David Beach's Blog

Dipity

Update: I added my own timeline to this post now that I know the embed works well.

I really like Dipity. It's an awesome application that organizes and visualizes stuff (feeds, life content, whatever) using time. Their main view is a timeline but they also have a flipbook view like itunes and a list view. Here's an example. I want to see how the embed works...

Twitter Tutorial

Somewhat Reblogging from Laughing Squid. This is a sweet video tutorial from Common Craft about Twitter. Nicely done.

SocialThing: "Digital Life Manager"

I hope to have a conversation with Matt Galligan about SocialThing soon (I've been ill). He contacted me after a comment I made on Mark Krynsky's lifestreamblog. I had heard about SocialThing but hadn't made it to the site until just now. I hope to try it sometime. Something on the page caught my eye. They are calling the service a "Digital Life Manager", this is very cool. As you may know, the Digital Life Manager has been part of my bag for the past three years. It's nice to see someone using the term and potentially building something cool. I look forward to checking it out... and I encourage you to sign up for the beta. By the way I really dig the illustration on their homepage and the little blobby character they have. So far so good :)

Information Bankruptcy

This pretty much sums up what I'm feeling.

I don't use a feed reader. I find that it's too easy to get overwhelmed. Too much data. Too many distractions.

I've been working on setting up the next Search SIG with Dave McClure and noticed that he's been out of pocket. He had not been answering emails. I decided to check his blog to make sure he was still alive. Thankfully he's fine, but then I saw what was going on. He's declared email bankruptcy. Too much input. I never thought of this, and it took me a second, but I understand.

I don't have the same issue with email. For some reason I don't get much at Yahoo. Maybe because of IM and IRC. Email at Brickhouse isn't the primary form of communication. Especially at the SF office. Everyone's two feet away. I do have several email accounts that I have to check regularly. Work. itsbeach, gmail, yahoo. I check Facebook and Twitter often. Twitterific is often on. Yahoo IM and Skype are now always on. Admittedly this is too much. Add the blogs and the articles and the other crap I've convinced myself that I care about (keeping up with startups, competitors, friends, friend's ideas, photos, videos, new technologies, politics, family, local stuff, podcasts, music, the latest and greatest, and on and on). It turns into one giant pogo party across the web and into my head.

Every few months, I clean out the information mess. I unsubscribe as much as possible. But it doesn't last long. my attention inbox fills up pretty fast. I would love a simplicity app.

Jerry Yang (of Yahoo, not the poker player) unveiled a new idea called Inbox 2.0 (or something) at CES earlier this month. This is part of Yahoo's starting point strategy. This is supposed to expand mail into more than mail. Mail is your starting point, so why not cram other stuff into it? Like social network friend updates, IM, news, maps, recommendations, etc... your entire "social graph" and "attention" peodopular plediptions. Why not open that up so others can build apps to expand your mail/starting point experience? I really don't know much about this, but I can hypothesize where it's going. At first, this may sound like a good idea. And, well maybe it is. It's all in the implementation. But this can get messed up pretty fast. Too much data. Yes, filters can be built. Your "graph" has big bubbles for the people and the stuff you care about more and smaller bubbles for the stuff on the fringe, but still. I can see this leading to more "email bankruptcy" pretty fast. I mean your inbox is already too much to deal with... even with filters. It's really information bankruptcy.

I want my starting point to lead me to my ending point as fast as possible. I want to build an app that can handle as much input as possible, but does predictive filtering on the output based on what is important or interesting to me at that moment. I want something that can organize my life stream and all that gets put into it in a way that allows me to recall what I want, when I want it... without much effort. I don't want to miss out, but I want to have a life. A real life. I don't want to feel stress that something missed my attention, but I don't want to be glued to a screen or device. I want to refinance my information with a much lower "interest" rate.

This way I hope I can avoid declaring information bankruptcy.

Time Machine + Time Capsule + iLife + .mac = Life Caching

It looks like Apple is on the Life Caching track. Today they introduced Time Capsule, a 500 GB or 1 TB wireless backup devise. If you combine that with Time Machine (a OS X Leopard feature) and their digital life capturing software (iLife) you get Life Caching. I've called it Digital Life Management, but it's the same thing really. All they need to do is combine it with iCal and provide a way for the life content to be published and you have something special. Not that these tools aren't special, but I've never understood why they haven't done this. Maybe they will, but until then there's an opportunity for something cool.

New Look

I was getting tired of the heavy red header, so I picked off a new template for this here blog. Cleaned things up. Hopefully this will last a while. I also worked on my Tumblr page, since JoeLaz says that people look at it.

Taking a closer look at Tumblr, I noticed their archive. They seem to be taking the notion of life streaming seriously. I don't know how intentional it is, but they understand digital life management.

SuprGlu - Gluing your life together.

This is about as close to the first piece of a Digital Life Manager that I've seen. What's left? A calendar, time management, and the social network.

Link: SuprGlu - Gluing your life together..

iTunes To Sell You Your Home Videos For $1.99 Each

Another revenue model for the Digital Life Manager. ;) The funny thing about this is that there's a modicom of truth to it. Apple could very easily connect their iLife products with iCal and .mac to create a kind of DLM. Then sell it all back to you... Ha!

"Ladies and gentlemen, the future of home-video viewing is now," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at  a media event Tuesday morning. "As soon as you record that precious footage of your daughter's first steps, you'll be able to buy it right back from iTunes and download it directly to your computer and video iPod."'

Link: iTunes To Sell You Your Home Videos For $1.99 Each | The Onion - America's Finest News Source.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is finally here. I've waited over a year for this. I'm happy to say that it's everything I expected it to be... it's a very good and simple shared AJAX calendar. Nothing more, nothing less. There are some bugs, and it's a bit slow on the sharing and finding contacts task, but overall I'm pleased. Actually it's a bit slow all around. I'll review it more plus do some comparisons to other calendars over the weekend.

TalkCrunch & Thoughts for Today

I don't have the energy to come up with a decent title for this post, so search engines be damned...

I've been catching up with some podcasts this week. This morning I finally took a listen to Michael Arrington's (from TechCrunch) TalkCrunch. I heard their first installment about calendaring. Really cool stuff. The podcast does so much to put humanity behind these sweet, new products that are being developed. It's important to keep that in mind. I got such a better sense of what zvents and 30boxes are doing and trying to do. I came away with a deep respect for these guys. Michael and Nic as well. Above all the web is about people. Most Web 2.0 applications are designed to provide people with a voice, or control, or a place to feel involved, or comfortable. Getting to know the people behind these products in a comfortable and casual way is something that Michael is doing with his podcast.

Since calendars are very near and dear to my heart, I was happy to hear some good discussion on the subject. zvents has a great grasp on monetization which I'm so happy to hear, and 30boxes understand its audience and is well positioned to take off in the next 6 months. This also makes me happy :)

I also enjoyed the discussion on how all of these guys realize that they can't get caught up in the hype. They recognize the importance of the core early adopters and influencers, but they understand that there is a huge audience of folks that need simple applications and are very new to the social web. Again, happy to hear that, with these guys. We can not design for ourselves. We have to solve real problems. So check out TalkCrunch if any of this junk interests you. Michael is a tremendous filter; pay attention.

I've been encouraged lately to start to learn to program. Leonard and Andy from Upcoming.org suggested that I jump into Ruby on Rails. I've considered this before, but I'm now convinced that it's something I need to do to better express myself. A working demo or prototype is the only way to get people's attention these days. No one reads documentation or can understand wireframes or even rendered designs unless they have something to play with. I'll keep you posted on this new chapter.

ETech: Calendars are hot + gCal images

Calendars have been discussed quite a bit today. Scoble did a a good job with his 2006 report card. He tore Yahoo! Calendar apart for not being able to do the most basic things like select a specific time for flight information...

Time has been a hot topic too. Time is perishable, time is scarce in this new world of abundance.

Ajax calendars are popping up all over the place. Let me say it again, we don't need another ajax calendar. If using Ajax and accessing feeds is your idea of calendar innovation, give up. I'm talking to you 30boxes and Google Calendar. We have to break free of what we traditionally think of as a calendar. It's not about 30 boxes or 7 days; it's about time. Time. Managing time, making time, making life less complicated, make meaning out of my life...

That's not what Google is doing, nor anyone else that I've seen. You may think that it's not a calendar's job to do that--make meaning out of my life. But why not? A temporal visualization of my existence is perfectly suited for a calendar context. I am more than just my events. Let's see a calendar that truly understands this.

Link: TechCrunch � Exclusive Screenshots: Google Calendar.

Plum

I just saw the DEMO demo for Plum. I'm a little overwhelmed. The problem with demoing something that is complex and potentially game-changing at DEMO, is that you only get the 6 minutes. Sure that should be plenty of time to convey a concept, but the Plum demo was packed so full with compelling features and interactions, it was hard to take it all in. Plum has a lot of elements that I consider necessary for a Digital Life Manager. I think it crossed into DLM territory when they showed how it can capture content from your desktop in order to archive and share it on the interweb. Among other things. I can not wait to get my hands on it.

I do fear that they've packed too many features into this thing. It could very easily sail right over the heads of most people. Although the basic interface looks accessible (it sure is pretty), it's going to take some time for the average person to have a reason to make use of it all.

Please remeber that the Web 2.0 community is very very small. I think that many people are designing for themselves instead of for the betterment of the medium and others. My friend Cale Peeples touches on this in a recent post.

"It seems that the Internet has become more compartmentalized - more widget oriented. It may be an evolution of sorts, but I think the the evolution is slowing down and maybe even stagnating. For better or for worse, the focus is shifting from innovation to stabilization and the innovations that exist are narrowly focused and introverted.

The prevailing mood is less "look what we can do with the internet" and more "look what I can do in a browser"."

While this doesn't necessarily describe the Plum concept, it does describe the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon very well.

Where are the big ideas? I'll say it again... Where are the big ideas?

To any of you who are developing a w2.0 service/feature/business with the desired outcome of being purchased by Yahoo! or Google or whatever... Stop what you're doing and get a real job.  It will never happen.  If you're trying to change the fucking world come hell or high water and that's your sole desire... talk to me. That's what's needed.

We haven't even tapped the Internet's potential. Please don't be complacent and think that what you see is what you get. It doesn't have to be. It can be anything. We don't really need a better -fill in the blank-. Do we? Make people's lives better.

If I can give you one bit of advice, it is this... Solve real problems, not made up ones.

Plum might be close. It sure is damn interesting. And it sure is getting closer to the DLM vision. Hey Plum dudes, release it already!