Help my bandwidth costs are killing me!

Ash and I were talking recently about how RSS can take a toll on hosting and bandwidth. Well there is a group trying to solve this problem with what is essentially a P2P or bittorrent type load sharing mechanism called feedtree. Great idea!

Shopping with OPML

I just found this great post about how OPML could be used to extend the great work Amazon (or other services) already does trying to work out what matters to you. It's funny though how the blogoshere works, I found the post via another post that basically summarized it. So I will link to both!

The original post I found at Mark's blog
Lisa's post - the actual subject of all this cross linking.

OPML Reading lists and rankings

There has been quite a bit of talk lately about using OPML for more than just storing a manifest of RSS feeds for one's personal use.

The discussion includes lots of great ideas that are best summed up by a post I found on library clips. Well worth the read!

How do you subscribe to a RSS feed?

This might sound like a silly question on a blog for, what is effectively, an RSS gadget.

But it's a valid question that many of our users will be asking us when they get their hands on Touchstone.

It's a question we have been asking ourselves when trying to think of interface design for giving the user the best possible experience when adding a feed to their list.

There have been a number of attempted solutions to this problem, some of which are discussed by this great post by Jeffrey Veen but it seems that the experience is destined to remain inconsistent from app to app for at least the short term.

Windows Vista also promises a subscription system built into IE7 that will make the subscription processes easier.

But none of this solves the problem universally. I guess this is both the power and complexity of the web in general and RSS specifically. It is so simple, and so open to interpretation that there are bound to be many flavors of implementation.

For now, as developers, we are forced to build in as many help mechanisms as possible to get that little URL into our apps.

There are so many possibilities. Tracking the clipboard like our friends at FeedDemon (and others I'm sure), allowing for blog search like Google Reader does, and feed discovery like Safari and the upcoming IE7.

If we wanted to go bonkers, we could write a plug-in for all browsers that discovered feeds for us - using various methods and mechanisms - but it's an awful lot of work for one program when the problem affects us all.

Private Alpha and Site Changes to Celebrate

We are at Private Alpha!

We have a small band of merry men (and elf’s and ompa lompas) currently testing our little baby. It's great! Soon we will take over the world... *cough* oh that was secret. Shh don't tell anyone.

Also, I have uploaded a whole new section of the website available via a number of 'speech bubbles' up the top of the home page.

These 'Bubbles' allow us to talk about usage scenarios for Touchstone in specific terms depending on the type of user who might be using the program.

We are also trying to minimize references to RSS and 'other adapters' to make Touchstone a little less geeky and a little more accessible to mom and dad. For now we are just focusing on the idea of 'subscribing to sites you care about'.

If you would like the private alpha, please drop us a line and we will see what we can do!

Alpha by Sunday night? Maybe

Alpha not far away, guys - in fact thanks to the assistance of a good mate of mine (the StormWarden) who managed to crack a C# AppBar class and get the ticker docking properly. He also added to this by creating types of docks, so you can limit the docking to "Top and Bottom", "Left and Right", or "All Sides". Naturally you can set visualizations to always "float".

He has offered to extend this class so the visualization will dock to the current window with the focus, giving Chris the title bar ticker he wants SOOOOO badly.

...And now for something completely different:

Bi-Directional RSS - Something Chris and I were discussing in our deluded states last night: It occurred to me that the TouchStone outputs do not have to be restricted to the users screen. I think that the possibility of bi-directional RSS is a great idea, and it’s quite exciting because the TouchStone architecture completely accommodates this idea. TouchStone Server...might be a future side project for unilaterally dissecting, prioritizing and parsing RSS feeds and output them in a number of ways, including back into RSS.

Imagine a TouchStone UI which can administer 1000’s of RSS feeds (and other content sources) and filter them for an entire household. RSS alone takes enormous bandwidth – so it would save time and resources (not to mention precious bandwidth) if a UI were developed to determine which household members want which content and using that same UI as an adapter to another TouchStone Core, on another machine. Bi-directional RSS makes this even more powerful again, allowing people to post and reply to content as it is streamed to them live.

Feed usage report

Reading through my feeds today I came across an interesting post titled "RSS is exploding, going beyond blogs" which is about Feedburner's 'Feed for Thought' report.

Interesting reading! Thought I would share.

Still working...

We're still working on Alpha 1. We have completely re-designed the entire UI (just for kicks hah) and are working on implementing the final changes. Hope to have the alpha ready to post tonight or in the early hours of this morning!

*Update at 1:31am* we ran into a few glitches (mainly the IDE working against us actually) so we are postponing the release until next time. Sorry!

An Interesting Conversation

블๑bourboN๑블* says:
yeh
블๑bourboN๑블* says:
u need publicity
블๑bourboN๑블* says:
like just curious, what is ur aim with touchstone ?

There is something very scary about being asked this question, so in the interest of being clear, I thought I would mention it here.

I want it to be popular. I want it to be a synonymous with RSS. When people think Instant Messaging, they think MSN/ICQ/Yahoo - when people think alerts management system, I want them to think TouchStone. I want it to facilitate attention management and augment many of the awesome and popular news readers.

I want TouchStone to be one of those apps you simply have to install before your nice new 'puter, or recently reformatted machine, feels right - the type of app that makes people wonder how they ever worked without it!

It’s funny though, because the more I look for TouchStonesque RSS gadgets on the 'net, the more I find things like this!

RSS Gadget

I have been talking to friends and colleagues about Touchstone and often the first question I get asked is "Oh so it's an RSS Gadget?"

And my answer is always a "Well... yes and no".

That's where it gets more complicated than people like for an 'elevator pitch'.

As we have said in previous posts Touchstone is a gadget that could and will be used to display RSS - and that is absolutely it's first useful function - but in the long run we see it as a persistent (hangs around), discreet (gets out of the way) attention manager (tells you what matters while you're being productive).

How is this different? Because the information Touchstone manages for you may not be coming from RSS - but rather form adapters that get content/alerts from local and web-based applications.

So Touchstone is absolutely useful as an RSS Gadget - but that is just the tip of our little iceberg.

According to Site Meter stats the average reader spends 96 seconds reading the average blog. Do our bosses know this?

I know this isn't really anything to get excited about, but I have to say that I’m really excited about us getting ranked 1 and 2 on Google. I think I really want to get ranked 1 for "rss gadget" but I guess we have to start somewhere.

BTW, TouchStone pre Alpha is running at the moment with Chris' FeedDemon OPML file and "The Office - Email Scandal..." - apparently. ;)

I also had an argument with a person I work closely with (in the real world - as opposed to the 'TouchStone' world I seem to have found myself in recently) about the intrinsic value of blogs and other personalised content on the web. They were claiming that blogging is just as bad as the old days of the internet when every second person had a dodgy website made from Word saying "Under Construction" or "this is my website and i have 2 cats and a dog".

I disagree with this. Passionately! I argued the virtues of blogging and RSS. Blogging is the long tail of publishing. And on the internet, nothing is as important as the long tail.

If you think something - and write it down - then the odds are other people in the world feel the same way. It's a way for us to connect to other people we otherwise never would/could.

OPML Goodness

We now have the RSS adapter loading up a list of feeds from an OPML file.

I loaded up my FeedDemon feeds with a couple of clicks and now Touchstone Alpha is sitting on my desktop giving me my headlines while I type this.

As one would expect, we are going to make sure Touchstone supports all the great standards we all know and love. Supporting RSS and OPML are just our first steps.

We are very close to the first official Alpha release. I am very excited!

Props have to go to Ashley for being able to whip this thing up so fast. He's a champion.

According to Touchstone - "Firefox 1.5 is finally coming... maybe" - good to know!

Momentum

Momentum... It’s a wonderful thing… it allows us to feel the wind on our backs and create snowball effects of productivity and/or fun.

Many people often overlook momentum as a key driver for success when it comes to business, communities and life.

I think it’s safe to say that we now have development momentum with Touchstone. We are building new features and polishing up UI components more quickly than we ever expected and it's only encouraging us to do more.

Today I developed our “Single Ticker” UI and Ash implemented it. This effectively makes the app usable! It’s very exciting! But it also makes me think about the work we still need to do to get a more important type of momentum… Community Adoption.

I think that Touchstone is a wonderful idea (obviously) but the thing that will really make it shine is a level of community interest and involvement that makes our little project more than a few lines of code… something that gives it life.

I just did something very stupid but Chris still loves me.

I just opened a .vb file from another project, and upon closing the window (and subsequently not saving) I realised all too late, that Visual Studio had in fact oped the file inside the Touchstone project. You can probably guess the outcome.

So off I go again, recoding the complete structure of the BagItAndTagItParser class – be assured that I wont be opening any “stray” .vb files for the rest of the day! Chris is ok with this though, because we just implimented the first ticker system and its actually reasonably functional!

It’s interesting, starting this project has opened my eyes to a whole subculture of RSS, which I was previously unaware of. I think that reading the excellent intellect of Nick (from FeedDemon) and others regarding some sort of solution to the growing ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) is inspired.

With the rapid expansion of content sources, the more ways we can think of to manage this content without hindering productivity (I am a pragmatist after all) is where we need to redouble our efforts.

This is the philosophy behind Touchstone – and I’m coding as fast as I can. Aside from the heavy setback today, I should have the Bag it and Tag It Parser complete before the coding marathon tonight.

If you feel inspired enough to chat with us through comments on this blog, please do – we like to feel popular.

I Should'a Put This In a Comment...

As you would expect, I read Chris’ last post probably the moment he posted it, and while this is technically a reply to his post – I felt its simply too important to bury.

The point, dear bloggers, is that RSS readers are all well and good… but nothing exists to manage your feeds when your being productive – as Chris said, when you’ve got your readers (or other apps) minimised. Having all 120 of your feeds managed and given to you in a way you can actually digest, is what we’re actually talking about.

By the way, the BagItAndTagItParser class is well underway.

Attention Attention everywhere...

Nick Bradbury and a number of RSS/Attention heavy weights are discussing methods and mechanisms for determining and storing attention information in either OPML or a dedicated Attention XML format.

I have, for a long time, used FeedDemon and I love Nick's work. With a growing number of aggregators generating and supporting Attention data we will all have a better experience trying to read and manage our news!

You can find the latest two posts from Nick here.

Attention.opml or Attention.rss?
An Attention Namespace for OPML

As we have always stated, TouchStone is not a competitor to full-fledged RSS readers. Rather it is a persistent UI that acts as a companion to any site/service so that the user can read news/updates/information about their applications at all times (in a ticker or sidebar format).

It so happens that we are all excited about RSS, but Touchstone could very well be a handy Microsoft Money companion as well (for example).

For example, Nick's FeedDemon could use Touchstone to alert the user of new content it acquires from feeds.

Why wouldn't he just stick to his existing alert system? He could!

But by using Touchstone as a supplement, he (or other developers) could take advantage of all the time we're spending on new and fancy alerts and a persistent news ticker/sidebar type interface that keeps the user informed even while FeedDemon is minimized.

When the user is ready to read their news - they would click the headline on Touchstone and head right back to FeedDemon where they belong.

Names are important!

Well.. first let me re-iterate, that i still stand by my initial feelings that our names for the three distinct areas of the Touchstone Core are appropriately and awesomely named, but I have to say...damn!

"Namespace TouchStone.Core
Public Class BagItAndTagItPaser"

It is getting very annoying to type "BagItAndTagItPaser" every time Ii need to create an instance of the class...bah!

On the other hand I have perfected the rounded form code. It's pretty cool how VS.Net 2003 allows you to bind a form's boundary to a defined region, but i have to admit that its not really easy to use. I found a cool little site with a bunch of useful apps - in particular, one that allows you to get the coordinates of a mouse drawn window. I had to tweak the output, but it's great for anyone interested with the idea of non-standard window.

This brings me to the reason for my post tonight, the first OFFICIAL screenshot of the TouchStone Core GUI. I admit that it needs some tweaking, but overall, I think Chris' plans for a simple, clean and elegant GUI are a complete success.



I think the man has to go actually. I think it needs to be replaced with the TouchStone "balls". I estimate that the "BagItAndTagIt" Passer should be complete by Monday night. Here's hoping I guess.

Online again...Mostly

A follow-up to my last post I have to say - I was without my precious internet for only a few days and I’m a little rugged from the experience.

It also reinforced what might happen to TouchStone if a person is offline for a while and then get their feeds updated. Could be chaos - better bring the buffer back? I'm not sure. Perhaps I should pass the buck and make sure that the UI buffers content it can't show rather than hold up the alerts by adding buffering to the core? mmm.....shit.

While Chris is partying away I’m left to make the really hard choices.

Like, should I include Ninjas or not?

He leaves ALL the hardwork for me.

Website online

I just posted our very first website. This will be a landing page for the general public to come on and learn about our modest little gadget.

I am sure there is lots of room for improvement - but it's something to get us started!

Offline.....and hating it!

After a fiasco resulting in the temporary disconnection of my internet connection, I am suddenly faced with the harsh reality of being disconnected from my regular (and only source) of information.

Now it's a true statement that im not an RSS junkie (like Chris) for the simple reason that I was grossly unhappy with the delivery of RSS feeds into my machine - or is that my life. I have tried RSS in the past, and enjoyed the simplicity, but it was full of holes, and poorly (and ugly) executed.

So as I found myself feeling more and more isolated from reality without the net, I found myself appreciating more and more the power of TouchStone.

Now...."Show me the Gadget!"

What's in a name?

Today we sat down and reviewed the entire Touchstone architecture. We had done this before, and the result of our review was simply to clarify some points, crystallize some others and make sure we were both on the same page.

Basic things like the system will be event driven so that a change at the source will invoke a change in the UI as quickly as possible. XML will be used at all end-points and will be transformed into memory data structures internally for speed and efficiency.

It was all very interesting - the result was a pretty Viso diagram we can stick on our wall.

One major thing that did result from the discussion was our new component names. I will give you some examples:

1. The Bag it and Tag it Parser
2. The How Important is it Parser
3. Make the UI do Something Parser

According to Ashley we must now stick to these naming conventions (apparently I was the one that set the rule about naming conventions being of the utmost importance).

When I mentioned that I thought it might be a bit cumbersome to refer to various parts of the system by these names, Ash said I may refer to them as whatever I want when he's not around - as long as it's not on the blog, or in the public domain, or with people.

So I guess... He's really bossy.

Added FeedBurner

I just added FeedBurner/XML subscription icon on the right of the page. You would think Blogger would make this easier/built in.

Now that we have your Attention

This is a follow up to my previous post "Can we have your Attention please?"

Attention is getting more and more ‘press’ in the blog-o-sphere these days - so much so in fact, that my latest attempt to read all my feeds today has helped crystallize some ideas.

Current Landscape

• Gathering information about your attention is well underway (attentiontrust etc).
  
  
• Acting on your attention to give you the right type of information is underway (Google Desktop and Amazon’s recommendation engine).
  
  
• Collecting ‘group attention’ information and using it as filter to sort content is at the heart of many new sites/projects/companies (memorandum, digg).
  

Fundamental Principles

• Attention is a commodity that each of us are quickly sapping each day (Attention Deficit).
  
  
• Attention is a renewable resource that can, on a day-by-day basis, be better used and focused to achieve our personal goals.
  
  
• If we’re not careful there will be so much information that most of the population will simply ‘turn off’.
  

Room for innovation
Even with all these great services the result is still more RSS. There is room on the edges, where users actually get their hands on the RSS, to help them digest it more effectively. Specifically:

• Giving your attention should not be a chore (This is distinct and different from giving information about your attention – which is already collected automatically by Amazon type systems). I am talking about feed readers and other mechanisms for focusing your attention on something.
  
  
• Once your attention is focused, the relevant site/service/content should add something to your day (enjoyment, productivity, experience, knowledge etc) in a way that fits into your lifestyle without requiring you to shift gears all the time (e.g staying informed while you work - rather than having to bury your nose in a feed reader all the time).
  

I call these two items “Content Form Factor”.

But this is not the Form Factor that device manufacturers talk about when they talk about PDAs, Tablets, Cell phones etc – I am talking about the method that content on those devices is packaged up and delivered to your eyes (or ears) in ways that make sense based on importance, priority, relevance, context and the attention preferences or automatically generated attention profile of the participant.

The issue at hand is not how to get a user’s attention information (that’s easy) but rather how to help the user manage what their paying attention to across all the things they care about – both local and in the cloud. To service their needs intuitively.

Content as a service.

Update: All of this was obviously a prelude to our thoughts and ideas for Touchstone. We have since made some important updates and announcements about how Touchstone will help users focus their attention... these include:

'I think therefore I-AM'

'What's an Attention Engine'

Moving Parts

Early on in this project (I guess it's still early on - but I mean even earlier than now - like in the first 'meeting') we decided that Touchstone would actually be made up of 3 categories of moving parts.

They were.

1) The Adaptors
2) The 'Core'
3) The Visualizations

This meant that 3rd parties could write Adaptors and Visualizations to add value to the app!

But recently I had to go into Photoshop and design an interface for 'The Core'. The mandate was to create something elegant and simple that would not really clash with any visualization or skin that was eventually created or used with Touchstone.

But when I sat down to start, something became quickly apparent. 'The Core' was a boring ass name :)

So... I renamed it. 'The Attention Engine'. This is, as the previous name suggested, the core of Touchstone. The adaptors feed the engine, and the engine feeds the visualizations.

I mocked it up and ran it by Ash - he says he loves it! (he's not one to lie so I believe him hah).

Here is the mock-up for anyone who might be interested!

I also designed a wallpaper today because I recently got two beautiful 19' Samsung monitors that needed some nice eye candy in the background!

We have RSS!

I just saw System Tray alerts fire off based on TorrentSPY RSS. Wow :)

Ok so it isn't going to put Microsoft out of business (was that even a stated goal? hah) but it is bringing back lots of memories of earlier projects when we wern't working just to meet customer expectations and budget constraints - but rather working to create something. Something we loved.

We since switched it over to whedonesque.com RSS because:

a) It's less illegal
b) Whedon is our master now

Back to making the settings screen for me now...

Can we have your Attention please?

I stole this headline from Media Guerrilla but I am hoping you/they will forgive me because I want to both discuss their article and reference something we are working on right now.

The article talks about a growing 'Attention Deficit'. The idea that with a growing number of information sources that our Attention - which is actually a finite resource - will become saturated.

This is interesting to me because yesterday I was writing our 'manifesto' for Touchstone and the first word I used was 'attention'.

When we started Touchstone, Attention was just one reason I thought it might be a necessary and successful tool. Over the last couple of weeks though, the growing attention deficit problem is quickly becoming the number one reason to build/install/use a tool like Touchstone.

I really feel like we can chip away at this problem by engineering creative ways to help people focus their attention at the right time, without becoming overwhelmed.

I will post the manifesto soon for all to read. Of course it will just be a draft (beta?) - but it's something we can work on together.

Just call me Big Kev

I'm excited. System Tray Alert UI behaviors are well on their way and we have completed the alert buffer subsystem (and watched it work). I feel refreshed, tired, but refreshed. I found myself marching forward with new passion and determination.

Next: the audacious task of developing the custom event triggers.

Alerts are alarming

Today we are working on alerts. Sort of working backwards from the UI, to the alert queue, to the 'new item' event.

We thought we would post a picture of what a Touchstone alert might look like in the alpha version.

So here it is! Isn't the transparency and fancy font layout beautiful. We thought so.

v0.0.1

Well, thanks to Chris and his intrepid suggestions, we have chosen to build v0.0.1 as the first client build for the project. The process has been very interesting.

In this build we have elected to shelf the marquee for the time being and work on the far easier messengeresque style alert UI system - and the results are fantastic. The _event form spawns each time that an alert is received and it has built in functionality that enables each alert spawn to determine when and where it should appear on the screen.

Technically speaking the 0.0.1 build isn’t much at all, but its a valid proof of concept that has shaped the way the TouchStone UI will operate.

The Current List of Problems (what we are so cutely describing as the CLOP):

We are having troubles with alerts overlapping each other if alerts are terminated as a new one are spawned. To combat this we have developed the TouchStone Alert Buffer - a subsystem that queues up Alerts that are unable to be displayed at the screen immediately.

Displaying alerts on any screen is going to be a problem, but for the time being, the screen is going to be divided up into "slots". These slots will be defined by a member of a UI class called clrGlobal. The array will store which slots are filled and which are empty. Events will be launched into available slots or be moved to the buffer subsystem. The number of slots will be derived later to accommodate screens of any resolution.

Apart form this, things are actually moving far faster then I initially thought possible. More importantly though, things are fun - so it makes the journey all the more rewarding.

Information Overload

This is an interesting post about RSS overload. The premise at the end of the post is an interesting one - having 'editors' sort the news for you and deliver just the best information.

At the end of the day though, the author recommends a 'tabloid' view. Interesting idea hey?

I am not sure how we, as a community, will solve the information overload problem. Perhaps Touchstone, as a discrete information delivery mechanism can bring us some way along the path of measuring attention, interest and context and only deliver the news that matters to you, at the right time.

Also the author mentions a 'tabloid' view as the viewing/reading model. I am interested in that idea too.

Check out the full article 'Feed Reading Lifecycle'

The Bane of my Existance

Interactive Scrolling Marque's are going to be the death of me. Already i have started to dream about them. Apparently, the windows GDI device doesnt like Interactive Scrolling Marque's . Under VB.Net when a label is given a transparent background, and then moved, it apprently takes 40-50% of my CPU grunt (constantly) and the animation is far too slow anyway. Bah! I shall have to experiment and see if i can fake the transparency with duplicate background images.

Overall the interface demos are comming along quite well. Once i nail this problem, the real fun will begin.

Hi Everybody.....

This is my first (of many) official posts regarding, what we are so modestly describing as the "universal gadget". I thought that of a way of commemorating such a momentous occasion, I would upload a screenshot of our first UI brainstorm sessions.

I am extremely excited about this project. Somehow there is something idealistic about it. It's something that’s a piece of something far bigger (the web 2.0 evolution) and it has awoken something in me which has been dormant for a long time – I’m not sure what that is yet, but it's like being on the edge of a large cliff face,and yet being completely unafraid of what the future holds.

To me, this is more then technology. I want Touchstone to become an experiment in sociology. I want us all to use technology to become more than what we are.

I want it to become a piece of all of us.

Hello World

Welcome to the TouchStone development Blog – This is our first post!

“Hello World” (har har)

We will use this blog to keep all those who are interested up-to-date with our ideas, thoughts, explanations of new features and decisions as well as general musings from the development team.

Stay tuned for more information!