May 9th, 2008

Lifestreaming, Conversations, and Context

Yesterday I eavesdropped on a short Twitter conversation between Charlie and John. Here’s images for the threads - Charlie’s stream and John’s. In short Charlie was saying that he finds little value with the lifestreaming services and John, who works at Plaxo, wanted to know why.

Charlie’s answer? Lack of context. Interestingly, Charlie’s issue with context was with the relevancy of friends.

I jumped in with my $0.02, saying that it wasn’t limited to a lack of context with friends, but also included contextual issues with location/time of the content consumption. We’ve all talked about this problem at length on the BlueBlog so I won’t revisit this here.

But John’s question in response, “Is that a general criticism of social media feed aggregation?”, got me thinking. I don’t have a clear answer to this, but I think working through it can be beneficial for all of us [note: this translates to “rough thoughts lie ahead”].

Is the time/location contextual issue a general criticism of feed aggregation?

There are times and instances when the current structure of feed aggregation works well. Lately, Robert Scoble has been talking a lot about the benefit of the aggregated conversation at FriendFeed. It’s an example of the benefit of centralized feed aggregation.

This makes sense. Decentralized content and conversations that are occurring around a similar topic are pulled together into a common conversation stream. From timing and location perspectives it’s contextually correct and provides real benefit.

For close friends, with activities of a certain nature, I benefit from feed aggregation. Facebook’s newsfeed is a good example of this. This also makes sense - I wanted to experience a “social sixth sense” with those closest to me.

Time and location context issues arises when, for example, a Last.fm entry appears in the lifestream. Are you looking to discover music while conversing? The appearance of content like this, at this time, is noise. Noise that supports feed aggregation criticism.

Scoble recently said that the /discussion page on FriendFeed is where the value of the service lies. Which makes sense but leads me to a bunch of other questions:

If the aggregated conversation is the value, what’s the benefit of adding feeds that aren’t conversational in nature? In terms of # of feeds, do feed aggregation services exhibit diminishing marginal returns? Is the inclusion of certain feeds a negative to the service? Are different aggregation services necessary, constrained and focused on different feeds and experiences? And, finally, when does the aggregation of Last.fm-type (nonconversational) feeds make sense?

Update: Corvida at R/WW has a post up titled “Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media” that’s related to the thoughts above. Corvida discusses how different aggregation platforms should be used for different purposes and how different services cater to different audiences. Bingo.

Corvida concludes with the following: “Instead of being able to freely add whatever service you wish, some users like myself are taking into account what others may consider noise on certain services as a courtesy to members. In essence, you are becoming our own filter.” And then calls for better filters for the services. Filters and context - the missing pieces of social aggregation.

May 6th, 2008

TechCocktail Conference: May 29th

We’re actually going to play the One-of-These-Things game twice in this post.

1) Wind, Michael Jordan, Sears Tower, Wrigley Field, Deep Dish, Semantic Web, Oprah

2) Jason Fried, Brad Feld, Gary Vaynerchuk, Fraser Kelton, Dick Costolo

Easy, huh?

Yep, I’ll be speaking at the TechCocktail Conference in Chicago on May 29th. The topic is Understanding the Semantic Web. I’m going to do my best to garyvee* Semantic Web.

I’m honoured to have the opportunity to speak and share my knowledge and perspective on the Semantic Web.

A big thanks to Eric and Frank for the invitation. They’re playing a major role in strengthening the tech community in Chicago and are doing big things to highlight how vibrant it already is.

They’ve assembled a stellar list of speakers for the conference and May 29th should be another great day for tech in the Windy City.

Register now and enter the following promo code to save 10%: techcocktailers

If you’re heading to the conference drop me a note - I’d love to grab a drink.

* to garyvee: to take a topic with a certain stigma (i.e. wine) and “break down the barriers, stereotypes, and misperceptions that otherwise prevent people from exploring and enjoying the exciting and rewarding world” of said topic.

May 5th, 2008

Contest: Show Us How You Use Us (and win $)

We had a fun weekend watching various ego feeds light up. It was all sweet: twitter updates about us, blogs that added SmartLinks, people sharing things via BlueOrganizer.

The constant bombardment of good news made me smile.

And then I started thinking, that if the constant bombardment of good news can make me smile, maybe happiness can be bought?

I want to find out. Here’s the deal…

Continue »

May 2nd, 2008

The Week That Was

The wonderful party at our office was the highlight of the week. Celebrating a special moment and bringing so many friends together was an incredible, memorable, moment for everyone.

We were also happy to meet new friends who joined our adventure this week. To everyone that bought into our vision for a smarter web and installed SmartLinks, Widgets, or BlueOrganizer… thank you.

Join our Facebook group (it’s growing!) and subscribe to our blog’s feed to ensure that you get up-to-date access to swag, betas, and more.

Continue »

May 1st, 2008

Party Pictures

Here are some shots of our Office Open House. Thanks again to everyone who came.

View of sunset over the Hudson

Fraser with some friends from St. Martins Press

Continue »

April 30th, 2008

Thank You

Last night was fantastic. Thank you to everyone who stopped by and made it so.

Lots of friends dropped by to say hello, enjoy some food and drink, and toast the opening of the office. The conversation was electric throughout the entire evening - ranging from tech talk to the qualities of Hoboken, NJ (and everything in between).

The view was commented on by many and we enjoyed a proud moment when Glemak took a photo of the sunset across the Hudson (it’s rumored that his office has one of the best views in the city).

Thanks to everyone who came far and wide to attend (can anyone beat Anne’s 2 hour trip?) and for making a special moment for everyone in the company.

Photos to come when Andy returns to MD and uploads some pictures. If you took any, please send them on over.

Thanks again everyone.

April 28th, 2008

Reminder: AdaptiveBlue’s Open House

It’s tomorrow. And it’s time to party like it’s… well, like it’s an informal celebration of the opening of our first office.

When:: Tuesday, April 29th (tomorrow)
Where: 131 Varick St, Suite 909 (map)
When: 5 - 9 pm
What: An informal open house to toast the opening of our first office. Stop by anytime between 5 and 9 pm to say hello, see the space, and enjoy some food & drink.

Come and say hello. If you haven’t yet, drop me a note - via email or in the comments - if you’re planning on attending. We need to know how many drinks to pick up.

Despite naming us one of the top web apps Jon is breaking our heart and can’t make it. Don’t go breaking our heart.

First one to guess the surprise guest in the comments wins a prize.

April 25th, 2008

What We Can Learn From Beckett Baseball Card Monthly

Did you ever collect baseball cards?

If so then you’re already familiar with Beckett, the bible-like price guide that kids in the late 80’s and early 90’s studied for hours on end.

Behind the glossy cover lay pages of cheap newsprint filled with row after row of card prices. Organized by year and set the guide contained a price for every card produced.

Familiarity with the layout was so great that locating the entry for the Greg Jefferies 1988 rookie card from Donruss was a quick task.

But the information of value associated with the entry wasn’t the price. And this is an important observation.

Continue »

April 23rd, 2008

Thinking About Context

Semantics provide meaning. Meaning provides context.

And context is an opportunity to provide individual benefit. Lately we’ve been thinking a lot about context. We’ve started to classify different situations where having context is beneficial (and how).

Here’s three that we’re all familiar with:

Contextual Links: understanding what the individual is looking at enables contextually-correct “next steps” for interaction to be accessed (i.e. SmartMenu in BlueOrganizer).

Contextual Information: knowing what the individual is looking at allows for relevant or related information to be pulled directly to the to distributed site.

Social Context: identifying unique objects and where they’re distributed across the web allows for the presenting of web wide popularity, a form of recommendation.

Now, this is a post to “butter up the dry toast.” Patrick commented on a previous post about the benefit of having a “conversation about what can be done” and having regular “day dream posts.”

Alright everyone, let’s start day dreaming about what else could be done online with context. Think about what you’d want if the browser and web was smart enough to know what your intentions were.

Let’s butter that toast. I’ll join in with some of our day dreams as well.

April 21st, 2008

Introducing AB Meta - Simple Annotation Format for Pages About Things

We have been working on something very exciting here at AdaptiveBlue - annotation format called AB Meta.

What is AB Meta?

AB Meta is a simple and open format for annotating pages that are about things.

A book publisher can use AB Meta to provide information about a book such as the author and ISBN, a restaurant owner can provide information such as the cuisine, phone number and address and a movie reviewer can annotate reviews with movie titles and directors.

The format allows site owners to describe the main thing on the HTML page in a very simple way - using standard META headers. AB Meta is purposefully simple and understandable by anyone. AB Meta is based on eRDF Standard.

The benefit of AB Meta is that it makes it easy for software to identify things–books, music, movies, recipes, restaurants, wine and more–inside regular HTML pages. With AB Meta, search engines can find and classify pages to help users interact with real things instead of flat HTML pages. Here are more benefits:

• Object-centric: Focuses on everyday things that we encounter around the web
• Semantic: Upgrades pages to be part of growing Semantic Web
• Lightweight: No complex markup, no changes to the body of the document
• Intuitive: The names of things and attributes are easy to understand for anyone
• Efficient: The meta headers are easy to get to without parsing entire HTML page
• Extensible: Additional attributes and concepts are easy to add
• Compatible: Alternative markup based on existing standards is supported

AB Meta Example: Book

AB Meta is best understood through an example. Consider a page that describes a book - a product page or a book review on a blog or a page on a publisher site. A simple example below illustrates how AB Meta can be used by placing the standard meta tags inside of the head element of the HTML page:

The object.type header above declares that the page is about a book. Additional headers specify the title and the author - a set of essential headers needed to describe a book. Next we look at the expanded example:

<meta name=”object.type” content=”book”/>
<meta name=”book.title” content=”Kite Runner”/>
<meta name=”book.author” content=”Khaled Hosseini”/>
<meta name=”book.isbn” content=”1594480001″/>
<meta name=”book.year” content=”2004″/>
<meta name=”book.link” content=”http://books.com/1594480001.html”/>
<meta name=”book.image” content=”http://books.com/1594480001.jpg”/>
<meta name=”book.tags” content=”fiction, afghanistan, bestseller”/>
<meta name=”book.description” content=”Story of an Afghan immigrant.”/>

In the expanded example we added more metadata headers to describe the book. We used the same simple notation as in the compact format: name of the meta header described the attribute and the content specifies the value.

Who should implement AB Meta?

AB Meta is simple and beneficial for many web sites, because it makes the content more discoverable. Here are some examples of pages that are a good fit:

• Book publishers, book review sites and blogs.
• Movie home pages, movie review sites and blogs.
• Electronics manufacturers, electronics review sites and blogs.
• Record labels, music review sites and blogs.
• Restaurant home pages, restaurant review sites and blogs.
• Recipe review sites and blogs.
• Stock review sites and blogs.
• Wineries, wine review sites and blogs.

How is AB Meta Related to Semantic Web?

AB Meta is part of the bigger effort to annotate web content to be machine readable. This effort, broadly known as Semantic Web, was first suggested by Sir Tim Bernes-Lee. AB Meta is part of the so-called bottom-up approach, which is generally considered difficult because it requires the content owners to annotate pages. However, because AB Meta is really simple and easy to implement, many content owners will be able to support it.

AB Meta Specification

You can find the full specification of AB Meta format here.

What is next?

We had a pleasure of collaborating on AB Meta with another company - a major provider of web technologies. This company is planning to annouce a broader set of related specifications in the coming weeks. When that happens, AB Meta will become part of bigger ecosystem and growing body of open standards around Semantic Web. In the mean time, if you want to help us spread the word, please grab the AB Meta button and the link and put it on your blog or web site.

Feedback

We designed AB Meta to be simple, but also flexible and extensible. Our goal is to have community drive the spec, expanding it to handle other everyday things that we encounter around the web. So please tell us what you think. What did we get wrong? What other things we should add? We’d love to hear from you!