Life By Numbers and Notifications

From morning until night, I'm led by numbers and notifications. These numbers prompt me what to do next, what actions to take, and often, can be used to inform whether my decision was the right one. And throughout the day, all my devices, working in concert, alert me to what they believe is the information I need to know right now. As we've seen a graduation of our primary content consumption from longform text to microtext, we're moving again to the notification being the central medium by which our get our updates.

Like most of you, my day starts with an alarm clock - mine being on my Nexus 7. When the time hits a certain number, the familiar tone blares. I pick up the device and am confronted with two things: Notifications, which catch me up on the emails I received, responses on Twitter, and any texts or instant messages that came overnight. The next scan goes to the numbers. How are the stocks I watch doing? Up, down or unchanged? How many emails do I need to respond to, and do the social networks (Google+, Twitter and Facebook) need responses?

With the essential bits out of the way, I move on to the next numbers - which usually means opening up my laptop and using Feedly. Feedly, like Google Reader before it, catches all my RSS feeds and lets me know how many items are new, I hit J and K to get caught up, share the very best to Pocket (which then flows to LG Stream on Twitter), and bring that number down to zero.

Only with my email box empty, social networks made whole, and Feedly brought down to even can I move on to the next steps. No pun intended, that means getting ready for the day and making sure I have my Fitbit on - and have weighed in on the Fitbit Aria scale to track progress. If I'm completely wired, I might be sporting an Android Wear watch (I have the Samsung Gear Live), my Nexus 5, and the Fitbit. All three devices are counting my steps, and the Nexus 5 (thanks to the Moves App) actually tracks exactly where I've been and how long I stayed there - my every movement being tabulated.

   

Moves Tracks My Every Step in Parallel with Fitbit

The drive to work gets counted. Automatic scores me on a scale of 1 to 100 on whether I've driven too fast or wasted gas on the way. My GPS tells me how many more miles it is to reach my destination, and how many minutes it expects I'll sit in traffic and peek at my colleagues who are looking at their notifications on their devices while driving.

While I'm at the office, my Nest thermostat works in the numbers to keep the home temperature feeling just right. My Sunrun solar panels are taking in heat from the sun and converting it into Kilowatt hours of energy. If the numbers produced are higher than the numbers consumed, and they almost always are, then we saved money that day. The Rachio sprinkler system checks to see if expected rainfall is above a specific numeric value, and if it is, they simply won't run.

If I've updated my content channels, at home or at work, the numbers tell me what's happening - through Google Analytics, Twitter and Google+ Insights. Who's watching and engaging and sharing the content? I can be alerted if one of my posts has reached the top of Hacker News, or is shared by Marc Andreesen on Twitter. The numbers always tell the story.

The Hacker News bump begins.

While most of those numbers are a holdover from the PC and even mobile-centric world, the new age of devices is driven almost entirely by notifications. Google Glass, in addition to being a first-person perspective camera, is a notification machine, getting you the updates you need directly, and giving you the option to engage. Android Wear goes beyond the clock and brings the notification (and engagement) to the wrist.

Android Wear is here. You can get yours on Google Play.

Application developers are getting smarter about how they can make their app less passive and more active. If it can justify notifying you to an update - be it ESPN's SportsCenter alerting me to trades or Google Now telling me it's time to drive home, then the app stays on my radar. Abuse the privilege, and the app (often games) will get uninstalled.

The day's efforts becomes a balance of managing the numbers and the notifications. Answer the emails. Read the updates in Feedly. Respond to Twitter and Google+. Answer the instant messages.

There are three checkpoints to tell you how you're doing. The first comes at 1 p.m. Pacific (4 p.m. Eastern) when you find out how your stocks did on the market. Did you make money or lose it? Mint.com and the Check app can give you updates on your daily progress. The second comes at the end of the workday when you get home. Did you whittle down your work to inbox zero or have more to do when you left than when you started? And the third comes at the end of the calendar day. Did you walk enough to get your step goal? Did you drive well enough to keep your score at 100? Did your favorite team win? What was the score?

Then you get ready for the next day by setting the alarm and seeing, in clear numbers, how many more hours you have left before starting the numbers and notification race again. There's an app for that. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some notifications and updates to clear.

Disclosures (per usual): I work at Google, which owns Nest, and is behind Android Wear, Google Glass and the Nexus 5 and 7. Our friends at Facebook now own Moves, and we occasionally partner or compete with Twitter and others on various bits.

Twitteronia vs. Status.net: The Battle for Hosted Microblogging Begins

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Facebook/FriendFeed)

It's no secret that I'm a huge proponent of self-hosted Microblogging. I've written numerous times on LouisGray.com and my own blog about the benefits business can see by "rolling their own" microblog with their own brand, look and feel. Not sold on this idea? Read what I wrote earlier about the implications of ESPN running their own sports network, or even the company I advise for, TodaysMama.com and their recently-launched network for Moms, TodaysMama Connect (which has quite a community going now!).

There is something to be said for a brand being able to have full control over the relationships and community they build. Self-hosting is the only way to achieve this full control. This is why I was excited to see the developers of both Laconi.ca (which hosts TodaysMama Connect, Identi.ca, and Leo Laport's Twit Army), and OpenMicroblogger (which we also wrote about before) both come out with their own way to easily set up your own, hosted microblogging environment without the need to even run your own servers. The two services, Status.net, and Twitteronia, I guess you could say are the "Wordpress.com" of the "Wordpress.org-like" self-installed microblog platforms. They provide the complete set up for anyone to have their own branded microblog with just a few clicks of a mouse.

Status.net

Evan Prodromou has been busy since we last heard about Identi.ca and Laconi.ca. As we heard several months back, his company, Control Yourself received funding, and it would appear they're using the money well. They have multiple people working for them now, and in a different scenario than perhaps their biggest competitor, Twitter (that would assume that Twitter even releases their source code like Laconi.ca or communicates with other OMB instances), they have an actual business model.

When I chatted with Rachael Herrscher, CEO of TodaysMama, she told me Evan had given them several hours each month that they were paying for, to help them out with the install of their Laconi.ca instance. Evan and Laconi.ca are working with multiple similar clients to do the same - it's a business model that works because those brands that need some support and can have that guaranteed through payment will pay for the support and extra hand-holding.

It would appear that they are pursuing another business model however with a recent blog post by Evan (and Rob Diana also wrote about it on RegularGeek).

"I’ve been telling people for a few months that one of our plans for commercializing the Identica software and getting more people on the OpenMicroBlogging network is to have a hosted service for new microblogging communities. I wanted to get out some information about the upcoming service — I’m really excited about the prospective launch."

Status.net, according to Evan, will provide for both small and larger communities to have a branded environment to host on. It will be a for-pay service, and those with fewer users will pay less. "yoursitename.status.net" will point to your instance, although it wouldn't be that hard to point a CNAME domain record to redirect to that as an alias. All microblog instances set up under Status.net, just like any Laconi.ca instance, will be able to communicate with each other via the OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) protocol, meaning you'll be able to subscribe to a user's updates on another OMB-supported site without ever having to visit that site.

Evan seems to know his users are businesses. He hinted at integration with LDAP in the future, meaning you, as a business, will be able to seamlessly allow your company's employees and your existing company database to easily integrate into the system. Perhaps this means they plan to also go head-to-head with internal communities such as Yammer. I think this has a very strong external benefit as well though, and could give any company the edge to build a community around their brand, both internal and external.

Also hinted-at was the potential to integrate with other 3rd-party aggregation services. Perhaps such integrations will be sites such as FriendFeed, which already integrates Laconi.ca as an option. Such services will also most likely work under other Laconi.ca-supporting clients such as Twhirl. Evan is certainly creating the Wordpress.com for Microblogging platforms.

Twitteronia

Alongside Status.net, Brian Hendrickson, the developer behind OpenMicroBlogger, another open-source microblogging platform that also supports the OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) protocol, also has announced a similar hosted microblogging site. His is live currently, in private beta, and enables a very simple registration by just providing your Twitter OAuth credentials (however I'm a little unsure what would happen if one were ever to leave Twitter). OpenID is also a work in progress which will be supported shortly.

A site based on Shaq's own term for Twitter, Twitteronia calls each instance a "Twitter". Whether that's just a code-name for now (I can see Twitter's lawyers getting hungry over Trademark dispute, although I'm not sure "Twitter" is even a registered Trademark at the moment) or something they'll keep for the future is yet to be determined, but the terminology is interesting. Essentially, any user can create their own "Twitter", using their Twitter credentials, with just the click of a button.

Several sample "themes" are given for the site administrator to choose from in order to customize your implementation. I imagine many more will be added, as Brian Hendrickson's OpenMicroBlogger platform previously supported Wordpress themes natively. I am guessing this will eventually do the same, so maybe you'll even be able to create your own in a very familiar fashion to what any Wordpress developer could create.

In addition, with the ability to upload photos to each "Twitter" instance, you can also provide an Amazon S3 key which will enable those photos to go to your Amazon S3 storage. The site also supports Zeep Mobile 2-Way SMS integration.

The OpenMicroBlogging Revolution

The move to more open platforms is starting. I predicted this at the beginning of the year, stating that we would see more open source platforms delve into microblogging, and this is just the start. Status.net and Twitteronia are both sites with great potential to be leaders in this space. How large will they become before Facebook or FriendFeed, or Twitter follow suite? Will it even matter at that point, if companies can then pick and choose the platform of their choice where all platforms can talk back and forth with each other? It will certainly be interesting to watch - I certainly hope the major players are watching, as this will be where brands turn to as they need stronger control over their community.

You can check out my Stay N' Alive Twitteronia instance at http://twitteronia.com/twitter/staynalive - leave me a message and let me know what you think!

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Can Microblogging Power A Blog Community?

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

With the growing popularity of Twitter, people are looking at ways to use Twitter-like applications for different purposes. There are the corporate Twitters, like Yammer. There are open source Twitters, like Laconica. Now, Dave Winer is trying to find a way to "shrink wrap" a Twitter install. He is basing his efforts on the open source Laconica, and he is documenting things as he makes progress. Dave feels that it is time we break out of Twitter. It is not that there are problems with Twitter, but he has an interesting idea:

"It might mean lots of little Twitters. I'm starting one here on scripting.com, and in the first few hours of use it's already interesting. It wouldn't in any way be a replacement for Twitter. But it offers an alternative. Sort of like the difference between a blog and a big website, when blogs were just booting up in 1999 or so."

Why is this an interesting idea? Mainly because there is minimal discussion on most blogs and websites. In some cases, a website expands by creating forums or message boards. People can ask questions, get advice and respond to some of these same questions. So, does it make sense to have a local Laconica installation for a website? And what do we call these things? Dave has wondered whether Twitter will become the term for what techies are calling microblogging. That is not the real question. If we call it a Twitter install like we used to with Xerox and copiers, who really cares. That is a simplification of the question.

The real question is one of benefits. Forums are really useful in large communities due to the number of people that can ask and answer questions. However, there is a critical mass of members that must be reached before there is enough traffic in a forum for it to be useful. With a microblogging installation, you can interact directly with your readers and keep the conversation local to the blog. The sense of community could increase greatly. Events could be based on the use of the microblogging stream. Live blogging for events like SXSW could be covered through the microblogging stream.

The big issue with using microblogging is the ease of installation, maintenance and use. If Dave could accomplish his goal of a shrink-wrap Laconica installation, this would be significantly easier. Forums have significantly more overhead in terms of maintenance and use. Microblogging could be a simple baby step in forming more of a community around a blog.

If you really want to name this idea, you can call it a micro-community. Or to be simple, let's just call it a community, because that is what it really is.

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Twitter: Is There Room For Anyone Else?

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)


Recently, a question was raised to bloggers, should we shut up about Twitter? Eric Berlin responded with a simple no. He then goes on to list several reasons why Twitter may even go mainstream. Twitter actually going mainstream will be a big story as it is something different than the typical social network. However, Twitter is not the only game in town. Microblogging is quickly becoming a crowded field, even with the closing of competitor Pownce. Twitter is growing rapidly and none of the competition is anywhere close. What does the competition look like?

Twitter Alternatives
Pownce was probably the largest alternative, but they are no longer. So, what comes next? Below is a graph from Compete.com with 5 leading competitors, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Plurk, Kwippy and Yammer. Jaiku is the oldest of the group and is currently a Google property. However, since the middle of last year their traffic has trended down.


The general traffic trends in the graph above are very similar to what Alexa shows as well. Identi.ca had a big burst of traffic at their launch, but that traffic came down fairly quickly. It may be increasing again, but itis tough to tell. Kwippy had a nice boost during the summer, but their traffic has tapered off as well. TC50 darling Yammer is also trending downward, but they are the newest of the bunch and hoping to gain traction in corporate environments. The surprising statistic is the amount of traffic for Plurk. They have not lost a significant amount of traffic after gaining traffic while Twitter was having problems last May. They are also one of the few sites that is not "pure microblogging". What I mean is that they are not a Twitter clone with a different style and name. They have a different feature set and the timeline is a different way to view information. Mona Nomura stated that they have different demographics, even calling Plurk "the MySpace of Twitter". Assuming that the different demographics allow Plurk to continue to grow, what about the other alternatives? Is there room for more than just Twitter?

In its most basic form, Twitter will own the space unless Facebook status updates become more open. If this is true, then Twitter will share the masses with Facebook. Plurk would probably continue on, but its growth would likely be limited. The other question is whether there really is much more growth for microblogging.

Custom Communities and Niche Networks
I am a big believer in niche communities and networks. People gathering together with similar interests can quickly form a passionate community. Jesse Stay agrees with this sentiment and feels that niche microblogging networks will start to appear based on free and open platforms like Laconi.ca. This could become a very popular destination for a niche community. It is the equivalent of the forums and bulletin boards of past years, but with a new spin. These niche networks can also provide a way for people to find a community of "experts" for a specific topic.

On the custom community side, Yammer has a decent idea with trying to get into the corporate world. However, I think that their business model gets corporate people concerned. However, there are microblogging products that can be installed within the corporate firewall, like Laconi.ca or other commerical alternatives, in order to promote microblogging without the public consumption concerns. This could even be true for other communities like a large blog. If a blog has enough readers, they could build a community around the blog using a standalone microblogging product. It could easily sit behind some sort of registration or even become a premium feature for some sites if positioned correctly.

So, to answer my original question, is there room for more than Twitter? In the form of basic microblogging, there is little room, especially if Facebook pushes its status updates. However, if there are other features added, like what Plurk has done, the application could gain some adoption. There is likely plenty of room in the niche and custom communities precisely because Twitter is purely public. Is there some application that was missed that could gain significant marketshare?

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Walls, Blogs, and Power: Building Fortress Twitter

By Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist (FriendFeed/Twitter)

The race to build the perfect Twitter add-on service is in full bore. There are so many new services and applications being delivered these days that new sites are cropping up exist solely to aggregate and organize all the cool stuff that's being built on top of Twitter's open API. For example, Twitterati notes that the goal of Twitdom is "to provide a consolidated view of all the applications developed for the Twitter ecosystem."

Some have argued that Twitter's relative simplicity may be a factor holding it back from going "mainstream." While I disagree – I believe that Twitter's strong growth will continue – I have been keeping a close eye on those applications that add value to the basic Twitter service to create what I call "Twitter Pluses." In a sense, the Twitter Pluses could be thought of as iterations of the base platform that Twitter itself could hypothetically adopt for itself.

TwitWall
The first Twitter Plus that took my notice is called TwitWall. You sign in to TwitWall using your Twitter login and password (the ongoing Twitter phishing plague will make people nervous about doing this for a while, but that's a different topic, I'm afraid) and are brought to a profile page that looks much like your regular Twitter page.

There are two main features that make TwitWall interesting. The first is the ability to add posts longer than the standard 140 character limit that Twitter imposes. The idea is that you can tweet away under the normal 140-max, but you also have the ability to add additional text, images, and video that appear on the TwitWall "side." This is a way to increase the range of Twitter's microblogging platform for those who are interested in doing so.

TwitWall also allows you to insert ads into the right column, giving microbloggers the ability to monetize their microblogging efforts. This goes a ways towards making Twitter the "full-fledged publishing platform" that I talk about here.

A challenge that TwitWall will have to solve to really take off will be to solve the problem of multiple communities within the Twitterverse. In other words, most people are probably not going to want to add TwitWall friends on top of the normal process of fleshing out a Twitter social network.

Twitblogs
Twitblogs, a service that was released to the public recently, is similar to TwitWall but has fewer features thus far and a somewhat rougher-feeling interface.

I chatted recently via e-mail with Roger Kondrat, co-founder of Twitblogs, who notes that "we are going to add lots of value to the Twitter community but that won't be obvious for a couple weeks yet. Until then Twitblogs will at the very least give users a more flexible way to engage on Twitter using Rich Media such as images, video and sound as well as the additional characters 140+ that so many found useful on other services non-Twitter services."

Power Twitter
Power Twitter, covered by TechCrunch this week, is a Firefox add-on that amongst other things fuses the popular Twitter search service (formerly Summize) into the Twitter profile experience itself. Overall, Michael Arrington muses that "this is the way to fix Twitter, directly via the user interface, not from a third party site that users will forget to go to.

My opinion is that while most of these services add value in different ways, Twitter doesn't need to be fixed in the first place: it works just fine as is, but the bevy of new services and add-ons allow the various factions of Fortress Twitter to customize the experience in many different ways.

Read more by Eric Berlin at Online Media Cultist

SocialToo Launches SocialSurveys for Polling Via Twitter

For the last few months, I've been using a service called SocialToo to transparently and automatically follow those people who choose to follow my accounts on Twitter and Identica. Rather than resort to manually deciding who to add to my list, or going to other services, such as Twitter Karma, SocialToo has been automatically synchronizing my lists. Today, the author, Jesse Stay, also a frequent contributor to this site, has rolled out a new feature aimed at making the service much more interactive and differentiated, with the launch of SocialSurveys, a viral way to quickly poll your followers on Twitter.

As with other online polling engines, creation of the survey consists of posting a question and listing potential answers. You have to list at least two choices, of course, but you can theoretically post as many options as you wish.

When the survey is completed, you can then check the box that sends the URL for the survey via Twitter, and hit submit. This sends the survey to Twitter, and automatically reduces the URL using the is.gd engine, to fit in Twitter's strict 140 character limit.

Given that SocialToo is "social" by nature, you can even sign up to follow surveys your friends have created, using RSS.

The addition of SocialSurveys is an interesting wrinkle atop what is already a fairly strong feature set for SocialToo, despite its spartan interface. You can not only autofollow the Twitter and Identica registrants, as I mentioned, but you can blacklist people from ever following you, or even automatically unfollow those who stop following you, essentially acting as your own personal Qwitter in the background. And if you want, you can even route your personal socialtoo.com domain to your Facebook profile.


How SocialSurveys Appear to Visitors

The Results of the SocialSurvey, In Bar Chart Form
SocialToo, authored by Jesse, is partly owned by Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki, upon the launch of SocialSurveys, is sponsoring the site with Alltop ads for the first few weeks.

My ID on SocialToo, as with just about all other services these days, is "louisgray", and louisgray.socialtoo.com routes to my Facebook page. To see my first SocialSurvey, on who will own Yahoo! by 2012, check out: http://socialtoo.com/survey/view/49.

Can Microblogs Just Talk To Each Other?

Guest Post By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Twitter has had a bad few days. After a few weeks of wonderful stability, we started to see some Fail Whales. Then people started losing followers and subscriptions. Because of this, even more people are moving to alternative micro-blogging services like Identi.ca. Of course there have been several requests for a Twitter friend importer. I think people are getting caught up in the problem and not thinking about the best solution. Previously, I mentioned that Twitter was at the crossroads. In that post I started thinking about a possible solution:

It is now late May and they are just admitting that they have infrastructure problems. Obviously, there are the redundancy and replication issues that can be solved with known techniques. The realtime API needs to be using a replicated database and not affect the main database. This is the part that is concerning me the most as it should have been obvious some time ago.

Another post appeared from Dave Winer where he mentioned that we are inching toward federation.

Right now, today I'm using an approximation to the ideal system. I try to enter my original post on FriendFeed, then I have an agent script running on one of my machines that routes it to Twitter and Identi.ca, with a pointer to the discussion thread on FriendFeed, shortened by bit.ly.

Obviously, this is not a good solution to the Twitter problem either. There are also multi-posting services like Ping.fm and Posty which allow a user to update each of their micro-blogging services with the same message. So, with one click you can update Twitter, Identi.ca, Pownce, Jaiku and Plurk. While that sounds really cool, they only provide one-way updates. Tools like Twhirl are starting to allow posting and retrieving of tweets and dents in one application. This gets a little better, but you still have multiple accounts to deal with.

Federated Microblogging

Federation is the real answer. What does federation do and why is it different from Twitter creating a distributed architecture? A distributed architecture means you have various pieces of the application sitting on different servers. Typically, several parts are replicated or redundant and there are various load balancing devices thrown in to complete the architecture. I am not going to go into tons of detail as books have been written about distributed architectures.

Federation is different from distributed in one simple sense. Federation requires a full copy of the entire system. Federation is the cooperation between various systems to act as one. Wikipedia has a good description of a federated database system.

A federated database system is a type of meta-database management system (DBMS) which transparently integrates multiple autonomous database systems into a single federated database. The constituent databases are interconnected via a computer network, and may be geographically decentralized. Since the constituent database systems remain autonomous, a federated database system is a contrastable alternative to the (sometimes daunting) task of merging together several disparate databases.

If you replace all of the database and database system terminology with microblogging and microblogging system you will understand a federated system. So, how does this help Twitter? It does not, at least not directly. By having a federated system, people can move to Identi.ca or the next clone that appears and not lose their followers. If you think about the concepts of email, you will understand how the federated system would work. My account in the federated system would be robdiana@identi.ca. A Twitter user could reply from within Twitter directly to me (robdiana@identi.ca) and I would receive it in whatever client application I had. I could also follow Twitter users, Pownce users or any other microblogging user. By enabling people to communicate across platforms would mean that the server load would be spread across various services, thus decreasing the amount of traffic on Twitter directly.

The one part of the federation that is missing is the routing between servers. This can be accomplished by following the DNS model. A local DNS server has a reference to its parent or master server. This allows new servers to be built and their location and IP address propagated to other servers. This is a very effective solution and it has worked for several years.

Because Twitter and Identi.ca follow the same API, they could act as the root servers in the system. The other option to the Twitter API is the XMPP protocol, which Twitter is using for their realtime API. The protocol choice is important because a federated system requires that all of the systems speak the same language. A federated system would also require a different client application than we have now. As I mentioned earlier, Twhirl fully supports Identi.ca and Twitter. However you are dealing with two different accounts. How cool would it be if you had one microblogging client to chat with people on any service?