Joshua Guffey

Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

If you don’t already know about Aardvark, you should.  It allows you to ask a question of those people in your networks and those of your friend’s networks.  And it does a damn good job most of the time.

Aardvark attempts to provide you with answers from people who actually know about the topic you’re inquiring about. And it’s actually quite useful. Apparently even Google thinks so since they acquired Aardvark back in February for $50 million.

Here I’d just like to mention something that relates back to my post about timing.  Aardvark (like any web social network) has users who are active at various times. This said, it makes sense to position your question at a time when it’s likely that your specific question will get answered.   This isn’t possible with Aardvark’s basic web interface or their iPhone app, however Aardvark also offers the ability to ask questions via Twitter, which has the side-effect of making it possible to schedule questions.

The usefulness for asking via Twitter is you can ask your Twitter followers at the same time.  You can also use a service like Hootsuite or SocialOomph to schedule your question for a time when more people are going to be active or for when users who’d be more likely to know will be available.

Tonight I’m just asking a general question about managing documents in the cloud so I made it for early morning (7:45am PST).  My rational is that at this time early risers will be available and also, that they may be a more organized faction of the Aardvark community.  Really the big deal here is that there will be a great deal many more users available at this time than when I thought of the question late at night.

A better example of this might be a question like “I’m planning a trip to NYC next week. Got any tips on great breakfast cafes on or around Main St?”  Something like this would probably do best scheduled around morning time in NYC, so take account of time zones too.

You can schedule a question on Aardvark by scheduling a tweet to be sent out at anytime you wish and including “@vark” in the tweet.  Have fun!

-@JoshuaGuffey

Building on Gmail’s recent app platform, Syphir allows you to create filters that just aren’t available in standard Gmail; such as an ability to delay emails until a later time.  It’s not perfect but it’s worth a serious look.

I’m just playing with a basic filter right now that delays all incoming email from 11pm to 7am.  It’s an attempt at empowering myself to sleep more and geek less.  (Or at least to geek during daytime hours.)

You can also combine filter rules to have email containing certain words or from certain senders to be delayed until a later time.  For example you could have all Facebook email delayed until 2pm and then respond to all of it at that time. (Remind me to do that!)

Watch the screencast below to get a sense for how powerful Syphir is already, and then consider that they’ve only just begun.

View this screencast on iPhone here: iPhone version

For updates about more ways to filter the incoming data stream that is today’s web, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog

Tech startup Placethings is doing what I’d hoped augmented reality would do, putting user-generated media into physical locations using the multimedia and geotagging capabilities of today’s mobile devices.

The service will capture any type of multimedia; such as pictures, video, audio and text and will ‘place’ this content in a physical location by linking it to GPS coordinates for others to view and interact with.

The company presented at the Mobilize 2008 Conference [video here].  At the conference they discussed how you will have the ability, with your mobile device, to create ‘persistent media’ which will remain tied to that location for others to view and even reply to.  This could transform the way we interact with venues around our home towns, help us to meet interesting people in our area, learn more about our environment and share relevant information about any place any time.  Think of it as writing on an ‘invisible’ wall, anywhere.

It’s a compelling idea that opens up a lot of possibilities.

You could post pictures of concerts, leave messages in places you know that your friends frequent or play location-based geotagging games.  Businesses could keep tabs on what sorts of activities are taking place local to their business and adjust their offerings or other aspects of their business to make better use of this information.  There are a million uses for adding an informational media layer to our existing experience. Not to mention that it’d be loads of fun!

In their presentation the co-founder, Dean Terry, mentions that there’s even a ‘secret message’ function so that you could leave a message at a specific location for someone.  When that person visits that location they receive their message.  This immediately makes me think of leaving digital love notes for my wife, but I’m sure you could think of some less nauseating examples.

I actually see services such as Placethings as poised to become more popular than the check-in trend happening right now with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Buzz and the like.  Without going to far down the rabbit hole, my thinking on this is that check-ins are real-time; and for location-based services this could be a problem since it’s kinda like saying “I’m not home, please rob me“.  All of these services could likely do well to have a delay built into them for safety.

As for Placethings, I cannot say if it is real-time (likely it is) but the shift of focus from geotagging as person-centric to location-and-media-centric may be a healthy direction to take things.

What uses would you find for this? How would you use it or like to see it used?

Lying in bed tonight I was thinking about my Twitter stream (yes, I know that’s weird) and asked myself “what’s missing?”

I didn’t mean “what’s missing from the service?” I meant “what’s missing from my use of it?”

Today I asked a question about car seats and received a reply from three blogger moms that I follow within five minutes.  The responses were useful and nearly instantaneous.  Amazing!  Amazing and yet this happens every day on Twitter.  And to be fair, it happened on Facebook too when I got advice on the same topic from some moms that I know offline and stay up with via Facebook.  Since Facebook is still a sort of a closed system and the ladies aren’t really promoting themselves, I’m not going to list them here.

All of this gets me thinking.  Everyday.

What’s most amazing to me about platforms like Twitter is that I’m meeting intelligent, funny and talented people whom I would likely never meet otherwise. Very often these people are very apt to provide assistance in their areas of interest or expertise.

The service is also transforming the application of customer-centric service, primarily for companies that do not have a brick and mortar business model.  Tonight I sent this tweet to Timebridge and received a reply within the hour (after hours).

I’m learning a lot on Twitter every day; about a variety of topics of interest to me: tech trends, mobile computing, location-based shifts taking place in the social media space, web design, festivals I should be going to and a whole barrage of things that lift my skirt.  I’m connecting with a real community and even learning a few things about human interactions.  And I share the best of this stuff out to those following me.

What sorts of experiences have you had like this?  Leave a comment on the blog to add to this discussion.

Twitter has lists & hashtags. That’s fine.
Facebook has lists, groups, pages, fine-grain privacy controls and the ability to hide users from our stream. That’s fine.

So what’s the problem??? — Relevance!

Is the data relevant for you in this moment? If you work in the tech world or even (and especially) in the social media space, it’s pretty likely that managing all of your connections  and non-stop, real-time data can be a major undertaking.

Twitter and Facebook have provided us with some basic tools for managing our data streams, but they are still relatively rudimentary and require us to manually categorize our connections by placing them, one-at-a-time into lists or groups of contacts.

I haven’t yet seen anything that goes beyond this level of sophistication for segmenting and filtering out, in real-time, data based on RELEVANCE and not merely upon the source of the data.

Hashtags and Twitter Search begin this process but there are some issues with these tools.

Hashtags are not used by everyone and therefore lose relevance as a tool since important information may not be tagged in a way that brings it to your attention.

An advanced Twitter Search can turn up some pretty relevant data in real-time; and some fancy RSS feed action can make this data more useful, but this tends to cast a wide net and still requires some significant wading to find the data that is most relevant for you. You can build some very specific searches that turn up more targeted data but this also typically filters out some terms you may not have thought of and ends up in a multitude of Twitter search RSS feeds to manage.

If this all sounds like a hell of a lot of work…that’s because it is.

As more of the world adopts Twitter, Buzz and other real-time data sharing technologies, we will have more people connecting with us, and hence, a bigger challenge then we’ve ever seen in trying to read more of what helps move us to forward and less of what doesn’t.

Social media isn’t going away. So how can we stay on top of our game? Well right now you can geek out and plug some Twitter search feeds into Google Reader and you’ll find your reader full of interesting things.  But it takes a special type of geek to even consider playing around with this level of “real-time, data-piping architecture”.

So what do the rest of us do?
I have a few ideas that may help moving forward.

Redundant tweet filtration

It’s my guess if you’ve read this far, that you know a lot of people on Twitter, many of which re-tweet and share the same articles. How many times do you really need to read a tweet about Google’s new policy change? Tweets that share the same links or information could be filtered out or downplayed to make room for unique information.

Real-time tweet relevance filtration

Google certainly has the advantage in this area.  In fact this technology is already in place in Google’s own search engine in the form of suggested search queries.  And even more robustly in the keyword selection tool for their ad network, Google Adwords.

The system knows what words and phrases are generally synonymous or in some way related. On Google.com the technology returns the most popular search terms based on the search habits of entire populations.  Imagine though if your tweet stream (tweets from those you follow) were filtered by relevance to your interests and even the specifics of your current project.  This reality isn’t far for Google.

Better collaborative spam filtration

Perhaps unfortunately for Twitter, Google has a clear lead here again. Gmail has provided a surprisingly spam resistant email experience based upon the ability to block spam message across the entire network given the input of the community it serves, Gmail users.

Yet over at Twitter, auto DMs haunt Twitter like an over-friendly neighbor with bad hygiene. Much of it outright offensive spam that has NO basis on any relationship with you or specific interest of yours as a prospective customer. [dramatic rant]

Google has always been about relevance and “organizing the world’s information”.   Given their ability to provide content in a relevance-centric fashion, I see potential for Google to truly move into social media in an even bigger way in the coming future when there is a potential for more noise in the social space.

Written by Joshua Guffey.  You can follow me on Twitter: @JoshuaGuffey

What do you have to say about this?
How else can we mere mortals manage to keep up with the increasing influx of information?  How  do you think the playing field will change in the next 6-12 months?