Dylan Greene dot com

Part 1 - Community and Contacts

One of the important concepts of Web 2.0 is community. The problem is that there is no method to integrate all of the Web 2.0 communities we now belong to.

When I meet somebody I want to keep in contact with I need to add their contact info to most of the these systems:

1. Outlook Contacts for email.
2. MSN Instant Messenger for IM.
3. GoogleTalk if they don't MSN IM.
4. Skype if they don't use MSN or Gtalk (AIM is for kids!).
5. LinkedIn for business contacts.
6. Cell phone for calling on the go and knowing who's calling me.
7. MySpace if I want to pretend to be hip.
8. XBOX Live Friends List if the person is a gamer.
9. Subscribe to their blog if they have a blog worth subscribing to.
10. And if I wanted to do this right... add this person as a friend on TagWorld, Flappr, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Consumating, Friendster, Orkut, Yahoo 360, Tagworld, and a dozen others I'm forgetting or leaving off on purpose...

Web 2.0 was supposed to make my life better! Now I spend more time managing my friends and contacts than talking to them. Half the people in my Web 2.0 communities I no longer remember who they are or why I added them. The problem is that we have too many collections of contacts to manage and they communities are not working together.

The Web 3.0 Fix:

One community system to rule them all!

I envision a decentralized contact storage network for storing our contacts. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and small companies would all offer this as a free service. Use the one you trust the most, with the best UI, or run your own service, it doesn't matter.

For each contact we describe how we know that person [friend, co-worker, family, customer, school, common interests, met at conference, etc] and who can see them [just friends, just co-workers, everyone, nobody, etc].

You choose which services can see your contacts, and what types of contacts they can see. Maybe you don't want the people you MySpace just because they had a nice photo listed as business contacts on LinkedIn.

Some cool benefits:

1. One place to add and store our contacts.
2. When we get an email from somebody we don't recognize, our email programs will inform us how we know that person using information from LinkedIn, MySpace, or any of our others services.
3. When joining a new service, instantly add contacts instead of manually finding them again.
4. Services without communities could use this to add community features without more work for the users. For example, Amazon could show recommended books based on what your friends are buying.

Who is building this?

As far as I know, nobody is. If you know otherwise, let me know!

With all of the hype behind Web 2.0, my hope that people aren't thinking this is the answer, the end game, the best that we can do. This part one of a six-part series. I will describe problems with Web 2.0 and how they can be fixed. Look forward to radical new ideas, insider interviews, and heavy usage of bulleted lists.

- dylan

A friend sent me a story that was mostly true, but some details were changed. I found this out through the urban-legend-busting site Snopes.com.

We've all seen a blog entires about stories that seemed real enough but were actually urban myths, totally made up, or originally posted on parody news sites.

Here's my idea: A tool that automatically looks up content on resources like Snopes.com and lets users know when something they are about to email, post, or share is not real. It would work behind the scenes, the same way anti-phishing and anti-virus software.

A tool like this would help make all of us smarter by reducing the amount of fake information clutter we run into every day.

I already have an idea for version 2: political spin detector. Of course there have to be several different editions of that one depending on which resources our users trust for their information.

If you click on a photo caption my site brings you to photo album and jumps you to the image for that caption, scrolling the page to the right image if necessary. (Example)

The disappointing problem is that you can't see that particular image until Internet Explorer or Firefox download all images on the page that happen to be in the HTML before that image. This happens even though all of the images before the image you are trying to look at are off the screen. This means that you have to sit there and wait for all preceding images to load before you get to see the one right on your screen.

The fix seems simple: IE and Firefox should load images that are viewable to the user first, and then load off-screen images.

I can probably fix this via some fancy JavaScript, but it seems like more work than should be necessary.

If you shift-click a link, it will always open in a new browser window.

This is helpful when reading a page like this one, and you see a link you want to visit, but your not done reading this one. Shift-click the link, and come back to it later.

I wish that trick also worked on the Back and Forward buttons, Favorites, History, Windows Explorer, and everything else in life.

I find doing my taxes to be fairly boring.

Any suggestions for how to make it more fun?

Click on Comments to see what I've come up with. Can you think of something better?

I've registered for Gnomedex 5.

Why?

I want to bounce an idea off people. A concept that won't fit in a blog entry.

And I want to share this concept with a small crowd of visionaries with the experience and expertise to know what to do with the idea, or for them to tear it apart so I know what I need to bring back to the drawing board. They will be at Gnomdex.

What's my idea?

Now that blogging is practically everywhere, we are going to face a new problem. Too many blogs.

I predict we will see a blogging implosion from it's own popularity.

There are too may blogs to read, and the less popular ones are going fade away, leaving us with the blog equivalent of newspapers.

Choice is good, but we don't really need dozens of online book stores, auction sites, or pet food stores, and we don't really need dozens of blogs about the same mp3 players, digital cameras, and right-wing conspiracies. Rather than weed out the less-popular, I think I have an idea that will keep everybody who wants to blog interested in blogging, and won't require us to read a Scoble-riffic 1000 blogs to keep up with the topics we're interested in.

I have an idea, and I look forward the sharing it at Gnomdex, and I'm looking forward to hearing everybody else's ideas.

BTW, thanks to Steve Rubel and Brad Wilson for the heads up. And I plan on posting the idea here too, but I'm still trying to decide if I should have the idea looked over by a patent-lawyer-type-of-person first. (Not so that I can lock it up, but so that I can make sure nobody else can.)

Google, MSN, Yahoo, and others have decided that the new best way to prevent comment spam is to use an HTML tag that will prevent Google (and other search engines) from following links that could be spam links.

That new tag works as so:

<a href="url" rel="nofollow">Link Text</a>

When indexing sites, this will prevent Google and others from "following" these links. Normally following those links helps a site's PageRank, which makes those sites appear higher in search results. The theory is that if spammers aren't getting their PageRank improved, then they will stop spamming blogs. Ha!

My prediction is that this change will not prevent comment spam because of the following issues:

1. The text of the spam messages will still be indexed by search engines.
2. Humans will still see the the spam messages.
3. Humans will still be able to follow the spam links.
4. Most importantly: Spammers can still post spam messages.

In short, all this does is make life a little easier for Google. Their PageRank system, which might just be flawed, has been abused and blamed for the onslaught of comment spam. Now they have an out - an excuse to to say it's not their fault anymore. I'm all for better search results in Google (ever try to search for a specific hotel?), but their solution simply does not prevent comment spam.

What do I recommend?

1. For automated spam bots: To prevent bots from posting spam comments, I require JavaScript. When a human user clicks the Submit button, JavaScript to renames field names before the comment is submitted to the server. Fields are unique named every time the page loads, and the server will only post comments when it gets the field name it is expecting. This prevents the automated spam attacks because the software spammers are not able to predict the field names.
2. For manually entered spam comments: I have basic spam filtering mechanism similar to many email spam filters. It looks for common spam words, URLs, and topics, and prevents those messages from being posted.
3. Either way, I have a RSS feed which shows me whenever a spam comment is attempted, along with IP address and other information so I can track the progress, and watch for false positives (real comments that the system thought were spam), and easily ban IP's of known spammers.

Something important to me is that my solutions stop comment spam without requiring any extra effort from my users, Some sites now require registration or a CAPTCHA input to add a comment. I feel that this is just an unnecessary pain which prevents people many busy people adding their feedback. I also feel that the links in comments are often important enough that search engines should follow them, therefor always putting a nofollow tag will ultimately be unhelpful to those small sites that should get a higher PageRank.

And most importantly, unlike the nofollow "solution" from Google, my recommendations can actually prevent spam comments from appearing on sites, and that's what we all want, right?

I use Windows Media Player 9 for listening to music.  I have some qualms with it...

Feature 1: You are in your car listening to a CD, and you turn your radio off to answer your cell phone.  Or turn your car off to do some chores.  When you turn the stereo back on, the CD continues right from where it left off. 

So why is it that Windows Media player can't remember what it was doing after being closed?  If I shut down my computer, close Media Player, or even hibernate my laptop, when I re-open Windows Media Player it should continue right from where it was, no questions asked.  The list of songs should be remembered, even if I hadn't saved a playlist. 

Feature 2: You're in your car, listening to a CD, and then you switch to the radio to find out about traffic.  If you go back to the CD, your car's player auotomatically continues from where was on the CD. 

So why is it that if I'm listening to music, then click on a WMV, MPG, AVI, or other video (or music) on a web page, the video takes over what Windows Media Player was playing, and then gives no option to go back to the music I was listening to? 

Feature 3: If your car has a CD jukebox system, many systems let you add and remove a CD without effecting the rest of the CD's.

So why doesn't Windows Media Player let you easily add/remove a CD (or folders with MP3/WMA's) from what's currently playing?  I know you can do this manually, especially if I have a playlist set up, but it's not as obvious and simple as it should be.

Conclusion: Practically all car CD players have these three features, and some MP3 players have them as well.  I think it's about time that Windows Media Player catches up to our car's CD player.  I have not seen Windows Media Player 10 (the next major version), so maybe some of these features will be there.   I don't know if other players such as Apple's iTunes, AOL's WinAmp, Real's Realplayer, have these features, but that wouldn't ben enough for me to switch because I already use Windows Media Player for just about everything - built-in cd ripping, cd burning, mp3 player file transferring, full screen video, WMV-HD playback, QuickTime, DivX, AC3, XviD, OGG, etc.  Plus I don't need to worry about ads, spyware, or a feature that would convert my music to a format that my mp3 player doesn't support.

I hate getting voice mail on my cell phone. It takes too much time to listen to messages, and it cost me minutes.

What I would like to see: List new voice messages on the cell phone's screen. I imagine the list to look similar to new text messages, with the date, time, phone number, and length of message. If the phone number is in my phone listing, the name and the location (home/work/cell) of the person would be shown. Then I should be able to scroll through that list on my cell phone, and click "Listen" to hear that message.

My girlfriend has a great idea that I'd love to see in my next cell phone: If you dial somebody and they aren't there, and your phone knows other numbers for that person (such as work/cell/home), the phone should make it easy to choose an alternate number for that person right away without having to go back to the list of numbers.

While right-click menus are often full of great shortcuts, their nature of being completely hidden from the user until a user clicks the secondary mouse button means that beginner and advance users alike have trouble discovering the existence of these helpful menus.

When a use moves their mouse pointer over an object or area that has a right-click opportunity, I propose altering the mouse pointer to show the existence of the hidden functionality.

Think about how helpful mouseover highlighting is in Windows XP in preventing miss-clicks. Take the feature a step further (and a button over), and suddenly Windows is helping beginners and advance users learn about the availability of these hidden, but useful, menus.

I also think there should be a standard user interaction method that triggers Windows to highlight all available right-click targets, such as right-clicking an area where right-click is not supported.

Anybody from the Longhorn team reading?

Undo is a great feature that most modern programs now have, but here's some feature request for that great Undo God in the sky that would make Undo even nicer:

1. Selective Undo: Select an area of a document and Undo only undoes changes in the area selected. The rest of the document is not touched.
2. Undo/Redo Preview: Microsoft Office is the only application I've seen that that has text that says what it is going to undo or redo (hidden in the drop down next to the icon in the tool bar), but the text is so generic that it's not even helpful. Right now I'm using Frontpage, which is use almost exclusively in text-edit mode. I'm editing Javascript functions, XSL, XML, DHTML, and CSS - but the the Undo dropdown only has "Text Editing" listed 35 times. What good is that? I'd like to see a collection of "Undo preview screenshots" and be able to click on the one that matches the changes what I return to.
3. Undo Support for User Interface Modifications: How many times have you accidental rearranged a program's layout by dragging a menu bar or icon bar only to find what happened by accident is a total pain to fix. Clicking Undo (or maybe a special version of Undo) should undo these user interface changes. This would put icons back in place, fix relocated menu bars, and return lost toolbars back to view.
4. Standard API for Undo and Redo: Why does Notepad have only one level of Undo? Any program that uses standard Windows API for input should automatically get unlimited levels of Undo and Redo. Today all Windows programs automatically get access to Cut, Copy, and Paste. In Longhorn, the codename for the next major revision of Windows, every input also automatically gets a Spell Checker. Maybe a feature-filled standardized Undo stack will be added to the features.

Agree, disagree? Have other ideas for improving Undo?

Hard drive or no hard drive, the XBOX 2 will likely have some sort of large local storage for storing downloads, game data, and saved games. 

Here's two idea I had that would further take advantage of the XBOX's local storage: 

Instant Game Swapping:

You're playing a game, and then your friends come over and watch to play some other game.  You aren't near a save spot and you don't want to loose your progress.  Instant Game Swap would copy the current memory contents to the XBOX hard drive so that when you put that game back in, it loads the memory from the hard drive and you can continue from exactly where you were.

Instant Hibernation:

You're playing a game and it's time to go to school, work, dinner, your wedding, whatever, and you're not at a convenient point at which to save.  Instant Hibernate would copy the memory contents to the hard drive so you can comfortably know that your game will be exactly the way you left it.

These features are not new in the PC world - Emulators such as Virtual PC and VMware let you do the equivalent of Instant Game Swapping to swap operating systems, and laptops have been doing hibernation for years.  Car and portable CD players have these same features so that you can turn your car off and on and not loose your place on the CD.  The fact that it is automatic part of what makes it so nice.

I don't think these features will make or break the XBOX 2, but I bet they would raise the bar for expectations of all gaming systems.

Do you attend lengthy conference calls that tend to put you to sleep?

Microsoft has created an awesome solution for this: XBOX Live

Now wait, hear me out...

1. Talk for Free. XBOX Live has free full-duplex voice chat. Unlike telephones it's digitally encoded so you have a better quality call and no worries of outsiders listening in. Comparable TelCo conference call plans cost about $5 per hour per person and still aren't going to be digital quality.
2. Free Meeting Rooms. XSNSports.com (XSN stands for XBOX Sports Network) is a web site Microsoft has built for all of their sports games. Here you can set up tournaments, ladders, championships, or in the business world: public and private meetings. There's a public "meeting" called "Road 2 Longhorn" where Longhorn developers and independent software developers meet and talk about the the future of Windows.
3. Have fun at the same time. During the meeting you get to play golf. When you join this "meeting" you are on the same course as everybody else, with the same weather, rules, and other settings, all set up by the meeting host.

With up to 64 people able to join each "meeting," the lure of a golf game to entice people to join and keep them there for the duration of the meeting, it seems like XBOX Live and Links 2004 would be marketing gold. Right? Wrong, it seems....

Well it seems that Microsoft is doing as little as possible to publicize the fact that Links 2004 even has online play:

• No mention of Online Play. Microsoft's Links 2004 home page never mentions playing online, online public and private tournaments, stats tracking or the multitude of other features Links 2004 has. There's no screenshots of online play either, and videos seem to only show cut scenes and not actual game play.
• No mention of significance of XSN Sports. There's a link to "What is XSN Sports" but it doesn't say on the Links page why I should even care enough to click it to find out what it is. The What is? page doesn't really say much either.
• Old videos with no game-play. There's two videos on the site, and like all videos on XBOX.com, they are really really old and don't show what it looks like when you actually play the game.

XSNSports.com, which is the free online network for Microsoft's sports games has issues too:

• The web site is too hard to use. Way too much focus was put on "use Flash to make it cool!" and not enough on "give easy access to what the user needs." I still haven't figured out how to join "Road 2 Longhorn" because the "Join Competition" link brings me a to new page that lists all of the competitions going on, and for whatever reason Road 2 Longhorn no matter what I search for.
• Too many tabs! Tabs are everywhere. Since I can easily scroll the web page with my mouse wheel, why not just make the page longer rather than requiring me to click on each and every tab to see what's changed? On my personal stats page there are 26 tabs!
• Terrible message board. The Message Boards are using message board technology from the Internet stone ages. There's 8,000 messages in the Links Form alone and they are only available as one huge flat list of 15 titles per page. The only way to read them is clicking one title at a time, and each time you do that it reloads and displays this annoying flash animated menu.
• Not enough personalization. Your personal profile doesn't let you give a picture of yourself. Seeing who you are meeting with (and playing against) adds greatly to the overall experience.
• Why require an email address? When you modify your personal profile it requires an email address. Why? Your XBOX Live already has to be associated with a Passport just to view the page. Oh yeah, last one:
• Why require a Passport account? A Passport account is required just to view the pages. Passport should only be needed when trying to join a competition or modify your settings.

Well the potential is there, but the problem is that Microsoft doesn't seem realize the goldmine that they're on and my bet is that full capabilities of XBOX Live are never understood by anybody outside of their Redmond offices.

Maybe XBOX marketing manager and fellow blogger John Porcaro will fill us in?

Here's a review of Link 2004 with a more information and screenshots than you'll find any Microsoft site.

My Gamertag is Dylan.

The concept of using Links 2004 and XBOX Live for online meetings was not my idea. I first read about it on Scoble's blog. Scoble saw it on Newsgator author Greg Reinacker's blog. Greg saw the idea on Microsoft blogger Jeff Sandquist's blog.

I got a funny email from Tristan Louis today:  He was typo Googling his name and found that I mentioned him in a blog entry about who reads my blog, but his name was spelled wrong.  I fixed it, and it gave me an idea....

Today Google suggests the correct spelling of words you search for but happen to spell wrong.  To take this awesome feature a step further, Google should suggest popular typo variations as alternative searches when you happen to spell the search terms correctly.

Example 1: Misspellings.  Bloggers, press, and coworkers often spell my name wrong, leaving off the last e in Greene.  If was to Google for Dylan Greene, Google would suggest also searching for Dylan Green.

Example 2: Spacing.  The company I work for is called webMethods, but it is often written as Web Methods.  When searching for webMethods google would suggest "Web Methods" as an alternative.

Example 3: Ordering.  Canon's latest digital SLR is officially called the Canon 300D in the US, but their previous model was called the D30, so people often mistype 300D as D300.  A search for 300D would suggest D300 as an alternative. 

Example 4: Wrong Word. I meant to search for wiring but instead typed wriring.  Apparently wriring is a word too, so Google didn't suggest any alternatives.  Even though wriring is a word it knows about, Google should suggest the far-more-popular word wiring as an alternative.

Thanks for the idea, Tristan!  This make sense to anybody else?

Note: If you search Google today for "Typo Googling"  there are no matches.  I'm looking forward to searching again in a couple weeks or months to see if people use the term.  Meanwhile, Typo Google your name and blog the results.  Find anything interesting?

Sam Ruby notes that there are a bunch of RSS feed validators. Note to Sam: The one at feeds.archive.org has disappeared. That's the one I used to rely on.

Ross Karchner is building a web-based front end to the multiple RSS feed validators.

I would just like to have one RSS feed that I can subscribe to that only has an entry when it sees a problem with one of my RSS code. Problems with my RSS code are rare, but I like to know when they occur.