Messy is the new clean

I have long held a strong personal dislike of MySpace. I don't think they really care though - it's not targeted at me - it's targeted at a totally different demographic.

That won't stop me airing my grievances though.

One of the main reasons I dislike it is how messy it is. How utterly useless the user interface is and how much worse the users make it with their colors and backgrounds and embedded music tracks. It drives me crazy whenever I find myself accidently stumbling onto a MySpace page.

I have always been a fan of clean lines. In fact, I have just been working on the secret, yet-to-be-revealed, Touchstone user interface that will be revealed with the all new Touchstone Beta and it is all about clean, simple lines.

Over on BubbleGeneration however, he explains that clean lines are just old fashioned. They are part of the 20th century's Modernism movement. To quote:

Re-engineering was about streamlining: about cutting the fat; about removing "resistance" and "drag" created by superfluous processes, whose near term returns were non-existent.

The result, as we all know too well today, is a commercial landscape both bleak and bland: homogeneous, robotic, synthetic, and hyperrationalized, where the Barista's or burger-flipper's value is timed, measured, studied, and analyzed to death.

He uses mySpace as the prime example. He states that mySpace beats LinkedIn as a real social platform because, unlike LinkedIn, mySpace allows its users to get messy - to hack up the page and distroy any trace of consistency.

Touchstone, of course, is very different from MySpace or LinkedIn. The primary setup/status windows are not about personalization, self-expression or social networking. So we can get away with clean, simple lines. That's what I tell myself anyway. I don't want to make a messy interface that people can hack up. I want it to be clean and slick.

I take comfort in the fact that Skype seems to have the same philosophy and they aren't doing too badly.

Am I the only one who thinks that MySpace chaos and CraigsList's complete disregard for aesthetic quality is disturbing and concerning? Someone save me...

Update: Daniela suggests to me on Skype that perhaps I don't like MySpace because Murdoch bought it just to drive traffic to his Fox TV sites.

This is probably a topic for another post but I don't mind that Murdoch, being an old school media guy, recognized (in some small way) the volume of traffic that MySpace could generate and purchased it to keep his media company relevant. I do, however, have a problem with the fact that the platform itself didn't necessarily deserve the popularity it received/receives (for reasons mentioned above and many others) and the fact that people like Murdoch, in general, don't understand the real power of social platforms beyond the old 'eyeballs to monetize' paradigm.

Show me the money (or the pain)...

When you are in a startup that has any sort of visibility investors will always approach you. So having spoken to more than my fair share you start to hear certain patterns in their line of questioning. Some have already realized the growing problem that faces users as information explodes and attention dwindles. Some, however, ask a common investor question… “Where is the pain?".

Let me rephrase it in a few other ways…

What problem is your product solving? Is that problem causing pain in user’s lives? Is it so painful that they would they take time out of their life to try your product? Is your product so good, and the pain so great, that they would change their behavior to use it? Do they NEED you?

Because need creates demand and demand needs a supply. Sounds almost like drugs.

As Rod Tidwell would say from Jerry McGuire - Show me the MONEY!!! Or in this case, "Show me the pain, and the money will follow".

There are many answers to the question of pain when you are talking about a product like Touchstone. You can use all sorts of industry buzzwords that refer to trends that are emerging... things like 'the Long Tail’, ‘Publishing 2.0’, 'Participant Created Media', 'Syndication', 'Information Overload', 'Attention Deficit' and so on...

I have been guilty of using these phrases many times... As I have admitted before I have a problem.

I agree pain is important when it comes to building a high-growth startup - especially if you want to cut through the noise in this increasingly crowded marketplace where everyone is trying to make the next YouTube and Digg.

Cutting through noise, however, is exactly the problem. It is the pain. The volume is increasing. Can't you hear it? If you can't hear it then you are not listening. Chances are, however, if you’re reading this blog you are listening all too well.

You could argue that users - your typical Jon Doe - don't hear it yet. I would argue that there is a growing number of users every day that stop watching TV and start watching YouTube and BitTorrent. There is a growing number of users every day that are starting to read, write and remix the blogosphere and flickr and facebook and youtube and they are not going away.

Some could argue that those users are coming, but in the mean time John Doe is happy to read the local newspaper. Have you heard what's happening to the local newspaper recently? They're being decimated.

Mark Cuban recently suggested something new to save Newspapers - More Content and RSS.

Can you imagine it. Your local newspaper becoming a clearing house for every piece of gossip that happens down the road?

Forget newspapers; what about when every school, golf course, company, employee (etc etc) start publishing content and packaging it in RSS. No wait, they are already starting to.

That is rivers and rivers of content that an increasing percentage of the population is becoming aware of and coming to grips with. When you are drowning in a river, pain is everywhere.

Add to this the pain of keeping all your devices up-to-date and trying to fit some productivity in amongst all that news reading – and you are ready to black out.

What about Publisher pain. I (along with many others) have already mentioned how publishers (particularly newspapers) and broadcasters are hurting as users flee to online, time-shifted, personalied alternatives. Don't they need a way to strengthen their brand and monetize their users? Their shareholders are definitely feeling that pain.

In all this discussion of pain however, people have forgotten to ask about pleasure. But that's a post for another day.

Sounds like there might be a pain looking for a solution.

Unsocial behavior on social networks?

Lately I have noticed two annoying trends on LinkedIn that are starting to bug me.

1. People hiding their connection list?

2. People not passing on contact requests/messages.

If you're going to join a social network - then be social!

Getting STIRRed Up in Sydney

STIRR was imported from Silicon Valley to Sydney Australia last night and I think Marty and Mick from Tangler (don't worry you will find out what it is sooner or later) did a fantastic job.

They gathered a great group of people (even Brisbane residents like myself, and Joel Pobar) to drink, eat and play games. There was also some networking involved I'm sure.

It was great to see 'old' friends like Marty Wells, Mick Liubinskas, Cameron Reilly, Brad, Randal, Mike Cannon-Brooks and finally get to meet face-to-face with Emily (Congrats on winning Emily!), Mike Zimmerman, Marc Woodward (thanks for sponsoring the night guys!) and others.

I didn't get a chance to take photos of my own unfortunately but there are plenty posted up by Mick on flickr.

Look forward to the next one...

Update: Watch the video from The Podcast Network - on the cam with good mate Cam

IAM responsible for this

As you could predict, Chris Anderson is a hero of mine. I almost had a chance to see him speak at Plug & Play while I was in the bay area last month but unfortunately we had a scheduling conflict. Thank heavens for blogging.

His latest post entitled 'I'm not responsible for this' , like many, strikes a chord for me personally and for Touchstone as a product.

He quotes:

The fact that you and I both watched American Idol last night probably doesn't define us, whereas our niche interests really do. We go deep and find people who share our affinities, which represent much tighter connections between us. So my suspicion is that we're going to have fewer loose connections with lots of people but tighter connections with fewer people.

I like this idea very much. It is an idea we have been discussing internally for quite some time. If Touchstone can calculate a highly granular and complete picture of your 'long-tail interests' and store it in APML, and if it can apply that model of your interests to filtering and finding content and people - have we not created both a finger-print of your identity (at least part of it) and a highly personalized world view of content and people like you (and that you like).

The whole post is put in context to Kevin Smith and his continuing popularity despite his recent box-office failures. Anderson writes:

Just like they did 10 years ago, lonely/nerdy/smart teenage boys see in Smith a humor they identify with and a personality they want to emulate. The movies are incidental: Something like Clerks II has the relationship to the Smith brand that a communion wafer has to Catholicism.

I love that :)

Intelligence Amplification

I like this article by Ryan about "Intelligence Amplification"

To quote:

Our ability to produce information is growing exponentially, and this can be problematic. What do you get when you leverage internet applications to coordinate the clickstreams, hyperlinks, tags, actions, relationships and interests of billions of people? Hopefully the means for humans to synthesize information into knowledge exponentially faster than was previously possible.

I also particularly like a comment by Tom's on the post which refers to "Aggregation Is King" which I posted about earlier this week.

On a more serious note, Spencer Wang's report for Bear Stearns - "The Long Tail: Why Aggregation and Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment" cries out for a tool for "intelligence amplification," though his operation definition is "filters required to connect users with content that appeal to their interests." Same thing.

Automatic Digging...

Imagine this:

Touchstone is a Personal Relevancy Engine. This means it can automatically calculate which Digg stories are the most ‘Personally Relevant’ to you.

Therefore it is conceptually possible for someone to write a Touchstone ‘Output Adapter’ that:

1. Checked incoming Touchstone items to see if they came from the Digg RSS feed.
   
2. If they came from Digg and they are rated, by Touchstone, as very personally relevant to you, the adapter could execute the ‘Digg’ command for that story on your behalf.

This way, Touchstone could automatically Digg stories for you.

Automatic Digging…

Update: I'm not sure if this is useful or even appropriate for Digg - it was just an idea that struck me - if nothing else it is an interesting application of Touchstone Technology. Feel free to comment to let me know your thoughts.

If you are interested in creating this adapter, contact me and I can get you started.

If you want to know when the adapter has been made so you can try it out, sign up to our mailing list (on the left hand side of the page) and we’ll let you know when it’s done. No spam I promise - I hate spam.

Filtering is so 5 years ago

In a recent Read/Write Web blog post Richard (Great guy by the way. Met him at Arrington's place for drinks and poker!) talks about Filtering RSS. He states:

[Filtering is important] Because it's the next step up from RSS aggregation, as many of us now have too much information coming at us.

I agree there is too much information coming at us, but the problem is not just the volume, it's the quality.

There is no variation in the sound. It's like using all the colors of the rainbow at once. The result is white. Or playing all sounds everywhere at the same time. The result is noise.

What we need to do is add variation back into the system. We need a way of creating our own personal signal.

I have a problem with filtering. To me, filtering is like Web 0.5 search. WebCrawler and others were doing keyword matches and returning a barley useful set of results. Filtering is rudimentary and only partially useful. Google understood that a piece was missing. A way to rank documents not only based on the number of keyword hits, but on their popularity in the community and relevancy to the subject matter.

What we need for RSS is ranking. Real ranking. Not just based on the number of keyword hits but on relevancy. Unlike search, however, relevancy is not enough. What we need is Personal Relevancy.

Personal Relevancy is not about asking 'How many keywords hits does this document have to my search query' or even 'how popular is this document based on incoming links' but rather 'Based on everything you know about me, how much do I personally care about this document right now, in what format do I want it presented to me and on what device'.

Can you see the difference? Of course you can.

Unlike filtering, relevancy is not black or white. On or off. Include or exclude. It has variation. It has rank.

Touchstone has been ranking content for 6 months now. We have decided to go one step further. Escalating Alerts. But that is a topic for another post.

Another key theme of the post was the ability to re-syndicate the 'filtered' content to RSS. Touchstone has also been doing that for ages. But again, our RSS feed is not just filtered; it is ranked. We have added an extra tag called 'Rank' so that compliant applications can make intelligent presentation decisions just like Touchstone does with its Escalating Alerts.

Filtering is neat. Ranking is powerful. And over the next few months when we start to release Touchstone into the wild I am sure the community will agree.

If you have interesting ideas about how to apply our personal relevancy technology, drop us a line.

Google should stick to maths

Google shuts down Google Answers - losing out to Yahoo's competing service...

I've said it before and I will say it again - Google should stick to math’s and automation instead of trying to compete with Yahoo and Microsoft at what they do best - community/applications/platforms.

The only two things Google has ever hit out of the park were search and advertising. Both involved automating the process of people finding stuff. Automation being the key ingredient. They are great at math’s.

But when it comes to building communities like with Google Answers Yahoo or Microsoft seem to win every time.

Google should stick to what it does best instead of getting distracted by the other 2. If it plays to its strengths then it would minimize it's growing evil image and decrease its wasted efforts.

I guess for now they have the cash to burn, even if all they achieve is keeping Yahoo and Microsoft on their toes.

The reorganization around people

Over on Leafar's blog he has made a great post entitled 'Venture with Wit' that covers a number of topics including chasing VC/Angels who have the right understanding of the Attention Economy (we have found it is better to let them find us) and various factors that affect information flow.

These, according to Leafar, include: Content ("Hyperchoice Problem" - I love that name), Identity (An area where we have contributed APML) and Social (at which point he kindly mentions Touchstone as the best example of work being done in the area.)

I particularly like these quotes from his post:

From EquityKicker.

"As I’ve said before to me the web is re-organizing around people instead of sites"

I wrote about this in a recent post called "Aggregation is King"

Another great quote is from Umir

"Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest - and so most strategically vital - resource in the value chain. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of most industries it touches; beginning with the media industry."

Ultimately though, users don't care about these market forces and factors of information flow. What they care about is a highly tailored experience that saves them time, delivers the right information on the right device and at the right 'Volume'.

If the web is reorganizing around people and Attention is the scarcest resource, then a tool that performs ultimate personalization by indexing, apply and managing user attention must be worth something to someone :)

Touchstone on "A Current Affair"

Touchstone was mentioned on an Australia TV show called 'A Current Affair' last night at 6:30.

You can check out the behind the scenes photos on flickr.

I will try to get a recording posted on YouTube at some point too.

Thanks to Sean who made it happen and Nik for all his help!

Update: Here is the video (I'm just after 2:20)

Aggregation is King

I am finally home from our trip to the US. It was a fantastic visit - the first of many. You can see some of the pictures at Flickr.

But back to the real stuff:

Disclaimer: I am using the terms Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 pretty heavily here. I am aware of the buzzword fatigue that they are attracting these days but these terms give me an invaluable shorthand for referring to different bubbles/iterations/movements/waves.

Aggregation (not Content) is king.

I've been saying this to people for a while but have not really had a chance to blog about it. It actually came up a few times at conferences such as Web 2.0, Web 2.2 and StartupCamp while I was in the Bay Area.

The common misconception these days is that services like YouTube are Web 2.0. This is only partially correct. Uploading your work to a site, rating it, sharing it - these are not new concepts. Sites/Services like DeviantArt have been doing it since Web 1.0.

People are talking about the word 'Community' like it represents the spirit of Web 2.0. Community was one of the buzzwords of the Web 1.0 bubble. It is not new.

The new part is that YouTube lets you embed your video on other sites and access their content via RSS. These are both forms of syndication.

So if syndication is the main new feature (and not community or user-generated content) then the main new tool must be aggregation.

But aggregation is a means to an end. When a user is able to access content on their own terms another much more fundamental trend reveals itself. Personalization.

Every feature typically associated with Web 2.0 (blogs, syndication, rating, digging, ajax) is actually about allowing greater Personalization by putting the user at the centre of their experience.

However the current set of aggregators (with a few exceptions) has a long way to go until they give a user ultimate personalization. Allowing them to choose the feeds they want to read is the most basic form of personalization. There is so much more room to innovate.

While most have focused on the boring folders/items metaphor, and others like Microsoft have created useless 3d representations of those same folders and items, the real opportunity lays in recognizing that aggregation + true personalization is actually the holy grail of this latest web iteration.

Tripping: Microsoft 3D Photography - Photosynth

Over the last few days we have been at the Web 2.0 Conference and the Web 2.2 Conference (apparently there is an upgrade coming out!) and by far the coolest thing being demoed (besides Touchstone of course) is Microsoft's Photosyth research project.

This thing is amazing.

Today at Web 2.2 we talked about community building and how tools can influence, build and disband communities via various subtle and not-so-subtle influences.

My main contribution was the sentiment that the ultimate community building 'tool' right now is blogging. Blogs are many pieces loosely joined and that model is at the heart of the Web 2.0 movement.

We also talked about how applications like Touchstone can model interests in the community to build a profile about which components (people) of a community contribute the most, even when the contribution is only passively received.

Very academic!

Tripping: The trip so far...

Hey everyone - I see that Ash has been a very busy beaver on the blog and with the builds while I have been away. Thanks for that Ash!

Also while we have been over here, we have been mentioned on Read/Write Web in a list of top Australian apps and Real Software Development as the best of the best. Big thanks to those sites.

Here are some pics for you all to see from our trip so far.

Tripping: Pre-Trip Prep

Housekeeping note: I will prefix all posts to do with our San Fran trip 'Tripping' so that those who are only interested in Touchstone or Attention related things can skip them.

Now on with the post...

Before you spend lots of money to visit a country you have never been to, to meet people you have only read about or chatted to it's important to do some ground work. Paperwork (E.g. Get your passport), Technology (E.g. How can I keep reading my feeds and getting my email) Geography (E.g. Where exactly is the Bay Area?) and social (E.g. Who are you and where will you be).

As part of the process I seem to be getting a better understanding of the layout of San Fran and Silicon Valley than I do of my own City.

I look forward to actually meeting some of people I have come to know over the last year but never actually met. People who have inspired and motivated us to do the things we're doing. They probably don't even know the effect they've had.

I have also been getting to know fantastic new people like Tara and Chris.

Now all we need is a place to stay!

All of this is happening while the latest build for Touchstone is coming together so well that I am starting to think that there is very little to do before we can go Beta... but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

A little something

AreYouPayingAttention.com

Not sure what else to do with the domain yet. Any ideas?

Traveling with Spam

Good news - we are heading over to San Francisco/Silicon Valley from the 29th of October to the 22nd of November.

It will be a great chance to catch up with all the friends we've made and meet some new ones along the way. If you are in the area during that time then feel free to drop me a line and we'd be happy to catch up. Unless you're a murder of some description.

I will try to keep regular updates on the blog about our travels so that you can feel like you’re there.

Also... am I the only one that got about 400 pieces of spam last night? Most of it was the same spam email over and over "Make your career with TrustPartners Company as a part-time Payment Manager!". Either they stuffed up or have decided that if 0.1% of spam gets a result, let’s send it out 10,000x more.

The Human Network

I just stumbled across something that, as far as I can tell, is a brilliant stroke of marking genius by Cisco.

They call it 'The Human Network' and it is a phrase they have coined to try to embody the connections being made on the new social web.

One of my favorite definitions of the network is by Mike Davidson from Newsvine.com:

The human network is the only defense we have against the ever-increasing flow of information to our overworked brains. The technology of publishing was originally about creating signal. Then, as monetization became more important, noise was added. As information discovery shifted to the web, customization allowed for an increase in signal and a reduction in noise. Now, however, we're at a point where even in the absence of any noise, there is simply too much signal for most brains to handle. Enter the human network -- a collaborative filtering system which vets all signal against the profiles and tastes of those we trust, admire, and love. Not all signal is created equal and the human network is the only way to adjust for this.

I would (and have) describe it like this:

The Human Network means that there is no more audience. There are no more users. There are only participants. Participants in a human scale network.

Participants do not passively consume what an author, creator, director, developer, editor, critic or media outlet has to publish. They do not accept the authority. They do not sit silently ready to have their eyeballs converted into cash.

Participants participate. They create their own original information, entertainment and art. They remix their own version of mainstream pop culture – copyrighted or not. They post their thoughts, publish their fears and fact check every announcement. They share with their friends and discover the quirky and interesting, making it an instant blockbuster – at least for 15 minutes.

Participants are no longer eyeballs to be converted. They are ideas to be declared. Individually they are a market of one. Collectively they are a trend, a publishing powerhouse and a voice to be heard. A voice that has something to say.

Participants have changed the way media is published and interactions are monetized. But more broadly and importantly than that, they have changed the flow of global information from top down to bottom up. They are changing the tone and tempo of the conversation.

Elvis? Who is he? It’s the audience who has left the building. All that’s left are fellow participants. We are all authors, creators, directors, developers, editors, critics and media outlets. We are a million voices saying one thing – listen to me.

As Mike says, however, with all this signal, we need a way to create personalized media experiences. Our own personal signal.

"Now, however, we're at a point where even in the absence of any noise, there is simply too much signal for most brains to handle. Enter the human network -- a collaborative filtering system which vets all signal against the profiles and tastes of those we trust, admire, and love."

However I believe that collaborative filtering is only a factor of Personal Relevance.

Heading to SF from 29 Oct to 25 Nov

Have not locked in accommodation yet - but should be a fun ride. Will try to update the blog with some news and pics!

What do you think of widgets?

Niall and Om are organizing an event for the Widget community.

People often ask me what I think of Widgets/Gadgets. Here is my answer:

Is that Attention Management?

Vs.

It might not be as fancy and graphical - but I would argue it is far more useful.

Widgets are ok for interactive elements. But if you want to track information over time (e.g. RSS news, packages, auctions, stock prices, application alerts etc) then you need a more intelligent approach.