Sparkspring

A Closer Look at Jolicloud

nickreynolds — Thu, 31 May 2012 14:36:00 +0100

Great to hear Tariq Krim shedding some much needed light on the ambitious Jolicloud vision.

“We have to focus first on developing the product and getting users to value their personal cloud.”

and

“I think though there is a cloud ecosystem that’s being built as we speak in France, but maybe the problem is that we don’t make ourselves heard enough.”

Too true.

Do one thing better than anyone else

nickreynolds — Wed, 30 May 2012 12:28:24 +0100

Memolane is a personal cloud service which stores all your online activity from Twitter and Facebook to blogs and photos. I signed up a couple of years ago and plugged in Twitter and Flickr, the only services which were available, and then forgot about it. As you do.

Then a few months ago I started receiving a daily email containing Twitter updates and Flickr photos from that particular day in a random year from the past. A sort of personal ‘this day in history’.

I liked it. I liked it a lot. For a few seconds every day a memory would be triggered by a long forgotten photo on Flickr or a passing remark on Twitter. I have continued to enjoy these daily email memories ever since.

Out of curiosity I went back visited their website. And how it had changed. Not only can you import many more services now including your blogs, YouTube and many more, but it encourages you to interact with other users on the site, share and subscribe to memory ‘lanes’ and generally stick around. All of which I had no interest in whatsoever, in fact it put me off completely. Until I visited the site, Memolane seemed to be doing one simple thing very well and better than anyone else.

The burgeoning personal cloud market is still finding it’s feet and developing their services. They walk a fine line between overpowering us with features like Memolane has done or keeping things very simple a la Jolicloud Me.

The personal cloud is all about context

nickreynolds — Wed, 30 May 2012 09:03:24 +0100

The personal cloud is all about context:

Damn right.

"We sincerely hope WebIntents become ubiquitous, supported by all modern browsers, as well as by all..."

nickreynolds — Tue, 29 May 2012 14:40:08 +0100

“We sincerely hope WebIntents become ubiquitous, supported by all modern browsers, as well as by all web application makers. They’re links 2.0, and the faster we get there, the better for the web!”

- Superfeedr : WebIntents are links 2.0 (via msgboy)

Degrees of difference

nickreynolds — Tue, 29 May 2012 12:39:51 +0100

I have tried to use Pinterest, on and off, for over year and it just hasn’t found a place within me. Whatever hooks it has have not sunk in. And yet today I came across Gimmebar, effectively yet another personal cloud service, which immediately took hold in the same way Jolicloud got under my skin.

Even if a service has shortcomings and lacks certain features it can still find a place inside you simply because it provides some sort of instant satisfaction which gives you time to find the value. Or not in some cases.

The degrees difference between Pinterest and Gimmebar are slight but profound. The same goes for Everyme and Glassboard; Hojoki and 300.mg; Basecamp and Wunderkit; Orchestra and Do.

The differentiating details which can make or break a product are often so slight you’re not even aware they are there or not there in some cases.

Radically Simplified WordPress

nickreynolds — Thu, 24 May 2012 09:11:53 +0100

Radically Simplified WordPress:

Matt Mullenweg is still one of the brightest sparks in tech and it looks like he’s not letting up on the WordPress innovation.

The cloud in reverse

nickreynolds — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:26:27 +0100

I just received an invite for Social Folders which on the face of it seems to aggregate all your cloud data for easy access. Although during installation it became clear that it synced all your cloud date back down onto your local computer.

Personally, the whole point of apps like Dropbox and Evernote is to get data off my local device and up into the cloud for access from anywhere, not to sync it all back down to my computer. This is a cloud strategy in reverse which means a rain of data I don’t want flooding my hard drive. No thanks.

Ranking for signal to noise ratio

nickreynolds — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:09:29 +0100

Ranking for signal to noise ratio:

Seth Godin says:

Signal to noise ratio is a measurement of the relationship between the stuff you want to hear and the stuff you don’t. And here’s the thing: Twitter and email and Facebook all have a bad ratio, and it’s getting worse.

The clickthrough rates on tweets is getting closer and closer to zero. Not because there aren’t links worth clicking on, but because there’s so much junk you don’t have the attention or time to sort it all out.

Spam (and worse, spamlike messages from organizations and people that ought to treasure your attention and permission) are turning a medium (email) that used to be incredibly rich into one that’s becoming very noisy as well.

And you really can’t do much to fix these media and still use them the way you’re used to using them.

I don’t think there’s any arguing that there’s a lot of noise on Twitter, Facebook and Email but I disagree with him that there’s not much we can do to fix the problem.

I have eradicated virtually all email noise by unsubscribing from noisy sources and keeping those of value. On Twitter I only follow high signal accounts and throw potentially noisy ones into lists. And it’s a similar story on Facebook - unfriend and unlike noisy sources.

Robert Scoble’s constant moaning about the poor quality of noise control tools on social networks is bizarre, the idea that we are victims of spam is ridiculous and the fear that somehow we will miss out if we’re not camped out in the the noisiest room we can find is a fallacy.

Each of us is our own noise control tool. The power is in our hands as subscribers, not the publishers which is just how it should be.

Simple but smart

nickreynolds — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:46:20 +0100

I’ve just started testing Sepia Labs’ new private group sharing product Glassboard.

As with many of these new private sharing services it’s hard to ignore the tumble weeds as they blow past while you wait for your friends and family to join up too. If they can even be bothered that is.

Glassboard have done something simple but very smart to help alleviate this problem. By letting new users join up to an existing group to which everyone is invited, this immediately lets you do three important things: Feel there is an existing community around the product, talk directly to the creators by submitting feedback and feature requests and finally discover people with whom you may wish to share privately in another board.

Glassboard also benefit by getting immediate and direct feedback on the product and can gauge the success of the on-boarding process in realtime. As always it’s the little things.

Bitly readies real-time viral search engine, raises $20 million in new funding

nickreynolds — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:16:03 +0100

Bitly readies real-time viral search engine, raises $20 million in new funding:

Realtime search is coming back! I love how Bit.ly keeps moving, keeps innovating.

Time Warner Cable CEO: 'I'm not sure I know what Airplay is'

nickreynolds — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:09:44 +0100

Time Warner Cable CEO: 'I'm not sure I know what Airplay is':

This says everything you need to know about the future of TV.

Why Evernote Really Could Last 100 Years

nickreynolds — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:28:00 +0100

Why Evernote Really Could Last 100 Years:

Evernote do great marketing. They’ve crafted two superb tagline ideas; one for users and one for investors. Both nonsense but both distinctly memorable and endlessly recyclable.

For users we can play with the idea of Evernote becoming our ‘second brain’ while the business sector can savour the idea of a ‘100-year company’.

When the media picks them up and runs with them repeatedly you’re laughing.

Eat the Document

nickreynolds — Tue, 08 May 2012 08:39:36 +0100

Eat the Document

What The Fuck Is My Social Media Strategy? by Mike Phillips

nickreynolds — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:00:42 +0100

What The Fuck Is My Social Media Strategy? by Mike Phillips:

Beautiful. I didn’t know it but I’ve been waiting for the new version of Dack.com’s Web Economy Bullshit Generator.

Drafts, the quick way to capture and share ideas

nickreynolds — Wed, 02 May 2012 12:00:47 +0100

Drafts, the quick way to capture and share ideas:

Another great iPhone app for taking notes and then spitting them out to myriad different service.

750 Words

nickreynolds — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:45:00 +0100

750 Words:

The best site I know for writing and/ or journaling.

Hojoki: A personal cloud integrator that IT should watch

nickreynolds — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:50:28 +0100

Hojoki: A personal cloud integrator that IT should watch:

analyst:

Rather than starting with social activity feeds and adding in information services, like enterprise social collaboration platforms do, Hojoki starts by just connecting the cloud apps first to generate an activity stream of pure updates form the productivity services people use. This does generate value immediately, versus the often difficult task of demonstrating rapid value with traditional social collaboration platforms. The traditional platforms employ a model of adding users and groups in a stream first, then system-generated activities second. But right now Hojoki’s supported cloud apps list is thin, unless you use Google Apps. Evernote is supported, which is a plus. It also performs the integration at the personal user level. This will be disturbing to IT, for sure. So it will be interesting to see what kind of enterprise services, if any, Hojoki adds after coming out of beta.

But bottom line, if services like these continue to outpace enterprise ISVs and IT’s ability to deliver more services at a faster pace, then more employees are going to take their productivity workflows outside the enterprise. It’s like trying to plug the leak in the levee with a thumb.

The Verge at work: sync your text everywhere, never lose an idea again

nickreynolds — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:45:49 +0100

The Verge at work: sync your text everywhere, never lose an idea again:

Pretty much a carbon copy of how I use and sync notes.

Interview with Hojoki

nickreynolds — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:16:00 +0100

App activity stream service Hojoki has been on my radar a while now and I thought it high time I found out a little more.

Describing themselves as ‘making all your cloud apps work as one’ I like to see them as the Twitter for apps. Activity streams are everywhere in our personal lives so why not get the benefit as we work?

How long has Hojoki been going and from where did it spring?
Hojoki was founded a little over a year ago. The founders were involved in research in the field of activity streams and productivity in particular. They saw that something was missing in the area and decided to work on a solution. This became Hojoki.

How many employees do you have on the team?
At the moment, there are 10 of us.

How many users do you have?
Our user numbers are in the 5 digits and growing rapidly.

What is the average number of Workspaces users create?
We’ve discovered there are two types of users. One who use Hojoki to monitor their tools and the other who collaborate. People who monitor have fewer workspaces but still some and those who collaborate have many workspaces and sometimes tens of collaborators in each one.

What is your definition of an app?
My definition of an app would be a tool that serves a purpose and initially, we are focusing on productivity apps.

Who do you see as your competitors?
We do something very new and naturally there are not many competitors out there. Of course, we see some new startups following a similar approach (busyflow.com, 300.mg).

How important is mobile to you (iOS and Android apps)?
Very important. We’re currently developing our mobile app for both. We’re going to release them at The Next Web conference later this month.

What is your view on the web versus non-web (mobile only) apps (e.g. Path, Instagram)?
I think that, with productivity, both are necessary as people haven’t quite moved away from their computers in this field, but do need to keep informed and work away on the move too.

What are your views on the usefulness of email in the context of services trying to reinvent it (Fluent.io, Shortmail) and the shift towards activity streams and realtime micro-messages of the sort attached to collaborative documents and to-do items.
I think email is still very useful for certain types of correspondence. When it comes to collaboration and when one needs speedy feedback, realtime is the way to go. Hojoki tries to bring this platform to teams. There’s no need to send an email for feedback and refer to or include a link/attachment to a file, just write what you want in Hojoki. It’s that simple.

What are the benefits of linking many and varied apps compared to the one-stop-shop solution of services like Bascecamp and Wunderkit?
Well, we feel that people already use separate apps for everything and they love these apps. If we were to create our own versions, people might not get that same feeling, so we decided to integrate the best apps out there into one platform.

Do you see Hojoki as an app only for small ‘private’ teams or do you foresee features for sharing certain things outside the Hojoki garden?
At the moment Hojoki is a private space but we plan to release an API that will let you export your activities. This will open up Hojoki and you could use this any way you’d like to.

What are your favourite apps and/ or services (not neccessarily supported by Hojoki)?
Cloud App and Google Docs are two of my favourite as with them two alone you can do an awful lot.

As a freemium product how do you gauge the right time to add ‘premium’ features?
We’re going to do that at the close of our beta, when we have features we think power users will want and will love to pay for them.

What are the benefits of being based in Germany?
The data protection laws are a huge advantage. These guarantee that your data is safe.

Where do you see Hojoki in a year’s time and in five year’s time?
In a year, to have a suite of tools that cater for everyone and to have features to make Hojoki a must-have.
In five, to be the cloud aggregator and collaboration suite. Have all the apps you could want integrated and a huge amount of power users who love Hojoki like we and others do already.

Many thanks to Adam Bannister, Community Manager at Hojoki.

Micro messaging

nickreynolds — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:22:25 +0100

An extract from Keith Teare’s post on Techcrunch

As Android, iPhone and other mobile platforms grow we are moving away from the page based Internet. The new Internet is app centric and often message-centric. The number of users engaged in this app-centric and message-centric Internet is both huge and their use is growing. People used Instagram for images, not Flickr or Picasa. They use Foursquare for checkins not Facebook. And they do so in large numbers and they do it a lot.

The interesting part of this is Keith’s observation of not only a shift towards apps but towards messages too.

My view is that it’s not just Twitter and Facebook that are eroding our use of email but the myriad products and services which provide realtime messaging around collaborative documents and even To-Do items.