Who do these guys think they are?

Dear Chris and Ashley,

Who do you guys think you are! You promise to help us manage our attention. You promise a beautiful, discrete and polished application that will tell us what we need to know - when we need to know (like my mum!).

What do you do instead? After months of waiting for your sorry arses you finally deliver a program that won't even run after I install it. Don't you test this crap? You are not helping me manage my attention - you're wasting my time.

'Alpha' is not a cover for 'crap'. And you sirs.. are crap.

You're ex alpha tester

Mr Unhappy

This was the kind of email and forum posts we were expecting when we released the first widely distributed version of Touchstone to hundreds of people last night only to have reports start pouring in that it was crashing on start-up!

In fact, that letter above was just made up by me. I couldn't use a real example because we didn't get any emails like that! They were all wonderfully understanding and sympathetic and most of all.. helpful! We got stack traces and event logs and screen captures and everything else we could hope for - even though you all have not even seen our app - you still gave us your attention and pitched in to help.

For that - we are very, very grateful.

We have spent today trying to diagnose the problem... but we are coming across a little glitch - how do you fix a problem that doesn't seem to present itself?

Last night I couldn't even run Touchstone, and now it runs without a glitch. What did I change? Nothing! The bug just went away. It's as if it never happened. Which is exactly why we released it - it wasn't happening to us until we announced it!

So is this a load/scale issue? It's not quite clear. The only way to test that for sure is to spam everyone some more and see if it happens again. Something I am hesitant to do - I don't want to disturb everyone again if the build turns out to be faulty again.

We have made a number of pieces more fault tolerant and asked the people engaged on our forums to provide some additional feedback.

Once we go through that - we will tentatively try to announce a patch.

Thank you all once again for your patience and lets hope our second attempt is less.. lame!

*Goes back to work*

What makes a Touchstone adapter different from a Widget/Gadget

If you have been following our blog you will have noticed an ongoing 'conversation' about the difference between Touchstone and a widget/gadget platform like the Google sidebar, Windows Sidebar or Yahoo Widget Engine.

Well recently I recieved an email from one of our Adapter developers out there as he was just getting started, and his observations (in regard to the difference) were right on the money. So I thought I would share! Let's call him 'Al'.

Al Writes:

As far as adapters, I think the real value in this [touchstone] platform is that priorities can be set to allow the user to manage what they see and how they see it.

So I'm trying to contrast what Touchstone does with regular old Yahoo Widgets\MS Gadgets. I'm thinking that while something like a stock ticker is great (and typical of a widget/gadget platform), a stock alert ticker would be even better.

This would be where the user can specify stocks to watch and then configure triggers under certain conditions.

I think in terms of threshold based alerts, so that way I am not overloaded with 10 gadgets on my screen! I only see the ones where certain criteria have been met and my importance thresholds have been exceeded. Basically, while the regular suspects are good to have ( e.g. RSS viewer, stock ticker, etc) the differentiating factor for your platform needs to be attention based widgets, since all other widget engines have these other ones already.

I would agree with Al almost 100%. Here are the points of difference as I see them between the development of a normal stock quote widget on widget platform, and a Stock Quote Input Adapter on Touchstone.

1. You don't have to develop any UI because you are only grabbing stock data and injecting into Touchstone. Touchstone's Output Adapters look after the rest.
   
   
2. The user is not seeing all the information all the time in a little stock quote gadget or window - they see only what matters based on the importance of the stock/quote>
   
   
3. You can get ALL the stock information and inject it ALL into Touchstone - They would probably just scroll across the ticker.
   
   But the real innovation is when your Input Adapter allows the user to set triggers for 'what to watch' (E.g. If a stock drops by 20% then tell me about it now!). In this way, when this event happens, an item you inject would have a 'declared importance' of 5. This declared importance is combined with other factors and used to alert the user in a more 'disruptive' way.

All in all, this distinguishes Touchstone from a widget/gadget platform and makes it an alerts/updates and attention management platform.

Cool huh? :)

Thanks for that great observation Al.

Someone Pulled the Plug

Guys sorry about the troubles lately. It seems all I have done this week is worked on the one part of Touchstone I can’t stand (a.k.a. Feed Adapter) and fought with the hosting company to get us the heck, back online.

I am pleased to report that the issues should now be over.

Symptoms may have included; inability to use the invite system, inability to launch Touchstone, and the inability to browse to /use the community site.

There is a silver lining, however, in that our server is getting a major upgrade and relocation to a better data centre, so hopefully these issues are now in the past.

Now if I could just get SQL Server access back, we’ll be right-as-rain.

Yes men

One of the reasons Ashley and I are so interested in Touchstone is that in the past we have worked on ventures where we had to have sales teams that had to convince customers and partners of using our (usually fairly complicated) products.

With Touchstone we have decided to have a totally different attitude. We call it being 'xen'. We promised ourselves that we would never try to 'sell' people on Touchstone. If they got it by themselves then they were the people we wanted to talk to!

This is all fine and good and a surprising number of people have 'just got it' and contacted us out of the blue. It's been very gratifying. But sometimes the result of this approach is that you only hear 'yes' or 'that's so great' and never any real challenges to your ideas.

Recently I have been having a bit of a fun debate with someone about Touchstone and it's usefulness and viability as product or even an investment opportunity. I don't really hope to change their mind and I am sure they don't care if I change mine - but I think the debate is worth having - and its fun to have your assumptions challenged. It helps you clarify your decisions (for yourself) and re-evaluate your position.

The worst thing someone can do is stubbornly protect their own position out of fear - they should learn from the criticism of others.

Did I Write That Adapter?

I’ve been running the latest build of Touchstone on my home workstation for over 2 days continuously now, with no errors. Its good to know that it seems most of the fu**ups features people have been reporting are actually a fault with the Adapters and not the core, and while this is a bitter-sweet victory, overall, I have been very happy with this outcome.

Chris and I have always worked very hard to get this developed as quickly as possible (while still maintaining some form of “life”) but recently we’ve really been burning the candle at both ends to get the major public build which will go to everyone on the mailing list (…so if your not on it). We are very close and it’s getting hard to keep the lid on the present when we are so excited about the future plans for client-side attention management deliverables.

I really hope Chris announces *some* of these ideas soon, because I think I'm going to explode!

Also, don’t forget to checkout www.areyoupayingattention.com, the Touchstone Community website (also available from the “forums” link on the top of the page),a collaboration point for developers and users of Touchstone to discuss things they love, hate and want to see in future releases of Touchstone.

New media attention

I just discovered, via AVC, an amazing post about hyperefficiently allocating attention in the new media landscape. But this wasn't a technological or theoretical discussion like most of the 'Attention' posts out there - it was an analysis about what will constitute the new new media giants of tomorrow. You guessed it - Attention.

A quote:

Consider MySpace. MySpace's success is driven by it's proprietary music and now video player - the deepest social widget in the new media world. It is what lets fans connect to bands they might love - it is what allocates their attention hyperefficiently (more efficiently than Top 40 charts, corporatized radio robo-DJs, or even next-gen corporobots, like Pitchfork Media).

Read the rest Research Note: Discovering the Wrong Future - Denuo Mini Case Study

It's amazingly insightful. I wonder if Umair would consider Touchstone as generic plumbing (taboo in his scenario) or as an extension of hyperefficiently allocating attention?

Craigslist sucks

Can I ask a question that may get me shot by the rest of the geek community? Why does this site...


Command so much attention?

Ok so it was one of the first classified sites to be so liberal with it's posting structure and whatever else... but come on.. Look at that page design.

Some might say it's clean and simple - I say it shows a complete lack of style or substance.

Sure I have been accused of being too wordy and over complicating things, but surely the design sensibilities of Craiglist are the 180' opposite of that. And extremes in any direction are not good. Even Google has a logo on the top of it's page!

It makes me wonder...

Touchstone Site Tweaks

We have tweaked the site a little to now reveal links to our Forums (from the main navigation bar), fixed up a glitch on the blog that was appearing in Firefox (thanks TBD!) and added an overview page for those who are not technical and don't understand our crazy manifesto.

Adoption of RSS publishing soars

In an article on Yahoo Finance it claims that JupiterResearch Finds That RSS Spending Soars Despite Low Perceived Adoption Rates.

Good news for RSS readers and the attention economy in general!

Here's an excerpt:

The growth of RSS is also highlighted by the fact that 48 percent of current RSS publishers are spending $250,000 or more to deploy and manage syndicated content. However, JupiterResearch has also found that spending at this level is inconsistent with the current rate of adoption.

Perhaps it's time for an Enterprise ready RSS tracking application that helps staff keep track of industry news and the company intranet without interrupting their workflow hey.

Found via the Social Software Weblog (Which seems to refuse to mention Touchstone on its posts hah).

An audience of 53,651

This post has been going around for the last few days and I think it's a fascinating discussion.

Basically the premise is as follows:

As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.

I think that's true.

As Brad says in Feld Thoughts getting the first 25,000 users does not mean you've made it. They are the users who are trying everything out as soon as it comes out (thanks to TechCrunch).

The question is, can your product or service grow its user base over time (by actually adding ongoing value to people's lives in a way that keeps people coming back and encourages additional adoption from a broader audience).

A comment in that post even refers to the first 25,000 users as possibly having a negative affect on product development because their feedback may potentially 'geekify' things too much - makeing it inaccessible to the mainstream.

While I will say it would be great to have 25,000 users (or even 53,651) - I tend to agree. In the next few months it will be a key concern for us to...

a) Get 25,000 users that turn into 50,000 users
b) Make sure we resist the urge to geekify Touchstone for the early adopters

I think, at least in theory, that Touchstone might have 'mass market' potential because it is aimed at people who aren’t necessarily information junkies (although it helps them out too). It's aimed at those that don't necessarily want a 'news reader' but rather want a way to stay in touch with things (News, Torrents, CRM, CMS etc) with a heads-up-display while they work.

Touchstone also helps to 'Get Rid of RSS'.

Touchstone Alpha released to the 'First 100'

Today we launched Touchstone to the first 100 people who asked for a copy. Scary stuff! *pops Champaign cork*

Now we sit back and wait for the feedback!

We have also linked and published a rough guide to building Input adapters for Touchstone in the form of a Wiki.

If you're a developer and would like to start developing and testing your adapter please contact me for an immediate alpha invite so you can get started!

To the rest of you waiting patiently - we are almost there - can you smell it? You will get your invite soon!

At this point I would like to thank Ashley for his hard work and hard core programming - couldn't have done it without you my friend! Now get back to work haha!

Paying Attention for long periods of time

There is an interesting post over at Thought Signals about trying to reverse the short burst fickle attention span of the blog generation.

Touchstone might be useful when you're trying to 'feed the beast' - but it might also be useful to step away from the PC and read a book for an hour a day!

From the article...

If it’s harder to do those things, do them more. In other words, instead of reading so many blogs, read more books. Instead of writing short items for a blog, write longer items, or write books. Set aside half an hour a day to read a book — you know you should be doing it anyway. I’ve got a long list of books I’d like to read, so finding things to meet this requirement shouldn’t be hard. This also can come into play with relationships: Add some long, lazy conversations every once in a while to the short-and-shallow interactions that dominate most relationships.

A few semi-unrelated industry posts

Why couldn't google do it? Is a question we have tried to answer in previous posts. While reading Alex Barnett I came across a book that speaks to the issue of small startups vs. big business when it comes to innovation. It is about how big business can often miss opportunity and innovation due to momentum and focus on other things. It's called the 'Innovators Dilemma'. Of course - they also have more surface area and resources and a better chance of catching up quickly ;).

Technology flowing up stream.
This is an interesting post via AVC that discusses how technology is being adopted by users first, and then propagated to the enterprise - instead of vice versa. This was relevant for me because in discussions with some people they asked me about our 'enterprise strategy'.

My answer was that, like Google, Touchstone would probably find it's way into the enterprise not by top-down mandated technologies policies from the IT department, but rather by people finding it useful at home and bringing it into the workplace.

Paying Attention to Code is Important

In case you are all wondering who this stranger is posting here, I'm Mike. I tend to fix things when Ash has no idea. Well OK, he has some idea, but I think that Chris has to give Ash some more food and water - and maybe more light.

Why do I say this? Well tonight I caught up with Ash and my specific instructions were to fix something that has been alluding him all day.

I've been out of the loop for a while so all these changes have occured around me. When I went through some code to catch up, it seems as though someone *cough* Ash *cough* can't tell his Minimums from his Maximums. It was a very silly and very small mistake that was causing lots of headaches!

If Ash showed this piece of code to Chris, chances are he would have skipped over it too, so it's not entirely Ash's fault.

It's not difficult being this good. Not when I work with these two. :)