Yes men

One of the reasons Ashley and I are so interested in Touchstone is that in the past we have worked on ventures where we had to have sales teams that had to convince customers and partners of using our (usually fairly complicated) products.

With Touchstone we have decided to have a totally different attitude. We call it being 'xen'. We promised ourselves that we would never try to 'sell' people on Touchstone. If they got it by themselves then they were the people we wanted to talk to!

This is all fine and good and a surprising number of people have 'just got it' and contacted us out of the blue. It's been very gratifying. But sometimes the result of this approach is that you only hear 'yes' or 'that's so great' and never any real challenges to your ideas.

Recently I have been having a bit of a fun debate with someone about Touchstone and it's usefulness and viability as product or even an investment opportunity. I don't really hope to change their mind and I am sure they don't care if I change mine - but I think the debate is worth having - and its fun to have your assumptions challenged. It helps you clarify your decisions (for yourself) and re-evaluate your position.

The worst thing someone can do is stubbornly protect their own position out of fear - they should learn from the criticism of others.

Did I Write That Adapter?

I’ve been running the latest build of Touchstone on my home workstation for over 2 days continuously now, with no errors. Its good to know that it seems most of the fu**ups features people have been reporting are actually a fault with the Adapters and not the core, and while this is a bitter-sweet victory, overall, I have been very happy with this outcome.

Chris and I have always worked very hard to get this developed as quickly as possible (while still maintaining some form of “life”) but recently we’ve really been burning the candle at both ends to get the major public build which will go to everyone on the mailing list (…so if your not on it). We are very close and it’s getting hard to keep the lid on the present when we are so excited about the future plans for client-side attention management deliverables.

I really hope Chris announces *some* of these ideas soon, because I think I'm going to explode!

Also, don’t forget to checkout www.areyoupayingattention.com, the Touchstone Community website (also available from the “forums” link on the top of the page),a collaboration point for developers and users of Touchstone to discuss things they love, hate and want to see in future releases of Touchstone.

New media attention

I just discovered, via AVC, an amazing post about hyperefficiently allocating attention in the new media landscape. But this wasn't a technological or theoretical discussion like most of the 'Attention' posts out there - it was an analysis about what will constitute the new new media giants of tomorrow. You guessed it - Attention.

A quote:

Consider MySpace. MySpace's success is driven by it's proprietary music and now video player - the deepest social widget in the new media world. It is what lets fans connect to bands they might love - it is what allocates their attention hyperefficiently (more efficiently than Top 40 charts, corporatized radio robo-DJs, or even next-gen corporobots, like Pitchfork Media).

Read the rest Research Note: Discovering the Wrong Future - Denuo Mini Case Study

It's amazingly insightful. I wonder if Umair would consider Touchstone as generic plumbing (taboo in his scenario) or as an extension of hyperefficiently allocating attention?

Craigslist sucks

Can I ask a question that may get me shot by the rest of the geek community? Why does this site...


Command so much attention?

Ok so it was one of the first classified sites to be so liberal with it's posting structure and whatever else... but come on.. Look at that page design.

Some might say it's clean and simple - I say it shows a complete lack of style or substance.

Sure I have been accused of being too wordy and over complicating things, but surely the design sensibilities of Craiglist are the 180' opposite of that. And extremes in any direction are not good. Even Google has a logo on the top of it's page!

It makes me wonder...

Touchstone Site Tweaks

We have tweaked the site a little to now reveal links to our Forums (from the main navigation bar), fixed up a glitch on the blog that was appearing in Firefox (thanks TBD!) and added an overview page for those who are not technical and don't understand our crazy manifesto.

Adoption of RSS publishing soars

In an article on Yahoo Finance it claims that JupiterResearch Finds That RSS Spending Soars Despite Low Perceived Adoption Rates.

Good news for RSS readers and the attention economy in general!

Here's an excerpt:

The growth of RSS is also highlighted by the fact that 48 percent of current RSS publishers are spending $250,000 or more to deploy and manage syndicated content. However, JupiterResearch has also found that spending at this level is inconsistent with the current rate of adoption.

Perhaps it's time for an Enterprise ready RSS tracking application that helps staff keep track of industry news and the company intranet without interrupting their workflow hey.

Found via the Social Software Weblog (Which seems to refuse to mention Touchstone on its posts hah).

An audience of 53,651

This post has been going around for the last few days and I think it's a fascinating discussion.

Basically the premise is as follows:

As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.

I think that's true.

As Brad says in Feld Thoughts getting the first 25,000 users does not mean you've made it. They are the users who are trying everything out as soon as it comes out (thanks to TechCrunch).

The question is, can your product or service grow its user base over time (by actually adding ongoing value to people's lives in a way that keeps people coming back and encourages additional adoption from a broader audience).

A comment in that post even refers to the first 25,000 users as possibly having a negative affect on product development because their feedback may potentially 'geekify' things too much - makeing it inaccessible to the mainstream.

While I will say it would be great to have 25,000 users (or even 53,651) - I tend to agree. In the next few months it will be a key concern for us to...

a) Get 25,000 users that turn into 50,000 users
b) Make sure we resist the urge to geekify Touchstone for the early adopters

I think, at least in theory, that Touchstone might have 'mass market' potential because it is aimed at people who aren’t necessarily information junkies (although it helps them out too). It's aimed at those that don't necessarily want a 'news reader' but rather want a way to stay in touch with things (News, Torrents, CRM, CMS etc) with a heads-up-display while they work.

Touchstone also helps to 'Get Rid of RSS'.

Touchstone Alpha released to the 'First 100'

Today we launched Touchstone to the first 100 people who asked for a copy. Scary stuff! *pops Champaign cork*

Now we sit back and wait for the feedback!

We have also linked and published a rough guide to building Input adapters for Touchstone in the form of a Wiki.

If you're a developer and would like to start developing and testing your adapter please contact me for an immediate alpha invite so you can get started!

To the rest of you waiting patiently - we are almost there - can you smell it? You will get your invite soon!

At this point I would like to thank Ashley for his hard work and hard core programming - couldn't have done it without you my friend! Now get back to work haha!

Paying Attention for long periods of time

There is an interesting post over at Thought Signals about trying to reverse the short burst fickle attention span of the blog generation.

Touchstone might be useful when you're trying to 'feed the beast' - but it might also be useful to step away from the PC and read a book for an hour a day!

From the article...

If it’s harder to do those things, do them more. In other words, instead of reading so many blogs, read more books. Instead of writing short items for a blog, write longer items, or write books. Set aside half an hour a day to read a book — you know you should be doing it anyway. I’ve got a long list of books I’d like to read, so finding things to meet this requirement shouldn’t be hard. This also can come into play with relationships: Add some long, lazy conversations every once in a while to the short-and-shallow interactions that dominate most relationships.

A few semi-unrelated industry posts

Why couldn't google do it? Is a question we have tried to answer in previous posts. While reading Alex Barnett I came across a book that speaks to the issue of small startups vs. big business when it comes to innovation. It is about how big business can often miss opportunity and innovation due to momentum and focus on other things. It's called the 'Innovators Dilemma'. Of course - they also have more surface area and resources and a better chance of catching up quickly ;).

Technology flowing up stream.
This is an interesting post via AVC that discusses how technology is being adopted by users first, and then propagated to the enterprise - instead of vice versa. This was relevant for me because in discussions with some people they asked me about our 'enterprise strategy'.

My answer was that, like Google, Touchstone would probably find it's way into the enterprise not by top-down mandated technologies policies from the IT department, but rather by people finding it useful at home and bringing it into the workplace.

Paying Attention to Real Life

In the last couple of weeks we have had a number of things in our real and non-touchstone related lives that have interfered with our ability to be very productive. It's an unfortunate reality that these things happen. As a result, we have been delayed on delivering the next build for Alpha Testing.

We promise to get back on track as soon as possible and get everyone a copy as soon as we can tidy up the last few loose ends.

Sorry for the delay guys - feel free to poke fun.

What are your Intentions with my Attention?

Phil Windley posted last month about the concept of 'Intention' and it's place in the Attention discussion.

He mentions how Doc Searls describes Intention as 'the buy side of the Attention Economy'.

If Attention is all about sell-side, then intention is about buyers (the folks with the money) describing what it is that they want to pay attention to.

This discussion has crystallized another sponsoring thought for Touchstone that I've had floating around in the back of my mind.

Once our Attention Data is stored in a standardized way (OPML or Attention.xml or as part of what we call your 'I-AM Profile') then you need tools to start acting on it. Companies, I'm sure, will find plenty of ways to capitalize on the information for their own up-selling and cross-selling purposes, but I am more interested in personal tools that put the power back in a user's hands... in my hands.

Think of it as stored potential. The next generation of Attention or Intention tools will need to deliver value on that data by, in Touchstone's case, creating a model for what you care about to give you a filtered heads-up-display while you work.

Other value might be derived through recommendation systems, watch lists, targeted advertising etc.

So let me summarize all this as it stands now for my own purposes and see if I have it right (if not feel free to let me know!)

All these words, Intention, Gestures, Attention - they are just different parts of the same problem domain. A problem that has two separate user groups.

Group A wants your time to pitch a deal, and your money for their bottom line.

Group B wants more time and better information to make buying and living decisions.

Attention Data is a profile of what you care about (in our case based on implicit and explicit historic information that we get from the user).

Gestures are part of an Attention Profile (as far as I'm concerned anyway) but include more subtle information. I really think that gestures should somehow be stored right along with your other Attention Data and for Touchstone I think they will.

For example, whereas a click-stream only provides a list of links that a user has visited, gestures suggest the reasons for those clicks - maybe the user hated the site they visited and never wants to see that sort of information again.

Intentions, unlike Attention Data, are indications of future interest by a user. They might be determined by what a user has done (their Attention Data) and is doing (I'm at work right now) combined with some sort of implicit predictive model or explicit tuning interface.

Seth Goldstien calls 'Intentions' a 'Promise to Pay Attention' or PPA.

Right?

Attention Seeking

Isaac Garcia from Central Desktop sent me a great article about collecting and trading attention as championed by Seth Goldstein's Attention Trust and Root Markets.

Seeking Attention
"Measuring exactly who's looking at what and for how long, some experts say, is the Web's new gold."

Haven spoken to Seth about his views on Attention, I can tell you that he has some fascinating insights into how it all fits together. I encourage you all to read the article and see what the thought leaders are saying.

I hope to work more closely with both Isaac and Seth in converting all this attention information into a practical tool for helping a user stay informed while they work.

Thanks for the link Isaac!

Being emo about Touchstone

For those of you who have followed this blog for a while, you will know that sometimes I just post silly things to amuse myself in between being productive... it's my way of staying motivated. So here is my latest round of silliness. Feel free to use them if you think they might come in handy for whatever reason.

Email - Still the King of Collaboration

The guys at "Central Desktop" have a great post on their blog about email and it's unwillingness to die as the collaboration tool of choice for most mainstream users.

The post (rightly) suggests, we still live in our inbox and any collaboration software that hopes to truly integrate into our workflow must start there. As they point out, email has the client-side immediacy of alerts and self-determined relevance that other applications don't offer.

Perhaps Touchstone might go some way to help free us from the inbox and give web-based software the power to reach the user outside of the mailbox.

Or perhaps Touchstone might help un-clutter the inbox by routing mail through its relevancy engine first.

I particularly like the last paragraph:

Am I suggesting that we all abandon our collaboration dreams and submit to email? Absolutely not. As a fellow collaboration software vendor, though, I think we've got our work cut out ahead of us. Mass adoption isn't around the corner. In order for any of us to succeed beyond the outer rings of the blogosphere, we must look closely at the single most successful medium to enter the business world in 25 years. We must take a closer look at this killer app and apply the same rules of simplicity and ease-of-use to our own products if we ever expect to become more than a cottage industry. To succeed, we must look back and learn and apply what we've come to understand as the Good In Email.

Read more at the Central Desktop blog.

Seattle Mind Camp 2.0

It's on - April 29th to 30th 2006. I wish we lived in the states... Would make things more fun and interesting. Register here

Am I Being Heard?

I used to run an interactive net radio show called 'radioactive'. This was long before the days of podcasting when broadcasting audio over the net was a novel idea.

The key to it all was the slogan and philosophy 'Don't just listen, be heard'. The idea being that the audience was so involved in the live broadcast (both on traditional terrestrial radio and simulcast on the net) via forums, chat rooms and voting polls etc that their interactions had a significant effect on the live show (in real-time).

This slogan spoke to a fundamental human need that I think podcasting, blogging and all forms of social/citizen journalism speaks to... the need to be heard.

People just want to feel connected and understood. Why else would people check their traffic stats and blog comments like cocaine addicts (hide's head in shame).

But beyond our personal and very human need to be heard... writing our experiences down allows us to preserve history and learn from our past. And with all the new-fangled conversation tracking technologies... it allows us to get a great sense of our collective thoughts at any given time.

I found an interesting quote about all this via Signal vs Noise and I thought I would share.

Mark Ostroth 29 Mar 06Don’t glaze over Don Norman’s point about writing. This is right out of a 1960 essay by Loren Eisley, titled The Long Loneliness:

“Man without writing cannot long retain his history in his head. His intelligence permits him to grasp some kind of succession of generations; but without writing, the tale of the past rapidly degenerates into fumbling myth and fable. Man’s greatest epic, his four long battles with the advancing ice of the great continental glaciers, has vanished from human memory without a trace.”

“Writing, and later printing, is the product of our adaptable many-purposed hands. It is thus, through writing, with no increase in genetic, inborn capacity since the last ice advance, that modern man carries in his mind the intellectual triumphs of all his predecessors who were able to inscribe their thoughts for posterity.”

So blog on my friends... the world is listening.

The loss of context and original intent

As part of the development process for Touchstone Ash and I take much needed breaks by watching the best of television entertainment. And without a doubt, one of the best TV shows ever made is the West Wing.

This show demonstrates the wonder that occurs when the right intentions meet the right circumstances and get executed by the right balance of technical and creative genius.

I am going to go into spoiler territory here (season 7 episodes) to discuss how the West Wing relates to RSS/Syndication of content (you have been warned).

As those of you watching know, a number of key things have occurred in the West Wing over the years (as you would expect). Two specifically relevant for this post are:

1. Aaron Sorkin (the genius creator) left/was fired in season 3.
   
   
2. In the latest episode - as of posting - a long running unrequited love (in the form of the Josh and Donna relationship) was finally consummated.

The scenes were strange to watch because they didn't quite happen as I had expected. But it led me to wonder... did they happen as the original creator had envisaged?

This is a question that has occurred to me from time to time because it also relates to loss of control when a company or project gets too big for the original creators to reasonably maintain control of all the moving parts.

By extension it makes you wonder... how is it possible to maintain a creators/publishers/authors intent when they loose control of their content (perhaps when they are no longer involved in the project).

Extrapolating further, is it possible to maintain the full meaning of a piece of content when it becomes divorced from its container (as RSS does).

Do we really understand the implications of an article when it has been broken apart from most of its 'neighbors' and divorced of the packaging and, unless we pay close attention, from our awareness of the Author's bias and perspective?

Does RSS begin to dilute the value of content because the author looses a measure of control and the reader looses a measure of perspective?

Can consumption tools help bring that context back by digging up related articles and information and putting it in the margins? Is this sort of context better or worse than having seen the content in the original container?

Touchstone Aquired by Google

We would like to announce that we have been acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum. Larry and Sergey have promised that they will keep our original vision intact, except that they will now only support a proprietary RSS-derived format designed by Google (GSS).

This deal will allow us to tap into Google's secret network of spies and assassins to ensure that we can gather intelligence on your interests, and punish kill people who waste your attention.

The people at Google assure us that RSS will soon become redundant as GSS will take over the world with its search powered, keyword filtered, mapping based content distribution.

We are off to the Bahamas for some much needed rest.

Happy April 1st.

By the way, Scoble is moving to Google as well so maybe we will get to meet him over a free lunch. Maybe Alex will wise up and join us.

Significant Liquidity Event

I wonder what that little GYM thing is all about on the bottom of our home page. Weird...