Day 1 with Google Wave

I just tweeted how Google Wave with no friends is like standing at a party with no one to talk to.  There are a couple of things that you need to have in your mind before you try out the product:

• It does not replace GMail.  This is not an email client, nor is it an IM client.  It’s a shared collaborative session that allows people to communicate in a unique enviornment
• You’ll be tempted to send emails to people outside of google wave.  Currently, you cannot do this.  You can only collaborate with people within the Google Wave domain.
• It’s a product that is way ahead of its time.  I’m not sure if people are ready for a product like this but I can see their vision clearly.  Perhaps they’re simply laying out the platform but the key to it’s success is enabling users to truly transition into an “ever present” app.

An “ever present” app is an application that constantly stays open your browser or on your desktop.  For me I have a couple of “ever present” applications that I cycle through on a daily basis.

• Gmail
• Facebook
• Twitter (via Tweetdeck)
• Digg.com
• Mint.com
• Finance.yahoo.com
• ITunes
• MS Office

For google to make its mark, wave needs to be adopted across the board.  Frankly, I believe the wave team should have powered wave through Gmail instead of creating a completely new domain/application for it.  I view it much more as a collaborative wiki where users can communicate with each other and share content on the web.  To the pioneers of the internet, I think this makes a lot of sense.  To the mass user, however, I don’t think the product is intuitive enough for people to embrace it.  I think Google really needs to optimize certain use cases for it to be applicable to the mass market.  For now, like I do with most new programs, I’ll try it out for a week and see if I continue using it.

Just my $.02..

-SD

Why hashtags are important for tweets

Many of you may wonder why people put the pound symbol in front of words on their twitter messages. Hashtags are a way of showing what the entire twitter universe is saying about a topic you’re discussing. It will show, in real time, what tweets contain the same word.

The reason why this is so powerful is that it demonstrate trending in real time. The best example of twitter, to demonstrate how real time the technology is, was when there was an earthquake and the twitter employees saw a spike in the word “earthquake”. Moments later, they felt the earthquake and the subsequent aftershocks.

Adding validation to your tweets by writing about something that is being discussed is a good way to gauge the public’s perception. The next time you tweet, be sure to put a hash tag in front of the topic you want your readers to see.

Quick #$.02…

-SD

What we should do with RV parks

RV’s are some of the worst emitting vehicles on the road today.  That’s why some RV park’s are changing their approach by putting eco friendly houses in previous RV parks.  This would definitely entice me to camp out in one of these.  Check it out:

Check out the way they look inside:

Each of these houses are 240 sq ft. but has a pretty large deck.  I love the way these homes look.  If we can figure out a way to be able have eco green low emitting RV’s with beautiful architected homes on the inside, we may get somewhere in optimizing the RV parks.

Quick $.02…

SD

The next big thing: Twitter Optimization

I’ve been looking to write about a topic for the last year or so but every time I’ve sat down to write something thought provoking, I’ve always felt like it was a laborious process. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I do most of my communication to the outside world within 140 characters these days that the feeling of macroblogging (yes a term I’m inventing) seems mundane.

I’m going to attempt to restart this blog on a new premise. I plan on utilizing shorter entries and sharing one or two thoughts instead of going in depth on a specific topic or area. As I look in my wordpress “recent drafts” I see 20 posts written but none of them completed.

Twitter is the ultimate form of being concise. Given my nature of loving to optimize things, I love the service due to fact that I can easily share a quick thought to my network. I already see different web 2.0 properties adopting these methods (e.g. facebook, myspace, tumblr). I’m currently writing on a “quickpress” within wordpress (is this wordpress’ idea of reengaging the user?) The interesting thing about all of these networks previously mentioned is that they’re vying for positioning on your browser to be your one stop destination. Due to Twitter’s Powerful API and real time notifications, I use TweetDeck as my medium to receive all of my web news, celeb news and friends news.

What’s interesting, however, is there is no feasible way of being able to manage all of these posts. If I miss a day of checking my Tweetdeck, I have a tough time catching up on my news. How will Twitter be able to intelligently show the tweets I’m most interested when I log on. Facebook has attempted to do this via “Highlights”, but the algorithm is yet to be fully optimized due to the vast network.

The question I have is how will Twitter leverage their social standing by showing a pulse of the network to the user in an easily consumable format. It could be simply aggregating the highest hash tags and showing that in a better way.

It’s on my mind so I wanted to share. No answers yet.

Good to be back though.

Just my $.02..
-SD

How Steve Jobs duped the world into thinking that the new iPhone is cheaper

Okay so the title might be a tad dramatic but after reading on how much the new iPhone actually costs, I couldn’t hold myself back.  After hearing Jobs keynote yesterday where the audience practically treated the event like a rock concert, I was shocked by the price reduction of $200.  The new iPhone 3G will cost $199 which is significantly cheaper than the previous model.

What Apple doesn’t tell you, however, is the added costs that come right after you sign up for a contract.  For an average user, here is the extra features they will have to pay for:

• 3G network – $30 (previously, an iPhone user paid $20 for an EDGE data plan)
• 200 Text Messages – $5 (previously an iPhone user got it for free)
• Mobile Me Push/Sync program – $8/month ($100 / year) – if you want to sync your mail with MSFT Exchange/Outlook – you need this program

When it’s all said and done, you’ll need to pay $43 on top of your AT&T minute plan to take full advantage of your iPhone 3G.  Well lets quickly do the math.  For the $200 you are “saving” from buying the new iPhone, you’re actually going to be paying that amount back to AT&T in about 9-10 months.   Now that AT&T requires you to lock into a 2 year contract, you’re basically going to pay $1000 for a new iPhone during your next two years when you add it to your minutes.

It’s a genius move by Apple on making the device significantly cheaper but its a model that is used by most smartphones.  There is a reason why AT&T advertises Blackberry Curves for $99 these days.  They make money on the variable cost, not just the fixed cost.

That being said, I think the average consumer will be drawn to the beautiful devices sitting in the shopping malls fully functional.  Once they go through the first sign up flow and look at their first AT&T bill after the first month, they may sing a different tune.

I think I might look at this picture in a different way now….

Just my $.02…

-SD

Blackberry launches a new device, Iphone 3G imminent?

Blackberry just launched this morning a new device known as the blackberry 9000.  RIM’s stock is trading well this morning as a result of this announcement due to the street’s perception of being aggressive against the rumors of Apple’s 3G IPhone announcement.  The rumors of a new IPhone heated up this weekend as many apple stores claimed to be “out of stock”.  As I walked into an apple store yesterday, the clerk indicated that they need to “check in the back” if they had any.

My initial speculation was the iPhone would be launched on June 12th at WWDC.  It makes perfect sense that Jobs would wait a year to announce the 3G functionality rather than simply put it up on the apple website and have a limited press announcement.  It seems like any change the iPhone might make would be at the front of Jobs’ keynote.

The new blackberry looks pretty sweet.  I’m a proud owner of a Blackberry Curve and I absolutely love it.  The UI, easy typing and size of the device makes it the perfect device.  I even use it for media and have discontinued using my iPod as it syncs very well.  The major improvement I see in this version is the ability to conduct video recording – something I wish the Curve had.

Here is a final product view of the 9000:

Just my $02…

-SD

Xobni is turning the inbox upside down

Xobni is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. I was having a discussion with some friends over the weekend where one of them felt like Gmail’s conversation structure was one of the best things to happen to email. I’m an avid user of both Gmail and Outlook and tend to like them both for very different reasons. Gmail keeps long conversations with many people in a very compact manner. Outlook does a better job integrating your calendar and email into one desktop platform where you can look at historical email easily.

I’ve always felt that the search functionality with Outlook is something to be asked for. Xobni, however, takes search to a new level by making it a contact based search. They predicate there product on the fact that you tend to contact certain people more frequently than others and at certain times of the day. As a result, they will profile each of your users with your conversations threaded and attachments shown chronologically.

In the three days that I’ve used the product, I’ve found it to increase my productivity quite a bit at work. I’ve used it almost as a file exchange system where I search for documents within my email. Ultimately, I think people are using email more for data storage (especially with GMail). Xobni provides a clear and unique way to organize it. Here is a screenshot of the product below. It lives just to the right of your outlook application for easy search use. It also doesn’t completely eat up your CPU usage like other indexing software (cough…google…cough).

FYI – bloggers all over the internet have been raving about this product. Xobni was offered $20 million dollars from Microsoft but decided to walk away at the 11th hour because they felt as though the team would just become another function of Outlook (which it would). Great move by the Xobni team as they have built a social framework around email. With this framework, they have the ability to create a social utility integrating chat, file sharing across email platforms. Instead of having to go to a separate domain to access your files, you can simply do it through your email. A user tends to be on email almost 50% of the time they are online and Xobni’s cloud structure can increase that usage and bring services to your fingertips.

Just my $.02…

-SD

New Blackberry coming out soon? It’s dubbed AK – “Apple Killer”

Rumors have been circulating in the past week that Research in Motion (RIM) has been secretly working on a project called “AK”.  The “Apple Killer” is said to be a touch screen smartphone to compete head on with the Apple IPhone.  Since the IPhone was introduced in August 2007, it’s made a major impact in the smartphone industry.  Rapidly gaining market share and moving to #2 in the smartphone/pda vertical, the IPhone has RIM in a much more reactive mode.

That being said, RIM is planning on announcing the launch of the Blackberry 9000 which is shaped similar to a curve but looks a little less professional to me.  It looks strangely similar to an iPaq or one of those “other” smartphones that is not made by Apple/RIM.

What’s crazy is that an unlocked version has leaked and is being sold on eBay for 399 GBP.  You can buy it here if you’d like.

Here is a pic of the Blackberry 9000:

Just my $.02…

-SD

The $300,000 watch

If money was no object, would you spend $300,000 for a watch that doesn’t tell time?  I think most of you would probably say no to this statement but what if I told you that the watch changes the way you look at the day and “treat time”.  The watch is shown below and is made by Romain Jerom, the watch maker famous for using metal from the Titanic on each of his watches.

The watch believes in telling time in a rather binary fashion.  You can tell whether it’s day or night.  The reason why this watch is so complex, as shown in the picture above, is because it uses a tourbillon to differentiate the 12 hours of working time (i.e. day) versus the 12 hours of non work time (i.e. night).  The user can specify different panels/components to place in each category.

The real kicker though…..the watch was sold it 48 hours after it was released….talk about high demand to not wanting to know what time it is….

You can check out more here: http://www.romainjerome.ch/en/les-inatendus/day-and-night-en.aspx

Just my $300,000…

-SD

Added universal applications means higher latency for facebook

For those of you that are logging onto facebook for the first time today may have noticed a chat application widget on the bottom of your screen acting as a secondary footer bar. For some of you, you may have seen it 2 weeks ago. For others, today was the first day you have the ability to stay on facebook and chat with your friends. I think there are some major issues with this application which is why I changed my facebook status to be rather “underwhelmed”. My major issues are outlined below:

• Latency – By adding a whole new component that is insanely dynamic to the presentation layer of facebook, they increase latency, or the time it takes for components on the page to load. The key to facebook’s success, in my opinion, has been it’s ability to be extremely fast – at least faster than it’s competitors like friendster. I’m not 100% sure if it’s variable by friend sizes – i.e. the more friends you have the longer time it takes to load.
• Filtering – Instant messaging, in my opinion, is a personal to personal interaction. I think the fundamental problem with chat on facebook is that I’m friends with many people I don’t want to chat with. There are numerous people on facebook that I meant once or twice that I would probably never IM, but I have no way of filtering them out. A feature should be added to place your most recent contacts to the top.
• Invisibility – I know that being invisible is actually a very tough feature to build out. There is probably a reason why GTalk took over a year to build it. Building it within a browser is very difficult especially with high refresh rates. That being said, you have to launch a product that is up to standard – especially when you make something available to your entire network. If you don’t you’ll start getting complaints like Arrington on Techcrunch who, in my opinion, is simply being arrogant about people that IM him.

So what are the major advantages of adding chat on facebook? It does a couple of things to really make everything tightly integrated:

• Longer session periods – You have more eyes staring at facebook for a longer period of time. That means higher prices for ads assuming they track their session lengths. If an average user was spending 5 minutes on facebook before, conversations with friends can extend that to 7-8 minutes. If you show an ad that lives on a browser for that long, more often than not a user will notice it.
• Beacon integration – Perhaps chat can serve as the savior to the beacon integration. I say that because chat allows further probing into a users intent and can ideally provided targeted ads based on content and friends. It can be as simple as noticing how many times a user communicates with another user and serving targeted ads in the background to their common interests. Adding chat gives them another dimension to market on.

Unfortunately, both suggestions above will not work if they solve for the issues described in the beginning of this post. If this slows down my facebook “stalking” sessions, I’ll be more than happy to disable the chat function. It truly would be sad if I ended up treating the brand new chat application as another spam group message and throwing it right in the trash.

I’m pretty sure Zuckerburg wouldn’t be too happy….

Just my $.02…

-SD