Well, you can certainly hear the crickets on this feed.
I’m resurfacing for the first time in a while, actually in part to talk about why I think this blogging interface isn’t cutting it for me anymore. Up front I will say, there’s a lot of research I should have done while I was busily avoiding the issue / firming up my prejudices; and I hope to do some of that soon. Now’s as great a time as ever there was, especially in light of last week’s acquisition of a top-of-the-line smart phone.
I decisively jumped on the Android bandwagon the minute I heard Verizon was going to feature the developer-friendly platform in their new Droid series. I made it my birthday present to myself, and stood in line at 6:50 Friday morning so I could start learning to use it at work and later while out on the town. The significance of all this bears explanation, more than can really fit here, but basically Android is software akin to Mac OS or Windows, it runs on phones that compete with Apple’s iPhone, and for coders like myself it removes a lot of the entry barriers to writing cell phone apps.
Anyway, with the confluence of social utilities like Twitter, an Internet-aware phone that’s constantly in sync with these services, and repository and syndication systems like those that power this blog, I can envision a number of really cool productivity apps. Searching the Android market effectively is a skill I’m still learning, so even if I had looked about I wouldn’t necessarily know how much of the space has been explored. But here are some haphazardly arranged thoughts:
Note-taking: my earlier ideas on this centered around bulk recording and processing of speech, which incurs big costs in bandwidth and/or power. There might be some strategies to get around this, but nothing short-term feasible.
A better direction, the one that interests me now, is to do away with the tape-recorder metaphor and start with individual snippets of text, the equivalent to writing a formula on a cocktail napkin. Fragments of such size are reasonable to type when your hands are free, or to run through Google’s server-side voice recognition (although that has its shortcomings). Maybe you attach something – a photograph, or the OCR scan of a block of data; workout statistics read from a bluetooth device; any old thing.
Once you’ve got a message fragment, what would you want to do with it? The fact that it’s in such short fragments means you’re probably not going to be dictating prose of any length with this system; in that case the tape recorder really is the way to go. The output here is going to look more like a string of tweets–little messages that become part of a bigger structure.
In Twitter, the structure is just a message thread, or a feed of all the statuses posted by an individual. Here, the structure is something more complex, something of value itself, but we can still specify that structure in part through message content–i.e., through tagging.
Once meaningful structure has been built up using these little fragments, it needs to be reviewed, updated and potentially shared in some form. Visualizing and saving structured ideas is a really cool problem, and fairly well solved in the case of hierarchical or graph-like structures, although I don’t know how much people have done with cloud-bound mobile services for carting such data around.
What intrigues me most though, I think, is the cases for compiling and sharing information. Not only is there the question of what format you use to publish something, as opposed to merely visualizing it for yourself. Where’s it going? Who can see it? What piece of it do you want to send out? Do you want your connections to be able to view it, alter it, give feedback, along the way? How, and at what point in the process, would you export it to produce text documentation?
Part of this ties back into my growing vexation as I repeatedly cross the space between traditional blogging, and the micro-syndication used in social networks. They’re quite different worlds. The former offers granular privacy, but not a uniform concept of content classification and priority that I’m happy with. The latter offer varying degrees of privacy, and sometimes different streams of information with differing levels of importance, but I would not hold them up as role models for how to do it right, either.
The underlying technology’s fine. You could hypothetically do all this with one or more RSS or Atom feeds, for instance. You could use a private twitter account or something like it as the raw input to an idea mapper or spreadsheet application. But that’s not what the thing itself is, those are just optional ways in and out of the application.
And in some cases, maybe it’s not Web 2.0 data at all, maybe it’s exported as CSV or XML data that gets fed to an external app, like a nutrition logger. I realize I’m talking about a couple different components at the same time, here–the note taking app and the data sharing app aren’t the same thing. They’re just two neighboring pieces of a complicated puzzle that I’m considering. And I’m trying to look at them open-mindedly and holistically. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the future is basically here.
Anyway, tomorrow I’ll tow this back to work and Nic will tell me how it’s actually done.
