vanderwal.net

An Insanely Good Bookshelf Viewer

I have a thing for books, bookshelves, bookstores, and libraries. Doing a quick scroll through Mastodon and I saw Marcin Wichary posted something that stopped me cold, in a good way. This bookshelf viewer in his post, My design bookshelves – Aresluna, is amazing.

I have many of the same books and enjoy them, I have the same horizontal stacks in front of vertically placed book, and I did the “ooh, I’ve been wanting to go through this one” and the “if this book is there these other surely are as well”.

But, the most wonderful thing is the design and interaction of the viewer, with the ability to click to see more about a book and go to where you may pick up a copy. I really like the rotation of the inspection lens and being able to see the books behind horizontally shelved books in front of the vertically shelved books. This is so insanely well done.

For a few months I’ve been taking pictures of my shelves, quickly having them converted to markdown lists for the shelf with title and author backlinks, mapped my bookcases and stacks. But, I keep culling my shelves and moving things, which means redoing the pictures and conversion of shelves’ lists. Having something a little more interactive like this may help calm the moving of books, but I do have many I don’t care about, are drastically out of date (unless I time travel), or picked up and just weren’t good.

Seeing Marcin’s interactive interface makes me want to go in that direction. But, for my immediate needs I really need to finish capturing my shelves, converting, and tying the list to the mapping. Someday I can tackle something like what Marcin has done, but maybe someday that will be made well and available to use on my books and collection.

Updated Blog Analytics and Added Personal InfoCloud Site

Yesterday I did a little updating of the blog analytics and took my data workflow and applied it to data from my Personal InfoCloud site. There isn’t as much data, as there are only around 130 posts. But, there are 50 categories and not all categories have been applied to older posts as needed. With the the different data shapes the force graph looks different and works differently, Personal InfoCloud, 2003–2026 forced graph for blog posts and categories, and the bar charts for posts over time and word count and line chart for cumulative word counts, Personal InfoCloud, 2003–2026 Words also looks different.

Both of these have been added to the Blog Analytics page in the Lab, Blog Analytics :: Lab :: vanderwal.net. I have normalized the templates for all of the analytics, to some degree. There is more clean-up I’d like to do on the templates. But, I mostly created these for myself to get an understanding of what is there and patterns.

A Note About the Personal InfoCloud Site

On the Personal InfoCloud site side of things I have quite a few posts that have been queued up to publish there. There are also many things I thought I posted, which have gone to point to, but realize they aren’t there. The laying out of the “four InfoClouds”: Personal InfoCloud, Local InfoCloud, Global InfoCloud, and External InfoCloud hasn’t been laid out and posted that I can find. Also the Personal Info Cycle that frames out the workflows in the Personal InfoCloud for individuals. This has been used for some very large products that many people use. This is part of the downside of presenting these publicly for 20 years and well over 100 times (maybe more than 200) I haven’t sorted out what is fully written and posted. This needs to stay in focus as many of the good patterns laid out are starting to break as development and product leads are reverting to earlier broken patterns thanks to vibe coding and AIs not understanding the improved patterns and the broken patterns are out there in abundance.

Also on the Personal InfoCloud site I was doing a Shift Happened series that had four of the 16 posts written and posted. I need to list out what was, or could be coming.

Large Observable Update

Around mid-week Observable announced a major update on their blog (A new Observable) and my evenings turned into looking at updates to the Notebooks, charts / data visualization offerings and much more. There are more interactive charting models and this is the first time I’ve noticed a downloadable notebook app for Macs (I haven’t tried it yet).

I use D3 by Observable quite a bit for data visualizations form data focussed apps (I also have been using Plotly for local Python interactive data apps). I started using D3 in late 2011 for some small data visualization projects, but in 2012 was working on a large project that made extensive use of it and it has stuck as a tool in my tool belt.

I often use Pandas, Polars, and Jupyter, but also RStudio. It might be time to look at Observable’s notebook, but I’m not overly fond of JavaScript and I’ve been using Claude to assist cut down the struggles with JS and getting to looking at and interacting with data visualizations.

The D3 and Observable sites have been some of the best resources for understanding data visualization basics and good fits for data and visualizations. The education aspect, as well as the really good quality charts and visualization tools have made it a regular resource that I use and regularly point others to.

I still have a lot of Observable and D3js tabs open as I’m pulling better notes for myself. But, I figured it was a good time to share it with others.

Vibe Markets Don’t Always Rhyme with Good Product

My recent Four Cornerstones of Development post (which I found the initial blog mention on a March 2001 archive page - Off the Top :: March 2001 and later on mention I’m working on an essay on it, which I somewhat remember having a publication ask me to write it for them, but no longer exists) was surfacing in discussion a bit lately when talking with those building quick things for themselves that they had used LLM for coding (as well as much of the interaction and visual design), which is viable for personal use for a stretch and then you hit the reliable, maintainable, repeatable thresholds of pain.

Ooh! This Looks Interesting

But, I’ve looked at a quite a few of these projects (not those that aren’t really products) as they initially seem like they would solve a use case gap I have. But, I saw a video for an app that was pitched and it hit a long-standing need I had that has heavy friction. It was an app that linked to Glaze, which is a product / service from Raycast. I read through the information about Glaze and thought this could be “interesting”. I had trouble finding the app that caught my interest as the Glaze app marketplace is a mess. I finally found the app, looked at the descriptions and images and figured I’d give it a go. I found I had to download the Glaze app to seemingly run the app I wanted within Glaze. This was less than optimal putting a silo wrapper around apps, that has never worked well and there is a long and abundant history of attempts at this poor model. (An app with scripts and workflows that can be added through a marketplace / gallery like Raycast or Alfred is a good model, but full apps that is a very different story).

The Needed Perspective Framing (Likely to be skipped to preserve a rant)

I’m not adverse to people using coding assistance, but there is a lot more to building an app or script than just code (and often being a developer or engineer helps keep the AI coding assistance in check as they can resurface long gone poor practices that are abundant in the training material). Not having background in development nor product management nor design creates a lot of gaps and little depth to know if something is actually good or not.

I’ve Seen this Movie Before and …

I opened Glaze and got the app I had interest in set up, and it was slow, not well considered with limited functionality that would be helpful for a basic app in the genre it sat in. The hope I had was shot, I was rather disappointed (it happens a lot) with the level of a “proof of concept” build that only examines is something possible to let you then you interrogate the hell out of it to figure out what is wrong and how to improve it before you get to the prototype or alpha version. I shut the app and won’t open it again.

I looked at other apps in Glaze. All I looked at had the same level of quality (or I should say lack of quality and basic understanding of what an app is, let alone what a product is).

I jumped to the four cornerstones, as I would on something I was building or running a product group that is creating and developing. Things were sort of usable, but half a cornerstone doesn’t get you very far. There is a lot to know and understand beside an interface that does something and I haven’t found AI services that fill much of this ground that needs to be covered in a solid manner. They can help code decently on small-ish projects (and slightly larger) and get okay (yet often problematic) interfaces. But, the other considerations and forward-looking needs to plan for or at a minimum consider so to account for future adaptation are missing or not supported well. The person building has to bring that understanding with them to drive this to a decent outcome.

Creating an app seems easy but there is a lot that should be considered and accounted for in the process, even for something simple. Putting out what will soon be abandoned ware with a “developer” / creator that didn’t quite ship something solid and left it at that, and not to return.

It May be an Idea Farm

There are a lot of great ideas in Glaze, but the lack of quality has me deleting the Glaze and adding a reminder to not go back. The deletion of Glaze took around 2 hours as the thorough app deletion tools I have were getting errors from many components claiming deletion was not permitted. This often happens when an app is running, but the app had been quit. It has been a long time since I’ve had to go through rounds of rebooting my Mac to rip out stubborn poor app remnants.

Know What You are Getting In To

There are people who have been building good niche products that have used AI to help fill gaps. Most of them have a lot of experience with UI, UX, product, and/or development to know what needs to be done at least at a basic level. Not all of them have worked through all four cornerstones, but they have considered them, and have lived through the hell from not considering and/or working through the cornerstones.

Four Cornerstones of Development

In the late 1990s through 2010s when working with development and product teams the four cornerstones of development were always at the tip of the tongue or as a small poster on a wall somewhere. I know I wrote this up somewhere before and likely presented it in the late 1990s and/or early 2000s. Working in enterprise environments where people would get involved in product and development, but don’t have background these cornerstones were essential to bring up as basics.

The last few weeks and months I’ve been thinking of this a lot and wanting to point to it, but realized it isn’t really on line other than a quick mention in a 2003 post of mine – Needs When Running a Service. Actually, it is something I am always wanting to point to. With the increase of vibe coding and people creating products for “unique” purposes, but then people are sharing these more widely than personal use, the need for understanding and considering what they are getting into is really needed.

The Four Cornerstones of Development

These four cornerstones were initially called out for information application development, but applied to all user-centered development and product management. If a team building didn’t focus on all four of the elements from the beginning to make the right decisions early (or have them framed and adaptable) the product was really going to struggle.

The four elements are: Usable; Reliable; Maintainable; and Repeatable.

In the current state of quick development by non-developers using LLM coding tools the only one of these cornerstones that is known or partly handled is the first cornerstone, usable. What is made may be usable, or mostly usable, but that won’t really last and when selling it, sharing it widely, or having others rely on it. The reality means the person developing and shipping has unintentionally signed up for things they don’t have background in and often the LLMs aren’t that helpful with. Much of what is coming out as apps are proof-of-concept level of completion, which doesn’t get into any consideration of the other three cornerstones.

Usable

Usable is the first hurdle and focusing on the user and their needs. If things aren’t usable the offering doesn’t really have much. The other cornerstones don’t really matter, if the offering isn’t usable. But, usable and not having the other cornerstones will be problematic.

To be usable, even if it is a single simple use case, how adjacent use cases that aren’t supported are handled or avoided should be as clear as possible. The capabilities and limitations being clear help with the ease of use and understanding something when someone hasn’t touched it in months.

Reliable

The reliable cornerstone is what starts making the offering stable, secure, and enduring. The bugs have been remediated and it works as intended continually. Security and levels of privacy considerations have been put in place and consistently work as intended. But, so do the core myriad of use cases that were intended to work and also be supported, continue to work.

Lacking reliability you have something that breaks at various stress levels and use cases (core uses cases or edge cases). Building and shipping requires setting bounds for what is supported and how, but also how well the edges of what is supported are handled.

Maintainable

Maintainable gets to the reality that products and shipping them doesn’t mean something is done when shipped, it is the beginning. When planning out what is being built how it will be maintained over time and supported is essential. How will the product be updated to support changes to the coding language and/or operating system, and device updates. How do the regular changes in languages and operating systems get handled where security patches are made and break apps and services for users that use apps and services that aren’t updated.

User / customer support and how this is handled also falls into the maintainable cornerstone. Planning for maintainability and how that will be handled needs to include support as the two are often tightly related. When something breaks or doesn’t work as expected, that becomes support work. The support work is often related to considerations and steps (or not making them) the area of the maintainable cornerstone.

Repeatable

Repeatable is one that often gets left of consideration and one that is essential if what you built gets popular and scale. It is often thought of as something that may happen in the future, but understanding early on how to handle repeatability means it should be easier when the time arrives. Repeatability is needed when a server or service built on crashes and is not available or you need to replicate server backends for supporting the service as it scales (there are a lot of needs for repeatability, including building sandboxes to test and develop).

Everything changes as it scales and understanding that at the start of everything (product, organization creation, shared simple scripting project, etc.), gives a decent foothold to when growing and scaling hits. Planning not to scale is also an option, but often that can take just as much work as scaling and you need to be prepared for not scaling when others really want what you’ve made.

Not planning for this early and accounting for how to design the development of the app and/or services for this will lead to painful issues with growth or the reality of moving from one supporting backend server / service to another as things change (often more quickly than we expect).

Wrapping the Cornerstones to Help Make Decisions

The cornerstones were really helpful 20 to almost 30 years ago for a quick reality check for early early-stage planning and building something to ship. Building something and shipping it is the start, not the end. All four cornerstones will provide stability once things are shipped if you have planned understanding and using the cornerstones.

Today, much like early-ish web thinking of how far you want to open something up for use by others comes from considering the cornerstones. If all that is considered is just use and there is no interest in the other corner stones or just partial interest or capacity, it is likely good to keep the use of it limited to friends and or family, similar, or perhaps tighter.

Weeknote - 25 October 2020

I’m returning back to something I read a bit ago from Matt Webb about getting back into a habit for blogging again. Matt’s posting about 15 rules for blogging, and my current streak is one that really struck home as I’m trying to get back to a regular writing habit, here and elsewhere. Matt’s idea for one idea per post is the old school way of knocking out quick short notes on one topic for reference for one’s self, but also sharing out for others by default. The weeknote model runs a bit counter to this, but trying to get back to a habit of capturing things and trying to get to a schedule helps get things moving again. Matt’s post is more than worth your time.

The week was heavily focussed on the work front as trying doing work that could really benefit from a good innovation space with large whiteboard and to include teammates to think and work through the flows and integrated systems. I’ve been working through a solutions to a gap that makes some easy solutions not viable due to compliance and needing to craft for a large enterprise and the constraints and diversity of needs. The start to the solution came about about 3 weeks ago and trying to work through a solution for one piece of it that would remove a lot of manual work that has a lot of opportunity for error as it scales and scope increases. Getting he foundations right is key, but I think we will have a good solution. Working through permeations of scenarios and modifications coming from vendors was a good chunk of working with large logic puzzles, but the foundation should be good. Now to work on workflows and interactions for it, or at least the first step and a solid system of record for these. I love this type of work, but it is much more sane with a good sized room, large whiteboard and stickynotes, and a few others to work through permeations and potential missing manhole covers that are created when the goal is seeing them and resolving them.

Early voting starts this week and trying to sort out when I can fit that in. While today (Sunday) was eerily quiet, which could be the cold snap or Covid cases spiking at its worst everywhere around the U.S. and people playing safe, I don’t expect that quiet to last for the week.

Read

A really quiet week on the reading front. I have some things to read this next week for a quick review that I am really looking forward to.

Watched

I sort of stumbled onto starting the Finnish crime drama, Deadwind that is on Netflix. I have only watched one episode, but I think I will stick with it. I thought it was a different series, but it has me interested.

One of the things that had me intrigued is not so much the show, but it is in Finnish. I haven’t listened to a lot of Finnish as an adult and its spoken and linguistic patterns are well outside of any language I have a passing understanding of. I was reading the closed captions and trying to pull out some words that could work as way in, but that was tough. I also realized I really liked the cinematography and focussing on closed captions and thinking about language structure was a bit in the way of what had drawn me in.

Listened

Over the past year I’ve become a fan of Rick Beato’s YouTube channel and I stumbled onto his break down of Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes in the episode What Makes This Song Great? Ep.27 Peter Gabriel. There is so much more to this song and with Rick had taken another 30 minutes to dig into that.

Productivity

I’ve been using Obsidian more and a release that should hit those with early access and allowing block addressability really looks good. I’m finding with what Obsidian offers I’m able to really get a lot of crosswalks between ideas, sources, authors / creators, and structures that I just didn’t have access to before. Already it feels a bit like I have a James Burke far transfer method in the works that is part of the structure of his Connections series.

The Writing Ache

It has been a while since I’ve written here, or over at Personal InfoCloud. I have an even larger stack of things in my writing queue and it is getting to the point that I am aching to write.

Shift Happened

I have a few things I really want to and need to get out. One is to take the Shift Happened series I started and made it through 4 of 16 I have outlined and I am finding the shifts myself and others saw and were living and advising through, happened to far more and they are really lost and acting as if these shifts never happened. Still.

Complexity / Social Lenses

The other thing is my Complexity / Social Lenses are now numbering in the 70s and I need to write to frame the core 12 or so I often use as half-day or full-day workshops to help others see through the fog of complexity with social and other complex environments they work and live within. I have been hoping to get these into a book, but the timing either wasn’t right or the environment (publishing company) shifted.

Information Strata

The last of these is around information depth, which I started relabelling Information Strata, that I have been including in client work and as one of the lenses related to social objects / socially mediated objects (depending if it was Jyri Engstrom or Karin Knor Cetina as one’s entry point). Information strata gets back to the core point and realization in the early 2000s that having a discussion with the subject in clear sight drastically improves the depth of the conversation, reduces errors from lack of clarity or misunderstanding, and improve conversational (information sharing) efficiency. Somehow today that basic concept is really lost and people accept the poor communication patterns as a given or don’t think to investigate a better way.

Over the last 10 years or so I started using a point system around the layers inhibiting a person from having a clear view of what is being discussed. This concept of having a clear understanding and isn’t new, it was something I learned as a communication major in many dog years ago as an undergrad. I need to do a decent write-up of this to have something to point to when helping others. I’m also realizing Info Strata leads right back to the “Come to Me Web” and related matters where the importance of bringing things related near has prime importance when building a service and system for someone to live and work with.

Now what I need is time and stability at the same time to get these going. Oh, and to get the ever bumped side project moving forward again.

PubPub from MIT Media Lab

I just stumbled into MIT Media Lab’s PubPub service that is an open platform for writing new research journals. It has some nice collaborative features, versioning, embraces markdown at its core, and inline discussions.

Social Circles

One of the pieces I really want to explore is how its social dimensions work. My my take on different things I write and have interest in have different social circles that I want to ping and get feedback from. But, there are subjects and groups / communities that I really would like to participate in as well. This is a more complicated and complex area that really needs work and focus. Google+ tried this but deeply flubbed it as their circles are based on individual’s perspectives and not socially constructed realities (knowing the boundaries of who is involved in a circle and having really solid social interaction design around that is a basic requirement, something nobody at Google seemed to consider nor have basic foundations in social sciences to understand this basic need). For PubPub, getting these constructs right would be really helpful and make it a really powerful service and platform.

Other than PubPub

PubPub is fairly close to what I was hoping Poetica would become and Draft app. I’ve been thinking about this for The Lenses and its subset, Social Lenses writings. Also just being able to write blogs and get knowledgeable sanity checks on them from others before posting. This is something I was trying to do with Draft app and had some success with people who are familiar with markdown (which is most people I interact with), but alerting people or subsets of groups that there is something I would really like early looks at and feedback is where it falls a bit short. It also seems like Nate Kontny is now more focussed on Highrise (light CRM service that he took over and now is CEO) than Draft. Also with the purchase of Poetica and its imminent shuttering, I’m looking at other options.

Some of what I have interest in can be found in Medium, but I’d rather just syndicate there, given their use policy. Medium is a really nice content creation platform, with some okay drafting with feedback capabilities, but I’m looking for a bit more. I also really prefer Markdown approach these days as it keeps things really light and I can edit and work on writing from most any platform I have with me or at my access, even if I’m lacking a network connection (which is something that is really helpful for focus for me actually).

One PubPub Wish

The one thing I wish PubPub had was an open source version where I owned the platform and could run it on a server of my choosing. But, it looks like this is in the plans (a few bugs need to be squashed on their way to this), as the PubPub About page states.

New Adoption Points

One of those things where, yet again, realize you have a really quick personal adoption threshold when a new device fills in and you start wondering why everything can’t be logged into with a fingerprint. Then there is the, “why are you calling me on my payment device?”

It has been over 30 years of having new devices arrive at semi-regular pace and quickly disrupting things for workflows around devices and interactions, which is followed often by relatively quick adoption and getting used to a new mental model that makes things a little easier. This is really true for software that is buggy and never really fixed and where I (as well as other humans are the human affordance system).

The Software Counter Model to Quick Change Adoption

As much as new physical hardware and software interaction model shifts largely causes little difficulty with changing for more ease of use, the counter to this with software with a lot of human need for grasping mental models. It is particularly difficult when structuring mental models and organization structure before using software is something required.

There have been some good discounts on Tinderbox across podcasts I listen to or websites around Mac productivity I read, so I nabbed a copy. I have had long discussion around Tinderbox for over a decade and it has been on my want list for large writing and research projects. I have had quite a few friends who have been long time users (longer than I have been a DevonThink user), but I don’t seem to have one in my current circle of colleagues (I you are one and would love to chat, please reach out).

I have a few projects that I think would make great sense to put into Tinderbox, but not really grokking the structure and mental model and flows - particularly around what I wish I would know when I have a lot of content in it. It is feeling a lot like trying to read Japanese and not having learned the characters. I also wish I had kept better notes a few years back when I was deeply sold on a need for Tinderbox, but didn’t capture a detailed why and how I thought it would work into workflow.

Some Tools are Nearly There as a Continual State

I have some software and services that I use a fair amount with hope that they will get much much better with a few relatively small things. Evernote is nearly always in this category. Evernote is a good product, but never gets beyond just good. The search always falls apart at scale (it was around 2,000 objects and had about doubled that scaling threshold pain point) and I can’t sort out how to script things easily or remotely drop content into the correct notebook from email or other easy entry model. There are a lot of things I wish Evernote would become with a few minor tweaks to support a scalable solid no (or very few faults tool), but it never quite takes those steps.

Their business tool offering is good for a few use cases, which are basic, but getting some smart and intelligence uses with better search (search always seems to be a pain point and something that DevonThink has nailed for 10 years) would go a really long way. Evernote’s Context is getting closer, but is lacking up front fuzzy, synonym, and narrowing search with options (either the “did you mean” or narrowing / disambiguation hints / helps).

We will get there some day, but I just wish the quick adoption changes with simple hardware interaction design and OS changes would become as normal as quickly with new other knowledge and information tools for personal use (always better than) or business.

Late to Realizing Ovi Maps Does Exactly What I Wish

I been a big fan of Nokia's mapping solution built into its smart phones, Ovi Maps as it provides the best mobile turn by turn directions I've seen on any mobile device. But, this is largely because Nokia owns Navteq, which has long been the leader for on board mapping and driving solutions.

That FINALLY! Moment Reached

While I have been incredibly impressed with the Ovi mapping on my Nokia E72 device and often use the Ovi resources on the web, I hit that finally, somebody got this right moment with Ovi over the weekend. While, many web mapping solutions allow you to save favorites on the web getting those to sync to your mobile device, with your directions has been left out of most of these solutions (I have been complaining to friends at Google, Yahoo, and elsewhere for many years that this is a no-duh next step). Well, it seems Ovi figured this out quite a while back. (I noticed Google Mobile Maps provided this at the end of 2009, but have never been able to get it to work, even on my supported Symbian device.)

The simplicity and ease with with Nokia's Ovi pulls this off is rather stunning. With this aha moment, I feel like I was the last one to see this and sort it out, but in chats with other mobile maps and navigation users, they have been pained waiting for exactly this functionality, as most people it seems will get a location link and add it to their desktop maps (particularly for travel) but that does them little good as they don't take their desktop or open laptop into the car with them, they take their mobile. Understanding context of use is incredibly valuable.

Now may be a good time to check your device's capability, although iPhone does not seem to have this functionality supported by Google maps (surprised?).

January 2011 Books Read

My monthly list of books read is something I have had in mind for a long time. I was inspired by Matt Webb's book list which he was doing for a while years back. Not only is the sharing out with others helpful, but it also helps me finish reading a book.

Books read January 2001 with short summaries.

Shibumi: A Novel by Traviathan

A really good thriller set in Japan and Europe. Not only was the story good, but the details and a good cultural view of Japan during World War II. This book caught and held my attention early and I really enjoyed it.

Halting State by Charles Stross

This thriller set slightly in the future where MMORPGs start intertwingling with life. A bank robbery occurs in the game which starts the whole story rolling. The interplay and storyline between virtual games and physical life interwoven with its pervasive digital layers we depend on today is really well done.

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

Business Model Generation is a surprise gem in that I had heard very good things about it and a quick skim of it in a bookstore convinced me to pick it up. But, the design, layout, and thoughtful thinking of how it steps through the model for understanding and thinking through business models is nothing short of stellar. The stuffy, staid, and often broken world of business models got tipped on its ear through design and understanding that makes walking through creation of a business model a sane process, but also leads to rethinking existing models for whole organizations or parts. It is a great way to look to see where software and services can have a positive impact when mapping out an organizations model.

Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design by Mike Kuniavsky

Smart Things is a fantastic walk through design considerations and methods for information interfaces for and streams from physical products. This book is very well thought out, well written and augmented with examples and very well produced. Not only is this a great book for designers, but for people working through ideation, iterations, and innovations for improving information use in, from, and with the world of things around us.

Closing Delicious? Lessons to be Learned

There was a kerfuffle a couple weeks back around Delicious when the social bookmarking service Delicious was marked for end of life by Yahoo, which caused a rather large number I know to go rather nuts. Yahoo, has made the claim that they are not shutting the service down, which only seems like a stall tactic, but perhaps they may actually sell it (many accounts from former Yahoo and Delicious teams have pointed out the difficulties in that, as it was ported to Yahoo’s own services and with their own peculiarities).

Redundancy

Never the less, this brings-up an important point: Redundancy. One lesson I learned many years ago related to the web (heck, related to any thing digital) is it will fail at some point. Cloud based services are not immune and the network connection to those services is often even more problematic. But, one of the tenants of the Personal InfoCloud is it is where you keep your information across trusted services and devices so you have continual and easy access to that information. Part of ensuring that continual access is ensuring redundancy and backing up. Optimally the redundancy or back-up is a usable service that permits ease of continuing use if one resource is not reachable (those sunny days where there's not a cloud to be seen). Performing regular back-ups of your blog posts and other places you post information is valuable. Another option is a central aggregation point (these are long dreamt of and yet to be really implemented well, this is a long brewing interest with many potential resources and conversations).

With regard to Delicious I’ve used redundant services and manually or automatically fed them. I was doing this with Ma.gnol.ia as it was (in part) my redundant social bookmarking service, but I also really liked a lot of its features and functionality (there were great social interaction design elements that were deployed there that were quite brilliant and made the service a real gem). I also used Diigo for a short while, but too many things there drove me crazy and continually broke. A few months back I started using Pinboard, as the private reincarnation of Ma.gnol.ia shut down. I have also used ZooTool, which has more of a visual design community (the community that self-aggregates to a service is an important characteristic to take into account after the viability of the service).

Pinboard has been a real gem as it uses the commonly implemented Delicious API (version 1) as its core API, which means most tools and services built on top of Delicious can be relatively easily ported over with just a change to the URL for source. This was similar for Ma.gnol.ia and other services. But, Pinboard also will continually pull in Delicious postings, so works very well for redundancy sake.

There are some things I quite like about Pinboard (some things I don’t and will get to them) such as the easy integration from Instapaper (anything you star in Instapaper gets sucked into your Pinboard). Pinboard has a rather good mobile web interface (something I loved about Ma.gnol.ia too). Pinboard was started by co-founders of Delicious and so has solid depth of understanding. Pinboard is also a pay service (based on an incremental one time fee and full archive of pages bookmarked (saves a copy of pages), which is great for its longevity as it has some sort of business model (I don’t have faith in the “underpants - something - profit” model) and it works brilliantly for keeping out spammer (another pain point for me with Diigo).

My biggest nit with Pinboard is the space delimited tag terms, which means multi-word tag terms (San Francisco, recent discovery, etc.) are not possible (use of non-alphabetic word delimiters (like underscores, hyphens, and dots) are a really problematic for clarity, easy aggregation with out scripting to disambiguate and assemble relevant related terms, and lack of mainstream user understanding). The lack of easily seeing who is following my shared items, so to find others to potentially follow is something from Delicious I miss.

For now I am still feeding Delicious as my primary source, which is naturally pulled into Pinboard with no extra effort (as it should be with many things), but I'm already looking for a redundancy for Pinboard given the questionable state of Delicious.

The Value of Delicious

Another thing that surfaced with the Delicious end of life (non-official) announcement from Yahoo was the incredible value it has across the web. Not only do people use it and deeply rely on it for storing, contextualizing links/bookmarks with tags and annotations, refinding their own aggregation, and sharing this out easily for others, but use Delicious in a wide variety of different ways. People use Delicious to surface relevant information of interest related to their affinities or work needs, as it is easy to get a feed for not only a person, a tag, but also a person and tag pairing. The immediate responses that sounded serious alarm with news of Delicious demise were those that had built valuable services on top of Delicious. There were many stories about well known publications and services not only programmatically aggregating potentially relevant and tangential information for research in ad hoc and relatively real time, but also sharing out of links for others. Some use Delicious to easily build “related information” resources for their web publications and offerings. One example is emoted by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb wonderfully describing their reliance on Delicious

It was clear very quickly that Yahoo is sitting on a real backbone of many things on the web, not the toy product some in Yahoo management seemed to think it was. The value of Delicious to Yahoo seemingly diminished greatly after they themselves were no longer in the search marketplace. Silently confirmed hunches that Delicious was used as fodder to greatly influence search algorithms for highly potential synonyms and related web content that is stored by explicit interest (a much higher value than inferred interest) made Delicious a quite valued property while it ran its own search property.

For ease of finding me (should you wish) on Pinboard I am http://pinboard.in/u:vanderwal

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Good relevant posts from others:

• Why You Should have a Website - Jeremy Keith
• We can save Delicious, but probably not in the way you think
• Delicious in Purgatory :: TechCrunch

Nokia to Nip Its Ecosystem?

First off, I admit it I like Nokia and their phones (it may be a bit more than like, actually). But, today's news regarding Nokia further refines development strategy to unify environments for Symbian and MeeGo is troubling, really troubling. Nokia is stating they are moving toward more of an app platform than software. It is a slight nuance in terms, but the app route is building light applications on a platform and not having access to underlying functionality, while software gets to dig deeper and put hooks deeper in the foundations to do what it needs. Simon Judge frames it well in his The End of Symbian for 3rd Party Development.

Killing A Valued Part of the Ecosystem

My love for Nokia is one part of great phone (voice quality is normally great, solidly built, etc.) and the other part is the software third party developers make. Nokia has had a wonderfully open platform for developers to make great software and do inventive things. Many of the cool new things iPhone developers did were done years prior for Nokia phones because it was open and hackable. For a while there was a python kit you could load to hack data and internal phone data, so to build service you wanted. This is nice and good, but my love runs deeper.

When my last Nokia (E61i) died after a few years, its replacement was a Nokia E72. I could have gone to iPhone (I find too many things that really bug me about iPhone to do that and it is still behind functionality I really like in the Nokia). But, the big thing that had me hooked on Nokia were two pieces of 3rd party software. An email application called ProfiMail and a Twitter client called Gravity. Both of these pieces of software are hands down my favorites on any mobile platform (BTW, I loathe the dumbed down Apple mail on iPhone/iPod Touch). But, I also get to use my favorite mobile browser Opera Mobile (in most cases I prefer Opera over Safari on iPhone platform as well). This platform and ecosystem, created the perfect fit for my needs.

Nearly every Nokia user I know (they are hard to find in the US, but most I know are in Europe) all have the same story. It is their favorite 3rd party applications that keep them coming back. Nearly everybody I know loves Gravity and hasn't found another Twitter client they would switch to on any other mobile platform. The Nokia offerings for email and browser are good, but the option to use that best meets your needs is brilliant and always has been, just as the unlocked phone choice rather than a carrier's mangled and crippled offering. If Nokia pulls my ability to choose, then I may choose a phone that doesn't.

Understanding Ecosystems is Important

Many people have trashed Nokia for not having a strong App Store like Apple does for iPhone. Every time I hear this I realize not only do people not understand the smartphone market that has existed for eight years or more prior to iPhone entering the market, but they do not grasp ecosystems. Apple did a smart thing with the App Store for iPhone and it solved a large problem, quality of applications and secondarily created a central place customers could find everything (this really no longer works well as the store doesn't work well at all with the scale it has reached).

While Apple's ecosystem works well, most other mobile platforms had a more distributed ecosystem, where 3rd party developers could build the applications and software, sell it directly from their site or put it in one or many of the mobile application/software stores, like Handango. This ecosystem is distributed hoards of people have been using it and the many applications offered up. When Nokia opened Ovi, which includes an app store with many offerings, many complained it didn't grow and have the mass of applications Apple did. Many applications that are popular for Nokia still are not in Ovi, because a prior ecosystem existed and still exists. That prior ecosystem is central what has made Nokia a solid option.

Most US mobile pundits only started paying attention to mobile when the iPhone arrived. The US has been very very late to the mobile game as a whole and equally good, if not better options for how things are done beyond Apple exist and have existed. I am really hoping this is not the end of one of those much better options (at least for me and many I know).

Social Design for the Enterprise Workshop in Washington, DC Area

I am finally bringing workshop to my home base, the Washington, DC area. I am putting on a my "Social Design for the Enterprise" half-day workshop on the afternoon of July 17th at Viget Labs (register from this prior link).

Yes, it is a Friday in the Summer in Washington, DC area. This is the filter to sort out who really wants to improve what they offer and how successful they want their products and solutions to be.

Past Attendees have Said...

"A few hours and a few hundred dollar saved us tens of thousands, if not well into six figures dollars of value through improving our understanding" (Global insurance company intranet director)

From an in-house workshop:
"We are only an hour in, can we stop? We need to get many more people here to hear this as we have been on the wrong path as an organization" (National consumer service provider)

"Can you let us know when you give this again as we need our [big consulting firm] here, they need to hear that this is the path and focus we need" (Fortune 100 company senior manager for collaboration platforms)

"In the last 15 minutes what you walked us through helped us understand a problem we have had for 2 years and a provided manner to think about it in a way we can finally move forward and solve it" (CEO social tool product company)

Is the Workshop Only for Designers?

No, the workshop is aimed at a broad audience. The focus of the workshop gets beyond the tools' features and functionality to provide understanding of the other elements that make a giant difference in adoption, use, and value derived by people using and the system owners.

The workshop is for user experience designers (information architects, interaction designers, social interaction designers, etc.), developers, product managers, buyers, implementers, and those with social tools running already running.

Not Only for Enterprise

This workshop with address problems for designing social tools for much better adoption in the enterprise (in-house use in business, government, & non-profit), but web facing social tools.

The Workshop will Address:

Designing for social comfort requires understanding how people interact in a non-mediated environment and what realities that we know from that understanding must we include in our design and development for use and adoption of our digital social tools if we want optimal adoption and use.

• Tools do not need to be constrained by accepting the 1-9-90 myth.
• Understanding the social build order and how to use that to identify gaps that need design solutions
• Social comfort as a key component
• Matrix of Perception to better understanding who the use types are and how deeply the use the tool so to build to their needs and delivering much greater value for them, which leads to improved use and adoption
• Using the for elements for enterprise social tool success (as well as web facing) to better understand where and how to focus understanding gaps and needs for improvement.
• Ways user experience design can be implemented to increase adoption, use, and value
• How social design needs are different from Web 2.0 and what Web 2.0 could improve with this understanding

More info...

For more information and registration to to Viget Lab's Social Design for the Enterprise page.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Catching Up On Personal InfoCloud Blog Posts

Things here are a little quiet as I have been in writing mode as well as pitching new work. I have been blogging work related items over at Personal InfoCloud, but I am likely only going to be posting summaries of those pieces here from now on, rather than the full posts. I am doing this to concentrate work related posts, particularly on a platform that has commenting available. I am still running my own blogging tool here at vanderwal.net I wrote in 2001 and turned off the comments in 2006 after growing tired of dealing comment spam.

The following are recently posted over at Personal InfoCloud

SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools

SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools focusses on the myriad of discussions I have had with clients of mine, potential clients, and others from organizations sharing their views and frustrations with Microsoft SharePoint as a means to bring solid social software into the workplace. This post has been brewing for about two years and is now finally posted.

Optimizing Tagging UI for People & Search

Optimizing Tagging UI for People and Search focuses on the lessons learned and usability research myself and others have done on the various input interfaces for tagging, particularly tagging with using multi-term tags (tags with more than one word). The popular tools have inhibited adoption of tagging with poor tagging interaction design and poor patterns for humans entering tags that make sense to themselves as humans.

LinkedIn: Social Interaction Design Lessons Learned (not to follow)

I have a two part post on LinkedIn's social interaction design. LinkedIn: Social Interaction Design Lessons Learned (not to follow) - 1 of 2 looks at what LinkedIn has done well in the past and had built on top. Many people have expressed the new social interactions on LinkedIn have decreased the value of the service for them.

The second part, LinkedIn: Social Interaction Design Lessons Learned (not to follow) - 2 of 2 looks at the social interaction that has been added to LinkedIn in the last 18 months or so and what lessons have we as users of the service who pay attention to social interaction design have learned. This piece also list ways forward from what is in place currently.