The Web 2.0 Blog » Technology

Stikkit Quicksilver Plugin

I think my life has just changed. My personal data manager of choice, Stikkit, has had a plugin released so that it works with the best task launcher ever conceived, Quicksilver. If you head into your Quicksilver preference pane, you can now add a Stikkit plugin which allows you to add and amend Stikkits as well as accessing your current Stikkits. Have a look at this post over a The Unofficial Apple Weblog which will run you through the setup process. This is really how things should work, the integration between Stikkit and Quicksilver is pretty seemless and having access to all my Stikkits right there on my desktop, and then being able to use them in the ways Quicksilver allows, is a revelation.

I’ve posted about Stikkit before and praised the way in which it uses natural text as an input mechanism. This remains extant when using Quicksilver. I’m convinced this is the future. So long as there are great desktop applications out there, Quicksilver being one of them, many people will find it hard give them up. Likewise, which web apps are as easy to use as Stikkit, many people will want to start using it. This is the perfect balance. One of the things I like about Stikkit is that I can just type information in there and Stikkit sorts it all out for me, tagging it and setting up reminders and generally acting like my mother (i.e. picking my socks up, doing my laundry etc.). With the amount of time it takes for me to create a Stikkit greatly reduced, its become my go to app for pretty much everything. A word of warning though, occasionally you will need something a bot more structured. For me, Stikkit works great as a place to hold to-dos, meeting minutes, general notes and such like. I back it up with a more formal and structured application for when its required. My personal choice for this is Active Collab, which you’ll need to host yourself, but provides a very usable solution. That may come as a shock to many of you as I was a long time proponent of the 37 signals application Basecamp. unfortunately, it just doens’t seem to be moving in the same direction as me, which is a shame. I’ll cover this at a later date, as it seems to be happening with a few of my old favourite we applications.

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How to get through today with Google Reader

So, we all know what today is. And, unfortunately, many tech and web 2.0 sites like to take full advantage. So, I bring to you a technique for avoiding all this silliness using Google Reader. Its quite complicated, sorting the wheat from the chaff isn’t easy at the best of times, let alone today, so bear with me.

Ok, first, bring up Google Reader in your browser.

Then, click this button Google Reader View All . This ensures that whatever you do next will be applied to all posts.

Next, click this button Google Reader Mark All As Read Button .

And that should be it, all done. You will, however, have to apply the same “fix” every so often for the next 24 hours.

Enjoy a peacefull Sunday.

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A New Approach … That Works

I really do have to confess my love for Stikkit. For such a simple premise it is executed incredibly well. Essentially it just lets you store small snippets of information, share it with others, create to-do lists, calendar items and people. The beauty comes from its intelligence, and this is what I fell in love with.

It’s occurred to me recently that allot of things about the Web 2.0 require work, hard work, work that we never used to have to do. Take bookmarks for example, before del.icio.us we would simply bookmark a site for later viewing and be done. Now, we have to worry about giving it appropriate tags and descriptions and sharing options. It’s allot to do. Stikkit, on the other hand, bypasses all this by picking up on natural language and doing all the work for you. There’s no jumping between fields and choosing options, its much more natural than that.

The power of stikkit comes from its ability to understand what you are writing. This is fairly arbitrary at the moment, and relies on certain keywords, but it feels natural. It feels better. The real benefit of a system such as stikkit’s is that it will encourage users who do not usually take advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities, to embrace them. Unfortunately, when it comes to this lofty goal stikkit isn’t quite there yet. Instead, it provides a quick and easy to use data capturing service for those who know how to use it. I think this is a crucial point to make. Hopefully, the ultimate goal of stikkit is to completely transpose the unstructured ramblings we type into structured data. Stikkit is making steps in this direction, if you type “Meet with Andy” it will know who Andy is and link the stikkit to the “peep” (stikkit’s term for people), providing they exist. The simple fact that the user doesn’t have to go and search for that person to link the two stikkits means that your less tech savvy users are doing something they’ve not done before, associating data. And bear in mind, in data terms, this is a somewhat complex idea. The net effect is that the user will end up with a better, more usable, set of data. If you consider the ease with which you can set up a meeting in stikkit, compared to something like outlook, it should be fairly clear this semantic interpretation is the future. In stikkit, you would create a new stikkit and type the details of the person you want to contact. Stikkit will realise this is a person and convert it into a peep. To create the meeting, simple pop up a new stikkit and type the meeting details. Stikkit will pull out the relevant details, such as the date and reminder and add it to your calendar. It will also notice that you invited the peep you created earlier and link them together. Now compare that to your Outlook workflow, where you would have to painstakingly complete all the fields across multiple screens and even then, you would have to manually link the calendar event to your contact.

Fortunately, stikkit isn’t the only service attempting to take advantage of this technology. We saw with 30boxes that you can add events using a sting of descriptive text. We’ve also recently seen with Gmail and gcal that events that appear in an email can be easily added to your calendar. The reason I stated above that you need to know how to use stikkit is that, in its current version, its not quite there. For example, to tag something you have to write “tag as …”, variations on that are hit and miss. The same goes for linking peeps to events, sometimes the “aka” (or shortname, if you will) works and sometimes the long/full name works. By using very tight phrases as triggers, stikkit reduce the possibility of error while also limiting the scope and usefulness of the service. This is a fine balance to strike and many have failed based purely on this point. I’m not sure what the future holds for stikkit, it will be interesting to see which direction they go in. For the moment, its simply the fastest way to input complicated data and relationships.

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Quantifying the digg Effect

I’m a huge fan of digg.com, it provides me, and millions of others, with a constant source of interesting content to ponder. And for many sites around the internet, it can provide a much valued boost in traffic. Of course, when you start talking about digg.com and traffic the infamous digg effect always comes up. Put simply, this is the latest take on being slashdotted. When a popular site allows for user generated content, specifically links, there will no doubt be a surge in traffic to that site. In many cases this results in that site becoming unavailable. I’ve recently fallen foul of the digg effect myself, with a site becoming unavailable until I moved hosts. It turns what should be an exciting time into more of a worrying one. On digg itself there have been numerous comments mentioning that a large number of sites seem to be going down. So, given these two factors, I wanted to see for myself. In this post you’ll see what I found out by recording some important data regarding the stories that make it to the digg.com front page over the course of a single day, thats 24 hours and EVERY story that made it to the venerable homepage spots. Read on for what I’ve discovered so far.

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digg not prepared for its own success?

I ran across this story earlier today and it completely shocked me. It would appear the the huge amount of diggs received by the iPhone story (which now appears to have been dugg down) couldn’t be handled by certain aspects of digg’s UI. The reason this shocked me was that the problems started to come at 10,000 diggs. Now to me, considering the large numbers of users digg has, thats not a huge amount. Of course this little issue was fixed fairly quickly but it begs the question, if the UI has never been tested to this level, what about the stability of the rest of the digg platform?

We’ve seen that digg has the ability to easily bring down other sites, and we’ve also seen that digg itself and slow to a crawl on occasion, early last week being an example. But the question is not of the infrastructure, which can easily be expanded, but more of the software. The nature of digg means that users “swarm” around certain articles, see the highly entertaining digg swarm tool for a great visual interpretation of this mass behaviour. This means its very difficult to perform accurate automated load testing on the scripts themselves. And, it seems obvious now that the digg team have not been able to test the site to the extent it is currently being used. Either in terms of numbers or usage patterns. It must be a scary time, so lets hope it all holds up. And lets all bear in mind that the uniqueness of sites like digg mean they fall out of the realm of standard testing practice, techniques that can be safely applied to other internet sites (i.e. content management systems, shopping sites etc.).

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Will digg redesign force a change across the internet?

One of the Web 2.0 Golden Boys, digg.com, launched a redesign last week. Alon Digg Logo g with some new categories, navigation and design (barely) there was one fairly major change in terms of impact on the rest of the internet. Of course, I’m not talking about the move away from news, or indeed the backing out of some of the more social features, but more this whole content serving “feature”.

In case you haven’t, although I’m sure you have, check out digg.com post redesign and you will find a new video and podcasting section. These aren’t necessarily all that new. People have been digging podcasts and videos for quite a while on digg. In fact, an earlier feature bump this year introduced thumbnails for videos, so it should have been clear that digg was heading in that general direction. Its the way in which this content appears on the digg site that is potentially going to cause the problems. Read on…

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How do you judge the success of a web application?

We live in strange times. The success of a business can no longer be determined by the amount of money it makes. In fact, its difficult to value a business in these times, especially with the concept of assets Google Logo evolving. Of course I’m talking specifically about web applications, spurred on by the recent acquisition of YouTube by Google. YouTube Logo

The acquisition shocked many, both in and outside the industry for two reasons. Firstly the amount and secondly the fact the Google has its own competing product. In fact, some where as bold as to suggest barely a few days before that the takeover would not go ahead. I shant link and shame them, I think we all know who I’m talking about. This raises the question of whether YouTube is, or ever has been, a success. I’m sure that for the founders, they will call it a success, they made a pretty packet on it. But in business terms I’m not so sure. The fact remains that YouTube has a very flimsy business model and the service is potentially riddled with problems.

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Cleaning with AJAX

As someone who has a real ‘thing’ for usability I’m cosntantly astonished that AJAX is used to complicate and baffle users. As if the non-standard navigation on websites wasn’t enough we’ve now got these new behaviours that don’t follow HTML rules to consider as well. What we really need is to clean up the use of AJAX and make sure that when the word is mentioned as part of site development, its the designers and user interface specialists that suggest it, not the developers.

In fact, AJAX should only be used to solve a problem that can’t be solved with regular static pages. I would add a very loud caveat to that though, and that is a problem doesn’t necessary have to be a bad thing, but, more likely, is an internal design problem. We can apply this fairly simply to some popular Web 2 applications. How about gmail, what ‘problem’ did they solve by using AJAX? See after the jump…

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Positive Side Effects Of Web 2.0 Applications

Whilst looking for some resources earlier I discovered a fantastic way of using Web 2.0 services to my own end, and not in the way they were intended to be used. I was looking for some free fonts for a projects and the usual avenues of investigation weren’t really fulfilling my needs. So where do I go? What do I do? The answer was to utilise the Web 2.0. So I headed over the delicious and digg and searched for free fonts. Through utilising these tools I found exactly what I was after, and much more. The simple fact is that by leveraging some of the social aspects of the Web 2.0 you can really enhance your browsing experience. The idea is, however, to think a bot outside the box.

What I mean by this is putting a slightly different slant on some of the popular Web 2.0 services. The example I used above was Digg as a search engine. And it really works. The results you get from Digg are better than the results you get from Google. You can further filter the results by the number of Diggs the entry received, or if your really clever, by the people who Dugg it. For more general searches, delicious works just as well, just watch for entries with few bookmarks, they may be adverts.

So what other information can we garner from Web Applications by slightly changing our approach? Bear in mind that you will have to use some common sense and maybe exert a bit of effort to get the most out of Web Apps, especially when your not using them for their intended purpose. Take ebay for instance. If your looking to buy something, say a TV, when why not check out ebay first. Not to find a cheaper price (remember to factor in warranties and buyer protection etc) but to see how many are up for sale, by ordinary people. If there’s a large number of the model your after showing up then the chances are people have bought it, but aren’t very satisfied. Of course you’ll have to do a bit of legwork to make sure the sellers aren’t high volume sellers of that sort of product, like I said, a bit of legwork. Another good way of getting some information about a product or service you’re considering is to take a look at forums associated with it. Should it be official forums, you may get a chance to see the customer service in action. Another possibility is using flickr to check out your next holiday location, sometimes including the hotel!

So in what other ways can we use Web 2 services in new and inventive ways? I’ve heard people using blogs as diaries and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of interesting uses of the Google Maps API out there. Open your mind, and think outside the box.

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Who should drive innovation?

One of the interesting things about Web 2.0 applications is that theres this gap that has to breach for them to be used. No matter what the application is, they are wholly reliant on a browser to access them. This is a very interesting concept and begs the question, where does the responsibility lie when it comes to innovation, with the browser vendors or with the websites? And does the advancement, or lack thereof, limit the scope of the other?

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