the integrated online experience

We need access to information at different times and in different ways - when we’re on the move we might use a mobile and at home a desktop. It is this change in circumstances and needs that devices are getting better at dealing with.

Email was one of the first devices to bridge the boundary between the desktop and the mobile. I am using Exchange at work and so a windows mobile phone works “well” at integrating the experience on the move. I haven’t been much of a fan of gmail via the mobile as yet - it currently feels a bit clunky, so I usually wait to answer personal emails when I get home unless they come to my work address but this will improve over time. It amazes me that the iphone doesn’t support exchange. It is one of the major reasons I ruled out purchasing it.

RSS is the next technology to do this and the need for this cross platform integration is stopping me moving from Google Reader. The platform works really well on both the mobile and desktop platforms. It’s all very well talking about using new platforms like Particls or fav.or.it but if it cant provide a great experience across multiple platforms then it at least needs to sync with Google Reader (or other great mobile platforms). It is now the first question I ask when I look at other RSS reader. This all comes back to dataportability. We need the ability to sync data as well as move it.

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Scoble has set a fire under Facebook for not letting him move his data out of their network and into another network. He has posted about it here.

Data portability (and interchange) is going to be an important part of 2008 with people using more and more services to meet their needs. Amongst the tech crowd, people seem to be using Facebook less and less and moving to specialised services like Twitter, tumblr and Flickr for “status updates”, life feeds and photos respectively. The ability to move between services can only be good for the consumer - increasing competition amongst similar services and providing better functionality. I am hoping this will allow for better attention based tools to come to the fore - Twitter is definitely better at putting quality information in front of me than the Facebook currently because of the tighter audience. Of course, if Twitter took off in the same way as Facebook then it too would suffer as it would need to prioritise or at least group messages.

There is a new group I have just joined called dataportability.org which is looking to help this happen. It seems to make sense.

I wonder if this idea could be replicated at the operating system level? It would make for more interesting competition - the ability to remove microsoft’s components and replace them with others. Is it technically feasible? It would need Microsoft to open up the OS significantly.

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It’s more than a year since I gave a talk on Attention based management systems and how I envisaged they would become key to managing all the data that is thrown at us everyday. If anything attention as a buzzword has decreased in the past 12 months, whilst the amount of data has increased massively thanks in no small part to Twitter and the Facebook newsfeed.

It would be interesting to see whether a prolific rss reader like Scoble saw a decrease in the number of posts he read compared to last year. Back in September, the BBC reported that the time required to use Facebook has come about at the expense of worker productivity.

So why are attention tools not getting attention? (sorry!) It is actually rather simple. It’s built into everything we use already.

The very Facebook newsfeed that has increased the amount of data we see, is customisable to show what we want to see. Facebook rolled out the ability to give feedback on what you do and do not want to see (I trust it will be used eventually as it doesnt seem to be yet!). It is early days but this very newsfeed allows you to keep in touch with more people using less time.

The major reason more people have been using Google Reader is the flexibility it gives you to read blog posts efficiently. I definitely read more posts now then I used to with Bloglines a year ago. Fav.or.it is another RSS reader that attempts to place content most relevant to you in front of you.

Even the workhorse of the office worker, Microsoft Outlook 2007 has taken a huge step with its task features. It now places tasks both in a new right hand panel so you can see it immediately as well as the relevant tasks in your calendar. I used tasks sporadically before but could not do without it now.

As for the applications I looked at a year ago, Touchstone (now Particls) and Attensa still exist and I’ll take a closer look at both in later posts.

Oh and one last thing - just like in marketing, attention is all about relevance.

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Attensa released a new version of its rss reader for outlook/attention management software. Those who saw my presentation on attention data at barcamp london will have heard me talk about Attensa. It prioritises your feeds in a “river of news” view so that in theory at least you see the posts you want to first whilst still retaining the ability to jump easily to feeds you want to check less often.

The new version improved 2 key things for me - one was an error on startup of outlook (which when I ignored seemed not to interfere with the running of the software) and the other was the inability to use the scroll mouse with any accuracy. Both these have been fixed so I am now a very happy user of the Attensa reader

A desktop alert system was introduced in this release which I am hoping that it is just the first step along the way as all it does right now is tell you that a post has arrived from feed X. I’d much prefer it to tell me what the post is so that I can decide then and there whether I want to read it.

There are a few other major improvements i would like to see:

• The first is to the river of news view - it still prioritises by feed rather than post - so even if some of the posts do not interest me at all they are prioritised along with the rest of them
• The second is similar to the search boxes found all over Vista - the ability to type in a tag/keyword and immediately see the posts referring to it. I wonder if I would actually use this often but it certainly makes finding those posts easier and quicker

Overall though it is a very good RSS reader in itself (having the flexibility of both the river of news view, folders and integrated into the outlook application). It will be interesting to see how the attention management side of the application progresses over time as there is still plenty of room for improvement - not least by adding support for email.

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Well the hype and anticipation in my mind dissipated quite quickly - installing touchstone on my computer lasted all of 30 minutes. It is in alpha so I should not have expected so much but it is a shame nevertheless. It crashed constantly. I’ll install it on my non-production system and play with it there.

In the meantime it is back to Attensa for now..

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