rlmrdl: When Something Finally "Gets It"

Earl Mardle (

rlmrdl) wrote,
@ 2003-02-22 16:45:00

When Something Finally "Gets It" - A Purple Cow
Matt Mower has come up with the term for the bursting of the damn, the Purple Cow. What he's looking for is not just something that is good enough, to be the tipping point in any field, it has to be remarkable.

The question is, how does something become a Purple Cow? The radically new and totally innovative is not the answer, the first mover advantage is rarely true.

I suspect that what happens is a lot of experimentation around an idea which helps to condition the thinking and set up a demand. Right now there's a growing set of people who are using an expanding set of overlapping tools. I use LiveJournal for my blog because of the desktop interface, I use Blogroll, especially ITS browser based desktop centric Bookmarklet to harvest and organise other Blogs, I use Awasu Newsreader because it is clean and adds feeds really easily but none of them is the whole deal.

What I want is a tool that lets me add a blog to the roll, automatically add it to my feeds then post to my own blog quotes and links from the sources I read, save the good stuff to a personal feed and share the feed with a group, gain the benefits of their shared feeds and use the whole thing as a shared reputation system for the content. Plus some other stuff.

All of that stuff lurks in different chunks of software but hasn't yet collapsed into an integrated application. When it does, the first or second one off the blocks will be the winner because the demand will have been built, the tools will be familiar and the applications for the idea hanging out for it.

I just came across Newsmonster which I'm about to try because it has several of these functions built in. Some of this stuff is getting very close to the Purple Cow

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	(Anonymous) 2003-02-21 22:21 (link)
	you might want to try this out. but it costs :-) (Reply to this) (Thread)

Using Groove
(Anonymous)
2003-02-22 02:45 (link)

I have tried Groove, admittedly in an earlier phase. I had real problems with it in several ways.

1. By creating and hosting shared documents on its own server it made them unavailable to the original files on my machine and there was no way to sync them.
2. The process was far too slow and cumbersome, lots of "spacecraft" design that just gets in the way of the action. If it isn't as clean and fast as chat or email, it doesn't cut.
3. Its plainly designed for a local server on a LAN, maybe some kind of VPN across a fast network. But for distributed individuals across the internet, not even close, and especially if some of them are using dialup.

Admittedly I haven't touched it for about a year, but then, why would I. My swedish collaborator and I get by fine with email, chat and phones.

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Re: Using Groove
(Anonymous)
2003-02-22 04:28 (link)

>>> 1. By creating and hosting shared documents on its own server it made them unavailable to the original files on my machine and there was no way to sync them.

How else can you do it? If you want to make files available for others to see you either have to put them up on a central server or keep them on your own machine which isn't great as far as availability goes. You could try to distribute multiple copies but this is obviously wasteful wrt storage space and keeping everything in sync would be a nightmare!

>>> My swedish collaborator and I get by fine with email, chat and phones.

So on the one hand you seem to be saying that existing tools are just fine but on the other you want an app that does it all!

I have to admit to not having tried Groove yet but it seems to be the way we are going wrt to the whole collaborative thing, even it currently only works well in a corporate environment which, to be fair, seems to be their target market.

This seems to be the direction it looks like we will have to head with Awasu - yes, it's me again :-) - but instead of having a monolithic app that does it all, I want Awasu to be the glue between existing tools. We'll hook into email using whatever email client you happen to use. Using Jabber (or something similar) we will provide you with instant messaging. The appropriate plugins will support whatever PDA and mobile phone you happen to have. More plugins to support the various blogging systems. And so on. The idea being that it will be easier for people to start using an app if it integrates with the way they already work and the tools they are already using.

Whaddya think?

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Re: Using Groove
(Anonymous)
2003-02-22 04:39 (link)

BTW, this touches on what I think is the fundamental, most awesomely powerful feature of Awasu: plugins. Virtually everyone has basically said to me "yeah, ok, but so what" and seem to have missed what it's all about.

For example, you don't have to wait for me to write something that will let you post to LiveJournal and incorporate it into the app. Anyone can write a plugin that will let you post, integrated into Awasu. We're talking to a company now that want to monitor 100 or so channels, do some search and filtering on it to come up with a meta-channel containing the most interesting items. Another plugin. You want to do things like this article talks about? More plugins. The example Cringely uses about a CEO monitoring database transactions in real time is exactly the one we've been using to explain what Awasu plugins can do.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm trying to plug Awasu here - that's not my intent. But it looks like plugins can go a long way to addressing the solutions that you seem to be looking for.

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Plugging Awasu

rlmrdl
2003-02-22 17:14 (link)

I'm happy for you to plug Awasu here, I like a lot about it and I think its going to be a great product.

You are probably right about plugins, most of us don't get them, mostly because most of us aren't techies who can start with the tool and see what it can do. I start with a function and want a tool to perform it. A plugin doesn't mean anything to me because I don't get the technology behind it any more than I get the technology behind my car.

So we need people who do things with information to get a better conversation with people who do things with data and we'll start getting somewhere.

I've read the bit on CastBridge and I agree, I'll do an entry on it because it deals with, but doesn't talk about the key to the internet (David Reed and others) End to End, which is such a great idea that I'll support anything that encourages it. There's also a whole lot of other stuff going on that maskes huge sense. RSS excites my neurons in serious ways. More soon

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Re: Plugging Awasu
(Anonymous)
2003-02-22 18:21 (link)

>>> most of us don't get them, mostly because most of us aren't techies who can start with the tool and see what it can do.

We are aware that this is a major problem with the way we're currently pushing Awasu. The best way would be for us to write 20 or 30 plugins to do things like monitor Ebay, monster.com or Google, let you post to LiveJournal or Blogger, have meta-channels like the one I mentioned previously, and so on. Then people can see them in action, realize what they can do and start dreaming up new ones or even writing their own.

But there's only 24 hours in a day so we have to focus on core functionality for the moment. Once we get the Advanced version out, we will be able to make a start on this.

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