, Item title, seller-namer and seller-location. And there are probably some other fields as well. Each auction has a permalink at eBay, such as this one. I wonder how long these permalinks stay around.

The information on the auctioned Item is a MicroContent type in itself. I get the impression that eBay does not offer to much structure for this, but I have look a bit more into that, when I use a sell client, such as GarageSale or iSale. These two MicroContent Types (auction and auction-Item) are a bit merged. I am not sure whether this a good or bad thing and whether we have in fact two different MicroContent types. In contrast to normal shops, where the Item refers to a product-category, in the case of an auction one points to a single product, with all its defects.

Interestingly an auction MicroContent Item, is dynamic as buyings can place bis on Items and thus influencing one of the fields on that Item. In fact each bid can be seen as a MicroContent Item itself. The clients I looked at have no support for following bids and one has to refer to the corresponding web-page.

JBidWatcher presents a single window with a single pane. This pane (Items-pane) contains a list of all auctions that are followed in table format. The table contains fields such as auction number, auction title, seller-name, etc. It is not possible to add or remove fields.

GarageBuy is a bit more complex with a three pane setup. This reminds a lot of a standard MicroContent Client. There is View-pane with information on the auctioned Item (details-view). This contains either a description of the Item or the corresponding web-page at eBay. The Items-pane shows either a set of auctions or the details of a single auction. And finally there is a Lists-pane showing categories of auctions based on searches. Or auctions that are followed. One can sort these auctions into folders.

Unfortunately the mixing of searches and individual auctions breaks the logic a bit. I would have preferred to have a fourth pane for all the details.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application
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Friend channels

I have been looking a bit at the video's on Qik. These are video's that are uploaded automatically from a mobile phone. It looks as if many of those video's are very silly. In a sense they remind me of the tweets on Twitter. Some of these items are well thought burps of their others, but many just are not. In this sense sense they seem to be video micro-blogs.

What happens when we can combine these 'qiks' in a television channel? So you can subscribe to what you friends are looking at (and are saying).

And when talking about channels, what happened to audio. Are we missing a step here? Where are the audio channels? Where is my ambient channel from by combined friends?

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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Thoughts about MicroContent State of Affairs

Lately I have been thinking about writing up a MicroContent State of Affairs. I have the impression that there has not been happening much lately. But that depends at what aspect you look. So I start of with some thoughts.

Theory - I do not see anything happening on the theoretical front of MicroContent. But maybe I am looking at the wrong angle here. I guess that the Semantic Web can (and is) contributing here a lot, but I do not feel that impact.

Type Ranges - I am a proponent of many MicroContent Types. There are already many types available, but there does not seem to much growth. The main types are still the golden triad (audio, image, video). Naturally blogs and micro-blogs are still continuing to get attention, and are still growing.

Other types just have a lot less impact. Where are the other types? Where are the downloadable recipes? I assume that the acceptance of other MicroContent Types depends on the availability of standards and support in services and applications. That is where the portable identity is stalling now (and getting new traction). And Locations (as in KML) are now getting traction. What is happening with bookmarks?

Mashing - The number of mash-ups are still increasing. Have to look a bit more into this. Many mash-ups are based on Google Maps. These are not really MicroContent related mash-ups, but more general Web 2.0 approaches. Many mash-ups are limited to widgets, i.e. filling a web-page. That is all OK, but I would like to see a next step.

Adoption - the more interesting things are now happening around adoption. How much MicroContent is going around? How many people are actually using it? The growth of downloadable audio, video, rss are good indicators here. I have to gather some numbers here.

Usage - the more interesting things are happening around adoption. How are people using all that MicroContent. Twitter is here an interesting subject. The same goes for delicious. Personally I just do not use, but other swear by it. What am I missing? How is podcasting going?, etc, etc.

Devices - how is MicroContent evolving on other (i.e. non-pc) devices. Naturally the iPod, Smart Phones, but also car navigators.

Business - how make people money on MicroContent. YouTube and Flickr come to mind. What are the services? What are the business models?

Enough stuff to do some work on.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general
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iPhoto Events

The latest version of iPhoto (version 7.1.1) has a new organising principle for images: events. It took me a while to get my head around it, but I think I got it now. I like it, however I do not like the implementation.

A big advantage is the the amount of management a user has to do, is much smaller. In the Event View one can drag an event thumbnail and drop it on another one, thus merging the two events. Clicking on the event title allows one to change it. Thus one organises tens to hundreds of images in one go.

A drawback is that changing the contents of an event also changes the folder structure. I do not know why did not leave the folder structure (based on date) alone. Might be for speed. And what is one supposed to do with the miscellaneous images? Create a special event for these?

In any case events greatly reduce the amount of organisational burden for the user. And that is a great advantage in this time of exponential digital asset growth.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client , iphoto
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