Oliver Thylmann

Boy oh boy has it been a long time since I have last blogged here. And you know what? The only reason I am writing again is the new Squarespace iPad app

The second part is that a lot of people have put out resolutions that they will start blogging again in 2011 and hell, I might just try to do that too. You can of course follow me on Twitter and all links I tweet or share elsewhere end up in my pinboard account. What I might try to do is go back to a bit deeper analysis. I see this not working already but with this nice of an app

Looking forward to reviving this blog

Writing this from a very sleek little app that makes me happy about my squarespace account

Wondering where the screenshot will end up and not having screen rotation is a bit of a bummer but this is blogging in style.

Ok it crashed on me after saving as draft but check the post management view or the stats and it did save the draft before crashing

Thank you Squarespace!

I love Twitter, hell I even secured myself the wonderful username “o“, which is a naturally scarce username length for those that have not noticed.

But that is not what this is about. The thing is that I think there is one relatively simple thing, among others, that makes Twitter so successful: it hinders conversations. I do not mean on a grander scale. It’s the wonderful enabler for long-term disconnected conversations. Maybe the more correct term for what twitter does not have so much is chatter.

Yes do you have lots of people talking about stuff that might not be interesting to you, but it is your decision who you want to follow and there is an option to even follow a lot of people and still see what is going on. Perhaps those of us who have grown up in IRC times remember that a chat with 200 people was impossible. Thinking about it and comparing it to twitter, it’s as if you had 2 million people in one chat room but you are only seeing those lines of the people you follow. That models brakes conversations over the entire space in a big way and hence keeps down the volume immensely.

The reason I am bringing it up at this point is that I really hope that Twitter will not put too much emphasis on enabling more conversation to happen. It is already happening but not real chitchat among 5 people and that should be something that should not happen. Imagine somebody asking something and then being able to go into the thread of that question and have a discussion easily by referencing that post. For all people just seeing part of that discussion it is totally useless and making the discussion easy means it will happen. So please people of Twitter, make it hard as it is now.

And while I am at it, please remove Re-Tweets. I admit, I did it once because it is so much easier to Re-Tweet then to write your own words, but that again is the point. It gets too easy. Twitters goal should not be the highest volume of Tweets by each user, but the long term bonding of relationships. This is where possible value comes from.

So how many people that still tweet more than once a week (fully enough) have an increasing number of friends in both direction? That would be the core user group I’d say, next to the echo chamber

no it won’t. Simply as that. Scoble thinks Friendfeed will win, Arrington believes in Twitter, so does Steve Gillmor. Now Loic comes in an says Friendfeed will kill Google Reader. Enough already people!
I do like Twitter, I do like Friendfeed and I do like Google Reader. And I don’t think anyone will kill anyone here. Twitter is a communication system with a very clear focus. The noise level is way higher for Friendfeed and in terms of Google Reader, that’s me desciding what to read in terms of sites. These things ar three totally different things and they will hopefully move their seperate ways.
I did start playing with the Friendfeed API though to see what interesting things can be done with it, so I do agree that there is a lot of power behind Friendfeed. But I have been using a similar system with Noserub for some time and I have my install at id.thylmann.net which actually allows me to stay master over my own data, which is something that is totally missed out here. The data Friendfeed aggregates is scary indeed.

I am wondering if I am not slowly but surely getting into problems. I like trying out things and there is a lot of great stuff out there. Aggregators of your personal life are starting to come up but this actually poses a problem.

I recently made a change in how I blog, twitter, tumble, the like. Real thoughts go in here, little notes go into twitter, which is more of a conversation. All the stuff in between now actually ends up on my Tumblr Blog. But the Tumblr Blog actually aggregates del.icio.us tags tagged linkblog, as well as flickr posts with tag moblog and my kyte.tv posts as well as qik live streams. It kind of aggregates my short thoughts.

Above that I also installed Noserub on my own server, for a large part because Dirk works at Ormigo and because I think it is one of the most interesting implementations in the open social graph movement. It aggregates all my accounts into one view. I can’t really have it aggregate my Tumblr blog because that would double aggregate a lot of stuff. It is actually more likely that I will remove some stuff and only have it take the Tumblr blog. That is actually more what goes on in my life that might interest other people than all the other stuff.

This is also one of the reasons I kept twitter out of the aggregation via Tumblr, because it’s kind of a different level that people have to be able to choose distinctly to follow.

What we really need is something that will aggregate all my feeds, and somehow allows my friends to selectively subscribe to that stream of my ideas, somehow only giving them what might interest them, maybe based on what they read. This would actually be a very fun project. There you go, another start-up idea for somebody out there. Even better would be if somebody would write something that extends Noserub to that extend. I am sure Dirk would not mind.

With that off my chest, on to some more work