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This week I tripled my use of products that synchronize ‘files across my devices’ by signing up for SocialFolders and InSync on top of the one I’ve been using for a year now, Dropbox. This has lead to an interesting use for the three services but before I continue let me explain what each of them do…

SocialFolders allows you to essentially back-up your social media networks to your desktop.  Right now it’s largely for your photos.  For instance posting a photo on Instagram or Facebook immediately shows up on your desktop with no fuss.  This is only so useful, I’d actually like to see them go beyond photos to backing up my text content.

InSync allows users to do the same thing, but for Google Docs. When you sign up for InSync, it asks you to authenticate through Google Docs, then it allows you to keep all your collaborative documents on your desktop as physical documents that could be used on or offline. Brilliant!

If you aren’t aware, Dropbox has a different value proposition. Rather than focusing on cloud to deskop, it creates a harmonious loop: desktop to cloud to devices back to desktop. It’s pretty simple, back up all your stuff to the cloud and access it from anywhere. 

With these new services I’ve begun saving content from SocialFolders and InSync to folders within Dropbox.  Here’s what that looks like with SocialFolders…

So, in effect, I’m backing up my stuff from the cloud (my documents, my social media and my collaborative files) to dropbox which centralizes it all to the cloud and across my various devices! This means I’ve got access to all the content I’ve synced from each whenever I should need it.

I can forsee a time when this might get out of control (ex. What happens if I back up one Dropbox folder of all my stuff inside of another?) but for now it’s a pretty cool workflow, especially because I have three or four computers, my iPad and my iPhone to keep updated.

I’m really thrilled that my suggested talk, “Democratizing Access to Data Platforms” has been accepted into O’Reilly’s Strata conference in March.  It’ll mean giving TED a partial rain-check but those are what we call good problems.

Over the past few years I’ve had a few of my infographics spread around the web in interesting ways.  Some have gone viral on social media channels, others have been picked up by people for use in their slides, while others have been published or referenced by journalists. That has lead to a great deal of interest in the subject matter, but by far, the most common thread I’ve observed is from people who want to create visualizations of their own data.  

Usually they have little to no budget, but are so sick of looking at the hieroglyphics that only their PhDs can understand that they are willing to try something else.  Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely a need for the intricate designs that appeal to experts and academics, but sometimes relating that information to people outside of that domain of expertise is not as easy as it could be.

However, developing infographics is at the same time nuanced and slow, as it is complex and meticulous.  And there I’m only talking about static work - the path to learning R or Flex and creating heatmaps like the image below is even steeper! 

Over at my company metaLayer our dashboard product includes a visualization suite. Some of you may be wondering just what will be available in that suite.  Well, here are a some sneak peeks of the type of visualizations we’re working on. 

These are just different ways of visualizing the incredibly difficult contextualization features we’ve developed for our platform, but they’re necessary if our goal is to make such complicated information collection more consumable. 

Anyways, here is a sneak peak of some things I’m working on.  You’ll have to visit blog.metalayer.com for more details about how and when these will be integrated. (Hint: Soon.)

The stacked area graph is a common chart in many programs.  The concept is simple, the columns represent periods of time, while the colors represent one measure of value, and the area of the stacked shapes represents another.

One that harkens back to my days as an audio engineer (it looks like a sine wave visualization). Using the same concepts illustrated above, this densely packed visualization can allow you to look at a set of information, a subset of that information and comparate it to a completely disparate type of information (the line in the background). It’s best when used with excessive datasets to spot trends over time.

There are quite a few more that we’re working on, and you’ll find news about their release here.

I’ve been a huge fan of Digg since at least 2006.  I was never really swayed one way or another by the ‘revolts’ that rocked the site. I just used it find good stuff to read and that was enough for me.

What I liked about Digg was that it wasn’t Reddit.  Don’t read into that too much, Reddit is awesome, I just use it in a different way.  It’s so full of inside jokes and community self-references that I go there more to socialize than to consume.  Whereas Digg, even at its peak was accesible to anyone, whether they were cool enough to be a part of the inner circle or not. 

A number of things have changed at Digg over the last few years and I find myself using the site less and less.  Today I decided to figure out why.  For me, it was far too easy to explain it away as a result of better places for discovering content coming around. There have always been better places for discovering content, this used to be among the best. So what changed?

1. Digg was my prism for the web.

Twitter is a wonderful serendipitous maze for discovering things you didn’t know you were looking for during the process of finding the things you were. For me, the point of Twitter is to consume more than I need so that when I do need something specific I have more places to find it.  

Facebook, assumes that I care what my ‘friends’ are interested in.  I don’t. My friends are my friends because of what we don’t share in common, not necessarily because of what we do.  Therefore, the ‘interest graph’ of people who are my friends is often completely and utterly irrelevant to me.  This is because algorithms have yet to get good at figuring out what interests me about each friend and when.

So where do I go when I don’t want a firehouse of random pieces of information, but I also don’t want to use my friends as curators?  

Well, that place used to be Digg.  I could let strangers do all the work of finding good stuff to read.  Not my friends, strangers.  This is because I want to know what people who aren’t necessarily like me think.

2. Too Much Choice

Digg used to be simple.  “Here is the most popular stuff from around the web today.” That’s it.  Simple value proposition, thus what I expected of the site was obvious. More or less they’ve kept that experience. That is, until you actually start navigating the site.  

What is this thing and why do I need it? What is it telling me? It looks cool and I’m sure it’s useful but this gives me more options when I actually want less. I clearly haven’t even taken the time to figure it out, because I don’t want to spend any more time doing anything but reading content.  I’m just here as a news consumer.

3. Following Individuals Doesn’t Add Value For Me

I mentioned I like letting strangers curate what’s popular from around the web for me. Strangers with an ‘s’, as in collectively. This is because it made for an interesting ‘picture’ of the web as assembled by many.  

If I wanted to follow the particular interests of individuals I’d be happy just going to back to Twitter or Facebook.  At least there I also get bits of their personality.  Here it’s just random links. I prefer my web refracted by a prism, not the laser focus gaze of a single person.  What about following my friends?  Not my thing, See #1.

4. What is the difference between a Newsroom and Newswire?

Both have categories. Both have other filters. Both exist on a site that I thought was already my filter.  These features seem to add more complexity where what I really want speed and simplicity.

Newsroom…

Newswire…

5. Too many ‘Tops’

Top News in All Topics used to be an authoritative list on what was the ‘best of Digg’ and therefor, one communities take on what was the best of the web.

Now, because there are soo many Top choices on other parts of the site, I don’t have a clue what is the more valuable list to pay attention to.  

This is perhaps because some users are looking for nuanced mechanisms for discovery out of Digg, and Digg has obliged. But I’m just looking for simple discovery.  This is because the site has always leaned more towards that sort of offering and so that’s where the utility lies for me. This is because I’m here to consume content, not engage with the middle man delivering that content.

I’m not slagging off Digg, these are just observations of my own behavior as it relates to the site.  I am a content junkie.  I dive deep into discovery with applications like Google Reader and the plethora of tools out there for mining Twitter.  Google+ and Facebook seem to think they can tell what I’ll find interesting algorithmically.  Fair enough, sometimes that’s useful too…but what I miss is my human prism of the web. 

Photo by Lowercased

Today I’m happy to announce I finally got around to releasing the MovableCite code on GitHub.  MovableCite began as offering a simple javascript plugin for writers, bloggers, and journalists who quote websites but want to make sure their citations stay up-to-date, even when the remote site changes, adds, or updates facts or fixes mispellings.

However, the bigger implication is to allow remote websites to correct themselves if they’ve accidentally been quoted citing facts that are inaccurate or that have been updated upon further investigation.  Think of it like an easy, unobtrusive, way to create read/write < blockquotes >.

My original blogpost from earlier this year frames the problem in more detail:

One of the ideas I’ve been mulling about recently is how to solve the problem of updates to articles after they’ve already been quoted and reposted by other websites or blogs. You find my entry to the MoJo Challenge here.

This problem affects the news industry in a big way as journalists, bloggers, and other media groups can end up inadvertently propagating outdated information.  So the idea with the MovableCite project is to create an easy, open way for one website to communicate to another, to check for updates to specific portions of text that may have been quoted.  

Here’s a list of some of the projects that offer page change notification as a service: changedetection.com, changedetect.com, femtoo.com, followthatpage.com, websnitcher.com,  watchthatpage.com, feed43.com, and one from Google.

However, as far as I know, this specific problem remains unsolved.  The existing solutions mentioned above require the user to monitor alerts or notifications that will make them aware of changes.  However that means a human has to monitor, understand and then make the required changes and humans don’t scale very well. None of these will make the changes for them, and using RSS or XML doesn’t work for people who are quoting specific portions of a text body.

MovableCite was developed with my friend Ahmed Maawy in Kenya and we’re looking forward to seeing how it evolves as an open source project.  If you are a journalist or blogger who is using Movable Cite, join us on our Google Group.

This is a plea to save Google Reader. First, you need to understand my use of the product because it’ll give you an indication of why I love it.

Note: As a few users have pointed out, Google Reader isn’t dying, it’s getting a makeover and being integrated into Plus.  Fair enough, but my Google Reader is going away (well, mine and Sarah Perez’). The point of this post is to encourage Google to preserve the existing, pre-integration, codebase…in some form.

I am an information hoarder. I set up custom feeds, custom searches, follow blogs I’ll never read, and follow my own bookmarks from all across the web. I’ve used Google Reader to do all this since 2006, maybe even as far back as ‘05 when it was released.

As far as I know, there’s no other product on the market that offers the following:

1. Speed 

No doubt the engineers at Google know their stuff.  They built this thing to respond insanely fast to user actions and also for retrieving content.  

Having used Feedly for all of a day, it’s an awesome product, but incredibly slow for my tastes. At least noticeably slow, which is too slow in web app years.  It’s not their fault, I’m sure they aren’t throwing the kind of hardware at this type of problem that Google does.

2. Infinite Archival 

Google Reader, for me, was like building my own archive of the web. Sure, only content that could be collected via an RSS or Atom feed was there, but indexing feeds from my favorite bookmarking services and then using their feeds was a quick way around this problem.  

There was seemingly no limit to what I could collect and store in Reader. Okay, I’m not sure if it’s actually infinite but Reader archived content for a LONG time.  A random search I conducted just now returned results from as far back as 2008.  

As a personal archival tool this was invaluable as I could now time-shift researching any given topic.  For instance, I could follow several blogs about a given topic, and sometime in the future (sometimes even years later) I could just enter a few keywords relevant to whatever I want to write about and retrieve recent as well as historic results.  I found this to be an invaluable information discovery methodology.

I believe the ability to ‘star’ content preserved would allowed users to preserve information even further back than this.

3. Narrow Search 

In the above scenario I was creating my own little personal index of my interests or anything that I was even remotely interested (per chance I’d be interested later). Google made this even more powerful by allowing me to search across ‘my web index’, my likes, my starred content, or my shared content. Again, a powerful way to streamline the retrieval of information. 

4. Sort by ‘Magic’ 

This little known feature of Google Reader was a way to ‘sift through the noise’ to find influential content from a feed, a folder (which could contain many feeds) or across your entire personal index. It has some sort of time decay built into the algorithm which meant that the freshest content always took priority despite the popularity of articles from, say, last week.  This was really useful to compare clusters of blogs to see which articles were popular in a given week.  When Google bought PostRank earlier this year, it was likely to augment this technology so that it could be used to improve GooglePlus.

5. Trends

Some people look at this and are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content left unread.  For me, this is a locker for all the content I’ve scraped from the web and stored for later.  Trends was a useful way to check out the size of this growing index and for checking out my own reading habits.

6. The Last Living Wordcloud

The notorious wordcloud has been called the ‘mullet’ of the internet.  Still, it makes me think of 2006, and as you may be able to tell from this post, I’m a sucker for nostalgia.

7. Scraping Twitter Information

Another cool function: the ability to aggregate, store and search vertical feeds from Twitter across multiple hashtags or user accounts.  Even after Twitter killed off RSS feeds (asking developers to use their API for tweet retrieval) this was still possible.

==

I realize Facebook is eating the internet at an incredible rate, but the answer is not more centralizing of our content consuming lives - at least not for me.  Also, Google Reader is a workhorse for journalists and news producers.  I know they called you a vampire to their industry, but they didn’t mean it. I take it back for them.

Google, if you’re listening, please consider the following:

1. Open source it. Much like you’ve done with the Jaiku and Wave code. If you aren’t going to keep reader around, don’t take it out to pasture just yet, open source it.  But when I say open source it, I mean open source it more like you did Etherpad versus the others.

2. Sell it. If Yahoo can sell Delicious, you can sell Google Reader.  Who’d buy it? I dunno, I’ll run a Kickstarter or something and give it a go. ;-)

3. Keep it around in Google Apps. I will pay you to keep my personal archive of ‘stuff’around, just give me an option to do so, and keep the API around.

==

If anyone out there knows of any alternatives that offer the above features (not just simply feed reading), I’d love to hear about them. NetNewsWire was the closest feedreader to come to this sort of utility but it all but bit the bullet in 2009. Also, it was a desktop app which was never convenient. Greplin is also pretty cool, but lacks on the reader aspects.  

…because they add a lot of value to my own personal life or work. 

1. Vizibility

So brilliant!  It allows you to manually curate your top ten search results on Google, then Vizibility buys an adwords campaign for whatever name or word you’ve created the list for. Now, their list will show up for anyone searching your name, company, or product.

I use it for my company metaLayer, but also as an individual it allows me to know who’s searching me, as well as where they live at a city level (reverse IP lookup).  After I give a presentation or go to a conference, it’s almost inevitable that the results of people searching from that location spike.

2. Buffer

If you have the tendency to overshare on Twitter, Buffer has an app for that.  By spreading out your bookmarked links or messages throughout the day or week, Buffer forces you to pace yourself.  It also helps to make it appear like you are tweeting away at work while you’re actually on vacation sipping mojitos on the beach in Cabo. 

3. Grammarly

SaaS grammatical checking and suggestions to improve your writing and sentence structuring.  It’s an awesome web service, but over-priced at $19 a month, in my opinion.  I paid for it for a while but found the cost disproportionate to the benefit. Still, I think the product is very much needed.

4. Flipboard

Your favorite Feedreader’s favorite Feedreader. Flipboard for the iPad just gets better and better. It’s also beginning to feel more organic to use. I wish they’d ship an iPhone solution already.

5. Simplenote/JustNotes

Why these two products are made by two different companies is beyond me.  They work seamlessly together. JustNotes is a desktop app for Mac that solves the problem of speed and simplicity for saving notes.  SimpleNote is a web app that allows users to store files, lists, ideas and notes to the cloud.

On my Mac I used to use the native TextEdit like a ninja. That’s usually the perfect solution until the day the program you’re using or your comuter crashes and all those ‘Untitled 1’ files mysteriously vanish into the ether.  

JustNote offers the speed and simplicity, while Simplenote stores it all in the cloud.

6. LittleSnapper

A desktop app for OSX that allows users to edit photos, capture screenshots, upload to the cloud and other things.  I used to use Cloud App but I like being able to edit and crop photos and screenshots before they are kicked over to the cloud.

7. Foodspotting

I never thought I’d be someone who took pictures of their food to upload them to the internet but as it turns out, I’m a total unabashed food geek.

8. Quora

A question and answer website where the quality of answers makes it more like Wikipedia than a YouTube comment thread (here’s looking at you Yahoo! Answers).

9. DropBox

Backup your important files to the cloud and across devices.

10. Spotify

It’s so easy and convenient it makes file sharing feel like a chore.  No download, no uploads, just start listening to music. Many competing apps have a catalog problem, but Spotify solves that problem by integrating with iTunes.