No Predictions for 2008- NEEDS

December 26, 2007 · Comments

orbitals Predictions are all over the web right now. I *could* follow that trend, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to tell you about my NEEDS for 2008, and hope that they thread well with where the Internet is going. I’m going to bet that lots of you have similar needs, and insofar as you’re smart, and know smart people, if we surface our needs, perhaps we’ll find our solutions faster.

Social Network Hubs

Marc references these here, and I agree. I want something that lets me hub my social networks together. I want to thread Twitter, Utterz, and Seesmic together. I want to have everything in a nice hub that lets me see the threads better. I need it. I can’t just traipse all over the Internet trying to follow conversations. Too much work, and not enough reward. I think apps like MyBlogLog and Lijit are close, but we need more.

Bacn Management

I want set-once, use-often rules for bacn. There are now transactions that I have to do over and over again that I want to be one-touch. Here are a few examples:

  • Receive email (bacn) from Twitter that CoolDude is now following me.
  • I check out CoolDude, determine if he’s a linkbot, a friend-adder, or someone who seems legit.
  • I check that CoolDude twitters primarily in English (as I can’t do much with other languages).
  • I follow CoolDude back if he follows those rules.

Time per transaction: 25 seconds, give or take the speed of my connection. Fine, if you get 2 or 3 followers a day. Not fine if you get more than that.

Other bacn “actions” I want to turn into one-click: friend adds on Facebook, friend adds on Flickr, and now that I think about it, social network “adds” everywhere.

Data Tools for Humans

We’re in an age where people are flinging REAMS of information at us. I follow about 120 blogs fairly closely. Robert Scoble reads over 800. With the Google Reader friends concept and shared items, I cover an even larger spread of info. Well, there are two ways to get at that data. One is to read it all linearly, which means I’ll skim and scrape and deep-dive and forward and clip, but at a frenetic pace, to keep up with my personal subset of everything going on out there.

This can be done MUCH simpler using business intelligence tools that are normally in the hands of enterprises. For all I know, I might be able to do some of this in Yahoo! Pipes. But even that’s a lot of work for the average Joe. I’ve got a feeling that Dave Winer would know a few more ways to do this, too. I look at his Club140 project and realize that what he’s doing with RSS outputs, mashing them for his own interests, was a great way to point out to people like me that we don’t have to read this info in a big glut. We can parse in lots of ways, figure out what matters to us, and filter the information we’re receiving. (Look for a related post on this soon by Clarence and me.)

We need data tools. Human ones. Ones that we can poke a few times and get what we need out of the flood.

Clouds for the Commons

In 1995, Bill Gates wrote in The Road Ahead that we’d start using software applications that blurred our perception of what was on our desktop and what was on the web. He was right in lots of ways, just really early.

Changes like the announcement of Mozilla’s Weave signal that we’re getting further away from the notion of a desktop (or even laptop) PC. I’m mobile. I use whatever browser I’m near. And even that’s starting to break down a little. I use mobile apps on my BlackBerry Curve all the time, meaning that it’s not the endpoint that matters to me. It’s the information.

Clouds for the commons means that services like Amazon’s S3 and EC2 and SimpleDB are just the beginning of what we all need. More of our services need to be more persistently managed through the Internet, with display variety for which endpoint we’re using. I’m using Gmail for my email, which plays great on a laptop and a cell phone. I’m looking for more of these apps to work fluidly between devices. I need it, as I’m more nomadic in my business practices than ever before.

It’s close, but I hope to see more announcements in 2008 to round it all out.

Flexible Media Purchases

I’m writing this in a bookstore. Behind my laptop are some books I’m browsing. In ALL cases, I want to buy the books, but I’d really buy them if I could get a three-media-types bundle purchase. I want to buy the paper book, an ebook, and an audiobook, for an extended price that’s more than a hardcover but less than the three piece parts. Makes sense, riht? I want to read the book when I’m on the beach. I want to browse the ebook to do finds and searches on parts I want to remember. I want the audiobook for the car.

And not just book media. I want to buy the DVD for a movie as I’m leaving the theater. And that DVD should come with a discount on a larger release of features later down the road. (You know who did this well? The team who did Virtual Hot Wings). Why lock me into watching the movie and then waiting a fake few months for the DVD? Will this chew on movie theater sales as some have predicted? Not sure, but would the bump you could charge for a movie-and-a-DVD make economic sense? Hell, add in the Soundtrack/score while you’re at it.

“Need” Might Be Strong

But as we’re sinking in more and more data, I want the Internet to work for me. Slaves to machines? I don’t know about you, but I’m more of a slave every day, and I need tools. I need tools that will shape information the way I need it. I need ways to better manage these new flows such that I can be even more helpful. And I don’t see why I can’t have them.

How about you? What are your needs? What are your tools of choice? How are you managing this now, or are you?

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

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  • I need a contact management tool that lets me add RSS feeds to individual contacts, so when I click on "Chris Brogan" it brings up one page with your latest Tweets and blog posts and Utterz and Seesmics. Thing is, *I* want to set which feeds are there -- I don't want FriendFeed or anything that requires each contact's participation.

    Then this dream contact management tool could have one main page for "all friends" and that would solve your Seesmic/Utterz/Twitter problem!

    I also need partial RSS feeds to go away. (Ahem.) I read almost 800 RSS feeds. With one exception (this blog -- seriously -- because you're that cool), if it's a partial feed, I unsub immediately. As an efficiency consultant, I can't spend all day clicking through, or I might as well have just bookmarked the URLs for each blog and gone through del.icio.us every single day.

    Also: more hours in a day :)
  • scottwitter
    sounds reasonable but look at all the middlemen that would be put out of business? I agree with the notion that there not enough hours in the day to track all of the things and ideas out there. Could it be possible that people such as yourself need administrative assistant digital clippers? Like Mahalo trying to sort out the 80/20 rule with content, some people need their own mini mahalos?
    twitter could be used for keeping your finger on the pulse... hmm sounds like there needs to be a new version of Steven R. Coveys '7 habits of highly successful people' but for the Web, blogs, social media types?
  • @scott- youre talking about the data part? I think human curation is vital. I just want MORE than that. I need better tools with which to curate. They can be done. Data is data. I just want the toolsets. I'll craft the curation.
  • I couldn't agree more, as I dive into this wonderful medium of social media and networking, I'm getting tangled by the seaweed of information. I need ease, I can't design it but I'd certainly buy into it!

    Aloha,
    NEENZ.
  • scottwitter
    Chris i was thinking about actual people reading and preprocessing some of those 800 blog posts. Doing a summary so you would know more efficeintly what is going on. I understand that you want all the information and you will decide what to do with it, but as more and more people blog and communicate you will reach limitations? Eventually need some way to deal with the flood of information from all sources? Not sure if you are but, what would happen to your ability to assimilate data if your browser did decent auto-translation and now you had an extra 800 culturally different blogs to track, today? and what about in 6 months, 1 year etc.

    Twitter has not even begun to take off IMO. Its going to get insane with lots of very interesting people and media sources to follow, and devices to view and interact on. Imagine 20 NewMediaJims with simutaneous broadcasts, and user contributed content like Operator11... ok ok i ramble.. Imagine getting NMJ tweets and watching the broadcast on TV, and then getting live feeds from individuals on the ground with iPod touches with video, and people twittering links to associated blogs and videos.... now multiply that by a hypothetical 20, add in your blogs, and foriegn language blogs, facebook groups, etc... insane amount of information to track IMO.
  • Chris,

    all of these "needs" can be served by one evolutionary step that we've partially taken, but not fully taken. The amalgam of twitter, jaiku, myspace, facebook and countless others crossed with a more immersive Second Life crossed with Halo & Roddenberry's holodeck yields something like Jeffrey A Carver's books (http://www.starrigger.net) about navigating rivers of space. In our case, this begins with navigating rivers and landscapes of raw information, communications, picture feeds and mental movies. But we have to be careful about moving from our social-web baby steps to the precipice envisioned in The Matrix - will we know to jack out and deal with our kids, our insulin injections (Piers Anthony's Killobyte) and the cutting of the grass?

    ..alex.
  • Chris, it may be time to employ a virtual assistant if we don't get the data wrangling tools we need.
  • It would rock for me if I could log into my blog and see my email, have my Facebook and Myspace notices, RSS feeds, and all manner of information on my dashboard. Theoretically, it's my information, right? It should be easier to grab and link my own content or link to others content from one centralized place without having to jump around from site to site. I would not stop using those web services. In fact, having them feed directly into my blog's dashboard would simplify things for me greatly and cause me to use all those web services more.

  • I’m on the beach. I want to browse the ebook to do finds and searches on parts I want to remember. I want the audiobook for the car.


    You really nailed this one. I hate the fact that I read a book, and a month later remember some meaningful part, but can't easily find it since searching a hard copy book is soooooooo time intensive.

    I recently purchased "Naked Conversations" from Amazon for just this reason - for $5 more I got a digital version immediately and forever (or at least as long as Amazon is around) that I can search, and I know I will - and I can get started reading it while I wait for the meatspace version to show up. Since there is so little incremental cost to offering this digital copy, I wish it was only a buck more, but for this one it seemed worth it.
  • An idea that I had, which Marina from Sufficient Thrust recommended I post a comment about here.

    Personalized start pages like iGoogle and Netflakes are quite static in that they tend to display the same feeds daily. But the real world doesn't work like that. We all have schedules. Some of us don't want to see our work email on weekends, for example. Even newspapers have different editorials/sections on different days. So why can't we have a personal start page that allows us to schedule when the different feeds appear?

    You can read more of the idea at http://derrickkwa.blogspot.com/2007/12/schedule..., but yeah, just thought I'd take Marina's suggestion and see what you think.
  • Can anyone explain to me why anyone out of jr. high school cares about twitter? I am 49, my brother is 34 and neither of us can fathom twitter or its raging popularity among adults. We are both in IT and neither knows anyone who uses or cares about it save a few interns. Please I am honest in this question.
  • @J.C. - even IBM talks about twitter. Here's their take.

    Brief one-to-many messaging. It's pretty easy. It's like IM, only with more reach, and handles unstructured messaging needs better than email, without a heavy overhead, and across SMS, IM, HTML, all into the same bucket. Pretty mean feat, eh?
  • Chris Brogan... Here is what I want:
    I want to have a pair of headphones that connects wirelessly (EVDO/wifi/whatever) to my iTunes account so I can listen to podcasts, iTunes radio stations and my music. No iPod, no carrying music with me.

    With this, i want my phone to be able to access my iTunes so I can watch vids.

    Also, I should be able to login to my iTunes account from anyone's computer... watch movies, listen to music or whatever and then logout.

    Maybe it is only possible with the iPhone and macbooks to start but let's carry less and increase access to our data.

    This is specific to iTunes only because they are currently the number one, but what is Amazon started offering this accessibility?
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