Ministry of Intrigue

Google Voice is Google’s upgrade to the GrandCentral service they acquired almost two years ago. I’ve had a GrandCentral account for almost as long as the service existed, but I never found a reason to use it, mostly because the feature set was just short of being useful enough for me to want to manage an additional phone service. However, Google has added a number of features that make it an extremely compelling service. In particular:

• Ability to place domestic and international calls with Google Voice number
• SMS support and routing
• Voicemail transcription (Also, downloadable as MP3)
• Call conferencing
• Call Recording (Incoming calls only, downloadable as MP3)

Wait, you smell that? Smells like screenshots:

Google Voice Inbox showing SMS functions and voice mail transcription.

Google sends a notification email for new voicemail with the transcription.

Google Voice forwards SMS messages received to my cell phone as well as voicemail notifications.

These features, along with the previously existing call-routing and contact management features (which are awesome) make the service something I could easily see myself becoming dependent on in the near future. I’m already scheming to start routing more of my telephone communication (especially anyone who is not a friend or family member) through my GV account.

Now, Google Voice has already received a ton of press online detailing all the new features, and rather than repeat everything that has already been said, let me just say this: I do not understand how this is not already a paid service. Slap an SLA on this service and I would not even think twice about paying $50 a year for it. The only possible reason I can think of for not doing this is to stay cheaper than Skype, which charges for having a phone number and voice mail. Skype’s international rates are still slightly cheaper than Google’s, but it’s free offerings offer nothing like the basic feature-set provided by Google Voice.

I have only two one complaints about Google Voice. First, the inbox defaults to showing all messages and does not have a way for me to use the unread-only view as my default, which gets annoying because it is an extra mouse-click every time I go to look at my messages. The only way to prevent a message from showing up again is to delete it, which I don’t want to do. (Fixed: Google pushed out an update on 2009-04-02 which defaults the inbox view to unread-only, or at least it remembers my preference). Secondly, While the mobile web app is fast and great, I want a native app for managing my account on my phone. It seems like Android integration is the obvious path for Google, but I would hope they would also follow their previous practice and release an iPhone application (or integrate it into their existing app) as well.

On the whole, I think this is an excellent service and a home-run for Google. It’s the first time I’ve been this excited about a Google product since Google Reader and Gmail. In fact, I’ve written this post partly in the hopes that it will help me stop telling my friends about Google Voice every time we talk to each other, as I am sure they are ready for me to shut up about it. I was even tempted to do a screencast to show off how you work with the application, but video adds a lot of difficulty to the process of hiding other people’s phone numbers, and I respect my friends’ privacy.

Currently the service is only available to users with existing GrandCentral accounts, but Google has stated they plan on opening to the service to new users soon, presumably with “soon” being a value somewhere between a few weeks and just before our sun explodes.

If you have used Google Voice and would like to leave me a comment about what you think, feel free to click the call widget below to leave a voicemail message with my Google Voice account. I’ll keep it active for at least a few weeks. Also, when you leave your message, please indicate if you would like your message included in this post. I don’t promise that I will include your message, but I do promise that if you leave me a voicemail I will not post the audio or your name without your permission. I reserve the write to quote you anonymously in text, however, because I like to write and that’s just the way I roll.

A few weeks ago I was having drinks with my good friend Greg, and the topic of social bookmarking came up. I was discussing some of my ideal features in a service, before we got back to the more serious business of catching up. A few days later, Greg sent me a link to Diigo, as it seemed to match a lot of what we were discussing at the time. I took a look at Diigo and was pretty impressed with what I saw, and I decided to give it a go. I’ve been using it full-time for about a week now, and feel comfortable giving you all a review of what I have found.

Diigo has a very attractive and subdued appearance, that is packed with features without being overwhelming.

To begin with, Diigo is an extremely powerful social bookmarking site. Obviously, Diigo does all the things you would expect of this type of service: you can save bookmarks, assign tags to them, and search the site for bookmarks that are also tagged with those terms or find people who have saved the same bookmark. Diigo also allows you to construct “Lists” of links. Lists are another way of structuring your data that you can use in conjunction with tags. Each List can be made up of any group of links that you can sort in whatever order you desire via a drag and drop interface. This is really nice to see a service that still understands that tags are not the end-all be-all of organizing content.

Diigo also allows you to import bookmarks from variety of sources, including Delicious, Magnolia, Simpy, Blinklist, Furl, Connotea, RawSugar and of course, your own browser. The import function worked well for me importing from Magnolia, although Diigo replaced the spaces in my multi-word tags with underscores. Diigo does allow multi-word tags if you encase them in quotation marks, so this was a quick fix, if a little annoying. When will people see the light and do away with space-seperated tags? Just let me use a comma-separated list. Diigo also exports all your bookmarks quite effectively in a variety of formats including RSS, CSV, Delicious format, as well as in formats for both Internet Explorer and Netscape bookmarks.

However, Diigo doesn’t just want to be a bookmarking service, they aim to be a flexible research tool, and allow you to highlight and annotate web pages to provide more directed commentary on what you are bookmarking. These notes can be private for your reference only, or publicly visible to any user. This immediately brings up comparisons to Clipmarks, except that this is very different. Whereas Clipmarks just takes your highlighted content and loads it into their service, Diigo also leaves those annotations in place in the form of highlights and sticky notes that are visible only to Diigo users. This allows you to not only share those annotations on Diigo itself, but also to visit the originating site and see those comments in context of the surrounding content.

An example showing a highlighted annotation with a private sticky note attached.

This annotation feature is particularly powerful when used in conjunction with Diigo’s social features. Diigo allows you to create groups which can be public, private or semi-private, allowing you to collaborate on research through the use of links and annotation. Diigo also allows you to attach notes and comments that are visible only to the group, which is an extremely useful feature when sharing the link both publicly, as well as in a group context.

In addition to collaboration, Diigo’s social side is excellent for content discovery. The service can provide recommended bookmarks from other members based off of the links you have saved in the past, as well as recommending other users whose bookmarking habits seem to match yours. Diigo takes the “social” in social bookmarking very seriously, and provides very effective tools for finding friends on the service, as well as finding new people who have interests similar to your own. Friending another user doesn’t mean just making them a contact, it enables you to generate buddy lists, allowing you to organize sharing of bookmarks with friends, as well as providing a messaging system. Whereas in many other bookmarking services the sharing and social features seem to occur more as a byproduct of the sharing process, Diigo puts those social networking features front and center. However, Diigo’s interface is very content focused as well, making it clear that this isn’t a social network as much as it is a social tool.

Saving content to Diigo is done primarily one of two ways: you can either install the toolbar application, which is available for Firefox, Flock and Internet Explorer, or you can use Diigolet, which is a bookmarklet they provide that should work with almost every major browser.

Examples of bookmarking. The first with the Diigo toolbar in Firefox, and the second using Diigolet in Opera.

The Diigolet is a surprisingly powerful bookmarklet, revealing sticky notes and annotations, as well as providing all the basic functionality a user needs. However, even with my hatred of adding additional rows to my browser window, the Diigo toolbar has won me over and become my tool of choice to interact with the service. Both tools will provide tag suggestions and assist with group functions, as well as the ability to send the link via email, however the toolbar goes even further. When using the toolbar, you also have the option of cross-posting your links to other bookmarking services, or even Twitter if you require. You can save simultaneously to Diigo, Delicious, Magnolia and Simpy, as well as to your own browser’s local bookmarks. Bookmarking to other services seems to work well, and saving to local bookmarks is a particularly awesome experience when using one of the latest betas of Firefox, which will attempt to auto-complete based on both history and bookmarks. It even correctly applies tags in the Firefox Places storage system, which is great but makes me wonder why the toolbar bothers to also build a hierarchal folder system inside Firefox as well, as the tags do that job already.

Another powerful feature that the toolbar adds is the Diigo sidebar:

The Diigo sidebar displaying my recent bookmarks.

As you can see in the above image, the Diigo sidebar allows me to search and browse both my bookmarks and the bookmarks my friends have posted. In addition it allows me to get current information about the page I am viewing via the “This URL” tab. I can access public bookmarks and annotations, and lists of Diigo users who like the site. Diigo also can provide quick metrics about a site that I am visiting via the main toolbar. Using the “About This URL” menu option will provide a overall popularity score for the site, including a breakdown of the number of links to the site from Diigo, as well as from Google, Delicious, Yahoo myweb, Bloglines, Technorati, and Digg. Diigo also provides a calculation of the site’s Google PageRank, which is a really awesome bonus feature that I just discovered today.

Diigo supports OpenID logins, which makes me smile. It would be nice if Diigo allowed you to sign up using just your OpenID, however you need to create a standard account and then associate an OpenID with it. This isn’t a big deal, but it would be a nice enhancement to see in the future.

My only real complaint about Diigo is the lack of an API for developers. I did send them an email regarding this, and was pleasantly surprised to receive email directly from the founders. They indicated that an API is in the works, and were receptive to some of my suggestions in that regard. As I have browsed through the user forums, this seems to be a common practice for the people behind Diigo to actively engage with their users for ideas, and respond constructively to critiques. Diigo does provide RSS for bookmarks, as well as blog widgets, but those weren’t sufficient for my needs. I’ve been able to work around the lack of API by using the toolbar for cross-posting to Magnolia and continuing to use that service for loading bookmarks into my site. However, I am eager for Diigo’s API because this workaround doesn’t allow me to take full advantage of the annotation features when loading the bookmarks into my link blog.

However, when it comes down to it I feel Diigo is really head and shoulders above the majority of competing social bookmarking services in terms of features, and the site itself is certainly more responsive than my beloved Magnolia, which is a wonderful service in itself, but runs slow as molasses. Based on this glowing review, it may come to surprise you I approached Diigo skeptically, even prepared to be antagonistic, but the service managed to win me over. I was unprepared for the seamless integration of Diigo’s social features, as well as the flexibility of the service, which strikes out like a fist of features into the collective nuts of their competition. If the forthcoming API meets the rest of the site’s high standards, you can expect me to be a happy Diigo user for quite some time to come.

In case you missed it, Pownce announced the release of the second revision of its public API today. The new API is much more elaborate than the previous version (which was honestly kind of a joke), and promises to be robust enough that interested parties could use it to rewrite the Pownce desktop app from scratch without losing any functionality. This will really encourage a lot of third-party apps to be developed for Pownce, and will probably be the thing to get the adoption of the service to really take off. I hope they have a nice caching solution for the API, because I suspect a lot of folks will be hitting it up soon.

You can find the API documentation here. I haven’t had a chance to give it a thorough review, but my first approximation is that it is just dripping with awesome-sauce. If prompted, I might even go so far as to say, “w00t!” 

Hack away, folks!

If you are a reader of tech blogs, you will have no doubt noticed the thorough savaging that the Amazon Kindle has been receiving at the hands of many prominent technology pundits like Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble, as well as podcasts, including the crew at TWiT and Buzz Out Loud.

There’s a small minority of tech folks who seem really into the device, for example you can read Andy Inahtko’s gushing review for the Chicago Sun-Times, and Cali Lewis, who appeared on the TWiT episode linked above, also seems to like the device. With them is a slowly growing cult of Kindle users who breathlessly defend every detail of the product’s design, in part because they like the device and partially in backlash to the initial negative reviews (often without having first-hand experience with the device) that surrounded the launch.

I was one of those people who ordered the device the day it was released, not because I’m usually an early adopter of hardware (this might be one of the first times I’ve bought a first generation device), but because of its link to Amazon, it has such potential to be a game changer. If I intended to provide any kind of commentary on the Kindle, I would need to live with one for a few weeks.

Kindle unboxing

Doubtless you have heard the basics of Kindle functionality, that it utilizes an e-ink screen for crisp readable text, an expandable memory slot, free EVDO access to the Kindle book store as well as the internet, audiobook support (via Audible, and a USB 2.0 interface (you don’t need a computer to use it, but you can plug it in and access it like a mass storage device). Some of those features, like the audiobook/mp3 support seem a little tacked on and better suited to a dedicated music player than an eBook reader, but the main thing that differentiates the Kindle from other eBook readers on the market is the free EVDO access to one of the largest (if not the largest) retailer online. That’s huge, because it means that any book in Amazon’s eBook library (currently 90,000 titles and growing) is available in less than a minute. This becomes a great vehicle for book discovery, as Amazon allows you to download a free sample chapter of any eBook, which has already resulted in my buying enjoyable books that I may not have tried out otherwise.

Now, I love books. I have bookshelves in every room full of them. I’m actually out of space and have to prioritize what goes on the bookshelves and what I box up for storage at any given time of the year. However, I have noticed that with my Kindle, while I still read the books on my shelves, I’m actually reading more in general because it is so easy and comfortable to get new content quickly. Also, whereas I usually have two or three books with bookmarks stacked on my bedside table, I now have some books, but also my Kindle with multiple books loaded that I can take with me anywhere. This allows me to read whichever book I feel like at the moment when I actually get some free time to do so. Because I have a tendency to carry it around most of the time, it’s important that the battery lasts, which it does. With wireless off the majority of the time I can go about a week before the battery starts getting low.

The experience of reading on the Kindle is actually pretty good. All e-ink screens have a slight delay and flash when turning a page, but honestly, after the first few pages I find I don’t notice it much. I’m probably just adapting my timing of page turns to sync with my eye movement to the top of the screen, but I’m not that aware of it. When holding the Kindle in its cover, it is very comfortable to read sitting up, although when laying down I tend to take it out of the cover and use the keyboard as a handle. The buttons on the side of the device control the page turns, and they are a bit oversensitive. This is the biggest issue when you are handling the Kindle outside of the cover, and it will be something that needs to be addressed in further iterations of this product.

My Kindle in its leather cover

As to the display, the text is very crisp and it is reminiscent to ink on paper. Illustrations are displayed well on the device although photos look about as well as you would expect with only 600x800 resolution with 167 ppi and gray scale. This is definitely a text-based device, so obviously the Kindle’s experimental web browser also performs best when pointed to text-based sites.

File formats and DRM are a big issue surrounding the Kindle. Currently it supports the aforementioned audio file types, Amazon’s proprietary AZW eBook format, unprotected mobi files and text. According to Neil Gaiman, the Kindle also originally supported PDF documents , “although not terribly well — it was one of the things I told them about, many of which they fixed — so they may have pulled it until they get the bugs out.” While it’s relatively simple to perform conversions, either via the Kindle service (for free via your email, or for $0.10 via wireless delivery) or by using free Mobipocket desktop software, it seems silly not to natively support more formats, or at least provide a conversion utility in the Kindle firmware itself. This is especially true for Apple users, who must use the Kindle service because the Mobipocket creator program is only designed for Windows. Linux users can run the command-line tool mobigen.exe via Wine, which works very well for me with the Project Gutenberg html eBooks. Apple users running OSX might have similar luck, but I haven’t seen any attempts as of yet. Regardless, this is an issue that needs to be rectified as soon as possible in the next firmware update, which from the looks of the device will be done over the EVDO connection.

DRM is a touchy issue with all digital media and in general I’m against it, as it primarily serves to inconvenience the end user, while at the same time failing in its advertised purpose of combating piracy. I’m certainly not as incensed as some are about it, and I think eventually DRM will go the way of the dodo, as customers get frustrated and publishers get over their terror of the digital marketplace. Honestly, as the Kindle is my only eBook reader, the DRM doesn’t really get in my way, although I’d prefer a more open model based around trust in your users.

How could I possibly review the Kindle without commenting on its price? The $399 on the tag is certainly steep for a device, especially for the average consumer (if there is such a thing). If Amazon wants the Kindle to take off they are going to need to lower that initial cost as soon as they can afford it. Once they get a handle of how much incidental EVDO use is going to cost and get a chance to recoup some R&D expenses, this needs to be brought down to at most a flat $300. Ideally, I’d like to see this device end up somewhere in the $200 range, which is justified considering the wireless capabilities.

My Kindle wishlist also contains feature requests for the Kindle Store. I’d love to see the ability to buy eBooks as gifts for friends who have Kindles, and maybe a way for my Kindle to communicate with another Kindle, such as sending the sample chapter of a book I own to a friend as a recommendation tool. Okay, I stole that last idea from DHP, but it is a wonderful notion. I’d also love to see the option to do bundle purchases, for example buying a physical book and getting the eBook for a nominal fee.

Here’s the deal: I like my Kindle. It has a simple and intuitive user interface, it is very easy to learn to use, and performs its designed task very well. I really enjoy reading on it, and I love the portability. The display is excellent for reading, especially when compared with other species of mobile devices. (If you think I’ll ever regularly read books on a tiny backlit cell phone screen you are very wrong.) That being said, this product is definitely first generation and has its flaws. Hopefully, Amazon will recognize them and correct issues through firmware updates and future iterations of the hardware. On the whole though, I find it to be a very satisfying device, and honestly, I find that some of aspects of the device that the tech community takes issue with are laughable. I predict, someday in the future, the cure for cancer will be released, and the tech community will be up in arms because the cure will lack a touchscreen and will not have a built-in social network. 

That being said, the device is pricey, so consider the features and what they mean to you. Perhaps right now, the Kindle isn’t a good fit for you, and that’s your call as an informed consumer, you don’t have to buy one. However, I selfishly hope you will because the coolest thing about the Kindle is that when you use it , you can see where the future of eBooks is, and exactly how to get there from here, so I’m hoping that it becomes a success.

Here’s to the future of eBooks, wherever it takes us.

Just another quick post that Dan and I just recently did a short podcast on Mahalo. Our contention is that Mahalo, while ostensibly a search engine, has far more in common with Wikipedia than anything else. We also discuss what advantage branding it that way may have, and come to the conclusion that Mahalo is Portal 2.0, but in a good way.

Listen to it here.

I’m a little late on this one, but it’s still worth discussing. I also apologize for the length of this post, but I had more to say than I thought!

A few weeks ago, some of you may have read this post by Jeremiah Owyang regarding his predictions for the future of social networks. The article makes several assertions, such as social networks will create open APIs in response to market pressure from Facebook, which makes a lot of sense. However, the most interesting thing that he predicts is that Facebook will become a major player in the identity game.

Facebook will launch an Identity widget that I can embed on my blog. This allows only those who have registered to Facebook to leave a comment, many high profile blogs will do this, to avoid nasty anonymous comments, thus reducing the incident of Kathy Sierra type events.

He also suggests:

Facebook will have faster adoption that Open ID, as the consumer users will drive it. (Remember the mantra of consider joining before creating communities)

Now, Jeremiah Owyang is not assigning any value one way or the other, merely making predictions based off of the trend he is observing. Facebook certainly is aiming to be a single web platform for its users, and moving into identity management would be a logical step in that direction. The Facebook API does makes this possible, and in fact their are some sites that already support using FB login credentials, like Ma.gnolia. Given the boom in popularity of FB, it seems natural that users would find this an attractive option. After all, we already have many poor benighted souls that eschew email for messaging within FB or MySpace, so it is logical that those individuals would prefer to manage their identity through one of those networks. It is also certainly demonstrable that the lack of anonymity reduces the amount of active trolling in communities (although this is more an argument for identity verification in general as opposed to a FB-specific observation).

All that being said, isn’t this a step backwards?

We don’t need another walled garden, where another corporate entity controls the keys to our online identity, and eventually more users are going to realize this. Thus, I suspect any trend towards using the Facebook API to provide authentication elsewhere is ultimately only going to exist in the short term, only to be superseded by more open systems. Dave Winer gives an excellent explanation of this in this post on user lock-in when he says:

Facebook could easily be the place where the dam breaks. It’s attracting so many users, who may at some point realize that they want control of the data that’s locked up inside Facebook.

That is exactly the issue with entrusting our identities to any single entity, because ultimately it comes down to a matter of trust. As users grow more savvy, they will trust closed systems less and less. Or at the very least, users will become more aware of how incredibly inconvenient the walled garden approach to personal profile and identity data is, as Justin Baum explains quite well in his post on redundant relationships. The future success stories of the web will be the ones that can solve this problem.

I turn to Winer yet again, because he explains it very well:

A vendor will come along and they’ll store your identity but give you complete freedom to move it where ever you want when ever you want at no cost. They’ll make it easy to do so. And they’ll get rich doing it, if they want to.

Why?

[…]

It’s the basic trust proposition of the Internet. People will only trust a service that gives them complete freedom to come and go as they please. Further, they’ll want to come back if you send them to cool places. It’s why people like Facebook today, and why they’ll be tired of it tomorrow, if it only sends you to places within the Facebook silo.

The key to building these future successes is developing and using decentralized protocols like OpenID, and utilizing simple semantic markup such as microformats or even more complex syntax like FOAF. OpenID allows for a truly decentralized identity system, which allows you to switch identity providers on a whim, or even run your own. For more info on OpenID, I recommend you start by checking out Simon Willison’s excellent screencast on using OpenID. Microformats and FOAF provide methods by which you can describe people, relationships and other objects in such a way to be machine readable, but comprehensible to human beings, which opens the possibility of importing/exporting relationship and profile data between various services automatically. We need convenient and open ways of managing our online identities as well, and there are some very smart people out there who have already made some initial forays into that area.

In a later post, Jeremiah Owyang acknowledges:

I realize that Open ID is one solution, but let’s get realistic, it’s not being adopted because it’s too geeky, maybe they need a marketing evangelist, or a mass consumer tool will need to be birthed. Please note, I’m not opposed to the tool, I’m just looking at the market around me.

Owyang is right on the money here, in that these services need more simplistic tools for implementation and more effective evangelism. Currently, the focus of these projects has been marketing the idea to other developers, and they have been succeeding in getting quite a few technical folks pretty fired up about it. Now it’s time to really focus on bringing it to the attention of the masses. Firefox 3 will have built-in support for detecting and utilizing microformats, as well as supporting OpenID which will go a long way towards raising awareness and usage of those methods of describing information. Lightweight and interconnected (maybe even interchangeable) social networks are clearly the future of the web, and these technologies, or their descendants, are the keys to creating them.

None of this is to say that services like MySpace and Facebook are doomed. Quite the opposite, both of these networks are uniquely poised to write their brands into the history of this shift in web technology. If they can let go of the lock-in business model and focus on developing with these budding technologies, they can be situated as central points of influence in the future web, rather than eventually fading into obsolescence, as many a closed system has before them. Turn user profile pages into OpenID identity providers, and offer the ability to use already existing OpenIDs for either new accounts or to associate them with existing ones. Utilize microformats and open APIs to encourage user freedom, and as a result, build brand equity as well as increasing user loyalty.

Users don’t want a walled garden, they want an open field. It’s time to give it to them.