Infographics Made Simple: Visual.ly

I am completely loving the new infographics site, Visual.ly.

Not only is it a gallery, where graphic artists can upload, share, critique, etc.. ( finally taking digital art networking seriously) it also includes an online toolset for everyday folks to create cool infographics.

While the toolset is still limited (they say growth will happen quickly, )

I was pleased with the results of the Twitterizer tool:




is what it came up with for my personal Twitter account. I was most intrigued when it came up with a couple of my apparently "made up" words as frequent topics of interest. Other than that, it is not too far off base... pretty impressive for an under 5 minute process.

location, location, location.... NOT

With the glamour of new technology approaching seeming magic, we are being drawn into location applications "just because we can". Foursquare and GoWalla are battling it out in the location tracker app service, but they are just the first big players to the plate... the hoards are following, but more like lemmings than with any sense of value. I contend that the value for end users is not in location, but in action or intent.

Undeniably, the ability to tag into GPS( or other location data) and place yourself on the map is cool. The apps are fun to play for a while. But the value add for the users ends quickly as the newness wears off. I was one of the first on both services in my small town and had fun making marks and then watching as other users came along and found them. And then that got pretty boring. Do I really care who has been to other places? Not really. What I care about, what draws me in-- is what they are doing there.

Certain that there is some use case for a location based social networking app, I have pondered this inside out, but I am stumped. Consider the following:

1) Using it to connect with people at a conference or event. Yeah, not so much. Someone I know checks into a talk or an event? OK. but I want to know what the event is, or WHY they are there before I decide to go. If they are a good enough friend that their mere presence draws me there, we are already text msg, twitter or god forbid calling each other to coordinate.

2) Using it to build an ego presence as a regular at a location and get cool discounts? OK, maybe-- but really- if you are a regular, the store will know. Loyalty cards, etc.. give the same benefits.

3) Using it to find other people who like to go to the same places you do. Nice idea, but doesn't really work that way. Yes, I can check into a location and see who else has... but really have no mechanism for connecting with those people in any meaningful way. Even given that.. is the fact that we shop at the same grocery store going to be a friendship building point-- or the fact that we both love to get the same brand of sauce for our BBQ?

Am I missing something? What really cool use have you fallen in love with a location based social networking application for?


There is a point and a usefulness to location apps- I love being able to log in in a new location and seeing what is nearby. But there are tons of services and applications that allow me to do this ( still waiting for the best of breed to emerge, honestly...) and this does not in any way build a social network. James Burke entranced us all with the fact that the things we do impact others-- and build connections. Connections 1 (5 - Disc Set) While there is amusement and entertainment in the "George Washington slept here" impact, it is short lived. George Washington Slept Here [VHS]
Map overlay does not have lasting human impact.

The one application that I think could come close to this, but has not yet is @getglue. They recently released an iPhone app, but I am waiting for the android version for my Evo. If I could take a picture of the cool new gadget in BestBuy ( or scan the bar code) and see an overlay of reviews from people who bought it/used it ( regardless of location)- that provides real value. And if I buy it and love it, I can choose to connect with other people who loved it as well. Will we become friends? maybe, maybe not- but there is more of a reason to believe that a network of people with shared interests will last. Will you really care who else stood in the same spot as you on some other day 6 months from now?

Slime Mold Splendor- System inspirations

As a grad student, I was TA for a developmental biology class (it was, for a while, my PhD target). Almost all of the aspects of the lab excited and fascinated me, but I was especially taken by the slime mold. It remains one of my favorite organisms ever.


Back in 2000, when I first saw Javaspaces demonstrated at the JavaOne conference, I immediately got excited and started babbling to fellow geeks about how the ultimate design for a self discovery middleware/messaging system would be modeled after slime mold. They are the perfect model for small message/self discovery systems. They mostly looked at me like I was slightly insane.

I love that others are now using slime mold as a model for networks, and have mathematically mapped the algorithms of slime mold network forming. Time for us to realize that we are not always discovering brand new things, but are just describing things that much simpler organisms discovered millenia ago. I think I want that algorithm... there is a next generation self assembling messaging system buried in it.

What biolgical inspirations drive your designs??

Tweetie2- very sweetie

I recently mentioned in an article about my iPod Touch that I was falling in love with Tweetie2 for twitter use - even across multiple accounts. I love it so much that even though I still hate and despise the Touch keyboard, I find myself at home picking up the touch to twitter with this Apple Design award winner rather than any of the computers I have access to. I am not going to waste time listing all the features available, you can click the link and read the website yourself. Instead, here are the top 5 reasons I love Tweetie2 enough to abandon a real keyboard.

1) Offline Sync: Since I have a touch and not an iPhone, I do not have constant connections. But I can download all the latest tweets, hit the road, respond while traveling ( while someone else drives) and have it auto sync when I get a connection again.

2) Bounce to update: There is really no technical or life changing reason why this is important. it is just simple, elegant and seriously fun. Simply pull down the list from the top and release to have the app update.

3) "Email this tweet": There are really a multitude of ways you can simply respond to a tweet, but the addition of being able to email it is a bonus. I still have important people in my life who are *gasp* not on twitter ( the Ogre is the main one). There are often times I want to share a link or message with him and this has always involved cutting and pasting and having multiple apps open. Being able to simply select "email this tweet"has made life much easier.

4) The Blue Light Special: Switching between your timeline, @replies and DMs is as simple as clicking icons at the bottom of your screen. Even better, when you have new activity in one of those streams, it glows blue. My timeline is active enough that I just ignore that one and update at will, but having DM notifications ( which I sometimes do not monitor closely enough) is very nice. If you are a low volume twitterer, all of these would be handy.

5) Threaded DMs: If you have had some back and forth exchange of messages with someone via DM, you get to see the whole exchange history when you open the most recent DM. I absolutely love this feature and wish I could get it for @replies as well.


There are other features... maybe some you love even more and I have not glommed onto. Do you use Tweetie? If so, which features do you love most?

Email: The Nail in the Coffin

I have been musing for a while now about the seemingly imminent death of email, but last night I became convinced that personal email is already dead, we are just hammering the nails in the coffin.

Yes, there is no doubt that business email is still alive ( and broken and annoying)- but that is another post. Let's focus on Personal email.

I was on a phone call with my mom when the ringing of the hammer sounded clearly.

"We decided to talk to Verizon and get off of AOL and just use our Verizon email."

Excellent news! AOL ( stop cringing) was the right choice for my parents back in 1990, when the web was new and there were not many user friendly email interfaces. Now, it just inevitably led them to clicking on links in ways that launch that horrid AOL browser and things were broken. Plus, it is spending money on a service they really don't need. Times are tight and money is not free.

"Your Dad was reluctant and is concerned about how the email will look, but I told him it really did not matter, hardly anyone we know uses email any more. When I look at my email, it is almost all junk or ads or things people forwarded me. We don't have many people who send us stuff any more- you all moved to Facebook".

Wow. Astute for a basically computer challenged person who strongly resists change of any kind. She was not happy about the shift, mind you- ( I did not even want to boggle her with the plethora of social networks where I have a home... we will just leave it as Facebook for now).

"I am going to have to get on Facebook if I want to keep in touch, and just when I learn it, you will all probably move someplace else. But there is no doubt that email is just dead."

This from a 64 year old woman who is far from a computer analyst and does not know Facebook at all, apart from her grandaughters talking about it and the little bit we showed her over the Easter Holiday.

If she is not on Facebook soon, I have no doubt she will be on by the end of my daughters' week-long visit with them the first week of June. Honestly, I think she will like it better than AOL email.. but for my sanity and hers, I hope someone solves the interoperability/open authetication/platform communication before they leave and migrate to the next great social networking platform and leave her behind on Facebook wthout a linkage.

Testing Google Voice- Need some help

My GrandCentral account (finally) got converted and I am busy testing all of the GoogleVoice features. Be sure to check back in a week for a full update, but in the meantime, I need your help. Please click on the widget below and help me test out the embedded call feature. Your call should automatically go to a voicemail I recorded just for you. If you leave me a message that makes me smile, it might show up in the review post and you could be (sorta) famous. Be sure to tell me if you do NOT want your message to be published, but please leave me some love anyway.

Twitter Dream or TwitterMare?

The flow of information over on Twitter has become a raging torrent these days. This is not a bad thing. I love diving in and out of the information flow,playing tag with bits and pieces of conversations and news blurbs. As an information consumer, this pattern of Twitter usage feels comfortable and is not overwhelming in the least. I follow a little over a thousand people and for the most part just use the standard web interface.

From an information dissemination point of view, this becomes problematic. Although I have more than a thousand followers, no single tweet gets seen by all of my followers. With people dipping in and out of the river, only DMs or @s are persistent and will be seen by followers across time - other tweets flow past. To paraphrase Heraclitus , "you can not read the same Twitterstream twice".

When I am asking a casual question such as "what is a famous brand of rootbeer", or " please recommend a web development company for non-profits", then I am likely to get a small handful of answers and solve my dilemma. I do not need to reach all of my followers at once to get the information I need.

But if I am trying to use Twitter as a marketing tool for an event or a project, the number of my fllowers who will see ( and potentially re-tweet) my otice is small at any given point in time. Add to this the concept of twitter groups becoming more common, and how long before we see a mass Twitter tol that is a Marketer's dream? More importantly, wil this tool be useful for the twitter masses as well, or will it become a twitterMare?
Here is the vision:
Log into a web page ( or use a desktop client) set up and config your groups.
Type in the 140 characters ( or less) of your message.
Select the group and click "updateGroup"
The twitter mass mailer will then auto @ your message to each of the members of the group. ( up to some groups size limit, due to API limitations...)

Do you see this as a potentially useful tool, or the next Magpie Tweetmare ? Tell me what you think.

Looking for design that drives intelligent behavior

I am tired of software that is trying to be "intuitive" or "friendly", but instead forces its users into behaviors that make it impossible to feel like an intelligent adult.

Let me given you an example. The company I work for recently switched to Interwise for Web-based conferencing. Interwise has this nifty "raise hand" feature. If you are a participant in a session, you can click the raise hand button to let the leader/speaker know that you have a question. Polite, helps discussion flow, would seem to make sense. The problem comes when you actually click the button. Your hand is raised as seen by the leader, but nothing in the interface changes for the participant. There is no obvious way to "lower" your hand. The correct answer is "click 'raisehand' a second time to lower it", but this is FAR from intuitive. I have been in a number of meetings just this week where I had to listen to intelligent, creative adults reduced to saying things like "can you lower my hand for me?" or "I am sorry, you have to lower your own hands".

This might make you smile reading this, but situations like that do not foster continued intelligent conversation. Taking architects/designers or executives into a situation where they have to feel like they are sitting in the small desks in a classroom again does not assist with the collaborative process.

I am waiting for the software designers who really 'get' what online collaboration should feel like to be most effective. Do you have suggestions or experiences?
Do you have other examples of design that forces "awkward" behavior? Help me feel like I am not the only one frustrated and comment below.

uTest- a crowdsourcing experiment

I signed up today for an interesting experiment in the usage of crowd sourcing. UTest is a new service that is compiling a portfolio of software testers that will be paid on a per-bug basis. There is no good indication yet what the pay scale will be, except that it will be sliding and linked to the type of software ( web or desktop), type of bug, number of bugs left to find (if they have come up with some magical way to divine the number of bugs in a software project in order to know how many more are left, they could probably make a whole lot more off of that service alone ;-) ). What I think they actually mean here is that if you find the very first bug, likely it is an easy to find obvious one that is different than finding obscure bug number 150. Since there is no indication of what impact this has on the pay, I can not comment on the "rightness" of this algorithm, other than to indicate that that first bug found may NOT be the obvious jump in your face silly one- it could be that you have a really good tester who noticed the back end data linkage error that will kill you application. Perhaps their inclusion of factors like experience, "reputation" and other personal factors in the pay rate will balance some of this out. It is all a big social and business experiment, I will report back as we go how things play out. They are claiming that testers can make hundreds or thousands of dollar per week, so perhaps the pay rate will be higher than the small rates typical over on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. There is no guarantee of pay rates at this time, and you can only register for consideration- they say they are not assigning any jobs for a couple of weeks; but if you like to play with new software and think you are good at finding and defining bugs, hop on over and sign up- who knows, it may give you some vacation mad money.
A special note that in order to get paid, you have to sign up for a special debit card and your pay will be deposited into that account. If you have some particular phobia or annoyance about debit cards, this may not be a solution for you. As for me- I am up for the ride and interested to see if there is actually money to be made in them thar bugs..

Drop.io tests- come and play please

I have added a Drop.io widget to the page, to test some of the interesting functionality. Feel free to send me something interesting... a poem, a picture of your dog, a virtual gift. Please do NOT upload anything you do not already own the copyright to. It WILL be deleted post haste. This is a public box, so do NOT upload anything you do not want the rest of the world to see( if you don't care if the rest of the world gets a good glimpse of your latest odd piercing, I don't mind looking- but others will see). Please remember that this is a public blog and do not upload anything explicit.

I also want to test the voice to mp3 functionality. I will probably be calling later and creating something ya'll can listen to, but you can try it out as well. Just dial 646-495-9201 x 91355 and leave me a message, or leave a message for the world.

Hmm.... this may turn into an interesting experiment into human nature, graffiti and self control....

Reviews of the technology and the experience in a future blog post. Feel free to comment and leave your thoughts about the user interface/experience.

Viewdle testing

I am not generally a name dropper. I am not much impressed with someone just because they are famous, or their name is batted about. I have no compunctions about walking up to someone and talking to them or asking them a question, if I have something interesting to say, or have a question I really want to ask them. Actions and the person themselves tend to garner my respect more than their title or the famous-ness of their name. However, I do occasionally have reason to mention someone by name, and so the development of Viewdle as a utility intrigues me. This is my post to try it out.

The concept behind Viewdle is that the company is developing and maintain a library of pictures of the faces of famous people ( maybe someday they will allow us to upload pictures of ourselves and have ordinary people registered as well..). By some simple javascript pasting and putting a custom tag around references to people in text, hovering over that person's name should pop up a picture of the person. I like this idea, because I will often find myself reading someone's blog, they mention someone and I find myself hitting Google to look them up and remember who the Heck Robert Metcalfe is. If this database expands and the technology works, that mental mind shake in the form of a picture could come to you without ever leaving the page!.

So here, let's test it out a little bit.

At SC'07 this past November, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with lots of new people, some of them famous and some who probably should be, but aren't yet.

Dr. Raymond Orbach, the US Undersecretary of State for Science was one of the keynote speakers, and I had a chance to chat with him for a few minutes after his talk. He is very excited about the expanding use of modeling and simulation in manufacturing and wants to see it grow more. It is, he believes, what will give any manufacturer the competitive edge.

I spent a great amount of time with Dave Pokorney. We met in the Twitterverse. I had put in a watch on all Twitters mentioning "SC07" and his ( and a few others) popped up. We chatted back and forth a bit, then met in person. He is deeply involved with the team that does all of the networking for the conference, and got me some great behind the scenes interviews. Hopefully a Network World and a PMI Journal article will come out of those interviews.

All in all, SC07 was great fun and over the next month there should be a good number of publications coming out of it. Too much name dropping here will spoil the fun.

I did notice in the news this afternoon that Marc Andreessen is being a remarkable person and standing up for free speech on Ning, even though there are people up in arms about people chatting about sex on it. Come on folks, chatting sex, is NOT porn. If it were and it were really illegal, they would have to shut down every chat network in the universe. You really think there are NOT people on Yahoo or AIM or Meebo or gTalk out there chatting sex sometimes? I know I am.. being a healthy human who is often separated from her fiance for long periods of time, chat is one of the things that keeps our relationship going. Just because Ning has "networks" published where like minded people can hang out, does not make it the anti-christ. Honestly, I had not spent much time checking out Ning, but it is now on my list of things to test this week. Review and report to come.

So-- a little bit of name dropping there, though not the celebrity Madonna type of names.... so it will be interesting to see how Viewdle handles it. Give me some feedback, what do you see? What do you think?

How to earn a loyal customer

Let me just say up front, GooSync rocks. They have now earned my loyalty for a very long time. Here is my story:

I love and live in Google calendars. I live a life that is complex to the point of being confusing. We have a blended household. Both my fiance and I are divorced with kids from previous marriages. Both of us have shared custody situations. I have two girls, he has two sons. Currently we are in a situation where Mon-Fri during the school year he lives in a house an hour away with his two sons and on the weekends, holidays and summers he is back here with me. This means that sometimes there are 6 people who live in this house I call home and sometimes it is just me. Because the members of our clan need to access our schedule from work, from several homes and sometimes from the road- we needed something more flexible than a paper calendar hanging on the wall ( although we still have some of those.. they have such cool pictures...). Both my fiance and I also wanted to be able to have reminders sent to our treos, to keep us in line and make sure no child got left behind. Google Calendars fit this very well. We set up a joint family calendar and began filling it up. It nicely sends text messages to my phone, but it would not sync. When my work life was more crazed and I was running around the plant all day long from meeting to meeting, I used to sync my calendar with Outlook for work( yes, Outlook sucks, but I have no control over what is used from email and calendaring at work- I work for a very large corporation) and only my work appointments were on my treo. But then work shifted, and I work from home more- and do meetings more by teleconference- sitting here in front of my computer which can nicely remind me itself. No need to go through the hoops and hassles of a bluetooth sync up several times a day ( my sync cord for my treo long ago shorted out and refused to work). Before long, I was just ignoring the calendar feature on my Treo. This irritated me some... I wanted an easy way to check my schedule on the go. Besides, having technology that almost works is a pet peeve of mine.

In the meantime, our online google calendar life exploded. My fiance and his ex have a calendar for working out visitation issues- I have read access on that one, as I manage most of the family schedule. I am active in several professional arenas and have meetings for MESA, PMI-CIC IT committee and some other activities. Having all these professional commitments on the BnG Clan calendar was cluttering it up and confusing kids.. so I set up a professional calendar that has my professional commitments only in it. Besides, if I get to the point where my consulting/writing/speech giving schedule continues to grow ( one could hope) I will need a calendar like this to share on a professional website. My daughters rotate between my home and their dad's home.. so having their family stuff online is helpful to them. They are old enough now that I am working hard to get them to use this as a management tool. Hopefully they will be adding things themselves. But having things like my monthly book club, Curtain Call executive committee meetings and other items of the sort on the family calendar drives clutter that confuses them, as well as puts them at risk for kid learning curve screw ups. So all of my personal life appointments are on their own google calendar.
As time went on, I continued to test and trial new gizmos and services that would sync your google calendar- but they all only synced your main calendar. This is nice, but no longer sufficient in our world.

Then came GooSync. I discovered them a week or so before Christmas. Tested, loved it and imediately bought it so I could sync multiple google calendars and not just one. It was amazing! I could even use categories and have new appointments on my treo auto sync to different google calendars. Brilliant! This was what I had been looking for. Oh ! And look- I can sync with Outlook as well! Cool!! This is a stroke of brilliance. Finally I will be able to use my mobile device the way it was meant to. But wait... Crap. That outlook sync just took all my personal, intimate,family appointments and dumped them into outlook as well. Groan. Facepalm. This is bad. HeadDesk. I quickly cleaned up Outlook to delete them all and moved into the Holidays. OK, honestly I cleaned up most of them, but left some in..the less intimate ones that I did not care if work saw-- time was short. No more time to play with syncing gizmos when Santa was about to arrive. But the whole thing was buzzing about in my head in a semi-random way and a couple of days ago, I got the chance to test again. "What if", I thought, "I did a one way sync from Outlook to my handheld and then a bi directional sync from the handheld to google? Then I get the work appointments dumped into the handheld and the 2 way sync with google. I have no reason to add work appointments on the fly in the treo and then want them to sync with outlook any more... so this should work, right?

(Let me here interject a word of advice that I should have known well. Back up your calendars before experimenting)

Here is what I thought would happen:

Outlook overwrites to the Treo. Treo is now full of only Work Appointments. Bi directional sync via GooSync to google calendars. GooSync: hmm... you have a bunch of appointments in google not on your handheld- let me add those in for you. Result: my entire world schedule in the palm of my hand.

Here is what actually happens:

Outlook overwrites to the Treo. Treo is now full of only Work Appointments. Bi directional sync via GooSync to Google Calendars. GooSync: hmmm.... you have a bunch of appointments that were removed from your handheld.. here let me remove those from Google for you as well. Result: my entire world schedule, other than work? Deleted. Not just from my handheld, but from Google as well. The only things that remained were personal items that had gotten inserted into outlook before Christmas that I had not bothered to delete.

Now, is this normal behavior, or a remnant of the sync and delete in Outlook before Christmas? I do not know. I will not try it again to find out, either. I Twittered my despair. I IM'd my fiance my panic ( especially before he could go to check the calendar and be caught by surprise when things were GONE). This may not seem like a big deal, but it was a total of almost 1700 items. ( I told you I lead a busy and complicated life....). I wrote an email to tech support at GooSync that was really just a rant. I just needed to vent. I did not expect it to fix anything, really. A while later, I got a response " no problem, we can restore from tape. Just please tell us when this happened and stop syncing in the meantime".

Holy majoly. This was an unexpected benefit ( you can see I did not carefully read all the fine print). And you know what? They did. All of my messed up calendars have been restored. I am happy syncing again. And I came up with a new solution for getting all of everything onto my treo without risking deletions and cross contaminations. I created a new work calendar in Google. I use a free version of Syncmycal to do a one way dump of Outlook to that specific google calendar. I added the new google calendar to my list of calendars that my treo does a bi drectional sync with over the air.. and everything is in the palm of my hand again. Now that I am using my treo to manage life and events, I need to go back and re-look at RTM for my todo lists as well.

The guys at GooSync? As far as I am concerned- they rock. I will stick with them for a long time now.