Twingly Channels, Social Filtering On Real-Time Web, Launches Private Beta
Twingly Channels is launching into private beta today, opening up to the wide public later this year. At the moment one has to apply for an invite by suggesting a channel topic.
Swedish Twingly have been building up the hype since early June when they first announced Project Shinobi, the working name for Twingly Channels we then got a sneak preview of for a month ago at the Sweden Social Web Camp. And they certainly are reaching for the stars, or as Martin Källström, CEO Twingly, puts it:
"Twingly Channels lets people cut out the noise of online search and the real-time web — to instantly see what news and content to spend time on. By following topics rather than bloggers or outlets, Twingly simplifies the challenge of RSS, social search, and the real-time web."
Twitter Moving Towards Jaiku?
The latest storm from the world of Nordic microblogging got me thinking a lot about Jaiku, Twitter, FriendFeed, the microblogging in general and the Open Stack that's trying to open up the silos, not just in microblogging, but the social web in large. We are looking into reaching the point where, just as Jyri Engeström put it, "[n]o single service, no matter how large and powerful, is the platform. The Web is the platform"
Now Many have realized that Twitter, which was competing head on with Jaiku and has won that race for now, should allow the service to develop towards what Jaiku did right when it launched, namely enable conversations. I believe those two services are different and perhaps should remain so and just talk to each other via open standards such as XMPP or an XMPP equivalent. Therefore I am not advocating Twitter becoming more Jaiku-like. Twitter should have its own future trajectory. What I am very strongly advocating is for the heavy users of FriendFeed and Twitter to start using Jaiku, the one service that does what services and apps using Twitter API are increasingly trying to do. TweeTree being the most recent example of that. Do I have a vested intrested in this? You can bet on it! I strongly believe Jaiku is a better service to engage in meaningful conversations and I am in Jaiku, but many people I would like to converse with are not.
Below Chris Messina below outlines his vision on where he sees activity streams going. He notes that activity streams need a "[l]ocation and context attached to or as attributes of social objects that are being created" and not just a lonely tweet which is not connected to anything. As Chris mentions in the video below [8min 27 sec into it], this is where Jaiku started from. Now we just need to get Google to realize the value it has in Jaiku and let Jyri & Co. to develop Jaiku further by incorporating filtering (by actor, action, social object, place, time, etc.), fast feed fetching, opening it up for the world to use and develop and voilá. Compare this to the #hashtags, which is about the only thing you can use to put your Tweet into a relevant context. This is really nothing but a poor hack compared to what Jaiku already can do for the conversations.
Talking Social Network Interop @ GSP East from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.
Since we are not yet living in a world where all the silos are broken and all the services can talk to each other, I think the Silicon Valley digerati should pull their heads from the California sand, see beyond their Valley bubble and give (yet again) Jaiku collectively a try to realize its value instead of complaining how the Twitter-cum-Jaiku attempts don't work. Yes it's closed, but the invitations are unlimited and I'm sure most of the microblogging heavy users already have an account. If not, I will personally send an invitation to anyone asking for one (you can email me at ville [at] arcticstartup.com). Twitter has the critical mass, but Jaiku still kicks its ass any day as a service to have meaningful conversations in. Since Twitter is not going to become Jaiku any time soon we all should give Jaiku another try. Struggling with two services is a drag, but things are changing fast, and once the users are there, Jaiku and Twitter can complement each other until the two services can openly talk to each other - or until a better option emerges.
Jaiku needs its critical mass and it needs to grow to become truly relevant to link people globally. I am advocating people to move there not only because I or some other people are there, but for the purposes of having conversations, it is a far better service than Twitter or FriendFeed. We should see and use the two services as the different services that they are, just as Eat.fi's founder @Spongefile commented here:
Jaiku is like a constant huge cocktail party hosted by your friends with interesting conversations to drop in on with semi-strangers.Twitter is like getting constant voicemail from everyone you know. You can reply via the same method, but that's no way to communicate.
So how about it Scoble? While we wait for the silos to come down, shall I send you a Jaiku invite?
First Impression Of Nokia Friend View
I'm playing with the Nokia's new service Nokia Friend View as I type this. I downloaded the software on my phone this morning and been using it through out the day.
In short the service wants to be a location aware microbloggin service.
I'm not blown away, nor have I completely lost hope with Nokia. They are trying fairly hard. The service is very Nokia-like in that it's not very user friendly compared to some others that have emerged from the west coast of US. The UI is rather ugly and after you start using it feels that someone has designed it on paper, but never really used it herself as it's not logical all the way through. Similarly the service is still very buggy, not loading the map on the web browser, eating one's battery in no time ...the list goes on and has still some really retarded features like the fact that the nick name is case sensitive. I registered as villevesterinen and now wondering whether there will be another VilleVesterinen. Does not really help you finding your friends from the service if there's two of each name.
I won't go into the nitty gritty, data portability etc. yet as Nokia is still in developing the service and I haven't used it long enough to get down and dirty with the features. Similarly, I won't go into how it could be integrated with Nokia Chat and the Ovi.com service in general for the simple reason that I don't use Ovi.com, since it only replicates other services I use like Flickr and MobileMe. Who knows, maybe Friend View lures me to use all of Nokia's services, but I'm not there yet. Nor is Nokia for that matter.
It's not all downhill though and this, after all, is still an early Beta. I don't know how my Nokia Friend View usage will evolve and where it becomes the most useful. I'd imagine I'd like to use it when I'm traveling and planning to meet people in a city at a given time. It would be very nice to see where their train is coming or see their plane above the Atlantic, but there's still a bit go before that. That said, it would be nice to see when my girlfriend is coming from work and see when she's just behind the corner or if she hasn't left from the office yet. But as many (In Finnish) communicated, they'd like to be able to control the level of privacy between the different contacts. The more of these services advance, the more privacy they invade. Nevertheless, I can find uses for the service already.
The sad part of this new service is that Nokia once had 'the next big thing' right in front of it: Jaiku was build right on Nokia's front porch and is doing much of what Nokia Friend View tries to do without the location bit. Add location to Jaiku and Voilà! One of Jaiku's co-founders and the father of the idea, Jyri Engeström, even worked at Nokia at one time, but of course it was too risky for the mobile phone giant at the time: It could not possibly put its weight behind a venture that is not already ubiquitous like microbloggin services now. That would be risky, which does not go very well with the Finnish management ideology. To make the irony complete Jaiku conversation threads are currently the best places to find out about how the Friend View works (or does not work in many cases), and Jaiku is still better service than Nokia Friend View, Twitter, Plazes and FriendFeed combined.
Now that Nokia has found the new focus for its strategy from the online services arena to go along with the hardware business, it should also embrace the new ways of working. Jaiku went to Google and nothing wrong with that, but if Nokia wants to be an innovative player in the online services field it needs to embrace different kinds of risks compared to ones it has before. This does not deal with mobile phone design, but rather with new behavior in communication as the web evolves. This risk involves betting on smart people, but not in a way Nokia has done before. I'm not talking about hard core MBA heavy hitters that can manage the hell out of any firm, but rather people who are the real pirates of the Internet. I'm talking about entrepreneurs.
Nokia needs to look at how Google has approached this issue by acquiring early stage startups and getting a boat load of smart people along with it. Nokia should start seeing the value in these energetic and smart people who want to change the way we communicate and won't stop until they do.
Similarly, Stefan Constantinescu, who's telling about the service in the YouTube clip made by Nokia, is also one of the best evangelist Nokia could hope for as the guy is super active and vocal in for example Jaiku. Let's hope that Nokia has learned its lesson and sees the value in what Stefan is doing and tunes into the Jaiku channels for community feedback.
