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I don’t need a special UI for my iPhone, thanks May 23, 2008

Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , add a comment

With the Safari browser and the iPhone’s sweet touch screen functionality, I can look at any web page and do what I would do on a laptop. Granted, browsing on the AT&T Edge network can try your patience, but when connected to wi-fi (and soon 3G), the browsing speed is perfectly reasonable.

So, it bothers me somewhat when I land on a site and they serve up an “optimized” UI for mobile devices (try MSNBC from your phone). Typically, there is less functionality available to you and in the MSNBC’s case, it won’t let you switch to the standard UI from a mobile device. I have the same issue with Twitter where the mobile UI doesn’t have the functions and details seen on the standard UI such as Reply, Delete, and how it was sent (Twirl, MessageDance, etc.).

If I choose the “Standard” UI option for Twitter on my iPhone, it works perfectly fine. Sure, maybe it’s small but two quick taps on the screen and it zooms in.

There was a lot of buzz yesterday about the availability of FF to Go which is an optimized FriendFeed UI for mobile devices. It lacks several of the features found in the standard UI, most notably search. Standard FriendFeed looks and works great on my iPhone.

At MessageDance, we believe in the future that the iPhone has brought us. Web companies don’t need to develop special UIs for mobile devices because the browsing abilities on ALL devices will move towards what the iPhone offers today. The same is true for companies that build resident application clients for mobile devices. Why not just take advantage of the native applications on the device? All you need is a good browser to access an application and an email client to use as an integration layer. Wi-fi is becoming ubiquitous so being connected all of the time seems less like a dream. Execution is critical; develop your applications accordingly.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

It’s the blog, stupid! May 23, 2008

Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , 3comments

The title is apropos for the election season, but I'm going to propose an idea here and I hope to get some feedback. Lots of people are talking about the disconnect with comments and conversations happening on Twitter, FriendFeed, and their blog. For example, you make a blog post and (with MessageDance automatically) it goes to Twitter (and thus to FriendFeed), people can comment about it on your blog, Twitter, and FriendFeed (and on MessageDance.com).  Big-time fracturing of comments. Since you started with your blog, shouldn't you be able to stay on your blog and see all of the comments come back to your blog? There should be no reason why you have to monitor everything to see what people think about what you said — just have it fed back into your blog.

Your blog is the center of your universe

When you post your blog entry, wouldn't it be right to have it say on Twitter that it came "from {your blog name}"? Not from Twirl, the web, or MessageDance — it is actually you and your blog that created the content — you should get the credit! When someone comments on FriendFeed, shouldn't that go back to your blog as a comment, regardless if it was your original post or on a Google Reader reblog by someone else? Same is true for a Twitter reply. Heck, why not make tweets, @ replies, and FriendFeed posts directly from your blog for that matter.

To steal a late 90's term, your blog should be your portal. You start with it everyday and you don't need to leave it to keep up with your friends and your conversations. Your blog is all about you. Keep it all together.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

Will FriendFeed be as kind as Twitter? May 13, 2008

Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , add a comment

Just read this piece about FriendFeedLinks on TechCrunch and the first thought I had was — will FriendFeed have a problem with this? After all, could you imagine a MicrosoftLinks or GoogleLinks?


Corporate lawyers live for this kind of stuff. But that was before Twitter.

Twitter really changed things by not going after 3rd-party services and the companies who used their name or likeness. Twittermail, Twitterrific, TwitterSecret — the list goes on and on. I believe the jury is still out on this trademarkless strategy as they can never reign it back in. True, they have allowed an incredible Twitter ecosystem to be created with so many tools and services they could have never built, but if the time comes where they need to expand their footprint, can they do it without squashing a friendly complementary service? I suppose they can buy out the good ones, but they can’t buy everything around them. And they clearly can’t put the genie back in the bottle and try to protect their trademark.

So, I’m intrigued to see if Twitter started a trend here by encouraging (or maybe it was just dumb-luck ignoring) unaffiliated hackers to use their name — or are the lawyers at FriendFeed just getting warmed up? The founders are from Google after all, and the company had a lot of experience in trademark law, albeit, defending their own trademark violations.

The Dark-Side, Dick Cheney equivalent is Facebook. If you’ve developed an application on Facebook or even tried running an ad, you know what I mean. They are the anti-Twitter where you can’t even use the word “face” in your app name or ad text. They allowed RockYou’s SuperWall and Slide’s FunWall as an application, but you can’t use the word “wall” in an ad. WTH?

I’ll give FriendFeed a couple of weeks to respond to FriendFeedLinks and if they do nothing, I call dibs on FriendFeederrific.

UPDATE: Saw Louis Gray had a mention about FriendFeedMachine today (and he wrote about them last month), so I guess FriendFeed is letting the trademark go and going the way of Twitter.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail | Reply On Twitter

An argument for the opposite of Plaxo Pulse and FriendFeed April 22, 2008

Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , 6comments

Don’t get me wrong, there is absolute value in knowing what my friends, colleagues, and people-I-pine-to-be-like are talking about. But not everyone who is in my circle uses an aggregator to follow me. I have friends who see my Twitter tweets. Some people see my updates on Facebook. I’d like to think people see my stuff on MySpace, but I doubt it (except maybe Lola and Cheyenne). I also have this blog, which is how my mother keeps up with me when I don’t call and return emails. Separately updating each social site, morphing the content to fit each format, is painful, tedious, and unlikely.

Inward-Out

Publishing my rich content and messages to all (or just some) of my social destinations in a single post is the opposite of the aggregators. They are Outward-In (not that there is anything wrong with that). MessageDance is Inward-Out.

The Middleware of the Internet

The key to this sexy processing comes from an unsexy tool — email. Email is still the killer-app. It is the most ubiquitous, under-utilized, and abused tool in everyone’s toolbox. When most people think of email, they think of spam. The beauty of using email in the context of MessageDance is that an email inbox is never the final destination of a message or content that has been shared. MessageDance uses the really good part of email which is its ability to transport data in the simplest of fashions. Along its journey, MessageDance transforms the format of the content for its final destination.

Portable and Powerful Email Address

Now there is great power in just an email address. You don’t need to start your sharing from an email client. Start in Facebook and send your extra-facebook messages, blog posts, tweets from the native Facebook messaging app. Stay on YouTube.com and share a video to Twitter by just using your MessageDance email handle. Hell, blog from Amazon.com if you must. Besides signing-up and adding a few settings, you never really need to use MessageDance.com or your email client — and still reap powerful Anywhere to Anywhere sharing.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail