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I’ve probably fallen foul of at least one of the bad habits by linking to this, but here goes anyway: The 10 Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers
Archive for 21 May 2003
In fact, the very
next post I saw described exactly that:
I have to admit, for all the hype it’s received, I don’t understand the
point of Plaxo at all. Everything I read about it makes it seem like a 1999
overhyped, overfunded, half-baked idea. It was founded by a former Napster
founder, and the idea is to let people href="http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5911375.htm">constantly
“ping” everyone in their address book to make sure the information they
have is current. First off, even if this is a useful feature, that’s all it
is. It’s a feature. It’s not anything to build a business around. If it’s
really that useful, I’m sure the next generation of email clients will just
build it in. Second, I don’t even think it’s that useful. In fact, I think it
sounds annoying. In the months that they’ve been beta testing, I’ve received
one such Plaxo ping, and I ignored it. I don’t want to be bothered all the
time from people who I haven’t spoken to in some time, having a robot ask me
to update my contact info. Personally, if I realize I’ve fallen out of touch
with someone I want to keep up with, I send them a personal note to see how
they’re doing. An automated ping isn’t exactly the friendliest way to say
hello - and I might even consider it spam in some cases.
[Techdirt]
I’m not sure I’d be
quite so harsh about the idea - if it sat behind the scenes and there was some
form of brokerage going on that meant I could control the process, wouldn’t
that make it somewhat more acceptable?
quite so harsh about the idea - if it sat behind the scenes and there was some
form of brokerage going on that meant I could control the process, wouldn’t
that make it somewhat more acceptable?
They might be
unoriginal, but they’re still bloody good ideas.
Does it even have to
be a mobile-based application? My phone syncs with my desktop, so
anything that’s in my phone is also sat in a database that’s addressable from a
web client. If my contacts database could ping your contacts
database through some kind of a trackback mechanism, wouldn’t that have the same
effect?
Notes from a conversation with href="http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/">Dan Hill pertaining (in
particular) to address books on mobile phones. I make no claim to their
originality or their novelty. Almost certainly they’re on page six of a really
well known influential book that I almost certainly should have read by
now.Thought one: The mobile phone address book as a web of trust.
This is really trivial, but it’s also really powerful - the telephone numbers
in your mobile phone all identify actual people (however you decide to encode
the metadata of their names). The telephone number is like the unique id
number that you give a field in a database. So what does it mean if a pair of
phones have each others numbers in their address book? Doesn’t it imply a
relationship? Perhaps even a similarity? Maybe it even means that you’re more
likely than average to like each other? So if you pinged every phone that’s
got internet access (and the phone was happy for you to do this) you could
pretty easily make a social network map of pretty much everyone in the
country. This is not a new idea.Thought two Self-assembly address books. So you’ve lost your
phone and with it you’ve lost all of your numbers. So you ring up two or three
of your friends and they amend their record to your new number and you add
their numbers to your phone. Then you trigger the ‘fix my address book’
trigger and sit back and watch. Your phone pings your friends’ phones. Their
phones ping their friends’ phones. Everyone who has your old number in it is
informed of your new number, and they ping your phone and build in the
reciprocal links. And those people who appear most interconnected between the
groups of friends you’ve mentioned are also added to your phone. An instant
sense of your social network. An instant way of grabbing your local space…
This is probably not a new idea.Thought three Distributed 192. 192 was (until very recently)
the telephone number for directory enquiries in the UK. You ring it, tell them
the name and address of the person you’re looking for and they give you a
number. Brilliant. Except if you don’t have their address of course. And it
costs money and stuff. And it doesn’t work with mobiles. So what if instead of
doing that, you typed in a search term, “Coates” into your phone and got it to
ping everyone in your address book, aggregate the results and display them to
you. Wouldn’t that be easier? I don’t know whether this is a new idea or not.
I would doubt it.Thought four Collaborative work over mobile phones. So you’ve
got a web-of-trust and you have a communications medium. So basically that’s
friendster then with a rather more intensive old-skool version of instant
messaging (let’s call it “speech”). I wonder if there are people out there
working on social software for phones. Or maybe social software that doesn’t
actually have much of a human interface at all, something that’s really
collaboratively sense related. Like a cyber-pet with two buttons that you can
press - one if you really like a place and one if you really hate it. And then
that’s geocoded and shared through your web of trust (because you’re similar
to people you know). When you go into a place that everyone dislikes, your
cyberpet freaks out. And if you go to a place that everyone likes, it starts
to purr pleasantly in your pocket… I bet someone’s thought of that as
well…href="http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/05/highly_unoriginal_thoughts_about_mobile_devices.shtml#comments">Read
the comments
This is a
seriously impressive piece of software. Worth every penny,
which is saying something for shareware.
http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=593
| href="http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=593">CommentsNewsGator 1.2 has been released! I
won’t duplicate the release announcements…here are the important
links:
- Blogger
- Radio Userland
- BlogX
- dotnetweblogs.com
- Movable Type (courtesy Matt
Berther)- EraBlog.NET.
