I’ve been on the road recently with very spotty wifi access and that’s when Twitter really breaks down. You’re left without context because most tweets aren’t self-standing but a link to a URL shortener giving no idea what’s going on. If you’re not knee deep in the “social”, Twitter seems like a mish-mash of ideas and links and bot posts. Then again, that what the web is: links to other places. However, how we use it and what we link to seems to have changed.

Yo dawg, I heard you like news aggregation so I put a news aggregator in your news aggregator so you can read social media while you read social media.

People are using services that make Twitter a duct-taped-together activity stream. I prefer to hear people’s ideas instead of being carpet bombed with bot notifications from the social media service du jour. But this isn’t exclusive to Twitter, Facebook took this further with web-wide likes and Facebook Connect. Your activity on the web is a feature on Facebook and they encourage you to dump everything there. Fortunately I can’t control what other people do, but a little bit of the Web dies every time someone publishes that stuff. That’s how I feel, but that’s the beauty of the Web: It’s a playground for experimentation. Too bad it feels like there’s not that much experimentation going on except on the business case side of the Web.

I rarely cross-post what I share/do on the various services. I don’t assume you’re stupid, if you want to know what links I find interesting, don’t expect them on my Twitter feed but on my Google Reader. If you want to know about my runs, I’m on Nike+. If you’re interested in what I read, or something else – well, there’s an app that isn’t Twitter for that. Sure, that’s more work for you if you want to know about everything I do but I don’t expect you to be. I don’t have to promote myself on the web – I have a nice day job and as a Finn I’m quite introverted anyway.

Also, if you guys haven’t yet figured it out – Google’s social network is the Web. And it will fail on your usual Web 2.0 metrics, because people don’t want platforms – they want applications. This is what happened with Google Buzz.

I ran a mile! Then I spent two hours promoting it on the web.

As I alluded previosuly, people use Twitter and Facebook as a make-shift Activity Streams because they just work well enough. Google Buzz was an early attempt to the next gen, but it failed miserably. It was complex, it was a platform and no one got the point. It offered advantages over Facebook and Twitter only on infrastructure level, not for the user. I’m quite certain that Google continues on this path, because there’s no reason to make a yet another Orkut when it seems that the future of Facebook and Twitter are activity updates. Better to control those updates than the services where they are published. Also, most of that stuff is just noise. In the future, the real business is filtering and exploiting those little snippets of information, not just dumbly showing them.

This hopefully could also mark the end of the dark age of “social media”, where we ignored the complexities of human social behavior and assuming that before “social media” everything was asocial. When someone can go and say that the end of social gaming is near because all gaming will be social – are you fucking kidding me? At what point in time were games missing a social aspect? Or did these guys only play Solitaire and Minesweeper? The Internet is after all a tool. It’s a delusion to believe we have required social enlightenment through Facebook when a compelling case can be made be against it. Repeat after me: you are not how many friends you have on Facebook, you’re not your LinkedIn profile, you’re not your fucking tweets, …

For example, Facebook gives us just one identity. This is by design and Mark Zuckerberg believes this is the right way to go forward. He and Facebook prefers that identity is our most low common denominator identity, probably so that they can sell more eyeballs to “targeted” ads. That might be reason why Facebook is boring, everyone is just showing their most bland identity they are willing to show to strangers.

On the web, people don’t always want to be “themselves” – or even social. Play some multiplayer games, preferably a FPS on a console – like Call of Duty: MW on PS3 – and you’ll quickly see the dark side of human psyche, also known as Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Blizzard tried to solve the problem as an engineering problem and attempted to force people to use their real names, this was very quickly shot down by users. On the internet, some of us want to be DeathSpank, the Orc slayer.

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Choosy is Mac software, currently in beta, and works as follows: when you click a link… it let’s you choose what browser to open it with.

I’m certainly not a typical user, but browsers hijack my time in a number of ways. For one, I tend to have a lot of tabs open in them. If the browser is running, that means that I don’t want to close it; if it is closed and a tab-saving feature is enabled, I’m hesitant to open it. Not closing a browser with many tabs, means that your browser gets heavier and heavier. Having many saved tabs, means that opening a browser will be slower and slower. Another, less prevalent thing, is extensions. I no longer use Firefox on a day-to-day basis, but when I did, the more extensions I had installed (and they can be so addictive), the slower that browser would get.

The consequence of the many-tabs problem is that I tend to use different browsers at different times. On the Mac, my no. 1 browser is Safari, because it’s the fastest to start. Camino is no. 2, because it’s faster (to start) than Firefox. Firefox is no. 3, and was, until recently, browser non grata (Firefox 3 has been a massive improvement). And I now use them interchangeably, according to which has the least tabs in it.

Quicksilver is a big aid in browser-management for me; having each browser attached to a keyboard-trigger, means that I can quickly launch one of them as needed. But it didn’t solve one problem for me, which is the default-setting in OS X. You can only set one browser as your default, which means that when you click a link in any other app, it will open my default, Safari (even if that is currently browser non grata).

And that is the problem that Choosy solves for me and perhaps for you too. And even cooler perhaps, you can set it up to open the link in the browser you are currently running. It’s still in beta (there are actually some bugs), and will eventually be be pay-ware, but test it out and you can get a discount.

This isn’t the end-all-problems solution for me, but it’s definitely a good step forward.
Vincent

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Checking out the HP Touchmark PC demo on YouTube. Watch it and then let’s discuss it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scs7DZhQ72E&hl=en&fs=1]

The question on everybody’s lips is, why didn’t Apple do this? Your first hint: look at the way the guy is standing. Few people use their PCs in that position.

I tried emulating the feeling a little, by making stupid gestures in front of my laptop. I’m pretty fit, but it did get annoying after a while. Having a touch-screen at 90 degrees, half a meter in front of you, is inelegant.

The reason the keyboard + mouse combo work so well is because it’s actually within perfect and comfortable reach by the human body. You sit, your arms bend, and you use. Like the picture below, which is the ideal typing position, as taken from Yale’s Ergonomics website. Vs. the Touchscreen, where you would sit, extend your arms and use.

The perfect touch-screen would actually be similar to an architect’s table, like on the picture below. Note that Jeff Han, godly inventor of all things multi-touch-screens, also has a similar set-up.

Why doesn’t Apple do something like this? My guess is three-fold.

1. The market is still pretty small (designers, etc.?).
2. It’s not really that amazing an innovation—as an average user, can you really do that much more with a touch-screen, vs. a keyboard + mouse?
3. And where are the manufacturing economies of scope? I made this point before, when I noted how many overlaps there on the component level for different Apple-products: a big e.g. the 13″ screen, which is now used by 3 product-lines. If Apple did this for one product-line, it would probably want to translate it to the other ones as well… but how would that work?

What do you think? Will we be seeing an Apple touch-PC (note: I say PC, not iPhone XL, which is more probable), and, if so, in what format? Also state if you’re thinking as a consumer or as a prosumer!

Vincent

P.S. don’t forget to answer our poll !!!

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If there’s one job I hate, it’s digging into Excel. I can read formulas as well as the next guy and can put a financial or marketing spreadsheet together easily enough. But man, it’s just such a chore!

The problem is, I believe, related to my own preference, which is definitely visual. I like drawing things out, I don’t like calculating them. I like seeing the effect that numbers have, I believe in the power of numbers, but I don’t really want to see the math. I know there’s other people that prefer the complete opposite, but we all get confronted with Excel-related tasks in our lives.

I’ve been thinking for about 5 minutes about this, but I’ve already come up with three improvements I want to see in Excel and other spreadsheet-packages. They are:

1. Instant zooming in when dragging

Sometimes, e.g. for a pivot-table, you need to select a very specific region on your spreadsheet. It sucks to drag the selection down together with scrolling the screen. Instead, it would be much nicer to just have the screen change, according to the action that you’re doing. Does that make sense? Anyway, here’s a picture. Excel also usually shows a little pop-up with the exact co-ordinates of where you’re at.

2. Visually displaying data

I think what I like the least about Excel is that I eventually lose the overview, especially after crunching away for a few hours. I’d like insta-graph™, by which I mean, I’d like to have instant graphical feedback on the effect that a change in inputs has on the whole. Just inserting a graph already does this, but is generally something you do after you finish your sheet. Instead, I’d like it to be in the sidebar, which both Excel and Numbers are using in Mac OSX.

3. Just drawing the line

No picture this time, but imagine just drawing a line on a graph and Excel filling in the numbers. Or, adjusting a bar-chart, by pulling bars up and down and having Excel doing the rest. Now that would be heaven for me!

Give me another hour, and I’d probably come up with another 10 suggestions. What it comes down to is that, right now, much of software is designed with a “my way or the highway” attitude, and especially things like Excel have shown little in terms of innovation over the years. I’d really like there to be more catering for the rest of us (probably a majority) that wants nothing to do with Excel, but is somehow forced into it. Excel is important after all, especially when trying to plan out your finances, which we all have to do at some point. Apple’s Numbers was promising, but didn’t really deliver either.

So where’s our salvation? And what would you like to see changed in Excel?

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