web: "where do they find the time?" exposed

This blogger gets the same response that I do when I tell people about Wikipedia editors, users supporting users, collaborative development, etc.:

Where do they [i.e. those losers] find the time?

First he figures out how much time we're talking about:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

Wow, that's a lot of time devoted by people whom the clueless majority accuse of needing to "get a life". But the key insight is that is dwarfed by TV viewing:

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus

How come TV watchers get a free pass? Then he goes on to talk about if only 1% of the time we waste on mass media (whose attitude is just "How much can you consume?") goes to participatory culture, the change will be dramatic. Do the math, it's 20 Wikipedia-sized projects, every year. So expect more great things!

software: e-mail enhancements

I use Thunderbird for e-mail, a mere 700MB of e-mail from Eudora, Netscape, Mac Mail, and corporate Exchange. I took a survey. Here are my suggestions in more detail. They're keyed around several hassles:

• the hassle of subscribing to mailing lists and getting duplicates of messages, and messages that are on web archives
• the hassle of threaded discussions and all those chunks of >>> quoted message
• the hassle of attachments, that again exist on the web

integrate Find Duplicate message functionality

There's extension that finds duplicates, but I want e-mail to detect them as they come in. If I get the same message several times (e.g. a personal reply and the message from mailing list), show me threaded with the one I prefer first, with an option for the rest to be flagged as less desirable. For example, if someone sends an e-mail to me and cc's to some mail lists I subscribe, I prefer keeping the original and deleting the ones that have the Yahoo Groups ad or Sourceforge.net promo line.

in threaded mode, detect and collapse previous quotations

The inconsiderate bozos who quote the entire message only to add "I agree" or "Thanks" need to be schooled (and bozos, don't top-post!). Meanwhile the mail program can help. It could inline the followup comments. Or, for each followup message, add thin colored bars corresponding to quoted sections, and you can click on the colored bar to pop up the comment, or display it inlined with the current message. And, if I go on to read a follow-up, the e-mail could collapse the original bits of text in the follow-up, sort of what Google Groups does

calendaring/address book/things smarts (e.g. turn e-mail into invitation)

This would detect "lunch tomorrow with Bob at Monk's and create a calendar appointment linking to Bob in Address Book, "Monk's coffee shop" as a Place (and its Web page), and back to the original e-mail. BUT, these linkages would also work in the current message. If I just have the text "Anna says we can install Minefield" in a folder called Beta, if I right-click on Anna or Minefield, the context menu can have a Related... submenu that should find the Anna Jones in recipients in the current folder, and find Minefield in subjects in the current folder.

Pensoft's Perspective PIM for PenPoint could do this, it was addictive and it felt that the software learned about your life.

Better control over attachment handling

It's still a hassle. Often Thunderbird's HTML window or View Source window could do an acceptable job of showing the attachment (like a .eml or patch file), but I have to save and open from the O.S. and then clean up. I want options for thumbnail preview in attachment pane, quick view in new window, a submenu for Open with > Paint / Firefox / jpegcrop / Thunderbird's own HTML viewer / Thunderbird as plain text.

use the Operating Systems's file system attributes to associate files with the attachment

Thunderbird's "Detach attachment" option is nice, but the file in the file system has no idea where it came from and doesn't get the same tags that the mail message had.

option to replace a local messages with a link to the same message in an HTML archive

I subscribe to mailing lists, but they're also available in mail archives. I should be able to tell my e-mail program about the connection, then allow me to follow/copy the archive URL, and to replace my local message with a link (but still keep track of my tagging, my read status, my reply status, etc.). When I reply or forward, I should be easily able to replace the quoted text with "John Doe wrote in http://mailarchive.net/list/x/msg1043.html". And I should be able to bookmark the link to the archive and share/push it to Firefox.

option to replace an attachment with a link to the file on the Web

People keep sending me huge attachments of files that are commonly available on the Web, even though YouTube, Flickr, and Google Docs make it unnecessary. So my e-mail program should proactively go out and find the same file on the Web and, much like mailing list archives above, I should be able to associate the attachment with the URL, or replace it with the URL.
The point is, my e-mail archives should be an added-value local repository that needs tight associations with the same information that's on the Web, and should propagate these associations to the file system.

web: instantly learn about anything

Whenever I see an acroynym or name new to me, I just go directly to its page on Wikipedia, which for abbreviations is usually a great disambiguation page. Only if that fails do I Google for term slang.

In Firefox, you can assign a keyword to this that makes it even faster.

1. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s (shows an error page)
2. Bookmark this
3. Right-click on the bookmark, choose properties and give it the keyword 'w' and the name "Go to Wikipedia page".
   

Thereafter, just press [Ctrl-L]w term[Enter] to learn about anything! ZOMG FTW! (If my brief explanation doesn't make sense, there's a good guide on Lifehacker.)

Firefox ships with several keyword bookmarks in the folder "Quick Searches", e.g. dict term. But this is not just for searches. For every site that you go to, then you type something in a box, then the site shows you the page you really wanted, you can make a keyword bookmark that eliminates the first page. It works for map addresses, zip code lookup, favorite section of a site, etc.

I want something similar on my phone's browser (if you have a recent phone, it can browse the web! You can and should read BBC news optimized for a phone at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low.html.) I want to permanently load a home page on my phone that has a drop-down list of all my bookmarks and a text field where I can laboriously type the term:

amazonGoogleGoogle MapsIMDBWikipedia 

Then I can jump to the Wikipedia page for "ganache" or the IMDB page for "Play it Again, Sam" and impress my friends without 5 minutes of navigating huge home pages on a tiny screen.

I think it's simple JavaScript, but I don't know of a phone that can do this. And there's no money in it, think of all the search ads and home pages I skip.

web: huge lameosity at Yahoo TV listings

I used to go to tv.yahoo.com/grid/ to see what's on TV. Yahoo "upgraded" to a new interface at tv.yahoo.com/listings and it can't even get the time right. I've told tv.yahoo my TV provider is "San Francisco-Oak-San Jose", so why the hell are they showing Eastern Standard Time? I've even told Yahoo my timezone on my Yahoo ID Card. Judging from the screaming and yelling on this Yahoo blog, they've had this bug for five weeks, which is beyond inexcusable (the tracker on Yahoo's suggestion board claims this is resolved?!)

Google, please take on Yahoo and punish them for this incompetence. tv.google.com is currently a 404; I'm trying various TV listing gadgets for my Google home page, without much luck.

Categories: web, Yahoo

web: it's one social network, not 1000 sites

I just joined MySpace to send my regards to Bill Frisell. I had to join Flickr to comment on a friend's picture. I had to join LinkedIn to say something nice about a co-worker. I had to join Evite to decline an invitation. I had to join LiveJournal to make a registered comment. I think I have a .Mac page, I can't remember if I'm on Google Pages. I have user pages on several Wiki sites. Every week I have to register an avatar on yet another bulletin board just to make a forum post.

All these sites are converging to the same set of features: picture uploads, a blog, commenting or replying to other posts, find like-minded people based on interests, and tagging. Even though they all seem different, you can tell they're the same thing because they all output RSS feeds.

Not only do they keep reinventing the wheel, they make me maintain a set of wheels in 100+ towns across the 'net. The only value is if I want to remain a different person in each town — the sex-crazed female elf, the abusive technogeek, the sober businessman, and only I know they're all me. But if I want to integrate my selves, it's a complete pain. Every time I write something elsewhere, I have to consider whether to repeat it here or link to it (which pushes my readers themselves into joining yetanothersite), or let it slide.

The Web itself is THE social network. You put something on it, I link to it. It's unnatural and unconvincing to restrict social networks within it to a particular site. It's entirely possible and straightforward for my link to indicate the type of relationship: she's my friend, this is a reply, this is a review, etc. and for us both to keep track of the link.

Unfortunately, there's an impetus to own a set of eyeballs, to get and keep users on MySpace or some arcane bulletin board so you can present lots of ads and eventually sell out for millions.

I hope the costs of identity management — dealing with fake users, abusers, lost passwords, etc. — will push sites to trust third party identity services. I should be able to hand "Joe's cellphone php BulletinBoard" my identity and authentication token and an e-mail contact, and not have to sign up for their site. They can trust that identity more than their own membership form because I paid real money to get it. (Wayyyy back in Netscape 3.0 Gold time, I paid $10 for a Verisign class 3 identity and public key, but I haven't used it in 8 years.)

Even with federated identity and single sign-on, that still leaves my thoughts spread out all over. Sites make me to come to them to post, but that's short-sighted. If I'm writing a feverish reply correcting someone's William Gibson bibliography, I'm not going to click on any ads. Instead, sites should pull in responses from all over the net, so readers spend more time on the site. I post on my site about them, they show that content on their site.

One other value to all these social sites is that they're free and in a features war. I pay to have my own place on the Web (skierpage.com), and although monkeybrains are fine people for Web hosting, this dump only has a storage locker and an electrical outlet. There is no picture upload, forum, Web 2.0 animated social tagging, etc. at skierpage.com. But for privacy, control, and copyright issues I don't want to lose my primitive house and join the condo association at Myspace. All software features should trend to $0 cost so eventually I'll have them here.

Categories: web