The Googlefly Effect (or Google Farts and the World Pays Attention)

Disparity seems to be trailing Google like bad smell these days. I’m not sure if it’s just “tall poppy syndrome” and the recent acts by Google are mere coincidence, but I am not so sure anymore.

As Google has grown comfortable as the powerhouse of Bubble 2.0 throwing away the mantra of early 21st century corporate-political philosophy of: Trust me, I'm [Google] [the president] [your local utility company]; replacing it with a form of commemorative inscription where they have to specifically remind themselves to be nice! Are they succumbing to the weak-ass corruption at the top of the service industry “food chain”?

I personally am tired of how much clout they have, and while I do recognise their place in the IT world, it’s getting tiring, that every time Google Farts it’s a headline!

As a founder of a start-up, and knowing many other people with their own start-ups, it means it’s even harder to get traction and cut through the noise. Breaking down the two biggest barriers for young [self-funded] startups, Mr. Apathy and Mrs. Ignorance. This wouldn’t be so bad on its own, save the latest piles of crap to leave the [Google] Campus, like Google Talk, Google Video, Google Docs & Spreadsheets to name a few. In fact, I would go so far as to say the only good things (outside search and ad networking) Google owns have been outside acquisitions. Overall their latest products have been sub-standard, uninspiring and have diminished the effect of others doing a same (and probably better) job.

I guess all this “Google Bashing” could be a good thing though, it was getting old hating Microsoft all the time ;)

Walking the Walk

Creating a profile of a person’s attention is something Touchstone has been doing for some time now. Since we have launched the APML specification, we have had a lot of positive feedback about it, which has been both inspiring and reassuring. Additionally, APML addresses something I have felt for a while now; that I have grown weary of the constant "banter" about solving the Attention Deficit Problem.

One thing that we feel will make the difference, is the implementation of the APML specification into real-world (and value added) user scenarios.

Having an attention profile specification is all well and good, but if nothing useful uses it, there isn’t much point in having it. At some point, the talking has to stop, and action must (and should) always take place. In order to facilitate the widespread use of the APML specification, we have charged Michael (a member of the Touchstone Development team), to building an APML library which will consume and process APML data so other developers do not have to worry about designing/programming their own to process the format we have suggested. We understand the pressures of supporting a standard like this, so this library and it’s source is going to be free for whomever wants to use APML in their applications.

While APML is still a young format that is being discussed by the community it it will continue to change and grow - we are committed to making it the right kind of solution for storing an Attention Profile (so that end users don't get 400 different ways of describing and profiling a person’s interests) and taking the first step by releasing these types of contributions. We will be releasing another build very soon, but we hope that within the week we will have the initial APML library ready to go for anyone who is interested in joining the “less talk, more action“ bandwagon, with Attention Meta-Data consumption.

You can read more about APML at the APML website.

Ash’s Theory of Progressional Persistence

There is a common problem amongst any program that generates any kind of alert. It’s quite a significant problem too because while I might have configured Outlook or FeedDemon to show popup (“toast”) alerts, if I have happened to turn around to talk-to or help a co-worker, then yep, there goes my important alert.

Who knows, my wife may have had a baby and I wouldn’t even know about it! ;)

Seriously, it’s a problem. At work, like most people I don’t just sit in front of my workstation without blinking and I am tired of missing things while I happen to be elsewhere, possibly reducing the security permissions for staff on the network.

Similarly, you can’t just throw stuff to the user’s screen and leave it there. A user’s desktop is a sacred place, and you can’t go about just leaving your shit lying around where you like. That type of annoying behaviour is what we call an “Uninstallable Offence”.

Missing alerts is a problem - one that Touchstone is guilty of too.

But this will soon change. Because I feel that whether or not an alert should persist is directly relative to how important the item is to a user. If the importance of the item is inside the top 25% of the threshold for that output adapter, then the alert should persist (at least our alerts will). Of course there will be an option to turn that off.

I will try to implement it over the next few builds.

Chris' Personal Site

Hey guys - just a quick note to mention that I have decided to spend a little more time on my personal site as well.

I have turned it into a straight blog (on wordpress) so I can post off-topic thoughts and ideas as well as more personal musings about business and technology that might not directly relate to Touchstone.

You can find it at www.chrissaad.com

One to Make Aaron Sorkin Proud!

Sometimes, American politicians confuse me. How do some of these polititions they get enough votes to get into office. Perhaps my expectations are set too high by the banter of Josh Lyman and Jed Bartlet (you know the guys from everybody's favourite political drama).

But every so often you hear something from people like Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) who like to give us meaningful reasons of why he voted against Net Neutrality and "gave an amazing primer on how the internet works".

There's one company now where you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn't going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.

We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [...]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time. [?]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people.

[...]

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day.

It's not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a viloation of net neutraility that hits you and me.

Oh, so THATs how the Internet works?
Perhps someone should show the Senator which "pipe" google is in. It might help him string a sentence together.

Someone Pulled the Plug

Guys sorry about the troubles lately. It seems all I have done this week is worked on the one part of Touchstone I can’t stand (a.k.a. Feed Adapter) and fought with the hosting company to get us the heck, back online.

I am pleased to report that the issues should now be over.

Symptoms may have included; inability to use the invite system, inability to launch Touchstone, and the inability to browse to /use the community site.

There is a silver lining, however, in that our server is getting a major upgrade and relocation to a better data centre, so hopefully these issues are now in the past.

Now if I could just get SQL Server access back, we’ll be right-as-rain.

Paying Attention to Code is Important

In case you are all wondering who this stranger is posting here, I'm Mike. I tend to fix things when Ash has no idea. Well OK, he has some idea, but I think that Chris has to give Ash some more food and water - and maybe more light.

Why do I say this? Well tonight I caught up with Ash and my specific instructions were to fix something that has been alluding him all day.

I've been out of the loop for a while so all these changes have occured around me. When I went through some code to catch up, it seems as though someone *cough* Ash *cough* can't tell his Minimums from his Maximums. It was a very silly and very small mistake that was causing lots of headaches!

If Ash showed this piece of code to Chris, chances are he would have skipped over it too, so it's not entirely Ash's fault.

It's not difficult being this good. Not when I work with these two. :)

Getting Plugged in

The alpha requests for the next round of testing are streaming in (now a list of many hundreds) and since Chris and I have had a good night’s sleep for the first time in a long while, it seems appropriate that I share with you folks what’s happened over the past several days. I guess you could say we've been inspired by Leeroy Jenkins.

The last release of Touchstone was pretty much a proof of concept. A one piece application that read RSS feed items, processed them and displayed them in a news ticker. Not very exciting.

This new version will introduce key architectural pieces that will make it possible for 3rd parties to develop input and output adapters for the Attention Management Engine.

Already we have received SDK requests from early adopters who get our approach in a way that has surprised and delighted us. They understand the potential of connecting multiple data sources with multiple outputs using a caching and relevance power plant in the middle.

Sure, out-of-the-box we will have the Feed Reader and a News Ticker and a System Tray alert and maybe even a Cursor Trail alert... but the real innovation begins when our development friends get their hands on the SDK.

While I work on finishing off all this low-level under-the-covers stuff, Chris has been working on polishing the interface. This new version of Touchstone will feel like a more professional application ready for prime time.

It really is true... 20% of the work takes 80% of the time.

Stay tuned for more...

The Cost of Coming First

I just opened Visual Studio 2005 and started another “new project” for the 11th time just now. Chris doesn’t like it when I break the stable build to experiement on that "next killer feature”.

I guess the realisation of being a class apart in terms of Attention Management Processing means that we don’t have much reference material to copy mimic from others doing the same thing.

Research and Development (or as Chris and I have come to call it: “How the ***k do we do THAT!") is something we have both enjoyed.

Now I suppose I need to store them somewhere in the SVN.

I simply can’t wait any longer

I am supposed to be in my box coding but I can’t wait anymore. I have to show something off to you patient folks.

I think it’s a fair assumption to say that everyone involved in Touchstone (Chris, Mike, Me and our dedicated testers) is simply splitting at the seams anxious to release the next build.

Here is a little glimpse at what the I-AM keyword bias screen looks like so far (minus Chris' polishing).

As you can see, we have made a conscious effort to blend the standard windows look with something that Mac users might even be happy with. It's always a fine line between beauty and delivering what people expect from a standard windows app (beast).

While it's been a little while since our last published build, we have taken great pains (just ask Chris) to adopt user feedback and advance the underlining technology. We have also revised parts of the framework to take advantage of .NET 2.0.

Now, we just have to get it to compile ;)… Just Kidding.

This new approach has simplified the entire user experience (yes Chris, “You told me so”) and it has made for a more solid Touchstone.

Chris just MSN’ed me: “Chris: dude stop posting and code!” So I guess its back in the box I go.

‘Till next time.

Its Been a While Since I Blogged.

This is partly because Chris has had Mike and I are chained to our computers like leather bound gimps, and partly because the times that I AM allowed to “go outside” I’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica season 2 (OMG by the way!).

But’s been worth it.

It's currently 8:50pm and we are making the necessary preparations for a huge development session, involving the last puzzle piece making TouchStone a true attention management platform.

Mike has already worked on the dynamic “plug-in” manager loading external assemblies and having that external assembly “pushing” a message to the manager - the very crust of what TouchStone is all about. I have been completly overhawling the inner-mechanics and migrating the project to .NET 2.0 (OMG by the way!).

Now the core feels stronger, more solid.

Oh, buggar, Chris has got the BIG stick out. Gotta go. More Later...

A Whopping 33Mb!

It looks as though Lex’s Comment, might be right! It turns out that Touchstone might soon completely evaporate. Thanks to Google and a few Windows API websites I have discovered a nifty little way to address the memory consumption concerns that many of our alpha tester’s have raised.

As the above screenshot shows, I cut the memory footprint by a little over 90%. That’s right 90%!

I know this seems like an otherwise pointless blog entry, but my ulterior motive is to demonstrate our dedication to active response to feedback given to us by our testers. In case your not already aware, emailing chris@touchstonegadget.com is what you need to do if you want to play with the alpha, now 90% fat free! Well…next update anyway.

Show Me Yours & I'll Show You Mine

In the past few days we have had a number of VIP’s get their hands on the Limited Alpha. One of these people reported that importing his OPML file failed!

We were a little agasp at this because we have imported basicaly every OPML file we could get our hands on – and they all worked fine (well, except for the one Chris broke - but he breaks everything).

I decided the only way I was going to be able to determine what caused the bug is by checking out the contents of the offending OPML file. Which means, asking for it!

At this point, I was a desperate man. And to be honest we (both) were pretty uncomfortable asking someone for their OPML file/s. In my eyes, it’s kind of like asking someone how much money they earn. It’s just not cricket!

But knowing there was no alternative we had to bite the bullet... and ask. Lucky for us, the person in question kindly obliged. And as yet, hasn’t ram raided our houses - which is a good sign. ;)

The whole experience has got me thinking about the Syndication Security Concerns. After all, if OPML becomes what we all feel it should then a person’s OPML file/s are sacred. It’s important for developers, publishers and especially marketing people to respect the sanctity of a user’s OPML. People found a way to bastardise email (spam anyone?) and it’s important to keep this in the focus while the “Syndication Revolution” gathers speed.

I’m not trying to sully the innocence of RSS before it becomes a mainstream communication technology, nor do I even offer any constructive suggestions. I only offer the thought that I think it’s a perfect opportunity for us (as ‘sort-of-early’ adopters) try to keep our eyes on security for the user - to come up with measures to safe-guard people and their ‘lord –of-the-rings-precious’ Attention data.

iAM on my way!

Up until now Chris and I have been in the nuts-and-bolts part of the project. As a consequence the app “seems” stable (/me touches wood) and we are now free to do more interesting things. So far we have been doing LOADS (and I mean LOADS!) of planning and design behind what I consider to be at the very heart TouchStone - The Attention Engine.

Now we can begin focusing on the 'Visible Innovation' part. Breaking down the things you care about into a single and intrinsic number. The iAM Rating.

But ranking items based on stuff I like isn’t enough! Because, for most people, just subscribing to a feed is an indication of interest. So, we have to consider other factors.

To be honest, programmatically, I have been a little frightened of the iAM binary. It’s so important to nail it! So far our plans are pretty ambitious and the basic core of iAM (processing items as they are injected into the Attention Engine based on source and keywords defined within an XML file) is functioning already – what’s been lacking has been the interface and the more advanced bias calculations. This lack of any interface has worked extremely well for me, because while there is no way to configure the XML file, I don’t have to code it!

Chris recently upset this delicate balance by actually developing the iAM interface mockups for the release of the Limited Alpha!

'iAM' is so exciting though, because it isn’t JUST a keyword scanner and ranking system. It’s a whole system to scrutinize the items based on:

• Content (keywords and source)
  
• Source (where it came from)
  
• Author (who generated the item)
  
• History of past items that got your attention (by scanning items for similarities to items marked as read in the cache file)
  
• Buzz value (how popular is the item on the internet and to other people)
  
• The publishers recommended importance (so publishers and bloggers could distinguish the variable importance of items they generate)
  
• ..and more.

All this is very exciting, but it’s STILL not enough. TouchStone is also about allowing the user to configure the DELIVERY of items based on the iAM determined value. So we will work on those "visualization widgets" as well.

It’s great to see all these things finally start to come together. While we are quite proud of our ticker, it’s time to move forward and finally uncomment the code that fires off the other alerts. Soon guys and gals – soon we shall be firing off SysTray, Cursor, Centre Screen Modal, and (my personal favorite) Compact SysTray alerts based on things you deem important.

Enjoy the Limited Alpha (those that have it) and those that don’t – email chris@touchstonegadget.com already!

Automatic Update - Yeah!

I got the auto update library and executable working tonight for the (currently somewhat unstable) "experimental" build of Touchstone. It’s well overdue because our little application is getting quite complex now and laying in new features can be a tricky process. Now we have a mechanism to automatically and non-invasively update users with new versions - making adoption and user updates quick, seamless and easy.

Now perhaps Chris won’t kick my ass so hard when a Private Alpha release starts throwing those ugly “object not set to reference of an object” exceptions.

Now all I need to write is a program which automatically updates the blog for me, and I’ll be right!

A review of Touchstone

Over the past couple of months we have really been working hard to polish the "TouchStone User Experience". We have received many bug reports (oh my! the duplicates!). But one, deserved special mention. It reads more like a review - and we love reviews:

So I grab a copy of the alpha.

And I have to tell you, this looks good.

First, a disclaimer: I'm not a heavy rss user. I don't use blogs (often), I do use rss feeds but not an unmanageable amount. My Google homepage can quite happily manage all the data I need to see. The downside of this is that I have to click to home to view my feeds. Obviously, I could use a third party solution, but none of them ever really 'worked' for me (too intrusive, too limiting, too much). Of course, using tabbed browsing means a self-refreshing google homepage can be left in the background at any rate (everyone uses Firefox or Opera, right? RIGHT?).

So let's say I'm a 'casual' rss user, and not one of these people who has millions of blogs to manage. I'm probably not the best person to stress-test something like this.

Nonetheless, I have plenty to say about this gadget.

The Touchstone ticker looks 'right'. It looks like a slick bit of software; it loads quickly and is immediately functional. You know someone's spent a bit of time working on the look - and it slips into a docking position at the top of my second monitor like it was meant to be there. I have all my 'internet' stuff on one monitor, which means that clicking a touchstone link invariably just means looking below the bar to see what I wanted to see. If anything else, this is probably an advertisement for having two monitors, but I digress. The mouseover effect to view extended information is excellent, if a little slow at times: obviously grabbing header data for a whole bunch of feeds can be a little time consuming - I wondered here if there was any caching facility for these feeds, so that information once grabbed doesn't need to be grabbed again. Not being a developer, I am most likely barking up the wrong tree :)

The second major bit of cool is the setup dialog. It's mostly icons; and I'm in two minds about this. The icons themselves are extremely pretty and once understood, very obvious. Once you've got the 'lingo' (does Touchstone use common feed/blog parlance? I wouldn't know, to be honest) you can see exactly how this thing works. However: I am a huge fan of threaded lists, and while the icon-based system is entirely worthy, I can't help wondering how much easier it could be for the casual user if you had all your options in front of you, ready to be selected from a thread. Again, I'm no usability expert, but it's something I noticed.

Also, a minimize button for the main dialog would probably not go astray. People get used to windows functioning in certain ways (I, for instance, like that many programs now offer the option to minimize direct to system tray - as with as touchstone - rather than the taskbar,), and getting rid of the minimize button, while making the dialog a whole lot 'prettier', does limit usability.

Here be my creative criticism. The software looks fantastic; highly scalable and thouroughly well programmed. I wish you guys the best of luck with it: keep sending me the alphas! I'm looking forward to system tray and mouse alerts - and the content ranking system should be awesome, if the work done so far is any indication.

Good luck again!

Anthony.

I Think Therefore "I-AM"

"I-AM" who I know.
"I-AM" what I read.
"I-AM" where I am.
"I-AM" how I work.
"I-AM" me.

During a huge Australian Summer Storm on the 8th (and the subsequent black-out), Chris and I took the down-time to fine tune and clarify some of the details about the TouchStone Attention Engine.

It wasn’t like we were going to code anything.

During this conversation, Chris mentioned that TouchStone embodied Intuitive Attention Management or "I-AM". This initially was just a rather fancy nickname for the “How-Important-Is-It-Parser”, but the trouble is (despite my previous directives about what he was and wasn’t allowed to call the parsers) – I loved the name.

After arguing/talking about ways of defining and encapsulating the essence of what a user does and doesn’t want to be notified about, we settled on the idea that each and every item generated by a source (be it RSS or other), has a given relevance to the user at any given time. This relevance is based on a number of internal and external factors. By defining, naming and weighting these sources it’s possible to give each item an 'importance value' and then allow the user to define alert types based on value thresholds.

Further, we decided, we could encapsulate this functionality its own library so that other developers and their software can tap into its power.

The result is we take a source item, it's content, it's source, the author/publisher, key concepts/tags and apply pre-defined global and user defined “rules”. By biasing (positively or negatively) the final importance value, we can begin tuning the user experience based on relevancy.

After we fleshed out the specific details on how we would accomplish this, I-AM was born. An external class library with the methods by which we should be able to determine, intuitively, the value of a piece of content to a given user. The result of this calculation should be an ‘importance’ value that is attached to an item moving through the Touchstone system. This value is then used to determine the way in which an alert is presented (i.e. level of user interruption).

I love diagrams!

All values involved (we decided) should be from -5 to 5. A negative value being a vote against the relevancy of that item for the user. 1 being the least import, and 5 being the most.

With a growing number of Meme Engines out there, it is clear that there is an ongoing effort to try and reduce the RSS Overload and help content rise to the top. In essence, I-AM might be a personalized Meme engine that any feed reader could use to place a value of importance on content coming in from a user's OPML file (for example). It is then up to the news reader to determine how to act on that value for a great user experience.

I-AM is not intended to replace the existing attention ranking and suggesting methodologies, but merely to enhance the user’s ability to sort and control the flow of syndicated content on the client side.

Plus it has an awesome name - don't you agree?

Update: An article about personal relevancy

The comments are broken!

I can't believe it - I found a post where the author is effectively begging for a Touchstone-esque solution, but the comment system is broken so I can't tell him we exist.

Read all about it - Maybe one of you can find a way to ping him for us!

This is also an interesting post about RSS -> SMS. I actually had this thought once - but I realized that there was too much garbage on RSS to just blindly SMS it all to someone! But perhaps, with Touchstone sitting in the mix, we could set up a visualization that sent the most important updates to SMS. With 'importance' being determined by all the smart attention engine work we're doing!

*Goes back to working on the all new Touchstone 'Status Map' feature*

Docking is not just for ships

Another serious development session was held yesterday (once again Mike joined us to help control the ticker docking behavior in all its C# craziness.) and I have to say the outcome was amazing. Certainly far more productive then we initially believed – this new version actually compiles now - always a good sign.

This all brings us another step closer to Limited Alpha.

Trac informs us that we only have a handful of tickets left before we can release a sneak peek of TouchStone to special people.

Most of the work being done now is focused on usability polishing. Since the beginning we have always been highly focused on the idea that the way Touchstone behaves (and makes the user 'feel') is as important - if not more - than what it can actually do. Chris tells me, this is more important then buying a 360.

In addition, the memory footprint has been reduced even further!

Time for a moment of honesty

Chris doesn't much like it when I get all DNM because I tend to force brute honesty from every orifice of my body, but release 3 of the private alpha, is ... well, highly experimental.

Yes, the transit system is flash and fast, but the BagItAndTagItParser seems think that a dropped item due to cache is a failed 'item injection' - Bah! I am getting the bugs out slowly, but we are making significant progress. Momentum is growing and (so far) it's having a positive effect on the project.

Michael has sort of become our unofficial C# and XML consultant; building a few little classes to extend our libraries. He is also extremely adept at spotting the objects I have created, but not initialised, catching those god forsaken object exceptions .NET keeps throwing in my face.

Private Alpha Release 3 (and the impending Limited Alpha) is getting there slowly!