Category Archives: Reviews

If you like podcasts, you should try the Breaker app

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Discovering a great new podcast is a real thrill and a relatively new app called Breaker makes it easy to do. It uses your friend list from Twitter or other social networks to tap you into a stream of podcast listening activity. And the interface is beautiful.

The social discovery is awesome – I’m finding new shows and new episodes to listen to that I really enjoy. It also prompts me to listen to popular things I’ve never bothered to listen to before, like The Daily from the NYT. Everyone likes it and so it was easy for me to give it a try once. There are far more shows and specific episodes being published now than anyone can listen to, it’s really overwhelming, and this is a good way to filter.

This is what sharing your social data like your list of friends with third party apps can do for you, by the way. This is the upside of that kind of capability, ways it can improve democratic values for a change.

I’ve used Huffduffer for years for podcast discovery but it’s web based, nerdy, sparse, and not nearly as popular. It’s still cool though, as is the HuffDuffVideo bookmarklet that strips audio from YouTube videos and puts it on AWS for 30 days, then pushes those audio files over to HuffDuffer to listen to on my phone or Sonos. Biggest bummer at Breaker? My Huffduffer feed didn’t get imported, for some reason.

Also disappointing about Breaker: I don’t see a privacy option for specific shows. There are some podcasts I listen to that I don’t want all my friends knowing I listen to them.

Further critique could be offered of the less useful push notifications. Some of the push notifications are amazing, like “your friend X was a guest on this podcast!” But other ones say things like “many of your friends like popular things” – and that’s just annoying. I’d also like it to do downloads a little differently so it supported the Sonos “on this phone” feature beter.

So that’s four things I don’t like about Breaker – but there are far more that I like a lot. I think you’ll like it too.

 

Screenshots from the new app Molly.com: Chris Messina and team help you teach a robot about yourself

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In the future there will be far more opportunities to engage with recommendation and other types of systems than we can keep up with – and we’ll want those systems to quickly and easily know about our interests and tastes.

Molly.com is a new system launched today that will allow you and your friends to teach an AI system about your interests and preferences so that it can answer questions about you and make recommendations for you in the future.  The AI system is forthcoming, it seems – but if there’s anyone (beside myself) I’d trust to hold my data about my interests and make it available in a developer platform – it’s co-founder Chris Messina.

If it can’t be an open source community standard like the Data Portability Project from days of old, then a startup with Chris Messina in a leadership position sounds real good.

You can ask me questions via this link. Feel free to try it!

It’s a child of Silicon Valley, more than a year and a half in development, funded by YCombinator, and lead by CEO Esther Crawford (formerly of the awesome Coach.me) and Chris Messina, a serial inventor who’s led the creation of many cool things, including but not limited to, the hashtag. (I wrote the so-far definitive profile of Messina eight years ago.)

Here’s a write-up on TechCrunch, and a better one on Venturebeat – but I thought a bunch of screenshots might be the best way to give you a sense of what the app is like.

The app learns about you through social Q&A, prompted question cards, and analysis of your linked social services. Based on what it learns, it can make suggestions for answers to questions you’re asked – and someday it will be able to stand in for you when another system wants to ask a question about your tastes. Perhaps it’s building a personal version of what the enterprise industry analysts call a “digital twin.”

Here’s what the app looks like so far, click any of these images to see them full-size.  It’s quite nice.

An Excellent Book: “How to Fix the Future”

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Author and entrepreneur Andrew Keen has just launched his latest book, titled “How to Fix the Future.”

The book argues that we’re faced with a historic threat to individual and social wellbeing in the form of big tech monopolies building addictive tech. To avoid the worst possible outcomes will require a combination of regulation, innovation, social activism, consumer choice, and education. Keen travels the world to meet people leading each of those types of work.

Here’s what I wrote about it on Amazon. “An optimistic map of a distributed future with humanity at the center? Yes please and thank you! An informative, inspiring book. Keen’s range of interviews here are remarkable. His historical references are delightful. This is a really important book. It’s also fun to read.”

It’s really a good book and if you’d like to see what people are doing all around the world to make a better future, where technology serves us instead of us serving our technology, I highly recommend it. The way it’s put in historical context is very compelling, too.

I was honored to get to interview Keen at Powell’s Books the day after launch. (A Little Bird monitoring system I’d set up to watch the top 1000 futurists online for any mention of Portland alerted me to his plans to come through town about 6 months prior.) A great crowd attended, with smart questions.

Particularly important was Amelia Abreu‘s question about the impact of black, queer, disabled, and women futurists’ work on our understanding of the present and what to do about it. To his credit, Keen had done some important interviews with really impressive women tech leaders, from investment to regulation, but there’s never enough discussion of the deep critiques and radically different cultural futures so often articulated by people at the margins of political power. And Keen is a political moderate, a reformer, he himself acknowledges, concerned about the potential for authoritarianism from both radical ends of the political spectrum. The perspectives he misses out on from anti-racist, 3rd wave feminism, the disability rights and related movements are his, and our, loss. (One view into these other perspectives is this list of 120+ influential women futurists.)

That said, what he has covered in the book is pretty incredible and very important. From Estonia the Singapore, from Stephen Wolfram to John Borthwick, the EU’s brave Margrethe Vestager to the lawyer suing new economy companies over workers’ rights, Shannon Liss-Riordan – it’s a really great book.

If you’d like to follow along with the incredible group of people he interviewed for the book, I put together a Twitter List of 40 of them I was able to find on Twitter. You can click to follow it, bookmark it, and keep an eye on this dynamic group of global innovators resisting monopoly power.

A distributed, networked-based, platform of a future, with humanity at the center. Let’s build that.

From Keen’s blog, 45 seconds from one of the most influential people in the world of Data Science, Hilary Mason:

Dreaming of the Perfect Friend Adder, MyBlogLog Came Close Today

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Super-cookie service MyBlogLog just emailed users to let us know about a new “friend finder” the site is offering. The feature is remarkable because it makes it really easy to add your friends from around the web – without asking you for any passwords! With just a few clicks your friends on services from Flickr to FriendFeed can become your friends on MyBlogLog. I wish everyone did that. Here’s a few bullet points on the implementation that could be helpful for other application developers to consider.

  • This doesn’t just work with early adopters. Most services have you “add friends” by asking for your email password because that’s where most of the online world has most of its friends. It’s creepy though and a bad practice to do that. MyBlogLog can grab the “Friend of a Friend” (FOAF) data from your public profiles at services like Flickr, Facebook and MySpace – hardly a tiny set of bleeding edge users. Your application could consider doing the same. Think also about using the new GMail contacts API.
  • There’s still no “add all” link. In what I assume was a silly oversight, there’s no link to “add all” when you pull up your friends from these networks. You have to add them one at a time. It would be nice to be able to select all and then deselect a few. That’s no small thing, it would make a big difference in growing the service and I assume they will fix that soon. As it is, the list of 20 friends at a time gets mixed up a bit like FriendFeed recommendations. Implementation of both are clunky though and could scale much better by presenting more options at once and displaying more information about users you are prompted to add as friends.
  • Service discovery could be faster. MyBlogLog is “discovering friends” via the public profile pages you filled out in your MBL profile. That process presents you with a long list of services from around the web and asks you to fill in the part of profile URLs where your username goes. Everyone should check out how Lijit discovers new accounts from other sites. It asks you “what is your most common username” and then searches to see where it can find an account with that username. You then confirm or deny each one and can enter exceptions to your standard username on any particular service. It’s really smooth and smart. I wish MyBlogLog and everyone else did it that way.

Almost every service on the web wants to connect users with their friends elsewhere, for aggregate activity feed displays or “viral introductions.” There are some best practices emerging for doing that, though. Companies looking to implement such features should take a look at oAuth and at Niall Kennedy’s recent post on user authentication best practices. If you want to see something cool about MyBlogLog, I’d also recommend checking out the BlogJuice bookmarklet. You’ll like it, I promise.

Looking for the Best Mind Mapping Tools

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I’m a very recent convert to the belief that mind mapping tools can be valuable. After years of sneering at them as vague and superflous (without ever really trying them) I did a one hour consulting gig with the folks over at Imindi a week or so ago.

Now I am hesitant to think about anything without the ability to “write it down” in a mind map. The ability to document the free flow of connected thoughts is just too seductive to pass up when thinking through complex proccesses.

I could use some help figuring out what the best mind mapping service is, though. Here’s my criteria so far – above in an image from MindMeister (which is AWESOME so far). Can you suggest anything I’m missing or favorite tools I should evaluate?
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5 PR Pitches: The Good and Bad

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I wear two hats. I consult for companies on usability, market intelligence and launch planning. I also blog about new web applications and internet industry news over at Read/WriteWeb. I don’t write about my consulting clients, but after several years of experience working on both sides of the promotion game – I think I’ve got some pretty good advice. At least on what not to do!

I want to post here about some pitches I’ve gotten from PR people and I don’t need to look back further than 24 hours to find most of them that I want to use as examples. I look at probably 30 pitches a day, sometimes more.
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