Work(ing Title)

This morning Marco Arment wrote:

Dear internet “social media experts”:

I really, really don’t care which office or restaurant you’re sitting in and checking into Foursquare from.

It’s important to balance the abundance of cheap, widespread internet publishing with appropriate considerations for your intended audience. If you’re trying to be interesting to anyone beyond… yourself, you have to consider whether anyone else in the world will benefit from spending a tiny slice of their time learning where you’re having coffee or holding a meeting.

This isn’t to say that such posts can’t contain other value. On the contrary, many of my favorite internet writers (like meaghano) write amusing, insightful, or touching stories around the trivial task of getting coffee. But when you tell Foursquare or Brightkite to automatically publish your location to Tumblr or Twitter, that’s not adding any value.

If your location isn’t interesting enough for you to manually write a post about it for some reason, why should your audience spend their time reading about it?

My experience using foursquare and Loquacious have developed a somewhat contrary opinion to Marco here. From the out I believe it’s important to state that I think Marco is a brilliant developer, and anyone who uses Tumblr or Instapaper should be glad he’s doing what he does. I’m not writing to pick a fight or insinuate that I believe he’s anything less than an inspired individual. That said, I think he’s going down the wrong road. Also, I don’t let foursquare publish to my Twitter stream, but I do allow Spymaster, and I’ve heard similar criticism of it.

First, foursquare evolves the criticism I’ve heard about Twitter time and time again, and the main point I believe Marco’s making: “Why do I care about your ____?” While those friends of mine who live in Washington may find value in some of my tweets, they almost certainly don’t give a shit when foursquare notifies them (on my behalf) that I’ve stopped into Mojo Bicycle Cafe. However, that information can be of value to say, the friends I have who find themselves nearby Mojo when they read that tweet; They have some amount of encouragement to swing by and join me for a pint. The point here is that each tweet I publish has a different potential value for each person who reads it.

Second, while I was in New York last month my good friend Niall Kennedy loaned me his HTC Magic in order to get a feel for Android 2.0 (I’m a big fan). One of the applications I used while carrying the phone was the Loquacious Twitter client. The killer feature here is the app’s ability to filter out things from my Twitter stream. Specifically, Loquacious gives me the ability to select particular users or services that I don’t want to see on my phone. Anyone who considers themselves a serious Twitter user probably has feelings similar to mine and Marco’s, where there may be users (or services) which publish what they believe is low-value information. By having the option of pruning my Twitter reading, I was able increase the value of my stream as a whole. A perfect example here is Urban Journal; when I’m sitting at my desk, the tweets about new posts to this blog are of high value to me, whereas when I was walking around Brooklyn, those same tweets were of significantly lesser value.

What my experience with Twitter and Loquacious have shown me is that intelligent software design can be a more effective means of resolving the sorts of criticisms of technology that Marco makes, rather than trying to directly influence how people choose to use those same technologies. I believe there’s a ‘lazyweb’ request here for developers start to consider the different conditions under which the value of communications change. If a future version of Loquacious (or Tweetie, or Peep, or TweetGenius) included support for location-based filtering of my Twitter stream, they’ll have my money shortly thereafter.

After a half hour with Google’s new browser, a few things have become apparent. I’m not really interested in rehashing the business and industry implications that everyone and their mother wants to focus on, so instead I just thought I’d throw out some of my experience just playing:

First, the integration of tabs could be perfect. By including the navigation elements within each tab, they are strongly reinforcing the notion that each tab is its own web page. While the underlying plumbing hammers this point home far more thoroughly, I think it’s just as important to help the user understand that each tab is its own, fully-independent portal to the web. So independent in fact that tabs are easily moved between windows, or grown into their own windows, with a simple drag and drop. Perfect.

Second, the UI design or ‘chrome’ from which it takes its name is exquisite. The latest Firefox release never made it into my lifestyle because I thought it was just hideous. In fact, most of the reason I have dutifully used IE7 since moving to Windows is that it blends into the UI of the whole OS. With the integration of the search and address bars (not to mention the inclusion of navigation elements within each tab), Google has really laid down some serious Kung Fu to build something so powerful and yet so understated.

Third, the speed increase is so significant that the browsing experience changes. While a faster connection to the ‘net or a fresh machine are the typical ways in which one finds a ‘faster’ browsing experience, this is something else. Because of Chrome’s updated processing schema, the browsing experience feels more like a desktop application, despite the fact that it is the Internet application. The first analogy that comes to mind is something akin to using an iPhone touch screen for the first time; the software responds so quickly that you find yourself no longer noticing any sense of speed.

All in all it’s an extremely pleasing product, and I hope it will challenge the team behind Internet Explorer to step up their game. Also, I look forward to hearing reactions from all my OS X friends once they get their hands on it.

I got an invitation to Yahoo’s new Fire Eagle location-sharing service this morning. While it’s still not fleshed out yet (the only function appears to be updating your location from the website directly). It’s somewhat hard to see what use the service will provide, but I don’t care about that. The polish on the Inferno Pigeon site is so well-executed, I want to use it regardless of what it does.

This screen is so human, so soft, so downright fucking cuddly, I just love it. Props should also be given to whomever on the Fuego Sparrow team came up with this privacy ping function. As the default is for the site to email you monthly to check that it’s still OK for them to share your location data, this is a great way to protect against irrate users. Nice work team Flame Heron; now just tell me what I’m supposed to use this Backdraft Canary thing to do.

PS - Yea, I think the name is funny, and I would’ve loved to be in the room bouncing those ideas off the walls.

Steve Caravaial points out the existence of a sweet and free little add-on for Outlook that enables Live Mail accounts to be managed within your big, burly enterprise mail client:

For those that want to manage their Hotmail account (now known as Windows Live Hotmail) from Outlook 2003 or 2007, you can download the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector free of charge. You can also view your Windows Live Hotmail contacts in Outlook with the connector. So go check out all the benefits. I just installed it and it works great.

For those of us who have swallowed the blue pill and accepted Facebook as our online social aggregator, Adam Ostrow writes up a new IE Facebook toolbar for Mashable:

 

…Some third-party developers have built My FB Toolbar, a toolbar with much the same capabilities as the official one from Facebook for Firefox. With the toolbar, you receive alerts of new messages, wall posts, friend requests, and other notifications you would typically receive via email. There is also a Yahoo search box, which I presume is how the developers hope to make a little money from their endeavor.

(My FB Toolbar - Mashable)