Evan Bartlett ‘s blog

I just read another read write web post about delicious’ top search terms, and I was pretty surprised to see how other people were using the site, or trying to use it.

What this says to me is that one audience is contributing, and another audience is searching.  To explore this a bit more, I figured I’d talk about how I use Delicious:

1) Bookmarking

Any bookmarks that don’t require the content itself to be stored.  If I need the content, I use Diigo to bookmark it, and Diigo also creates a bookmark in Delicious for me.

2) WebApp/Desktop App Discovery:

When I need to find an app or a website for a particular need, Delicious is one of the best filters.  It usually turns up a couple of options, and those options tend to be in line with what I’m looking for, aka these are new-ish, active sites.  Not old school sites with flashing .gifs.  I think this is because people like me are using Delicious.  Its biased towards other tech savvy users, that would be looking for the same time of application.

I find a lot of freeware utilities for windows on here, and quite a few webapps.  For example, when I wanted something to track my books and media, I found lots of viable alternatives on Delicious.

In the end, I see Delicious the resource thats most like the App Store for Webapps idea outlined in my  “Where the webs going” post. 

3) Hot Topic Discovery:

The front page of Delicious is a lot like Digg, it always offers a handful of highly distracting links.  Yet again, its as if these

 were chosen for me.  The focus is still very technical.

A lot of times I’m viewing this top Delicious sites through an aggregator called PopURLS (which I’m obsessed with), and when viewed next to all these other sites, Delicious is overwhelmingly techy.  More in the slashdot camp, than say in the digg camp.

4) Tech Support Resource:

Given that so many people with the same technical interests as me use the site, its not a stretch to see that they would have the same tech support issues as me.  Whenever I’m looking for a new way to get WordPress to do something, or I’m trying to setup some advanced functionality in Quicksilver, I can rest assured that someone has bookmarked the solution on Delicious.

—-

So for me, Delicious IS powerful because of its technical focus, and the top 10 search results finding seems to support this somewhat in the sense that people are not bookmarking your typical web interests.  Why so many people are knocking on the front door with these search terms is unclear.  I’ve always been afraid that Delicious would loose its power as it went mainstream, but maybe the bookmarking barrier is proving to be high enough to preven the masses from cluttering the site with their mainstream interests?  While searching has no barrier to entry, so it reflects a wider audience?

Here’s a few more in my series of predictions for the new year:
 

A smarter address book!

Yes, we’re more connected than ever via social networks, but I can rarely get the right contacts to sync back and forth between my computer and my phone.  Yes, google’s new contact sync is killer, and apps like soocial have a lot of promise, but we should be even further than that by now.  

Based on some brainstorming done a couple years ago, with a buddy in colorado, I’m imagining an app thats more like skydeck and zentact mixed with highrise.  Your address books is your most valuable asset, and right now its spread across gmail, facebook, linkedin, and plaxo.  And its rarely where you need it most, on your phone, the most relevant device when actually interacting with people.

People are working towards this new address book from scratch with the small new companies like skydeck or highrise, an the big boys like Linkedin and Plaxo are also moving this way.  Bernard over at ReadWriteWeb seems to be on the same path with his suggestions for linkedin to “Add a touch of integration with email, a pinch of basic CRM capabilities. Roll it all up into the biggest business contact graph on the planet”.  Throw in some reliable contact syncing, and I’d pay money for that!

To take over your TV!

My year with an Apple TV helped prove to me (and my roommates)_ that we’ve crossed the threshold with on demand video entertainment.  There is enough content out there that you can be entertained, without having to sell your soul to the cable companies.  Combine this with the less-than engaging experience provided by cable boxes and DVRs, I think its now time to go mainstream with web based media in the living room.  

Over the last year or two I’ve found myself watching youtube more and more in social environments on a TV.  Using Seeqpod, you can DJ a party and have music videos come straight from youtube.  Sites like hulu are providing the content and the monetization to make it happen, if you can get it on your tv.  And thats where  Boxee, the Apple TV, and the Xbox netflix deal come into play.  No to mention, who wouldn’t mind cutting back on that cable bill during an economic crisis?

Just wanted to hash out some ideas I think will happen in 2009.  Some of these fall more into the “i hope they will” happen category  Rather than pile them all on in one post, I’ll just do one or two per day.

App store for web apps

Webapps are built, launched, and reach the deadpool at an astounding rate these days.  Its impossible tokeep up with them all.  As the mainstream user realizes that webapps out there exist for every need conceivable, we can’t expect all these people to read blogs like ehub or techcrunch to get the latest and greatest.  There needs to be a centralized directory that helps people discover webapps, find which ones have the most traction, and learn how to use them. Will it look like the ihpone app store, will it look like download.com from cnet?

There are a few players in the space, and most of the existing efforts focus on building a directory for the techy startup venture niche, like crunchbase or tradevibe or Vator.tv  These sites have their place, and I love them, but I’m envisioning something that addresses a different, much larger issue for a much larger audience.

I may be completely wrong, and most of the world might not be interested in web apps.  But if you count the number of times you’ve said “did you know there’s a web app that does just that” to a friend, you might see that these web apps have a larger potential audience!

Omnipresense: Look ma, i’m everywhere!

Yammer launched with a desktop app, iphone app, and blackberry app.  Boxee is on mac, linux, and windows is on the way.  With apple continuing to grow and low cost linux boxes and netbooks gaining traction, does this mean you have to build for more platforms?  Now introduce the palm appstore, along with the android, blackberry, and symbian ones…. you get my point.  To reach larger audience, you’ll have to get on multiple platforms.  What tools are making this possible?

The 3 way combo - thanks Javier Aroche!

In response to RWW’s post on their top 10 apps, here’s the ones that I used a lot in 2008, and why I thought they were relevant within the tech industry.  They are not in any particular order.

Mint

Reminds me to pay my credit cards, helps me separate out my business expenses, lets me know where I’m spending my money, and reminds me how much I’ve lost

Simple, free, and lots of functionality, so much for Money or Quicken.

Posterous

Posterous is doing for email what Twitter did for SMS.  Posterous takes one of the most basic forms of communication (email) and empowers you to be able to post pictures, video, and blog posts to a range of services.  I like this aggregation of tools on the publishing side for power users, and I like that the posterous blog itself is insanely easy to use for your non-techy friends. 

Disqus/Intense Debate

I’ve only been using Disqus, so I’ll focus on that.  What I like, yet again, is the aggregation.  It takes my conversatinos from seperate blogs all across the web and puts them in one place.  More importantly, its put them in email, so i can respond from my phone.  This will get even more interesting as they integrate with facebook connect.

Tripit/Dopplr

The only “location-based” services that I currently use.  GPS enabled mobile apps aren’t far along, and don’t have the critical mass of users.  When I travel, family and friends on facebook want to know where I’m going and these two sites make that easy.  Tripit takes it a step further by organizing my itinerary for me.

Boxee/Apple TV

I know that AppleTV isn’t a webapp, but these two services combined showed me (or rather helped me prove to my roomates) that cable TV is no longer a requirement.  Theres a crticial mass of on demand entertainment via iTunes and Boxee to not need a hundred dollar commitment to the big cable providers.

GetSatisfaction

From the consumers perspective GetSatisfaction aggregates tech support and company contact all into one easy to find location, with one login.  As this post shows, I use a lot of webapps, and eventually have questions for the companies.  Most have terrible forums that are inactive and require seperate logins, and frequent followups to see if your questions have been answered.  Do us a favor, get on GetSatisfaction, we’ll like you more.

 
Anyvite

I hate evite.com.  Anyvite lets me avoid using evite.com, its easy to use, and it looks good.  Strike up another good app for ycombinator!  Unlike other invite systems, I actually get RSVPs to my events, and people use the comments.

Tourfilter

I discoverd and bought more tickets to shows this year through Tourfilter thatn through personal recommendations, last.fm, and ticket master emails combined.  Yeah a lot more people are doing it now, but these guys made my life easy, and they got me to buy a lot of tickets, thats a big success for a webapp.

Aviary – Phoenix

I don’t do graphics work enough to need photoshop on my machine, plus its expensive.  There are tons of simple web-based photo editing sites out there, but this is the only one I kept coming back to after I found out about it.  Its the only one I needed because it did everything.

Highrise

Highrise became a big-small contender in the CRM space this year by adding Deal tracking and full data export.  Not to mention, no CRM comes close to making it this easy to keep track of your contacts in detail.  After falling off the wagon with Salesforce (multiple times), SugarCRM, and PipelineDeals, Highrise is the only one that became critical to my day-to-day activites at work.  Though its not quite ready for a full sales team because the lack of personal views on the activity dashboard and in the contacts.

I’ve been subscribing to emusic for a long time, and I’ve found it provides me with a steady trickle of new songs along with the motivation to go discover new bands.  Knowing that I have 30 songs a month to use, and that emusic only has the more obscure artists/albums, you have to do some creative searching.

I’m mostly using last.fm for discovery, and then I check with emusic before going to amazon.  I’ve also got high hopes that emusic’s a new recommendation engine will make my life a bit easier.  

All that was to make the point that its sometimes tough to find music you want on emusic.  Fred, a bloggin VC and big time music fan, just posted his top 10 albums of the year and most of these can be found on emusic!  

• Bon Iver 
• Okkervil River
• MGMT (not that specific album)
• Jason Collet
• Thao
• She & Him
• Little Joy
• Vampire Weekend
• Sigur Ros (not that specific album)

— ( runner ups) —

• Conor Oberst
• The Rural Alberta Advantage

If you want to try it out, I can invite you via email from my emusic account (you can always sign up on your own), and you get 50 free songs.

Just bought the Blackberry Storm, and its all over the place.  One second you’re loving it, the other your hands are cramped.  Despite all the standard complaints, the phone has its moments of brilliance, and its not the copying and pasting.   The storms power is that it has almost all of the functionality (minus the keyboard) of a Curve AND it adds huge screen.

I’ve always heard that bigger is better, and with monitors that seems to be the case, so don’t you think that it applies to smartphones too?

The true Blackberry fans seem to be recoiling from the Storm back towards their curves and bolds because of the keyboard.  Fred Wilson has even posted about his plans to stick with the curve and its new upgrade here.  I’ll even agree that if you’re composing a huge amount of text on the phone, you might want to wait, but… its going to be really tough for me to go back to a small screen.

How much of a smart phone can it really be with only 12 lines of text on it? Any new phone with a keyboard on the front isn’t a step forward, its just stalling.  Bigger screens drastically increase the potential for the use of the phone as a platform (along with these 2 criteria), not just as a productivity workhorse.  The iphone proved that despite lacking on the productivity side.  Blackberry absolutely could not avoid this big-screen form factor, and I think they’re on the right track.  They may even take it a step further by adding a keyboard to the big-screen form factor (maybe they should have tried this first?)

Yeah the OS is very rough/slow (even after the upgrade), the keyboard-button is pretty iffy (i’m getting a bit more used to it), and the battery life tanked after about 3pm on my first day with a full charge (the iphone 3G only made it to about 11am).  Once you’re past all those issues, it comes down to keyboard vs. big screen.  But open up Viigo (a blackberry RSS reader), side-swipe through your beloved blackberry email, or chat on a massive google talk screen and you’ll see that for Blackberry,  bigger is better too.

So I finally got my hands on a Blackberry Storm, and its not all bad news.  I was beginning to think that it was over before it even began based on the reviews I saw the lat couple days ( CrunchGear, Engadget, Gizmodo, etc.).

The very quick summary is that this phone is not YET silky, sexy, smooth like the iphone, and its not YET screaming fast like the Blackberry Bold, so it could be missing the mark for both of those audiences today. BUT!! It definitely has potential.  

The form factor was great, and the keyboard will ease the switch to a touch screen for the keyboard addicted masses.  Most importantly, its very close (with a few software updates) of feeling like a true Blackberry with a giant screen, and solid multimedia options!

Crackberry , a blog focusing on Blackberry phones, lays out details of some of the potential launch problems that could explain why the software isn’t running so smoothly, and why I’m hoping there will be quick fixes.

In the end, for this phone to compete with the platform that the iphone has become, it will have to do 3 things:

1. The user interface will have to get smoother and smarter to keep the less tech savvy users happy.  To have the reach of the iphone, the Storm will have to get non-power users comfortable doing things like downloading applications, using gps, and surfing the web.  A poor UI could drastically slow those adoption rates.
    
2. The software will have to get much faster to keep the power users happy.  Blackberry gurus that use the Curve or the Bold are accustomed to lightning fast response times.  Their thumbs fly over the keys of a Crackberry because its the only phone that can keep up with their fast paced minds, so don’t slow them down with the Storm (which I felt was as slow as the iphone 3G, when I reviewed it).
    
3. Most importantly, Blackberry AND Verizon (they seem to deserve most of the blame) need to make it an open platform! The iphone falls short in this department, the Storm (and Verizon, because they tend to be control freaks) needs to be more open than the iphone to have a chance.
   -  You can’t lock down GPS, it needs to be open for ALL apps.
   -  You should have included wifi (Verizon shot it down)
   -  You can’t play favorites like apple , the new app center must be transparent/open 

 [Update] just found out Verizon charges extra to use the GPS!  Thats insane!  If you can’t understand why GPS needs to be open on a mobile device and available to as many users as possible, then this device deserves to tank!