Rather than continue addressing these iphone feature specific comments, I wanted to touch on the bigger picture. What will the iphone do? No, not features, but big picture market and social transformations!

Read Write Web really nails it here, when they suggest that the iphone is going to move in on the desktop market. All those teens that used to log into AOL chat rooms, which have since moved to Facebook and Myspace are going to be able to get that experience on their phone, at anytime…..anywhere. I thought I saw some recent articles stating how popular the iphone is with kids, anyone able to track that down?

This is where the big money is, and this is where I see blackberry having some trouble. They took the enterprise market, which was the only market at the time (Dell was in the same boat when desktops and laptops were king). The iphone is creating a second major mobile market, which consists of the masses that were never going to participate using a blackberry or windows mobile phone (even though those phones could technically do it).

Similarly, I see the Kindle as having the same effect. Its forging its own market for midsized mobile data devices, albeit in a much less rapid and sexy way.

Yes, I said it, the big money. Millions and millions of CONSUMERS hooked on mobile devices more than willing to pay for apps, compulsive content purchases on the fly, or download apps powered by advertising.

So despite the fact that I don’t think the iphone is for everyone (and I hope alternatives continue to develop), the potential is quite clear. Blackberry is freaking out about this, and is desperately trying to build phones that artsy hipsters will want to buy.

Whether or not thats good for us as a whole, I don’t know yet. I suspect theres going to be some pretty interesting social changes as our less mobile friends and family catch up (my mom just sms’ed me for the first time last month!).

1. I save Links
2. I save/archive the full or partial content of articles/posts/etc
   
3. I save specific clips of content within a page
   
4. I save certain clips of content along with remarks to be publish on my blog
   
5. I save things to send to my phone via sms
6. I save clips of content that I want to email to people
7. I save multiple pieces of content around a specific topic or multiple clips pertaining to one topic

Any of these things I save, I always want the ability to choose whether it is private, public, or shared to a restricted group of users. AND I don’t want them to have to have an account on the same service in order to see this information I’m sharing.

Private – just for me
Public – for everyone
Restricted Group -just a list of users I choose.

Now, how do I currently save each of these information types:

1. I save Links
   • Delicious, Diigo, Gmail
2. I save/archive the full or partial content of articles/posts/etc
   • Diigo, Scrapbook, Notebook, Clipmarks
3. I save specific clips of content within a page
   • Google Notebook, Clipmarks, Diigo
4. I save certain clips of content along with remarks to be publish on my blog
   • Diigo, Clipmarks, WordPress
     
5. I save things to send to my phone via sms
   • “Send via SMS”, Google SMS
6. I save clips of content that I want to email to people
   • “Gmail This”, Diggo, Clipmarks, Google Notebook
7. I save multiple pieces of content around a specific topic or multiple clips pertaining to one topic
   • Google Notebook
     

As you can see, there is a relatively concise grouping of types of data, but the choices for where I can store this data are rather mind boggling. I would like to reduce that clutter, and in further posts will try to propose a solution.

1) list out your favorite bands
2) put in your email
3) get an email when they play in your town 

Its really that simple, and its actually useful. I’ve bought a lot of tickets for shows i learned about through them. Shocking that people build functional, simple websites that actually do something for you and make your life easier!  

Look forward to seeing what they do in the future.     

It was downloadable from my phone, easy to setup, free for use with one personal calendar, it worked well/consistently, and it worked OTA (Over the Air)! What more could you ask for?

I highly recommend this, and would love for them to come out with something for Blackberry.

There were many other solutions, but none of them inspired confidence like OggSync and I don’t want to sync through Outlook.

Others:

• www.goosync.com/
• http://www.milow.net/public/projects/activegcsync-project-page.html
  
• http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/
• http://code.google.com/p/gadjet/
• http://www.scheduleworld.com/tg/cal/day.jsp
• http://www.nuevasync.com/
• http://spanningsync.com/ (ical)
• http://www.gcalsync.com/
• http://www.syncmycal.com/
• http://www.saraiya.com/
• http://www.companionlink.com/products/companionlinkforgoogle.html
• http://www.mobilegcal.com/
• How to Sync Google Calendar with Smartphones
  

Should it really be this hard? I complained about this before.

• Scrapbook – Firefox extension for archiving a web page to your computer only
• Google Notebook – application for clipping sections of content into a notebook, where you can group similar content
• Diigo (I previously used Furl ) – social bookmarking application that allows you to clip content and archive online copy of full content

• Delicious – the social bookmarking application that i’ve used the longest. I have Diigo post a copy of each bookmark to del.icio.us
• Google Docs – web based word processor that can also publish to a blog
• WordPress – open source blogging engine
• Clipmarks – similar to Diggo, with a touch of Google Notebook, it allows you to clip content easier from a page and share it via a blog or email.
• Google Reader – very close to being the best RSS reader
• Feed Demon – passable desktop RSS reader for windows that syncs with newgator service, and Net News Wire
• Net News Wire – my favorite Mac feed reader (see review here )
• ecto – my favorite desktop blog editor
• Gmail – my favorite email client, and one that can be used to store practically anything (aka CRM, storage, Task Manager )
• Gmail This! – a bookmarklet that clips a link and selected content directly into a new gmail message

• Send via SMS – a button on certain services that allows you to SMS data to yourself or others (Hopstop and Google Maps do this too)

At some point I touch every one of these applications. Whether its just reading RSS feeds, publishing blog posts, or trying to capture useful information for later. This drives me nuts! Some days I use diigo, others I use google notebook, and then with some articles I clip content for offline use, so I use Scrapbook.

There always seems to be exceptions for each piece of software. There’s always some small reason that I can’t use it, so then I have to go find another. Diigo limits how much you can clip and won’t archive password protected information. Google Notebook becomes hard to manage once you have over 20 or so notebooks. Google Docs doesn’t fully integrate with WordPress. Google reader is great for reading feeds, but terrible at organizing them into folders. Clipmarks is similar to Google Notebook and to Diigo, but lets you clip more content from different parts of a page. You get the idea.

The point is: There is a workflow to processing information, and there are only a limited set of actions that you can take at any point in time. The process has been stewing in my mind for months, and now i’d like to map this out, and see why no one has yet come up with the ultimate solution.

Honestly, I wasn’t so shocked. I’ve used flickr, zoomr, picasa online, and for local file management I’ve used ACDSee, iphoto, and picasa. None of them do exactly what I want, and none of them seem to propose an easy process for publishing your pictures.

These are all the steps nessecary to have a new person add photos to a
Flickr group:

• Click the link on this invite
• If you don’t have a yahoo account create one.
• On the main page the first option says Upload Or, look at our uploading

tools…

• Click on the tools.
• Download whichever works for your computer
• Install that
• Add all of your photos with that tool
• Click upload
• Add tags (what are tags?)
• Click create sets and type (group name) (in the future, you will click the drop down and choose North Magee)
• Upload
• When done, view photos.
• Along the right hand side, you should see the (group name) set with a link that says Edit, click on that
• Click batch edit then add to group
• Select (group name)
• At the top right click the Flickr logo
• Click Your Groups
• Click (group name)
• Click invite and add the e-mail address of other members.

Things I like about Diigo:

• Being able to clip content from an article and save it with the bookmark.
• Having an archived copy of the article when I bookmark it.
• Being able to share the bookmark to a “group” within Diigo.
• Being able to have my bookmarks set to private by default, so that I don’t share company research with the world.
• Automatically seeing highlights of clipped text on articles I’ve already bookmarked.
• The Firefox plug-in “auto-fills” tags as you try to type, which helps you stick to a specific groups of tags, so they end up more organized.

Things I don’t like about Diigo:

• I really would like to be able to archive password protected content. If I can copy and paste it from the browser, then I should be able to archive it to my bookmarking application for future reference.
• More powerful group features, like being able to manage and view the tags, as well as being able to get a private RSS feed of all the bookmarks that are being added to that group.
• Discussions, the concept is interesting in theory but I still have not figured out how to use them. Maybe they will be useful from the group level.
• There was no clear feedback mechanism for Diigo, since then they have launched a Diigo forum, which is a step in the right direction.
• The Firefox plug-in added a right-click context menu drop down that really drove me crazy, though I was eventually able to turn it off.
• No way to manage multiple Diigo accounts. You have to go to the Diigo page, logout, then log back in to be able to use a different account from your Diigo Firefox plug-in.

Generally speaking, I think Diigo is one of the most powerful social bookmarking tools out there, though I don’t think I’m using it for any social purpose’s. Most of my personal bookmarks I just have Diigo automatically post a copy to my del.icio.us account as well. The group features are useful, the archiving features are great, but there’s a lot more to be done before a tool like this can be the single tool to help someone process all of the data they go through on the Web at a given day.

Real World (offline) - here we take in information from people directly through word of mouth, or we discover new information to track from our own original ideas, or by being prompted or informed through media (books, articles, commercials, signs, flyers, etc)

Online - here we take in information through e-mail, rss feeds, traditional news sites, etc

Regardless of where it comes from here is an outline of all the different types of data I might want to take-in or track:

• Contacts
• Locations
• bars, restaurants, clubs
• stores
• travel ideas
• Consumables
• Products (cloths, gadgets, etc)
• Books
• Music
• Movies
• Websites
• Ideas
• Writing (blogs, journal, fiction, etc)
• Business Ideas
• Web apps
• Vacation Ideas
• Reflections/Observations
• Personal Information Repository
• Transactions (purchases, etc)
• Passwords
• Accounts
• Finances
• Insurance, etc

From the Hall: GmailThis!

GmailThis! <– just drag this to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.

The Gmail This bookmarklet rocks, and Its worked its way into my daily routine much faster than any new application. For some reason I want to compare this to the social bookmarking apps, and I definitely picked this up faster than those, and its doing a better job of getting my links and articles to the people I think should read them.

Feature Request: I’d love to see this integrated with delicious or onlywire! Combining gmail and delicious could allow you to track interesting conversations about articles. Diigo takes a stab at this, but the actual commenting doesn’t work in closed groups. It all goes back to the BLAG concept, that I continue to seek out a solution for.