Web 35.2 Is here

Forget Web 2.0 or Web 3.0. Web 35.2 is here.

By sunrise, we’d hit Web 10.0 and the VCs were lined up at SFO to hand checks to people as they arrived. The police were called when a few of them were caught slipping term sheets into INS new-arrival paperwork, but Vinod Khosla was called in to negotiate and the situation was defused without violence. At one point there was talk of blocking the southbound 101 and not letting anyone pass without accepting an investment, but cooler heads prevailed and they settled on the 280.

Touchstone won't work... we give up

Just kidding...

As I posted earlier, we were mentioned on Ajaxian. The resulting torrent of conversation and requests has made us a little dizzy. But one comment on the Ajaxian site itself struck my interest:

OMG what a great time to be alive!!!!
Kiss your browser goodbye: The radical future of media beyond the Web
Comment by hmmm — March 29, 2006

Please excuse the state of the website he linked to, it seems to be a poorly maintained archive from Wired Magazine.

In it, they claim that Push technologies are going to be the 'next big thing' replacing the browser and making us all work and play like super human beings.

Sounds encouraging for Touchstone right? Well actually he was being sarcastic because it was published in 1997 and it was referring to the last round of push publishing clients that came out including Microsoft's active desktop.

It didn't work then, so why should it work now?

So we give up...

Well not quite :) but I don't think we should shy away from the reality that Push publishing has happened before - so have compact applications that try to display content to the screen while a user works.

So I thought I might make a post about all the reasons Touchstone wont work.

It's too annoying to have things pop up all the time.

Just recently a couple of new applications out there are trying the 'RSS updates while you work' approach and receiving lots of flack for being annoying and distracting.

So how is Touchstone different from the last round of Push technologies and the latest round of annoying popup applications.

1. We don't use proprietary approaches to get the content 'pushed'. RSS and OPML are proven examples of push technology (I must say here that RSS is technically implemented as a PULL mechanism but it looks like push in terms of self-updating content). This means that the technology and approach are already accepted (unlike in the 90s) and there is a far broader base of content to drawn on - not just the companies who have set up media deals with Microsoft.
   
   
2. Touchstone is first and foremost an Attention Management Engine. What does that mean? It means that we do not push everything to the screen. We use an increasingly complex process to rank each item and then allow the user to determine, based on importance, how to display (or not) given importance thresholds. We have said from the beginning that Touchstone will live or die not by what it displays, but rather what it suppresses from a user's desktop.
   
   
3. Even if Touchstone never gets used as an RSS reader we don't care. Touchstone is not an RSS reader. It is an Attention Management Engine for Alerts and Updates. With an increasing number of web-based apps, users must have a way to get alerted to changes outside of the Browser sandbox. Something that client-side apps have taken for granted since the invention of the GUI. So Touchstone might fail... as an RSS reader... lucky we are not a RSS reader ;)
   

Imagine getting notified when someone joins your social network. Imagine getting told when someone assigns a project task to you via BackPack. All without leaving your work.

It is interesting to note here that I saw a comment about another RSS alert application that read 'I would use it if it was a Firefox add-in'. What about when Firefox is closed or minimized? Think outside the 'browser sandbox'.

[Name your gadget/widget platform here] already lets us send/get alerts to the client-side.

True. But how many gadgets and alerts do you want on your desktop? Does having 10 gadgets help you with your attention or further confuse the hell out of you?

Touchstone is not a gadget platform. I often struggle to explain this part because people look at the adapters as gadgets.

The clearest example I can give is that, with Touchstone, stocks prices do not appear on a stocks gadget. They appear in one of many ways. If it's an important change (like Google dropping 20 points) then it appears as an alert that follows your cursor for a few seconds. If it's an unimportant change then it might just appear on the ticker (or not at all). So yes there might be 10 widgets, but they are only visible when there is an alert, and only 1 gadget at a time depending on how important the alert is.

Conclusion

This post has ended up a little longer than I'd hoped. But I just wanted to let you all know that we quit... or maybe not :)

Touchstone mentioned on Ajaxian and MoMB

Michael Mahemoff from Ajaxian was kind enough to mention Touchstone. Thanks for that Michael.

We also got mentioned by the Museum of Modern Betas thanks to Saurier.

I OPML Therefore I Am

We are working late again and I got distracted by CafePress so I created a store. Just a little bit silliness really.

Maybe this is our real business model ;)

What's your business model?

Our traffic is going through the roof. It's fun to watch. In fact, I am a little addicted to checking our Feedburner and Mailing list subscriptions and HTTP stats. Am I crazy?

But with all this attention, people are asking me "What is your business model". Well now I have a one word answer... Freemium.

BusyBody will work out when you're busy

Caleb, one of our new testing recruits, sent me an email today with a great article entitled "How to cut through the info blitz and actually get some work done".

It's a great read and proves, once again, that there isn't any field of software and information services that Microsoft isn't involved in... even Attention Management. They have a very theoretical (it seems like a Microsoft Research project more than a product at this stage) project called BusyBody that seems to focus on predicting how busy a user is and creating a model for the 'cost of interruption'.

That's ok, Yahoo or Google will have to buy us one day to catch up ;). But that's another story.

The article discusses the impact of unmanaged interruptions on a user. A study reveals that people can loose around 10 IQ points while they are both working and being interrupted by incoming email, IM and other alerts.

It goes without saying that with an alert management mechanism like Touchstone in the mix (assuming one can funnel all their alerts through our platform) that we might help in reducing the 'noise'.

Another idea they raise is the ability for an attention management platform to go into low impact modes where the user is trying to concentrate on a specific task and wants to turn the volume down on interruptions. We considered a similar idea for Touchstone for when the user was 'idle' or away from the computer, but this article has given me the idea that it might also be useful to have a 'low impact' mode as well.

We have always maintained from the beginning. Touchstone will be judged a success not by the amount of items it displays, but rather by the number of extraneous items it suppresses on behalf of the user.

Good work Caleb - thanks for letting me know about this great article!

RSS has the 'good enough' quality that made mp3 so popular

Content has become detached from it's container. That's the subject of a post by Richard McManus on Read/Write Web.

It's an interesting look on a trend that we are all tracking now with the advent of RSS and Feed Readers as the new way to consume large amounts of content and syndicate information across 'applications'.

He also delves into Microformats and Tivo as clear examples of the trend.

But this post also reminded me of something I have had at the back of my mind for a while.

People say that Microsoft does not innovate. They say the most recent example is that they almost missed the boat on RSS and Ajax and are only now playing catch up.

I think those people are wrong. In this case they forget that Outlook Web Access pioneered many AJAX techniques and that Microsoft lead charge for XML Web Services.

At the end of the day, RSS (and REST) are rudimentary implementations of an approach Microsoft has been pushing for many, many years.

This article also shows a quote from Microsoft that has helped crystallize what I respect about them as a company. They may not always be first or best... but they are always the ones to take what is 'good enough' and make it so simple that anyone can use it. That has value that us geeks may not appreciate - but that the general community will always need.

The quote was in reference to choosing RSS over Atom - "RSS has the good enough quality that made mp3 so popular"... I think that is a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

Microsoft already has a complex solution for stitching applications together - it's called XML web services based on .NET. With RSS their just trying to support the simple/remixable web. Clear and simple.

Update: I just watched the Mix06 Bill Gates keynote - and they raised the observations I msde in this post. So I guess I am not very clever after all :)

Touchstone Ouput Adapter - myBroadSheet

John from Library Clips and I have been emailing back and forward about our idea of 'news as a newspaper'.

It was a project that I have wanted to start for a while. The idea being that RSS news could be presented less like email (as feed readers do) and more like a print newspaper.

I have had the domain myBroadSheet (.com, .net and .org) registered for a while, but I had hidden the site away ready for the day when I had a flash animator to help me create the first broadsheet.

Then John posted on his blog about an idea that almost exactly resembled the project I was trying to start!

We got to talking and he has kindly linked to the staging site and put the word out to find a flash animator for us.

Powered by Touchstone, we could easily create an enriched XML file that had enough information (article importance, related images, items from multiple feeds etc) that a flash file would consume and present to the screen in a way that resembles a good old fashioned newspaper.

I saw it as a way to give a niche news experience (the experience that RSS makes possible) in a metaphor that made RSS more user friendly.

So let us know if you want to help out and you have 'l337 flash skilz'.

Mine's bigger than yours!

I have often wondered - is it who you know or what you know. I think it's a combination of both.

That's why it is probably true that if you live in one of the tech centers of the U.S., fly to all the conferences and have working histories with the big names in the community that you're going to get talked about more.

There are a number of questions that arise from this assumption though.

Is it a deliberately walled garden, is it inertia or is it just an old-fashioned schoolyard clique?

Is there a way to break into [whatever it is] when you live an ocean away without flying over to attend the conferences and social events?

Do they need to talk about you to be successful with end-users?

Believe it or not, these questions (although I am only just now raising them) were the inspiration for our slogan - 'Are you paying attention?'

It seemed to embody the question we were asking of the A-List as well as of our target end-users.

The reason I write about this now is many-fold.

On listible recently I listed Touchstone, on a total whim, on the list 'Web 2.0 Beta Programs you just HAVE to be in'. Within a few days we had risen to number 1 on that list! It was crazy. We were above gMail, Listible itself, Google's new calendar CL2 and even Digg (with their ‘Digg effect’).

Maybe there were just a few votes on the page anyway, but it was a fun little achievement.

Since then we have dropped to 10th place (at time of writing of course). Maybe it was a little backlash against the unknown Touchstone topping out over the big names. Maybe people gave it no thought what-so-ever. Maybe we just don't have 'brand recognition'.

Another reason I bring this up is because we have obviously emailed a few big names about what we're doing in the hopes that we get a little mention on a blog. Why not? After all, there are coming soon screens that have received plenty of publicity before. But we haven’t received a single post reviewing the project's philosophy.

This post is probably a bit too long about a topic that is probably not very important - and I am honestly not complaining - I just thought I would put it out there as an interesting aside. I think these are questions that a few people who are just starting out must be asking themselves.

Do you have to be physically present in the social clique of the cool crowd to get noticed - even now in the social, casual and democratic web? Or does it just take a little more time?

I guess we will find out!

As Jason (37Signals) said during his SxSW speech - it's good to be in obscurity for a while - then you get to fail while no one is watching.

Oh... and if you're on the A-List and you're reading this - how about a post on your blog :)

What is RSS?

I have been browsing sites today (as I do) and I keep coming across this question:

"What is RSS?".

The question is posed by sites in anticipation of new users not quite knowing what RSS is. The question is invariably linked to a page that explains what RSS is and points to a few related articles and aggregators.

Do people go around saying "I browsed some great HTML today"? No. Of course not. Because HTML is mainstream and browsers are mainstream. The technology that sits underneath the presentation of website is just as pointless to an end user as RSS is.

Instead, I would much rather sites took the time to offer RSS as an experience rather than a technology.

Instead of "What is RSS" perhaps it should read "Track this Search Result".

Taking it one step further - why not offer a branded RSS tracking experience so that the uninitiated can get into RSS without having to hear those three little letters uttered ever again.

"Track this with Touchstone"

When we start treating RSS like a solution - users will start treating it as a neccessary part of their day.

Got some tasks?

Ever tried building a plug-in manager? It is fascinating work. Check out Mike's task bar as he manages a number of separate projects that each need to talk to each other across assembly boundaries.



This new build is shaping up to be unrecognizable from the last round of builds. It will focus more on satisfying the developer community's needs in terms of leveraging our engine to get a user's attention in a way that makes their life easier.

'Attention' is so last month. 'Gestures' are the new currency.

Honestly.. I have not digested the impact of this post yet - but it seems important so I thought I would share it with you all.

GestureBank - The new, new new-economy (hah) is not based on Attention (that's been done) but rather on Gestures.

Touchstone is ANTI-Web 2.0?

This post on FontShop made me wonder out loud... Is Touchstone a Web 2.0 Project?

First let's define Web 2.0. It's a buzzword. As Frank pointed out to me recently in an email, and I have posted on this blog before, I have a problem with Buzzwords.

My problem is not that I don't like them, but rather I use them too much. I find that they provide a common shorthand that people understand so that we can cut past the ordinary and start discussing the extra-ordinary.

Of course, Buzzwords (by the time their considered Buzzwords) lose their meaning because in the mad rush to jump on the bandwagon, they become so broad that no one actually knows what fits inside the paradigm anymore. It becomes 'me too' and 'Oh that again'.

But that's a tangent about Buzzwords. In reality, Web 2.0 merely describes a current trend to move rich applications from the client-side to the web and to do it in a very grass-roots, social, democratic way.

So, looking at it that way, Touchstone is actually ANTI-Web 2.0. We are on the client-side *shock horror*. How can this be? Even feed-readers are moving to the web - with some achieving almost the exact same interaction model as a local application (good old AJAX).

Why would/should/could the Web 2.0 community, and their users, care about Touchstone?

My personal stance is this. Touchstone is not of the Web 2.0 community, but rather a response to it.

What do I mean? I mean that the very fact that applications are finding themselves moved off the local machine and into the cloud has necessitated the creation of a client-side all-purpose dashboard that allows those 'cloud-based' applications (their not all necessarily exposed as a website maybe?) to alert the user of changes and updates that need attention. As good as cloud-based apps are, they can't do that on their own - AJAX or no AJAX.

Sure there are gadgets, active desktop components (yuck) and email - But I think Touchstone is better than all that stuff. And I am not biased in any way ;)

So, my Web 2.0, Buzzword loving friends - Touchstone is not part of the Web 2.0 world (because it isn't based on the web!) but it sure makes that world a whole lot more interesting and useful.

Reach out and touch your users...

Attention Management with Ambient Displays

In my last post I mentioned the concept of "Attention Ambience". Now comes a essay explaining the concept of "Ambient Displays".

It is a fascinating paper about the ways in which the most important aspects of information can be abstracted and displayed in a way that is glance-able with more important information calling more attention to itself.

Or as I would say - the more important the information, the more disruptive the presentation.

The more I read about this 'Ambient Attention' idea the more I feel like the phrase applies to Touchstone.

The difference between Touchstone and the examples shown in the essay is that the displays they show are physical hardware devices or dedicated communal screens rather than pieces of software that leverage the greatest piece of hardware we have - our ordinary day-to-day computer monitor.

Are you ready for Attention Ambience?

What a great phrase and a great idea - Attention Ambience. I guess you could say that Touchstone creates ‘Attention Ambience’.

In their article, Lee does a wonderful job of describing the Enterprise landscape and the way in which staff are experiencing their own of Attention Deficit.

The problem, Lee declares, is that they don't need LESS information, but rather MORE information and better tools for classifying and filtering content.

I don't necessarily agree with the specific way he words it – that they need MORE information – I would rather referring to it as more context and granularity alongside better tools for filtering based on those properties.

In any case I feel like the sentiment is the same.

I particularly like this paragraph (because I think email, as a subscribed information delivery mechanism, should die).

Finally, and most importantly, free people from e-mail enslavement. Allow them to choose their own information inputs and sources to support their work, but let go of the need to process and react to everything that comes their way in favor of immersion in a flow of information and social contact. Within a framework of agreed objectives and targets, let people find their own way to achieve them. One of the key lessons of social knowledge sharing using blogs and RSS is that other people act as your filter and information you need tends to find its way to you, somehow.

I would also add that current feed readers use a very 'email' centric metaphor. The idea of 'items to read' and 'marking as read; etc. So with this in mind, I feel that current feed readers are too much like email to provide an alternate/effective solution (on their own).

Check out the whole article at Headshift.

Announcing the new Touchstone website

In the lead up to the latest build of Touchstone, we launched a new Touchstone website today.

This site has a stronger focus on the developer and technology community as our partners in creating the definitive Attention Management Platform.

I particularly like this paragraph from our new Manifesto:

With Touchstone, you can control and filter the flow of alerts from your company CRM application, the latest news from your favorite blogs and the progress of your downloads in one interface - an interface that could eventually follow you from device to device.

In the new manifesto we have taken some specific stances about what Attention, Attention Data and Attention Management is. Some might not agree, but we are up for the debate!

Soon, our blog template will also change to conform to the new design.

I look forward to hearing feedback on our ideas and the new site.

Eyeballs are useless unless they are in front of a screen!

Marketers often talk about 'Eyeballs' when they talk about various mechanisms for placing a message in front of an audience. The more 'eyeballs' a given medium or piece of content has the more value it has as marketing real-estate.

It occurred to Ashley and I the other day (while having one of our usual impassioned discussions about Attention Management) that eyeballs are also important for Attention Management.

If your eyeballs are not on the screen, then Touchstone can't alert you to anything! In nerd speak - what happens when the user is 'Idle'.

We have decided that in some future release Touchstone may need to detect idle users (or even allow users to set it to idle mode) and have it catch alerts until you log back on.

Doesn't sound too fancy an idea - but we hope to build in some clever caching that will bring the user up-to-date without overwhelming them with information.

As 37 Signals would say - something for V1.1 Because it Just Doesn't Matter.

In other news, we are working hard on the next build of our little Attention Engine. This will have been the longest gap between builds since we started development, but it will also be the most significant build since the original.

We will be releasing a version of Touchstone that is actually 3 parts (as always and originally envisioned). A feed adapter, an Attention Management Engine and a Visualization collection called 'Ariel'.

This, we hope, will encourage other developers to begin creating Adapters (and the brave ones can even attempt to write a visualization of their own) and establish clearly that Touchstone is less about a news-ticker for RSS and more about an all-purpose heads-up-display for alerts from any source.

APML - OPML for Attention

Today Faraday Media (Creators of Touchstone) announce a new initiative to work with the community in order to design and implement “Attention Profiling Mark-up Language” or APML.

APML will allow users to export and use their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from Feed Readers.

The idea is to boil down all forms of Attention Data – including Browser History, OPML, Attention.XML, Email etc – to a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.

Imagine being able to export your Attention Profile from Amazon and plugging it into Digg to get an instantly customized view of the top Digg stories most relevant to your interests.

We anticipate that an ecosystem of technologies can begin to write and consume the format and we are taking the lead with Touchstone’s U-AR and I-AM engines. We look forward to working with everyone in the community to ensure the format delivers on this promise and empowers users to take control of their Attention.

Find out more about U-AR and I-AM at www.touchstonelive.com/technology

Find out more about APML at www.apml.org

Update: For extra coverage click here

For Robert - Touchstone Brrreeeport ing for Duty

I would like to announce Touchstone's support of the "Brreeeport Report" campaign. Let's see what happens?

Why couldn't Google do it?

There is a question that people often get asked these days when they go for Venture Capital (or so I hear) - "Why Couldn't Google Do it?".

When it comes to Touchstone - I guess they could. The question is - have they or are they doing it already?

With all the recent controversy over the 3rd version of the Google Desktop/Sidebar(privacy issues etc) it got me thinking - is the Google Desktop/Sidebar a Touchstone like heads-up-display?

I don't think so. Here's why.

Google Desktop (at the moment at least) is mostly like any other widget system. It is a framework to create little widgets and display them ON something. Vista uses the Vista Side Bar, Konfabulator uses something called 'the heads up display' and both of them allow you to detach the widgets/gadgets and float them on the desktop somewhere.

But the framework is just that - a framework - not a solution.

Inside that framework developers then create stuff. And most of what they create is all about pushing content to you without any intelligent decision making.

Now perhaps Google's sidebar and its widget framework are just a pretense for getting on your desktop so that they can launch into other services. And perhaps some of the bundled widgets use Google's incredible search and relevance technology to display information that is relevant to you in an intelligent way. But it still stands that most of the content being displayed on that sidebar is pushed with very little intelligence and via a single interface at any given time. Pictures come in the Pictures Widget. Stock Quotes come in the Stock Quote Widget etc.

Touchstone differs because it is a wholly different approach. Rather than giving developers the power to develop widgets, it itself is a 'widget'. Developers (those that develop Adapters anyway) only publish content into the system and Touchstone decides how to display that content (based on any number of variables) in a way that is unobtrusive to the user and sensitive to their needs.

So... To summarize.

Google Sidebar/Konfabulator/Vista Gadgets - Frameworks that empower developers to create and publish a range of widgets that have no relationship to each other. This is giving developers power on your desktop.

Touchstone - An attention management engine that processes content from multiple sources and then uses a series of 'visualizations' - all working in concert - to give the user the right type of message/alert/content while they are being productive with other things. This is giving users power to control the flow of information into their attention/consciousness.

Important pictures from your son don't just appear on the pictures widget... They slide onto the screen and fade away while pictures from your mate's holiday only appear on the ticker for browsing when you get home. Stock quotes for 'Touchstone Corporate' barley register on the ticker while Microsoft and Google stock quotes that drop by 20% follow your mouse around so that they definitely get your attention.

So to answer the original Question... Google could do it, but their Side Bar is NOT doing it - not yet anyway.

Update: Read the post about specific differences when developing a Touchstone Input Adapter