8BitKid: Living Bit by Bit

I tend to avoid writing about tech stuff, since I spend my whole day working on the web, but this is just too interesting to not discuss. FriendFeed, an activity aggregator and conversation platform, just introduced a “fake follow”. In essence, it allows you to “friend” someone without actually friending them. To the purported friend and the rest of the world it looks like a connection was established, but the faker doesn’t actually deal with the clutter of making a new connection.

Last year, when I was attending the Data Sharing Summit, we were discussing the need for this as a model on the web. In real world social situations, when I receive a business card I always have the option of just throwing it away. The person that gave me the card continues believing that a connection was established, but I don’t actually have to reciprocate. Creating the illusion of a bidirectional assertion is a critical part of social interactions. In life, we often find ourselves in a relationship where the parties see the bond in vastly different ways but can still both be satisfied. This kind of nuanced relationship rarely happens on the web.

The problem has been that online etiquette tends to pressure users to make these bidirectional assertions. Many social networks do this for us. On Facebook I can’t have a one-way friend, and the same thing goes on MySpace. Address books do allow for one person to declare that a relationship exists, but this can occur without the consent of the referenced party. As we have gotten more social graphs on the web, some have allowed for the “follow”. On Twitter, for example, I can follow someone without them returning the favor. The problem is that when a follow isn’t reciprocated, feelings can be hurt and the jilted party is left with hurt feelings. This causes quite a conundrum, where sensitive social web users don’t want to damage the quality of a relationship by slighting their admirer, but they also don’t want to become overwhelmed by the baggage of content that often accompanies the formation of an online friendship. After all, our news feeds can only handle so much clutter before they drown in meaninglessness, and the scope of people you actually want to stay current on is typically far smaller than the size of your friend network.

This is why the “fake follow” is so brilliant. It creates the appearance of a relationship without saddling one party with unwelcome information. I think this is an important step in creating more nuanced social relationships online, and am excited to see how this monumental, incremental, enhancement ripples through the web.

Some very good folks have been doing some very cool things to provide tools to artists to help them get their music out there. Check out what they did with the new David Byrne/Brian Eno album, and go grok the details over at the official Topspin blog.

I’ve been spending this morning listening to the new (to me) Mountain Goats albums I recently picked up. Midway through “No, I Can’t. [Alternate Version]” he references a Panasonic DX4500. I didn’t know what it was, so I threw it into Google, and the search engine gave me the crazy error screen above.

I’ve never gotten this weirdness from Google, but I guess my fears that I am slowly becoming an automaton are coming true…

Next week is a big week for me.  Finally, after a year of waiting, I get the iPhone with the featureset I’ve been wanting since day one.  The GPS and high-speed data are reasons enough to upgrade, but Apple’s real treat is the new 2nd-gen software shipping with the unit.  The availability of the SDK opens up a world of opportunity to developers, and I am looking forward to hopefully getting some amazing 3rd-party applications.

With the floodgates set to open, I have musing about what I want to be able to do.  It occurred to me that their may be a whole class of applications that could make use of TV-out.  I am not sure if this is permitted with the SDK, so if anyone knows, please throw it in the comments.  However, imagine how great it would be to be able to use the iPhone as a gaming control that plugs into a TV, or being able to use a remote desktop application that showed your desktop on the television, or having the ability to show presentations and use the iPhone as a control.  There would be an avalanche of applications that could leverage this feature to help take the iPhone to the big screen.  Even if this isn’t in 2.0, there is always 2.1…

I tend to try to not mix business with blogging, but I wanted to give a quick post about my new gig. Friday, was my last day at Yahoo!, but being someone who doesn’t like to slow down, I am already hard at work on my new project: MySpace’s Data Availability platform.

I am passionate about openness on the web and its potential to catalyze more meaningful user experiences. It was this passion that brought me to Yahoo! to be a product manager on the Games team, where I was tasked with working to build out our community tools. In November I switched over to the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) team to help Yahoo! create an application platform to open our properties to 3rd party developers. It was an amazing year, and I was fortunate to work with many dedicated and intelligent individuals who were passionate about helping Yahoo! embrace an open strategy. Today I took my next step in my work on creating platforms to help social interactions on the web, but it required a change in scenery.

As of this morning I am an employee of MySpace, working as the Product Manager for the Data Availability project. I strongly believe in the value of having an evolved sense of online identity, one that empowers users by giving them control over their digital self. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to work with the community to create a more open and social web. So keep a look out for what is coming down the pipes from the project, and find me on MySpace at: http://www.myspace.com/pixelelated.

Today at Apple’s WWDC developer event they announced “MobileMe”, a replacement for the “.Mac” suite of services. “MobileMe” will enable a user to keep their contacts, calendars, e-mail, synchronized across all devices via push. It also offers enhanced photo sharing capabilities that will be integrated into the iPhone and new website, as well as better data synchronization courtesy of iDisk. All of these new web applications and services can leverage “MobileMe’s” new 20GB of storage space.

So, the question inevitably becomes, “is it worth $99?”. For me, the answer is a resounding, “no”. There are a couple of major snags in the offering. First of all, my e-mail is associated with this domain, and so I have no interest in getting a “me.com” e-mail address. I have scoured the new documentation, but it doesn’t mention allowing you to do an MX forward so that you could associate a personal domain with these services. Major bummer.

Second, the services don’t match the price. $99 is a hefty sum for synchronization services. I use a Zimbra mail host for my personal data management, and it provides roughly the same functionality (disclosure: I work for Yahoo, which owns Zimbra, but this has nothing to do with why I use it).  The Zimbra hosting allows me to keep my personal domain, and offers an iSync conduit that keeps my address book and calendar in sync across all of my devices and has a web interface for accessing my e-mail, calendar, and contact list.  iTunes also supports syncing iPhone contacts with Gmail and Yahoo!, and I imagine that both of these companies will offer native apps for the iPhone to help keep everything up-to-date.

If you combine one of these PIM solutions with a free file storage solution like the most excellent Dropbox you can replicate these services for a much cheaper cost.  I pay around $6 a month for Zimbra hosting from 01.com and Dropbox is currently free.  Sure, you may not get everything managed in a single place with the extreme elegance and simplicity of an Apple product, but you do get a more flexible solution.  Is “MobileMe” for me?  Certainly not.  Is it a great service that would be perfect for my mom?  Definitely.

So I have been a Twitter fiend for over a year now (much to the chagrin of my friends). The ease of Twitter’s SMS short-code system is definitely the main reason I have been able to integrate Twitter into my life so easily. I have also been a user of Pownce, but certainly not to the extent that I find myself giving my thumbs an exercise communicating the minutia of my life via my mobile microblogging.

I received a Pownce friend request last night, and that lead me to spend some time revisiting the service.  I was pleasantly surprised by some nifty features that Pownce has rolled out and refined. They offer some really slick friend discovery tools, such as the option to import from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and other social sites. Pownce also has a pretty pretty desktop app built on Adobe Air. I’d love to see support for Google’s Social Graph API’s to check for connections against my blogroll, but hopefully that is coming.

There is one capability in Pownce that really catches my eye: event creation.  As a fan of flash-mobs and general ad-hoc tom-foolery, I love the ability to easily create an event listing and zap it out to my friends.  I often use Twitter as a social spam tool to let my friends know about events, but would love a more coherent yet light-weight event creation and communication experience.  For example, it is fantastic the Pownce supports iCal subscriptions to get your events into a calendaring application.

I think that Pownce and Twitter can coexist, with Twitter being a platform of self-expression and Pownce offering a toolkit for content sharing.  If you want to find me, check out: http://pownce.com/8bitkid/