Disqus - Latest Comments for mikepk

Re: A new OS feature worth upgrading for (Scripting News)

mikepk — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:39:16 -0000

Definitely like the idea. It's like a moving window of your own attention, kind of analogous to the River Of News being a moving window of media attention. I can think of clunky ways to do it with Apple "smart folders" at the moment, but not in a way that sounds as satisfying as this (especially across machines and networks).

Re: The Long Game

calciphus — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:12:35 -0000

Oh, I certainly agree that there will be no single feature, but when the big developers leave the platform behind, it makes a certain class of user (especially the kind that evangelize in the press, to their friends, etc).

As for Wave, I know it's a long way off (I've been playing with it for a while and still only /kinda/ get it). But what if instead of calling it wave, Google had a good way to integrate it into the general messaging platform, as a sort of "Group MMS on steroids with a timeline", you could see the value. You could also see the potential to make the iPhone and it's one-to-one style of communication, clunky "push" notices, look very dated. I don't think it'll be any one feature, like you said, but a lot of devices that are "good enough" and better tuned to a specific niche. I think the same goes for features: the iPhone, despite being quite feature-poor relative to modern smartphones, is still seen as "cutting edge". That image can't last forever, as new devices and entrants constantly take away another badge from the iPhone. There used to be a lot of unique features that added up to the iPhone "feeling" advanced to a new user. Multi-touch, large screen, thin device, long battery life, (mediocre) GPS, but many devices trump in not one, but MANY categories now. The HTC Dragon/Pro.Three looks to dwarf in many categories, whereas smaller devices like the Pixi and Droid scream past in others. There will be no one featureset that pushes it out, but the slow realization among consumers that an Apple is "okay" at a lot of things, but no longer the best at anything. Once that happens, it's very difficult to change the opinion. Look at the iPod classics...even iTunes. Both have been out-teched or out-features by one competitor or another, and while it doesn't directly dethrone them, it reminds the consumer that choice is a good thing, and that blindly buying the next generation of Apple product might be a losing bet.

Re: The Long Game

mikepk — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:43:39 -0000

That's a good point, I forgot that particular parallel. :) I think Google needs to be careful with rolling out advanced features like you describe. Even the tech elite can't quite figure out Google Wave at the moment, let alone mass consumers. Remember that all of the features of the iphone existed before the iphone appeared (browsers, touchscreens, email, etc...) It was the experience that tied it all together that made the iphone something different. I don't think features are going to drive the platform as much as cost. When Android handsets number in the hundreds of millions because every carrier subsidized free phone runs a 'smart phone' OS, that's when we'll see this strategy really bear fruit. I think it's then that we'll likely see the 'killer app' that you describe.

Re: Hackers and Painters in Seattle

mikepk — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:06:54 -0000

I thought your presentation was great. At one point I was thinking about if we begin to augment ourselves by hacking our own experiences and perceptions, could we get to a point where we're not only expanding space (as in information space) but time (as in processing time). Being that our perception of time is somewhat plastic already, with augmented processing, could we make a minute feel like an hour perceptually? Imagine interstellar travel where thousands of years are perceived as a week? Anyway really neat ideas!

Re: RSS is how the news flows (Scripting News)

mikepk — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:59:01 -0000

A river of news does not presuppose that everything *must* be in one river. In fact, what works best in my experience is a set of context and topic specific rivers. The best analogy is to the different sections of a newspaper: sports, science/tech, world news, politics, etc... Of course it doesn't always have to be topic specific either. I used to have one river that was just for people that I wanted to read everything they had to say. Keeping the sources for that river small, it's flow rate was diminished and I could read everything that went by.

Re: RSS is how the news flows (Scripting News)

littlescottie — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:49:53 -0000

Then I suppose something like FriendFeed–at least in its current form–is essentially a happier medium within the realm of supposed user-friendly social media platforms that allows a wider variety of source types, essentially breaking down the walls.

Re: RSS is how the news flows (Scripting News)

mikepk — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:41:49 -0000

Difference being that those "newer" examples are almost entirely walled gardens of only one kind of data. The true river of news should let me add sources from anywhere.

Re: RSS is how the news flows (Scripting News)

mikepk — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:31:31 -0000

Agreed on all points, Dave. I don't think 'regular' users should even be talking about "RSS". They don't care about the technology, the transport, or the medium they care about getting *the news*, when they want it, how they want it. One of my new projects, now that I'm on my own, will be to potentially address this (again :) ). As a fellow news junkie, I've agreed with you for a long time that rivers of news are the way to look at news, I think it will happen it's just going to take the right presentation (and timing).

Re: Gnomedex Was Amazing

griffintech — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:26:24 -0000

Thanks Mike. I'm serious, Kit Kat Chunky is one lovely chocolate bar.
You can probably find one on a British food ordering site. Let me know
if you find them. Yum!
Those were all great presentations, I loved all three of them too. All
three of those speakers are incredible people too.

Keep in touch! My best to Juliette.

Cheers,
D

Re: Gnomedex Was Amazing

griffintech — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:05:34 -0000

Re: Gnomedex Was Amazing

griffintech — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 04:31:06 -0000

Re: Gnomedex Was Amazing

griffintech — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 04:12:19 -0000

Re: Gnomedex Was Amazing

griffintech — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:09:47 -0000

Re: Gnomedex Was Amazing

griffintech — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:42:05 -0000

Re: Gnomedex Was Amazing

mikepk — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:58:22 -0000

Dave, it was great meeting you at gnomedex! Juliette was still talking about "Kit Kat CHUNKY" a few days later when we were walking around Seattle. I agree gnomedex was awesome this year and I definitely plan on making it to the next one.

I think for me, my favorite presentations were makerbot (because it's both creative and simple but also represents something potentially profound), Amber Case's Cyborg presentation, and Phil Plait's presentation on skepticism.

Re: Free Lunch!

mikepk — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:44:45 -0000

test

Re: It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future

mikepk — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:14:58 -0000

Thanks James, I'm still a fan of your ideas! It was great working with you and I'm glad we got the chance to meet in person. I still think feeds are an important part of the future of news and information on the web, people just didn't seem ready to graze yet. :) I hope we stay in touch in the future.

Re: It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future

mikepk — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:54:31 -0000

You've been a terrific supporter and I've always appreciated your counsel and feedback regarding Grazr. I feel lucky that we had such passionate and engaged users. I really am sorry that the news radars will stop working, I know how hard you worked on them.

Re: It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future

mikepk — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:38:56 -0000

Thanks David, I'll look you up if ever I'm in London!

Re: It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future

mikepk — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:33:29 -0000

Thank Fred, I really appreciate it.

Re: WTF Friendfeed – you may have just crossed the line

mikepk — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:44:19 -0000

But, in all honesty, aren't all feed tracking stats completely bogus? Just because someone's feed reader is subscribed (and your content is pulled) doesn't mean they're looking at it (in fact I would say the majority don't read every post). So yes, it does increase "bogosity", but I think most people look at sub counts as a statistical phenomenon. You can't model the individual interactions for all the atoms in a gas, but you can get a measure of gas pressure. This 'subscriber pressure' will be slightly more inflated than before but the trends are what's important, no?

Re: What are reading lists? (Scripting News)

mikepk — Sun, 24 May 2009 18:42:27 -0000

Dave, I missed your challenge to subscribe to an OPML. I added it to my account as well:

http://grazr.com/read/mikepk/techJunkWebsite.ne...

:)

Re: What are reading lists? (Scripting News)

mikepk — Sun, 24 May 2009 18:37:23 -0000

So as a service, Grazr was built almost entirely on the concept of Reading Lists and the deep functionality surfaced by OPML.

Unfortunately Grazr is totally flaking out this week due to server issues (reaching scaling limits as we track almost a half a terabyte of feed content). It's also been on development 'pause' for about a year (no major code changes or updates other than bug fixes), but we built the whole service with the idea of reading lists, hosting them as well as subscribing to them externally.

For an example, my account on Grazr:
http://grazr.com/files/mikepk

Here's one of my reading lists in my account:
http://grazr.com/read/mikepk/My_Reading_List

You'll notice that there's an OPML address for that reading list too, which can be used as Dave describes (as a live resource for other tools).
http://grazr.com/data/mikepk/My_Reading_List

Now, before development was paused on Grazr, we built a lot of additional functionality into the site, like the ability to turn a reading list into a single river of news view of all the underlying feeds in the reading list.

Each File in your account is an OPML file or RSS feed. In the case of OPML files, each file can either be hosted in our hosting system, or act as a bookmark/pointer to a live OPML file somewhere else on the internet. In all cases the underlying OPML file has an address on our site so you can use it in other tools (feed readers or other reading list aware services).

For an example of a "subscribed to" file, here's Scoble's old reading list on bloglines (one of the few services that actually created live OPML reading lists).
http://grazr.com/read/mikepk/Bloglines_Subscrip...

This file mirrors what Dave is saying, in that if Scoble ever changed the subscriptions in his bloglines account (which I don't think he uses anymore) they would immediately be reflected in that reading list "subscription" in my account.

The amount of functionality on the site makes it highly complicated to use and something I'd hoped to go back to and clean up but startup realities thus far have dictated otherwise.

Kind of a whirlwind tour of some of the reading list functions on Grazr. :)

Re: Google's incomplete support of reading lists (Scripting News)

arif — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:58:38 -0000

Reading this article above, the Grazr came to mind but without the name, until I checked your website and the name popped up. I recall using/trying Grazr a while back and thinking I would eventually replace this with any other Feed Reader I was using. But somehow Grazr dropped from my radar (perhaps because it is too gadget oriented and not positioned as a feed reader) and ever since, the Google Reader is the only alternative for online feed reading (what a sad state of affairs).

Re: Google's incomplete support of reading lists (Scripting News)

dave — Sun, 24 May 2009 12:06:08 -0000

BTW, don't feel bad -- my father once started to explain podcasting after he
read an article about it. I don't think families were ever meant to
undestand what we do Mike. :-)