Mark Krynsky

Today’s news uncovered by Arun Thampi that Path has been uploading users entire address book to their servers does not bode well for them. You can read coverage around this issue on ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, and Venture Beat. But none of that coverage discussed the future implications as Path has already announced future support for health tracking devices.

I’ve become a big fan of Path over the last few months. It provides a beautiful mobile Lifestreaming app and offers some nice syndication features to boot. But  I became even more excited as I heard about the possible future integration with the Jawbone Up. Having a single app to use for Lifestreaming as well as tracking health activity is a very interesting development. Then just a few weeks ago I learned of the newly announced Nike Fuelband which is a new health tracking device that Path announced it will support. So it’s now clear that Path is definitely going to integrate health tracking devices and data into their app.

It’s one thing to compromise users trust when it comes to status updates and other social data, but health data takes that to a new level. It’s a shame that this unnecessary data exposure will no doubt make users take notice and perhaps dissuade them from using the app as they move into their next phase of integrating health data. I hope the Path team can reconcile this issue and provide a means for ensuring it doesn’t happen again in the future. It’s such an elegant app with a bright future that will delve into an area (Lifestreaming + Lifelogging) that nobody else has entered yet. Hopefully they’ve learned from this and will provide a clear on-boarding method for the addition of their health devices support later this year.

UPDATE: Path’s CEO Dave Morin wrote a blog post where he admits the company made a mistake and apologizes. Path also deleted all address book data from their servers and have released a new version of the app that allows users to opt-in to address book sharing if they wish.

The gadgets and services for Lifelogging and practitioners of the Quantified Self continues to grow and evolve at a very fast pace. I made a trip to CES this year which was unique in that it provided a situation for my personal and work lives to collide. As manager of web production for the X PRIZE Foundation I was attending CES to help work our booth in support of our launch announcement for the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE. On a personal level I also was very curious about all the new health and fitness gadgets and services that would  be announced.

Below is a video of Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs speaking at the CES keynote. If you forward to minute 58 you will see him bring Dr. Eric Topol onto the stage who then demonstrates several new health monitoring gadgets that are already available or coming soon. You can also see X PRIZE CEO Peter Diamandis announce and provide details about the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE at the 1 hour, 8 minute mark.

This years’ CES showcased many new technologies that will appeal to both the Lifeloggers and increasingly the mainstream public as well. Unfortunately I didn’t get to walk the show floor very much but I have been monitoring all of the news coverage that has been coming out since the show. The competition for health and fitness tracking devices is really heating up. Early devices like the Fitbit and Bodymedia Fit saw some new players enter the market with the recent Jawbone Up as well as the Motorola MotoACTV device announced at CES. Then just 3 days ago right after the dust was settling at CES Nike announced the Fuelband which is similar to the Jawbone Up in that it is a device you wear on your wrist. In fact Digital Trends went ahead and wrote a post to compare the two similar devices. Then Mashable stated that “Nike also announced partnerships with Foursquare and Path.” I find this information very interesting since Path had hinted at offering the ability to integrate with the Jawbone Up in the future and now the Nike Fuelband announcement pretty much solidifies that, but also shows that they’re considering support for multiple devices. The integration of Lifestreaming and personal tracking devices is very exciting and Path will be a first mover in this area distinguishing their app from anything currently out there.

Even though I didn’t get to walk the show floor I was lucky to be working the Qualcomm booth next to Bodymedia’s Chris Knorr. I learned about updates to their service that will analyze the activity data to help provide recommendations and adjustments. They’re also releasing  disposable patches in addition to the armband. I asked Chris what health related devices or services he had seen that were impressive at CES. The first thing he mentioned was the Macaw App which is aimed as a prevention plan based health app available for both iOS and Android. It’s supposed to provide the ability to be paired and synced with multiple wireless health devices and then import all the data in one place to provide a health profile. I downloaded the app but don’t yet see the ability to add 3rd party devices and didn’t find any details on their website about device support. Perhaps it was just announced and coming in the near future. On the surface it sounded somewhat like the health aggregation service I wrote about last May which I’m sure we’ll start to see several startups attacking very soon.

The other device and service that Chris told me about was Striiv. This device and service puts an emphasis on gamificaton to motivate people towards staying fit. Striiv does this by providing a pedometer device that has a built in display that ties in your activity to generate resources which you can use in a simulation game called MyLand. The other nice aspect is that you can also donate your activity to help various causes via GlobalGiving. The LA Times review called it “Sim City meets Wii Fit” which seems like an appropriate comparison. If you visit the link you can see a video demo of the unit.

Yesterday I read Dean Takahashi’s post stating that “Quantifying our lives will be a top trend in 2012″. It’s a great  summary of some highlights of personal tracking devices at CES with his thoughts on the near future. I obviously couldn’t agree more with Dean and think these devices will continue to get better, cheaper, and continue to improve by analyzing the data to help improve our lives. This is going to be a great year for the health and fitness technology space and I’m really looking forward to it.

Today Facebook officially announced 60+ apps and web services that will now utilize their new open graph protocol to passively share information while you use them to your Timeline. Last year when Timeline was first launched to developers there were a few apps that were immediately available. This included Spotify and Rdio to share the music you were listening to in real-time to your newsfeed, Timeline, and Ticker.

Now a whole slew of ways to share have become available that cover travel, food, shopping, fashion, fitness, entertainment, causes and several others including some fairly unique ones shared over at AllThingsD. You can get a complete breakdown over at The Next Web. If you want to get in on the action and start your sharing right away just visit this page and start adding apps.

Look for a deluge of passive updates starting to appear on people’s timelines over the next few weeks. Even though Facebook has taken extra precautions with regards to privacy there will surely still be some snafu’s we’ll hear about. It’s unclear how the reception to this onslaught of information to an audience that is already fatigued will play out but hopefully as users we’ll see some value from the wealth of new data we will willingly share. I’m hoping that more tailored recommendations and other patterns will help surface more useful and interesting information. I know, wishful thinking but we’ll have to wait and see.

This year has been a tipping point for Lifestreaming. It has evolved quite a bit from the super geeky bailing wire and duct tape method of being a DIY project I started covering back in 2007. With advancements in technology, primarily through the proliferation of API’s, it has penetrated and mutated its way across the web. But the one place it landed to now become ubiquitous is with Facebook’s creation of the Timeline feature which has brought it to over 800 million people.

There have been many ways of providing a presentation layer for a Lifestream. Early on most methods didn’t provide access to the long tail for a person’s posts. I wanted to see a calendar (or timeline) view to make a Lifestream become more of a historical record of the past. Several services started to pop up using the Timeline method and thus this digital diary metaphor was born. I believe it’s the most compelling form of Lifestreaming for an individual to be driven to create one. Providing the feature using a simple interface in a dominant social network has now brought this to the masses. I like to think that the knowledge gained by the FriendFeed talent acquisition is what helped propel Facebook to do this…and here we are.

During the early days of Lifestreaming there were many debates regarding its value. Initially services tried to become the hub of Lifestreaming activity and it was a bit difficult to realize the ways that content discovery would eventually become the catalyst driving so many people to do it. But over time the proliferation of API’s would bring about more sophisticated ways to take lifestreaming data and provide both great function and beautiful design. We now have many apps that are built on the backs of the Lifestreaming data people share across multiple services. We have social reader apps that aggregate the links we share on social networks, sometimes with some logic to prioritize the viewing order, and beautiful visual ways to display them.

The passive (aka frictionless) method of sharing was made popular this year by having the stream of our music listening habits from Spotify populate our Facebook Timeline. We’ve actually been doing this since 2008 by scrobbling from last.fm but only now is it a big deal as it hits the mainstream. Passive sharing is just starting to scratch the surface of where it’s going. It will become much more prevalent and start automating many of the updates to our Lifestreams.

Most passive sharing actions will come from apps on our mobile phones (soon with NFC) connected to our Lifestream. Path was another new entrant in the Lifestreaming arena with their revamped app release this year. The new version took steps to add passive sharing by posting updates in the background to our timelines based on monitoring our geographical location on our phones. Theoretically they could also monitor the audio to passively share our TV or movie viewing using Intonow technology. We will also see passive sharing coming from the stats behind our workouts, sleeping patterns, weight, and many other health based stats to Lifestreams coming from the growing popularity of Lifelogging devices. These devices will see huge growth as monitoring this data will provide health benefits including added motivation by sharing information socially.

As we move into 2012 it will be interesting to see how the Facebook Timeline evolves with many more third party apps populating it with data. I think the jury is still out on whether the Timeline will be a success depending on the usage and adoption. However, I am bullish on more innovation with mobile apps like Path coming and a new breed of services being launched to aggregate the health data generated from all these new lifelogging devices. It should be quite an interesting year as the Lifestreaming concept continues to reshape itself in line with advancements in technology. As always, I’m looking forward to watching it and sharing my findings with you here.

There was a Wall Street Journal story on Saturday with David Gelernter who conceived the concept of Lifestreaming. It’s a great article and an interesting read where I came to learn several new things I never knew about him. More detail regarding the patent infringement lawsuits against Apple are covered which I touched upon in a recent video interview post about him. A new term he coins and goes into detail about is the notion of collections of Lifestreams in aggregate that he defines as a “Worldstream”.

From the article

Eventually business models based on streaming will dominate the Internet, he predicts. All the world’s data will be presented as a “worldstream,” some of it public, most of it proprietary, available only to authorized users. Web browsers will become stream browsers. Users will become comfortably accustomed to tracking and manipulating their digital objects as streams rather than as files in a file system. The stream will become a mirror of the unfolding story of their lives.

“I can visualize the worldstream,” says Mr. Gelernter, explaining its advantages. “I know what it looks like. I know what my chunk of it looks like. When I focus on my stuff, I get a stream that is a subset of the worldstream.

I too have often thought the business opportunities that could be built around the data generated by Lifestreaming. But we’re still in a phase of getting people to feel comfortable lifestreaming and developing methods to effectively tag and store the data. Facebook is trying to do this with the introduction of the timeline. They’re also trying to effectively catalog this detailed data with the development of the open graph. As lifestreaming and the resulting data becomes more ubiquitous, we should see these services start to come online. This could include vertical based lifestreams such as quantified self personal activity tracking (read paragraph 6 of this post)

In the article we also come to find out that David Gelernter and his son Daniel have created a new company. They’ve started to seek funding to create a product to bring Lifestreaming to the iPad.

From the article

The new venture, for which Mr. Gelernter is just beginning to seek funding, will focus on developing a lifestream product for the Apple iPad. “We like the pad,” he says. “A particular goal is to create a lifestream which aggregates the most popular social network streams, and includes email and stuff like that. It will generate revenues the way Twitter and Facebook do—by getting huge numbers of users, beginning at the place we know, Yale University undergraduates, who love glitzy new software. They tell their parents, who are big shots because their kids are students at Yale.” The new product will spread virally, forming a vast audience that can be sold to advertisers.

This is interesting. Entering the crowded world of lifestreaming apps and services will be very challenging at this stage of the game. I’m very curious to see what David Gelernter will bring to the table to distinguish this product from the rest of the pack.  I look forward to monitoring this and bringing you more news as I discover it.

The new release of the Path app for iOS and Android has created quite a positive buzz. Much of it has been centered around the very beautiful design and UI. But the app has also pivoted down a different path (I know, I should be arrested for this sentence). Path originated as a photo sharing app whose distinction was the limitation of only being able to add 50 friends to your network. The new version has now expanded from simply sharing photos by adding the ability to share location (along with who you are with), thoughts, music, and declaring when you go to sleep and wake up. They also optionally offer the ability to passively share (aka frictionless sharing) new cities you visit as updates to your stream by monitoring the gps in your phone. They’ve also increased the sharing limitation from 50 to 150 to be within Dunbar’s limitation. This post doesn’t cover the full functionality and I’ll provide a link below if you want to read the many reviews on it.

I didn’t use the first version of the app because I was happily using Instagram and the only distinction I saw between Path and Instagram is that I could invoke a “velvet rope” group of friends. I’m pretty comfortable sharing most of my content publicly so this only distinction wasn’t enough of an incentive for me. I’ve now given the new app a sophomore try and the new functionality deemed by them as a “smart journal“  is an interesting new direction. This has been compared to Facebook’s timeline and I’d say that it draws some inspiration from it. The problem is that Path has the challenge of overcoming the network effect for it to become a Lifestream you can share with your closest friends. You’ll have to become an evangelist for the app by giving friends a compelling reason to add yet another social network to their daily routine.

I believe to truly use the app in the spirit it was intended for with tight friends requires an effort to treat it as a journal with private content you don’t share elsewhere. Treating it like any other social network seems to defeat the purpose. I’ve tried to use that app with that in mind, posting unique and more intimate things I don’t share elsewhere. But using the service without having many close IRL friends has left me with an awkward friending dynamic by mainly adding my early adopter tech friends whose relationships straddle that ambiguous line of acquaintance to friend. This could lead to usage that Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb pointed out it as a timeline to worship the self.

But there’s another interesting aspect to Path. It has started to tread a little bit into the world of Lifelogging with the ability to track when we go to bed and wake up. The problem is that it requires you to do this manually as an action within the app. This is tied into the app functionality and far from ideal. I’ve seen many people use this feature inaccurately trying to explain their long bouts of sleeping. A few months ago I reviewed the Bodymedia armband which is one of many Quantified Self devices that are now appearing on the market.  Perhaps the next iteration of Path could be integrated to work with various of these devices to provide a hybrid platform for lifestreaming and tracking that activity.

Here’s a video Robert Scoble did with the Path team. It’s almost an hour long but I’ve set it to start where they do a demo of the app.

Around 9:15 of the demo Robert notices that co-founder Dave Morin has a Jawbone Up which is a new self tracking device similar to the Bodymedia, and Fitbit. Robert asks him about possible integration between the Jawbone Up and Path to which Dave answers “That’s something we’re very interested in”.   Dave talks about the trend around mobile collection of health data including workouts and sleep aimed to make us happier and healthier people. He goes on to say regarding the Jawbone Up “…we see that as a type of data we want to get into Path…it turns out to be a nice way to understand who we should be working with”. He feels that since Path is a private and trusted network that this type of data would be a good fit. Alexia Tsotsis over at TechCrunch also voiced her wish with Path integrating with her Jawbone Up.

These devices of health self awareness are still in the early stages but I believe on their way to hockey stick growth in the near future. With this there will be a slew of new web service opportunities to compliment them. I already see a need for a web service that could aggregate the data from people that own multiple devices. So if we used a Zeo to track sleep, Runkeeper to track workouts, Meal Snap to track our meals, and Withings to track our weight, we could view all of the data in a single place. This would essentially be a Mint.com for health and mark my words we’ll see this type of service coming in the near future. If Path pursues this type of integration at least across a few simple data points with multiple health device integration they could be a first mover in this area and clearly have a distinction between anything on the market right now. This could provide a compelling reason for people to use it.

Here’s my original post about Path on Google+ which also provides links to many of its reviews.

If you frequent this blog then you probably know that David Gelernter originated the Lifestreaming concept and dubbed its name. His original concept has come a long way from its inception in 1996 and a culmination is coming soon when Facebook will bring this concept to 800 Million+ users ushering it into the mainstream.

I just recently came across this interview of David on Big Think from March of last year. It covers questions about the future of technological innovation, print media’s future, and Lifestreaming. The question that was asked is “What is “lifestreaming,” and are modern social networking tools making it universal?”

His answer covered several areas. He begins by discussing the origins of Lifestreaming and then covers how he can no longer talk about its commercialization. He abruptly states how he can’t discuss some aspects due to patents. Apparently there are patents that David doesn’t own surrounding the concept that have resulted in a lawsuit against Apple. He’s heard that this patent dispute is the largest lawsuit in patent history. He describes how these patents revolve around the implementation and user interface design of Cover Flow, Spotlight, and Time Machine. I don’t know anything about these patent issues but it will be interesting to see if Facebook will soon become a target of them as well.

He goes on to state this

Without commenting on the legal aspects, which I’m not capable of doing, those are lifestreams and there are other companies that have done similar things. That makes me angry personally, not because of the money, but because of the deliberate failure to acknowledge work that we would have made freely available as academics and that companies will not acknowledge because there is so much money involved.

This really is a shame. David goes on to talk about how he’s excited about how the Lifestreaming concept has proliferated across personal sites and commercial services and specifically mentions FriendFeed, AOL, and Bebo. I was also humbled by the fact that I think this blog got a shout out in the interview which is great.

He closes the question by returning to the patent issue and states this

It’s not as if we want to stop that activity – shut it down, but we’d like to see credit where credit is due. Not just to me, or mainly to me, but to graduates who’ve actually built the software, worked tremendously hard, published the papers, put them in – you know, made them available, and we’d like to see credit awarded.

You can view a video of the interview on the Big Think site. Note: the Lifestreaming question comes in at 3:45 of the video. There’s also a full transcript of the interview available as well.

I followed this Poll on Mashable that asked if people planned to go back to fill in the gaps of their Facebook timeline. There were 3,101 votes at the time of this posting with ~11% stating they will and ~60% saying they won’t.  I find that 11% to be a pretty small number and surely not one that would make Facebook happy about the rollout. Sure it’s a relatively small sample size, and Mashable users may not equate to a mainstream Facebook user, but I think this number will be pretty close to reality. You can also argue that polling whether users will go back to update versus whether they will configure their timeline moving forward are two separate questions, I believe the answer will be about the same.

I stated in my previous post that:

I think the majority of users on Facebook will not like this transition as they mainly use the service to communicate and share information with their friends in a simple clean interface and timeline will now become an obstacle to that.

I also felt the timeline should have been a supplemental view instead of a profile replacement and if only 11% of users embrace it, then it will most likely fail miserably. It’s a distinct departure from both the current utility and UI of the service. I went through my timeline and there are huge gaps and the primary reason for that is that I don’t use Facebook as the hub of my Lifestream. Most of my content was posted on other services. Most of photos were posted on Flickr, my status updates on Twitter, my videos on YouTube…etc. Unless you’ve been using Facebook as the central repository for all of your social sharing, or plan to do so moving forward, then it doesn’t quite make sense to be your Lifestream’s home base.

This blog was created because I was researching tools that gave me the freedom to aggregate the content I created to create a Lifestream across various different services I wanted to use. I think many people enjoy that freedom and don’t want to be confined to the limitations of a single service and its limitations to do this. Facebook does appear to have built in the hooks to offer us the ability to cobble together a few custom apps that we will be able to place on our timelines (such as the spotify app) to provide a way for 3rd party services to power our Lifestream on Facebook. However I’ve also stated in the past that mainstream users won’t go down this path and Facebook could presumably become a Lifestream for them. With the rollout of timelines we shall soon see what mainstream users think of it and whether it will resonate with them.

If you had been watching me as I watched Mark Zuckerberg present the new Facebook Timeline you would have seen a smirk on my face. It was also interesting to see how many other people picked up on how Timeline was Facebook’s migration from Newsfeed to Lifestream. I’ve been writing about Lifestreaming here since 2007. As I first discovered the concept that started as a php hack to aggregate multiple RSS feeds to the launch of countless startups all taking very different approaches, I truly felt it would evolve into something big that would eventually make it’s way to the mainstream. Facebook will soon unleash Timeline which takes its cue from many of the Lifestreaming services that preceded it over the last few years.

The “timeline” approach to Lifestreaming, and there have been many different approaches, became pretty popular with several services over the last few years. Recently, Memolane has emerged as one of the more popular ones and very recently I reviewed Glossi which is very nice as well. I liked the timeline approaches but wanted a little more and wrote about wanting a calendar based UI for Lifestreaming in 2009. It’s pretty funny that my mockup for that post used FriendFeed as an example which eventually got bought by Facebook and made co-founder Brett Taylor their CTO, but I digress.

So what are my thoughts on Facebook’s Timeline? Well I think they’ve done a great job building it to visualize our posts and milestones over the years. It also seems that there will be apps that will allow us to segregate sections of it to focus on specific actions such as music, books and movies. I’m a fan of the segregated content approach and Flavors.me is my favorite site in this area. All of that said, I feel that they should have provided timeline as a supplemental view to our existing profiles and not a replacement. The simplicity and consistent experience of viewing the newsfeed when you visit a users profile will soon be gone. Status updates will now begin much further down on profiles pretty much “below the fold”. As we see more custom apps to publish content as boxes in the timeline, you will see a very diverse experience when travelling from profile to profile. I think the majority of users on Facebook will not like this transition as they mainly use the service to communicate and share information with their friends in a simple clean interface and timeline will now become an obstacle to that.

Two other announcements that will have huge implications are the Open Graph and Ticker initiatives. Open Graph will take “Liking” things to a whole new level with the introduction of additional actions that will now appear potentially both on your newsfeed as well as the newly introduced real-time Ticker. So you will be able to share new actions such as “read” a “book”, or “watched” a “movie”. I feel this is a great expansion on the limited nature and context of what “liking” something offered which I wrote about last year in my post on the evolution of likes as social gestures which hinted at the future we are about to see come to fruition.

An interesting aspect of this is that up until now you’ve explicitly shared information by clicking on the like, share, or recommend buttons on Facebook or other websites. Louis Gray wrote a post describing the value of user behavior in regards to explicitly sharing selective content on social networks.  His post questions whether the noise and minutiae of implicit sharing is of any value. As an example users may currently use a service like Getglue or Miso to selectively share tv shows or movies they watch. But in that example you choose what viewing you want to share. Now developers will be modifying or releasing new apps that can take your actions that are occurring natively within a service and automatically share them on Facebook.  So for example a modified Facebook app by Netflix they will add the ability to automatically post everything you watch on the service on Facebook.

I have some mixed feelings about how implicit gestures may get integrated into Facebook. I think it depends on several factors including:

• Can people get value from it?
• Can they control it?
• Can the resulting content be hidden easily?

Let me answer these points…

I’m fine with automatically sharing all the music I listen to in real-time because I’ve been doing this already for years scrobbling to Last.fm. For my following example implicit sharing means giving an app or service authorization to continually post an open graph verb / noun combination passively in the background for you while you’re using it. In the case of a music service this becomes “listened” to “song”. The value I’ve gotten from this implicit action is being able to discover new music from my friends that have also been doing it. Facebook is taking scrobbling to a whole new level by aggregating users real-time listening across multiple streaming music services including Spotify, Rdio, Mog, and others directly to the Facebook ticker. The Facebook ticker has been added to the chat sidebar and can easily be hidden away. So in this scenario I think implicit sharing and the method Facebook has implemented it is a good thing on the service.

I do however think that Facebook will run into problems with how developers implement implicit sharing on Facebook using the open graph. My example above is one that I think many people will enjoy and has very few implications from a privacy standpoint other than exposing your crappy music taste to friends. There will be other instances where this will not be the case. My guess is that the process for authorization of apps that leverage the open graph will be in the form of an additional item on the standard Facebook permissions dialog box which people will glance over in the same way they currently check TOS boxes without reading them.  Most people won’t realize that they’ve authorized the implicit sharing to the ticker from apps they grant permission to and we will no doubt hear some horror stories from this in the future.

Chris Saad wrote an analysis of Timeline, Ticker and Open Graph. It generated an interesting conversation over on Google+ that I participated in. His post poses several interesting questions including whether other services will implement similar strategies, whether independent websites will also try to gather their users data in the same ways Facebook now will. He also mentions that Facebook has essentially re-launched the much lauded Beacon product with the release of these features. While Beacon was squarely aimed at creating and leveraging user data for targeted ads, these new features weren’t described to resurrect that…yet. I did however go read up on Beacon a bit to refresh my memory and found this interesting blog post from Zuckerberg apologizing for the Beacon missteps and in it he stated “People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, [and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don't want to use it.]” I have a feeling that with the open graph’s method of implementation Mark will be challenged on this point once again.

Quite a bit has happened in the world of social magazine apps and services since my roundup earlier in March. We have seen many of the existing players evolve and several new ones enter the game all whilst the market continues to grow rapidly. Flipboard, came out of the gate last year with not only one of the most beautiful content visualizations but also the ability to import social content. They were the first to strike a nerve along these lines and have never looked back. Flipboard is a great app and one of my favorites. It also continues to have the largest mindshare in this area even though there are several facets to what can characterize a social magazine app.

A social magazine app is defined by providing the ability to connect and import content shared from your social networks. After that initial connection, there are three different approaches. Some focus on creating a rich visual experience from the content they import, others provide logic to filter the top news based on what’s shared by your social graph, yet others focus on learning your interests to serve up the most relevant news. Some will try to do a combination of two of these, with varying filters and functionality, but just like the project triangle they can only choose two.

There has been a slew of apps that have launched to try and strike a similar magic to Flipboard. News.me got a lot of attention earlier in the year as a contender coming from the team that brought us bit.ly but probably didn’t get much traction due to trying a subscription model unlike any other app I’ve seen in this space. They recently decided to drop that monetization logic and branch out as a separate entity. I’ve been playing with this app recently and compared to Flipboard, they’ve filtered the content delivery mechanism somewhat. Flipboard simply displays all content unfiltered in reverse chronological order shared from my connected accounts at the time I refresh the app. News.me on the other hand appears to apply a filter that only displays links to web pages from select people I follow still being done in reverse chronological order from when I refresh the app. So if you’re interested in reading shared pages from those you follow while hiding status updates, photos, and other non-related content, News.me will help you past that noise.

While News.me does filter the noise, I still don’t know how it’s determining what content to show me and it’s still a limited approach by only covering items from the last few hours. To get a full digest of the most popular news shared by your social graph over the course of a full day you need to look at other apps such as Tweeted Times or Summify. I’m a big fan of these as they prioritize the news based on the number of people that shared it and they show me who those people were. In the case of Tweeted Times I can even create separate digests based on my Twitter lists which is good if you want your news in separate categories. While Summify doesn’t offer list creation, they go beyond Tweeted Times by including data from Google and Facebook in addition to Twitter. I originally felt this these would lead the pack for apps that I’d be most interested in but I can honestly say that Zite has really surprised me by offering up great content I wouldn’t have normally found in these apps.

Another feature I really like is segregating by media type. This means to take all the shared content from my social graph across multiple networks and put photos and videos into their own sections. Newsmix, Paper.li and Knowabout.it provide this feature. Newsmix is the only one of the three that has an iPad app though. Since I last covered Newsmix they’ve also added a website and yesterday announced a Facebook app to access the service. They are the first to offer this triple play. Something to note is there’s been a new market created for several apps that now only focus on video including Squrl, Showyou and Deja.

I initially learned of an interesting newcomer that originally launched as Postpost importing only your Facebook content but then was bought by Postano and quickly pivoted to be much more by aggregating across multiple sources including Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger and RSS feeds and also positioned itself as a way for brands to embed their social activity on their own sites. They still offer functionality for regular users and you can see my page here. You’ll notice that they also offer the ability to segregate content by media type as well. You can learn more about their service here and a demo video here.

If you thought the social magazine app scene was pretty heated up already, it’s about to get invaded by Google with an upcoming entrant called Propeller. It should be interesting to see what they have to offer to a pretty tough market to penetrate. It will be interesting to see what services they support and I suspect part of the motivation for this is to provide a way for people to consume Google+ content which currently isn’t available for any other apps due to the lack of an API being available. Even though I did come up with a hack to read Google+ content on Flipboard.

As a final thought you can see things are a bit complicated and still evolving in the social magazine space and I believe will continue to be for quite some time. I’m just glad to see that this area is really taking off. Below I’ve embedded an updated version of my original comparison matrix (direct link). If you know of any apps or services that fall into the social magazine space that I don’t have listed, let me know in the comments.

I’ve been on the hunt to find a web enabled media streaming box to add to my home theater. After much research I narrowed down my decision to 2 devices I feel that are the best out there. Those devices are the Roku 2 XS, the Boxee Box. The Roku and Boxee have a set of common features between them so I wanted to thoroughly test both to determine which was the one I’d like to keep. The Roku is a cheaper and simpler device to setup and use, so in my comparison I decided to focus on the  distinct features that the Boxee box offered to see if it was a better choice for me. Below I’ve identified the unique features Boxee offers.

1. You can stream your own videos, music, and photos on it I feel that this feature is a must for any home theater today. We have all now amassed personal collections of photos, music, and home videos. Some of you may have setup other boxes you already have such as an Xbox 360 or PS3 for streaming these files. I was streaming using my PS3 and the PS3 Media Server. But as you may have found, this method isn’t ideal. The Boxee was built for sharing your own media from its inception. They also offer you several different ways to get the content from external sources to it. I’m using the built in SMB sharing to access the files from my NAS. It’s nice not having to have a program running on a computer that needs to be on to share content. So while there isn’t a native way to do this on the Roku, if you’re willing to hack a bit there are several third party apps (private channels) to do this. Probably one of the best options is Plex which is also based on the same XBMC software that powers the Boxee.

2. The remote has a keyboard I feel this is a very important feature that shouldn’t be underestimated when considering a streaming box. I have experienced the frustration of the single letter hunt and peck process of virtual keyboards on enough systems to know that I don’t want to continue wasting time using that process in the future. You will need to type words more often than you think on these boxes. Whether you are logging into a service, or trying to type in search words for a movie you want to find on Netflix, or if you need to type in the url of a website into the browser. You will need a keyboard to do this without losing your hair. And speaking of browsers…

3. It has a web browser So you have a box connected to the internet. Might as well offer the ability to browse the web too right? Well with a Boxee Box you can do this and with the keyboard on the remote you can rest assured that it won’t be an awful experience like it is on other devices without one.

4. You can bookmark videos on the web to watch on it Boxee offers a bookmarklet for your browser that provides a feature called “watch later” which allows you to be on any web page and when you click on the bookmarklet it will add any videos on the page to a view later area of the Boxee box to watch next time you fire it up on your couch. These videos can also be accessed via the iPad app. Wait what? They have an iPad app?

5. They offer a full featured iPad app add-on for free There’s an iPad app that provides access to some of Boxee’s features. This includes the “watch later” videos you bookmark functionality I mentioned above as well as accessing your personal movies, photos, and music. Another feature offered here (and also on the Box) is the ability to see all the videos shared by your friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. You can also start watching something on the iPad and easily resume where you left off on the Boxee Box or vice versa.

6. You can send video to your Boxee Box from an iOS device using AirPlay This is an experimental feature and I’ve had some mixed results but it’s pretty cool. I’ve successfully sent videos from apps that support AirPlay to the Boxee box and this is a great feature that I hope improves over time. I also am not sure if they’ll support the mirroring function that came with iOS to send content to a TV but that would be great too.

7. You can watch live broadcast TV Boxee just announced their LiveTV $49 add-on which adds the ability to watch local broadcast stations (like ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC) for free. This feature will go a long way to attract cord-cutters whose primary concern for eliminating their cable subscriptions is the loss of being able to watch live news and sports programming.

There is one major feature on the Roku that the Boxee doesn’t have. The Roku 2 XS comes with a remote that includes a gyro built-in accelerometer for gaming. Included with Roku is the ever popular Angry Birds. It was lots of fun to kill the piggy’s on my big screen. Roku also aims to bring many more games to utilize this remote. So if this is appealing to you it may be something to sway you into the direction of a Roku.

So there you have it. A little deeper dive into the unique features of these devices. One thing to keep in mind when comparing them is that the Boxee does require a little more work to setup and access all of these features. The Roku is almost half the price so you need to determine whether these features offer enough value for you. Also, If your household has children or slightly less tech savvy users, the Roku may still be a better choice.

Over the last year I’ve started an on-going initiative to try and streamline and simplify my life more. There are many different facets to this which involve taking a look at both physical and mental inventories. I’m consciously analyzing all aspects of my real-world and online behaviors to see where I can improve, consolidate, or remove anything. Now that’s a pretty high level goal that covers many areas and could sound ambiguous so I’ll try to explain it in more detail.

One thing I began doing was trying to determine if I could sell, donate, or throw out many physical objects that I own. I started by focusing on the tornado of strewn things that lived on my bookshelves. I took a look at my books and donated a large number of them. I then started going through all the other non book objects that occupied them. I threw out some of the souvenir and other cute trinkets that lined some shelves. I read on one of the many resources that I frequent that helps with this behavior that we get attached to the memories of many objects and that one way to maintain those memories without clinging these items is to take a photo of them. That’s good advice. I moved on to many other areas throughout my office like cables and old pc gear I had in boxes and many other items and was able to clear out a good deal of wasted space. This is still a work in progress but things now look more organized and neater which I believe also help me reach a calming state without so much chaos strewn around me.

I don’t know about you folks but the file libraries that occupy my multiple hard drives across my network are also an area that can grow pretty unwieldy. I’m actually pretty good at this now but it took some time. I have a dedicated folder where all new content I download ends up. From there it gets distributed to various other directories that are provide organization methods. The same goes for all media (photos and videos) I create. They end up in a holding zone when transferred from my camera and then I go through this raw dump and delete what I don’t want and then distribute to proper directories setup by year and month. Then nightly my local media gets backed up to my NAS as well as an offline backup service I use.

Then there’s the active software and web services that we use. I always determining whether I need to use all the memory resident apps I use and keeping an eye on alternatives. I look to web services that can help me save time and optimize my life. Mint.com has become one such example of such a service. I tie all of my financial accounts to it which make end of year taxes and monitoring of cash flow and investments in a single location a breeze. I was also a very early adopter of online baking services. I remember the days of sitting down for a half hour to write checks to pay bills and put them in envelopes and mail them out. Now I pay bills in less than five minutes. I’m always looking for existing things that I can do which can be optimized. Time has a huge value in life for me and the more I can do to reduce the amount you waste, the happier I am.

So those are just some examples of methods I’ve employed to try and streamline things in my life.  Another area that I can often get lost in, and have had to work on, is the distraction of consuming online content. This takes many shapes from the firehose of daily generated social content and all the link journeys that I’m taken on, to all the great blog and editorial content generated as well. I’ve recently seen posts that discuss the distractions described above.

• Finding Focus by Chris Brogan
• Apparently it’s called Social Network Fatigue by Luca Massaro (with wisdom from Brian Solis)
• The above story is also based on the Attention Crash concept coined by Steve Rubel that has been around for a few years now.
• I also recommend taking a look at the book Focus: a simplicity manifesto in the age of distaction

I recently read this article in the New York Times about a “Haunting Old Photographic process. It was a story about a current photographer who researched a photographic process called wet plate collodion. This photo process apparently was made famous during the Civil War by battlefield photographers. The San Francisco photographer wanted to learn this process so he could apply it for photos he was taking of current veterans that have returned home after serving in the Middle East.

The article showed a few photos of the process and described how it has gained a resurgence over the last year. I found this pretty interesting so I decided to dig a little deeper to learn more. I was able to find this video that shows each step of the detailed process to take these photographs.

This looked very interesting to me and so I decided to keep looking a bit to see if I could find any ways to simulate this digitally in photoshop. I was able to find this link to the Photoshop fine art effects cookbook that provides a tutorial on how to manually create this effect in Photoshop. So that’s a great tutorial for creating the effect using a manual process within core Photoshop but dug a little deeper.

I then came across some pre-built actions for Photoshop by Totally Rad that creates a very similar effect which you can see here. These looked pretty interesting but then I also discovered Alien Skin’s Exposure 3. So I downloaded the free trial to test it out. It’s very simple to get an initial effect using their “B&W – Vintage” filters which offer several varying Calotype presets with the ability to tweak the settings using color, focus, tone, grain, IR, and age. So I played around a bit and was able to get some pretty nice effects as you can see. I didn’t choose the most applicable photo, but you’ll get the point.

As you can see the Alien Skin filters do a pretty nice job. In an age of Instagram I have become fascinated with filters and the various methods to modify photographs to try and get an artistic look from them. I’ve stated before that HDR is the auto-tune of the photography world. I’m sure the purists are notably pissed by all these new wannabe photographers that are sprouting online nowadays but photo manipulation is fun and I only see it getting bigger.

I can tell summer is over, not from the weather or the calendar but when my commute returns to the progressively worse effed up state it was in prior to summer. That’s not to say that summer offers much of a break from it, but even a 10% improvement is noticeable.

I live in Los Angeles and my commute includes what has been ranked as the #1 worst freeway bottleneck in the whole nation. It’s amazing to me as a geek to watch the advancements in technology from my Atari 2600, as a kid to my first brush with a computer the Radio Shack TRS-80, to how online has changed from the single line BSS’s when I was a kid to where we are today.

How is it though that ground transportation hasn’t really gone anywhere in that same timeframe? It’s amazing how much of our lives are consumed moving from point A to point B nowadays at a speed that is even slower than it was 10 or 20 years ago. We’re actually going backwards.

The only saving grace to help with this antiquated non-innovative transportation issue are the technology innovations like, GPS, realtime traffic, and mobile phones which provide some comfort by letting us listen to podcasts or frikkin audio streams beamed over the air.

Being a geek I’m amazingly happy to have grown up during the emergence of computers and the web but I find this lack of innovation in transportation logistics or technology amazing and don’t see how it’s going to improve anytime soon. I think what this all boils down to is that I’m pissed that Back to the Future was a lie. There’s no way in hell we’re going to have hover cars in 2015.

A few weeks ago I was honored to be a guest on a podcast that I’ve been a listener of called Tummelvision. The podcast has 3 great hosts which include Kevin Marks, Deborah Schultz, and Heather Gold. Here’s the topic of the show in their words:

Tummelvision is a weekly salon-style podcast about the art and science of engaging and collaborating in a networked age. Each week we explore how to connect and create a world that puts people at the centre of business, technology and culture with the smart folks creating this new world.

Each week they invite a guest from varied areas to discuss how they “tummel” and share other interesting information about their roles for work, personal projects or other areas. They have varied guests from different fields which make for an eclectic show that both stays fresh and offers interesting topics to learn about. The hosts always make for a very engaging discussion around the topics that surround the guests that often go on welcomed tangents that branch off to other areas surrounding their discussion. It’s definitely a source of delicious brain food that is fed in different tasty chunks each week. I highly recommend it.

When I joined them we covered quite a few varied topics during the first half of the show including higher education, name spaces, and influence. The second part of the show I peel back the curtain to offer some insight to what we do at the X PRIZE foundation. You can visit their website and listen to my show here and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

After today’s announcement that Angry Birds was released in the Chrome app store I just knew I had to try running it on my new Sharp 70″ LCD TV (model LC-70LE732u). I recorded a video to show this. Unfortunately even the HD version of Angry Birds doesn’t go full screen to take advantage of the full 1920×1080 resolution of the TV. I think I may also now hold the distinction of being the first person to run this on such a large LCD TV.

The Sharp is a great TV that costed less than every 65″ LCD that was on the market when I purchased it and is fully LED backlit as opposed to most that are only LED edge lit. I’m really happy with it and highly recommend you research it if you’re in the market for a large LCD TV. Here’s a great thread on the very popular AVS Forum if you want to learn more about it.

My first smart phone was an iPhone 3G. While on AT&T I was loaned a Nexus One (Google’s Android phone) and tested it out to get my first chance to compare Android to iOS. As I wrote about this previously, I felt that Android still has some catching up to do before it provides the same seamless experience. I finally decided to upgrade to a new phone when moving to Verizon’s network earlier this year. I struggled on whether to get an iPhone 4 or wait for the upcoming crop of Android phones on Verizon’s LTE network. Well I couldn’t wait so ended up getting the iPhone 4.

This week I was given the opportunity to test out the new Samsung Droid Charge [Disclosure: I'm being given one to keep] which is their first entry on Verizon’s LTE (4g) network. I was very excited to read this favorable review over at Slashgear on the day I was to pick it up. When I finally got one in my hands the first impression that smacks you on the head is the beautiful 4.3″ Super AMOLED Plus display which is the same one they use on their new Galaxy S II. I know that this is either a plus or minus depending on personal needs, but this is my biggest complaint with the iPhone. How could Apple double the resolution of the iPhone’s display and not increase the screen size? It’s not just about having some more real estate, but I have some big hands and I can type much more comfortable on the Samsung. The image produced by the display is stunning and viewing photos and videos are gorgeous on it.

The next biggest feature difference on the Samsung vs. my iPhone is LTE. In the short time I’ve been able to test it thus far I can tell you that the speed is nothing short of awesome. It reminds me of the first time I upgraded from DSL to Cable. The speed at which apps that connect to the network and the browser operates is addictingly fast. Not only do you get that speed out of the phone, but you can also create a mobile hotspot to share that fat pipe or even tether to your computer to tap it. I get impatient now and it feels so slow when I revert back to the iPhone. The iPhone 5 better offer 4G on either AT&T or Verizon because it will be a huge handicap and seem antiquated out of the box without it.

I feel that the Samsung Droid Charge’s screen size and speed on Verizon’s LTE network are the 2 major standout features when comparing this to my iPhone without even getting into any of the Android vs. iOS differences. I feel these 2 issues require serious merit in general if considering a new phone on Verizon or anyone else’s network for that matter. Beyond those two clear distinctions I’m also re-evaluating Android from my last experience with the Nexus one. Unfortunately the phone is running Android 2.2 Froyo and not the newer 2.3 Gingerbread. I do like the Samsung TouchWiz UI which doesn’t get in the way and works better than the app scrolling on the Nexus. The built-in cameras (both front and rear facing) seem pretty good although I haven’t A/B’d them to the iPhone. I also like all the built in photo effects available natively in the OS, especially the panorama mode (see below). Another huge plus is the native android ability to share photos from the camera app or gallery to other apps like Twitter, Facebook, Picplz, Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others. I wish that iOS had this feature. The other feature I need to investigate more is AllShare which on the surface seems like Android’s answer to iOS’s Airplay.

One of the biggest concerns having both the 4.3″ display and using the LTE network is battery life. Since I’ve only had the phone for 2 days I don’t have enough experience to comment much on this except that I haven’t noticed it to be terrible. Day one I ran out at the end of the day and on day two I still had 26% left at midnight but in both cases my usage was moderate and didn’t involve heavy usage of the mobile hotspot which I’ve read is a battery killer.

Here’s more info on battery life from the Slashgear review:

Having seen the HTC ThunderBolt chew through a full charge in short order, we were more than a little nervous about the DROID Charge’s appetite. Happily it seems Samsung has managed to balance performance and power – impressive given the size and brightness of the Super AMOLED Plus display – with us managing 6-8 hours of heavy use before it died. With more casual use, and some tweaking of things like social network updates and other power settings, you could comfortably get through a day. Still, using the Mobile Hotspot app for any length of time chews through the battery in relatively short order.

So I still have some more testing to do and need to see if some of the Android issues that have bothered me in the past have been improved or overcome but overall I’ve been very happy with this phone. My goal will be to see if I can upgrade my Verizon plan to add LTE and Hotpotting so that it can support my usage of both the iPhone and Samsung Droid Charge simultaneously on one plan. That way I can switch between both phones as my daily usage dictates. We’ll see if that’s possible.

Today I saw a post at ReadWriteWeb about a Wiki started by Songkick’s Ian Hogarth so that startups could collectively share tools and resources used to run their companies. Here’s the link to the Wiki which is a good resource, but I once had a vision of something grander along these lines. I have actually given this quite a bit of thought in the past and even had a startup idea to actually create a website where companies could create profiles to share knowledge of web tools, services, methodologies and more, to collectively help one another. How meta right? When thinking this through further I had concerns about whether companies would actually be willing to interact and participate in sharing this knowledge.

From the Read Write Web Post (re: the Wiki)

That advice and openness makes this a valuable resource for startups, so they can focus on building their product and not get sidetracked on questions like “Does anyone recommend a CRM?” As Hogarth argues, “I’m a big believer of trying to focus on your core competency (in our case tour dates) and then partnering with the best class companies elsewhere.”

Primarily regarding web tools and services, it can be a pretty painstaking process to research and find the right one. In my work for X PRIZE Foundation I have to not only find great tools and services, but also have to consider many free, open source, or low cost tools. We are a non-profit so I do my best to try and limit the budget we allocate to these so I can put it to better uses. Recently I joined a really interesting service called BagCheck which is a community to share and discover interesting and detailed lists of items around a given topic. In testing out the site I create a “Bag” called Great Web Services to Help Run Your Business. In it I provide a list of many of the tools and services I use at X PRIZE. So basically my vision would be to have a site dedicated to this specific niche where companies, startups, nonprofits and even freelancers could collectively share their knowledge so that we could make tool and service discovery a much easier process. Perhaps I should rekindle this startup idea…if only I had the time.

Here we are on the eve of SXSW and I’ve seen several posts and comments across the social web from people with negative commentary on the conference. Strangely enough quite a bit of it coming from people that are still going despite the mudslinging. Really if it’s such a bad atmosphere then why even go? Many of these people make excuses stating they _have_ to be there despite their reluctance.

It seems that last year sparked a “jump the shark” moment for the conference for many people. The conference has grown and in much the same way an indie band with a following gets dumped by many of their original fans upon penetrating the mainstream, many SXSW OG Geeks are now acting the same way. Sure I understand that last year the parties were overcrowded tons of people and most regulars felt overrun by the mainstreamers, douchebags, and the like, but SXSW is just a victim of its own success.

This will be my 3rd year attending SXSW and I’m approaching it with just as much excitement as I have in previous years. Why? Because it provides me with the best opportunity to spend time with all the great people I’ve built relationships with online and discover new ones. My primary goal is to learn from these people, share knowledge, and have fun along the way. Also each year I’ve met many new great people that I’ve continued relationships with long after the show. Sure SXSW was much larger last year, but I adjusted. I didn’t go to as many parties and spend as much time at them either. The larger parties are usually so loud that you can’t really hold good conversations anyways which is my main goal.

Each year SXSW becomes a proving ground for a startup to emerge as a one week beta test to emerge with a concept that is met with the crowd’s love and approval. The fact is this years’ conference anticipated attendance is much bigger than last year and will prove challenging. So how are the old timers responding? Well it appears that group texting has gained the buzz mindshare as being the breakout mobile app category this year. Why? Because as a preemptive strike people are creating small groups in these apps so that they can quickly communicate to organize meetups to avoid, or as a backup plan to overcrowded parties. I’m sure they’ll also be a good way to have an elite back-channel to the conference as well.

Anyways, I’m looking forward to going and hope that spend time with as many great people as possible while I’m there. You can stalk me so that we can spend time together using one of the links below:

• My Plancast (Event bookmarks. Some of the possible places I might be)
• My Sched.org (Panels I like. Still working on this)
• My Twitter
• My Foursquare (Best realtime way to know where I’m at)

You can also read my post which details my experience at SXSW 2009 as a newbie here.
Some of the photos below are of great people I’ve met at SXSW

Last week my friend and co-worker David Locke who is a foodie and connoisseur introduced me to an old school cocktail called the “Old Fashioned”. I quickly fell in love with this simple and tasty drink. Tonight I went out to get the ingredients to make myself one and while not quite as tasty as the one I had for the first time over at Beechwood, it still didn’t disappoint. In doing some research there are several tiny variations on how to make it. You can get some history on the drink over at Wikipedia.