Disqus - Latest Comments for adamposey

Re: Incrementalism

adamposey — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:54:16 -0000

I think it's part of the evolution of the web. With a greater amount of information, and a static amount of time, not considering that the things we do with the net are increasing (how many of us REALLY watch TV anymore?) we're having to find ways to make the things we want to do fit into the time constraints we have.

This is why RSS readers exist, why start pages exist, why we've flocked to devices like iPhones to keep us connected as much as possible. We're taking as much information as we can, and putting it in one place, and adapting the technology to properly filter that information. It's why we use sites like socialthing, friendfeed, etc. to take information from all over the place and bring it into one place.

The supply of information is increasing, so this has become our way to condense and filter it.

As for early adopters using 'single feature' sites, I think the real question isn't if mass-audience will use them, but how to deliver them. I suspect that, originally, we'll see sites go with a facebook style 'repository' model where the core service maintains a list of these applications. The thing is that all of these sites are going to be very long tail, they're not going to appeal to everyone and we need to create filters for them. People are going to need assistance making something out of the mess. :)

Re: Incrementalism

adamposey — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:29:06 -0000

I think, much like legos, you'll get some pre-defined sets for less enthusiastic people who just want to have a good experience. but ultimately, what we're seeing is single feature sites and tools because the enthusiasts have become accustomed to mashing up everything.

So, when we get a new mapping application, we just want it to do that and do it very well so we can use that functionality on another site, and so on and so forth. We're gonna be building our own experiences, or getting sets built for us.

The enthusiastic among us will flock to places that give us more freedom and control to construct exactly experience we want in a way that mirrors our idea of what the web should behave like. I suspect the mass-market will be about pre-assembled packs of applications delivered to you in a well packaged fashion.

Re: Incrementalism

adamposey — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:32:35 -0000

I hate to draw an analogy of web applications being 'toys' but I think this fits. We're gonna see the same kind of 'innovation' we see in the action figure dept. at wal-mart. Endless cookie-cutter molds of pre-defined experiences and ideas.

The end result: less creativity, more copying, more 'add one feature to an existing product and release it'. There are very few remarkable innovations happening in action figures right now, and it turns out that people are having a lot more fun with 'build it yourself' experiences like Lego which is still going strong.

So, if I'm gonna predict the web in a few years, I'm thinking of it like lego blocks. Every page, every song, every graphic, every person, will be a block. And we can pull those blocks together to build our own experience. I doubt that the killer web2.0 application is actually going to be a website, I suspect it will be a browser application that's smart enough to put these experiences together and simply change the way we interact with the internet and the data on it.

There will be numerous pre-defined molds out there helping us to pull the experience together if we're not enthusiasts, but ultimately, I think the LEGO-web is coming. We're gonna need smarter tools, and smarter services, to help us pick which bricks we want to use in our experience.

The early adopters and the technologically adept will prefer to get a more advanced experience that is highly customizable, and the mass audience is going to prefer to use pre-defined tools and experiences.

That's my take on the situation, at least.

Re: What We Can Learn From Beckett Baseball Card Monthly

adamposey — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:20:06 -0000

I don't think so Fraser. Mostly because music, etc. is becoming so fragmented into countless niches that you'd probably have greater success being seen as 'obscure', 'on the edge', etc. People would feel like they've discovered something special before anyone else, and would probably become fervent fans for it (the kind that do things like spend $350 on tickets to your shows).

Re: What We Can Learn From Beckett Baseball Card Monthly

adamposey — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:16:07 -0000

I have to disagree, Alex. Actually, when it comes to smartlinks I don't think either is valuable enough. The absolute standing shows popularity, but as any good hard look at the iTunes top 10 list will tell you, popularity and quality do not necessarily go hand in hand.

However, I think that showing 'momentum' in a way that provokes interaction with the smartlink would let me find the quality in it.

Re: What We Can Learn From Beckett Baseball Card Monthly

adamposey — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:35:26 -0000

As an interesting experiment, I'd like to see what happens if we strip away the absolutes and leave only the trends. Hiding the hard data but saying "This is clearly becoming more (or less) popular than it's competitors".

How would the mechanics of marketing music change if top 10 lists were to be replaced with the "Top 10 movers" or "fastest risers". Would this change how people view the data? I'd like to say that I think it would change how people look for the data. I think they would start at the bottom of the list and work their way up. Rather than starting at the top hits and working their way down. People could feel like they helped 'discover' music by pushing it to the top.

To directly relate it to your product. What would happen if I hovered over a smartlink and instead of seeing an emphasized hard number about it's popularity I simply saw that the link was becoming increasingly popular. What If instead of seeing that no one had clicked the link, I was made to feel that I could be a trend-setter by getting in on that valuable information early (because it was on it's way up).

There's certainly a lot to think about, here.

Re: Sharing the disqussion

adamposey — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:20:46 -0000

Plaxo, its great that you're using Disqus for this. Now, all you need is a way to let developers add support for their site to Plaxo automatically. Perhaps a Stream-format is necessary now, with all these aggregators etc. around?

Re: Introducing AB Meta - Simple Annotation for Pages About Things

adamposey — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:05:48 -0000

It was metaphorically speaking. :)

Re: Introducing AB Meta - Simple Annotation for Pages About Things

adamposey — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:04:08 -0000

I support this. The web NEEDS more standards. IF only I had friends who could implement this, I'd force it down their throats.

Re: AdaptiveBlue’s Open House

adamposey — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:54:38 -0000

I'm in Elkins, WV. The drive to LP will take about 3 hours from where I am. Unfortunately, NY is an 8 hour drive or more (factoring traffic, and that I don't know the area, etc.) Like I said man, I would absolutely love to but Linkin Park kind of blew my 'let's go do something spur of the moment' cash fund. So I'm left with the basics for now.

Disappointing.

(Edit: Visual Aid: http://snurl.com/24lq0 )

Re: Browser Plugin Functionality, Widgets, & Distribution

adamposey — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:32:37 -0000

I think you've really got to look at who you're trying to talk to though. If you're talking to the person who spiders pages, looking for the 'web behind the web' then the functionality provided by the Firefox extension you provide is wonderful (although we've talked about the speed issues).

If I could make any changes to the way it works I would straight up remove 'my things' or make it so that it takes advantage of Firefox's native bookmarking strengths. I certainly wouldn't be opposed to MyThings integrating with the native bookmarking of my browser, even if it means providing a new front-end for bookmarking.

Re: AdaptiveBlue’s Open House

adamposey — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:53:34 -0000

Ok, I love you for putting disqus on your site. Next thing.. I'd LOVE to come see you guys, but that's quite a drive/expense for me. :( I'll have to take to debating with you on Skype/Jabber. :(

Re: How to handily tell tech bloggers to STFU

adamposey — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:23:58 -0000

Actually, I don't think Web2.0 is going to spread much farther. I believe the core audience has certainly been obtained already, growth will slow down, and eventually the fat will be stripped away leaving us with useful sets of tools and ideas to implement in USEFUL ways.

Re: How to handily tell tech bloggers to STFU

adamposey — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:42:27 -0000

Personally, I think that every person involved in the buying/selling of that twitter account is short a substantial amount of braincells.

I'm sure it's been covered, but people follow that guy on twitter because of who he is. If another person is behind the wheel, they'll simply go elsewhere. This entire auction is along the lines of those people who bid on jars full of air, etc. It's doing it just to say you did it, and there's no logic in that.

Re: How to handily tell tech bloggers to STFU

adamposey — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:35:17 -0000

I do want to provide a counter point though, could-a-shoulda-woulda is nice and fluffy, but at the end of the day that same $1,550 wouldn't have been spent on any of those things. Those people would have bought things with it that they valued for themselves.

While it is nice to see someone occasionally point out the great potential things we can do with our cash, that doesn't change the fact that unless we cared about those things to begin with we won't be spending our money on them.

Re: How to handily tell tech bloggers to STFU

adamposey — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:29:58 -0000

You're right. She's right. I do believe I'll do my part in getting the link around. :)

Re: Back to the bitchmeme.

adamposey — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:36:35 -0000

Mackenzie, you're right, and it's wrong and immoral to do THAT. Frankly, that's not even possible to stop on the web, though. I'll never forget talking to an artist who had recently had his work flat-out-stolen (read: someone else claimed they did it) by another 'artist'. I sent him a fairly formal notice about the 'rip' and his response amazed me:

"I have my work reclaimed hundreds of times each and every day, it's just not worth my time to try to stop it" These blatant violations of copyright law only come to the surface because we get angry and do knee-jerk things like file C&D complaints. Better to focus attention on creating than it is to focus on the people who aren't. If they get big enough on your content, they'll get caught, and their brand/reputation will be flat out destroyed by that. If they don't get big enough to get caught.. then does it matter?

Re: Early Adopter Syndrome and the attention trap.

adamposey — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:02:00 -0000

As Jdong says "Tools can't replace self control and willpower" ADHD-I is Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder - Inattentive Type. More commonly known as 'the day dreaming' type.

Re: Early Adopter Syndrome and the attention trap.

adamposey — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:28:54 -0000

Mackenzie, I'm diagnosed as having Asperger syndrome and ADHD-I. Typical 'geek syndrome'. I don't feel that I really said anything to disprove his hypothesis, since it may be very accurate. I think, however, that it's the atmosphere of web 2.0 that has truly brought 'geek syndrome' and the unique characteristics of the early adopter demographic to the forefront.

Rather, I'm suggesting that we've managed to create an entire economy that caters to our unique characteristics, and that's encouraged us to get to the point where many of us have well over 100 accounts on new web services.

Re: Are there psychological disorders with us early adopters?

adamposey — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:15:58 -0000

I really think it's a very interesting point of view you propose here. IN fact, I may very well write my own post concerning this topic. :)

Re: Testing post

adamposey — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 12:34:28 -0000

Argh. I be postin' a test comment on me blog.

Re: Feature creep is NOT a feature.

adamposey — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:51:01 -0000

Todd, Toodledo reminds me of a post I recently read on Seth Godin's blog about the 'world's worst toaster'. It was a toaster with tons, and tons of options, but ultimately it wasn't able to keep up with it's more simple toaster competition BECAUSE of those options.

Obviously ToodleDo has a market for people who'd like every feature under the sun, but I feel it will often slow you down with things you don't need.

Re: I love the word "Favorite"

adamposey — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 01:38:14 -0000

I completely agree. I don't feel that the current use of the word 'favorite' really establishes the strength of the word A great example of mediocrity in "Favorite" is YouTube.

I think simply providing a 'like' option as the default, and offering favorite as an option is great. Why? Favorite doesn't mean a thing to people who don't trust you anyway, but to people who trust you that's a powerful recommendation.

Re: Friday’s Bitchmeme: Fav.or.it

adamposey — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:50:47 -0000

What's truly terrible is how great Fav.or.it could be. This negative PR is probably going to stick around for them for a very long time. Shame too. The good news is that it's not unthinkable that other services (Maybe Streamy?) would be able to do the same kind of comment integration.

Re: test

adamposey — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:41:16 -0000

testing