Chris Messina wrote a fantastic article describing the inevitable future that’s ahead of us for location based services. I posted some thoughts on the topic in his comments, and I decided, while link-loving his blog, I’d reproduce my comments here:
In keeping with Lisa’s theme, I want to talk a bit about the topic of attention management.
A week ago, I declared information bankruptcy.
Information bankruptcy is a more generalized form of email bankruptcy and RSS bankruptcy. I have too much content to keep up with. I have 96 people I follow on twitter (low by most affluent standards). I have 73 friends on facebook (again, low). I follow the life streams of a dozen people. I’m on livejournal, flickr, yelp, upcoming, eventful, tumblr, delicious, wordie, pownce, linked in, myspace, last.fm…the list goes on. By declaring information bankruptcy, I stayed away from all of these things for a week with the intention of rethinking how I consume data when I return.
Twhirl and Alert Thingy are both well built little apps that are getting a lot of attention lately, but neither of them have rethought the way we need to communicate at all. With Twitter in the picture, we can no longer use the same paradigms from email, RSS, or even IM. Twitter is omni-directional, mobile, time-sensitive, and overwhelming in quantity. Voices are rising louder and louder complaining about how they are drowning in twitter messages, and so far applications have only been concerned with enabling users to get even more content, not less. Every day I realize the harsh reality that I cannot keep track of the entire Internet, and I quite literally dream of a service that would lower the signal to noise ratio. Here’s where everyone (including Twitter) is missing the mark: Read the rest of this entry »
This is a quick announcement for the first release of a strongly typed Fire Eagle .NET library. You never have to deal with XML or any OAuth, and it handles hashed, secure requests like it should. This project was submitted under VS.NET 2005 and uses the .NET 2.0 framework. There is still a lot that I would like to see this library handle, but it’s reached the point where it would be beneficial to give it to the community for testing and feedback. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, Yahoo launched Fire Eagle at ETech. Fire Eagle is a platform for sharing location information about yourself. The most powerful piece of this service is its privacy consciousness. Users who publish their location via this service have very robust controls regarding how third party applications access to their data. While not much value on its own, Yahoo is hoping that community developers (like Technarium!) will step in to provide novel uses of the service via their API. Read the rest of this entry »
