MohanArun.com

I have Google Buzz in my Gmail account now. I am disillusioned because the first thing that I look for, a way to delete something, isnt available in Google Buzz. I am also not sure if the contents are going to be indexed like a blog. Frankly, I am disappointed due to the lack of the Delete link.

Update Feb 12 : There seems to be a ‘Mute this post’ link in Google Buzz entries but it requires dropping down the arrow. They should have called it “Delete” and included a link labeled “Delete”.

Update Feb 12: Contents of individual Buzz posts can be linked to using the “Link to this entry” option and can be shared, like twitter status update urls.

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Would we start to see a “Follow me on Google” button everywhere now that Google Buzz has started? Google will be able to make the leverage to make webmasters add this type of buttons to their blogs and websites. I think this will merge with the usage of “Google friend connect” which I have seen in many websites, never really used it, so I dont know what it is for, I think it is there for ‘following’ the page itself, or the page author at the most. You cant expect to find this in the commenter’s profiles, as you can with Twitter. For example, when leaving a thoughtful, insightful, constructive, value-adding, discussion-generating comment on another blog that you particularly feel proud of generating from your tiny brain, wouldnt you want people who read it to be able to find your Google profile and choose to follow you so they can more easily recognize your name occurring in other places on the web? More about this below. (See the part about Google IDs functioning like Twitter handles – @UserID vs. ~UserID).

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I think Google Buzz updates would be more like ‘personal press releases’.
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Another question that occurred in my mind is that, eventually the Google “Buzz” tab on the Google Profiles page would evolve into a blog setup. Would the contents of the Buzz page be indexed by Google? Also, how about a facility to search somebody’s Buzz updates or a time line filter so you can view the status updates of someone say on a particular day or as of a particular week? I think they are also going to need a ’symbol’ of some sort to denote that this is a shortform of a Google Profile ID which can be ‘followed’ if you have a Google ID/account yourself. The symbol “@” has been widely used in the Twitter-sphere to denote a particular user’s handle, so we need something similar to that to denote a particular word identifier is in fact a user’s handle. I think all the symbols in the keyboard have been taken for denoting meaning. The only useful symbol left is the tilde, so I wont be surprised if people start referring to ~UserID to denote a google profile. This overlaps with the concept of Google Webfinger. But Webfinger is based on using a user’s email address to identify other personal data like location, interests, etc. about the user which the user has willingly shared to the public world. But with the use of the ~UserID format to denote a particular ID as a Google ID, the user can deduce that UserID@gmail.com is the email address. They need to allow an user to choose a Google ID separate and distinct and not traceable to their corresponding Google (Gmail) email address. That is, Google ID would be like a public key where anybody can view your Google profile page and ‘follow’ you and view your status updates. But they wont be able to get your email address unless you chose to share the email ID on the profile page. This would be just like Twitter. Add in two lines in the form of “Current Location:” and “Current Status:” in the profile page and it would easily challenge location sharing services like Foursquare, Brightkite, etc. and Twitter and Facebook too.

Update Feb 12: After I wrote about Webfinger yesterday today I was surprised to see two news items telling Google has started turning on Webfinger for Google Buzz public profiles. Here are the links

Webfinger now available for Google public profiles

Email as Identity: Google turns on Webfinger (RWW article)
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But I dont think American corporate idealogy would allow a single service to engulf upon or breach other big companies’ web playing grounds. What I mean is that, people want things like Foursquare and Facebook to be around, so these companies can concentrate on their own web playing areas. I think this is good for competition. But how will they make money out of this when users expect everything that Google has engulfed, to become available for free?

Twitter vs Facebook

Twitter introduced the concept of “following” people to get their status updates. You could theoretically follow anyone without needing to get ‘approval’ from them first, (I am ignoring the tiny minuteae of people who have ‘locked’ and ‘protected’ their tweets and who need to ‘approve’ you before you could follow them to get their status updates). Facebook works on the premise that if you wanted to get someone’s status updates, you will have to ‘friend’ them first and they have to ‘approve’ you as part of their friends circle.

Idea Bulb now I have the interesting idea of taking the ‘following/follower’ concept into the area of web page browsing. In normal life, if you know and trust a person (deemed equivalent of a ‘follow’) you would be more than likely to read and try to comprehend what they have said or commented about on a particular page or a blog post. It would be nice to view web pages with overlaid comments like a Google Sidewiki format – filtered to show only those people whom you choose to ‘follow’. Then we can see public comments made by those people whom you trust or choose to follow. Eventually we may see things like this:

X visited this page timestamp 20:33:14 spent 20 minutes on this page and had this to say…”. If you are following X, you will see this in your sidewiki, otherwise you will not.

Another example:
Y visited this page 23:12:12 spent 4 minutes on this page. “Y” can be in your ’social circle’. If not, you can opt to still see Y’s comments in your SideWiki normally, and choose to ‘follow’ Y.

This will be in addition to the standard ‘comments’ system that the majority of the blog posts allow that is hosted with the blog itself. You could read comments, pick up interesting comments and choose to “Google-follow” the ~UserIDs behind them, so you will quickly be able to pick out other web pages, where the same user has commented on, and what they had to say there. This is just as how it operates in a real world – you meet people, you ‘filter’ them, you size them up, and decide to trust their words or atleast, pay heed/pay attention to what they have to say about stuff in web pages. This I would call social browsing.

Currently, there are some projects that allow users to get some of this functionality. These are the Eyebrowse project of MIT, Fytch.com and Google Sidewiki. The Eyebrowse project is a Firefox plugin that allows the user the option to share the url of the current webpage he/she is browsing on. But it doesnt provide a way to share comments within the Eyebrowse system itself.

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I remember reading a popular Latin dictum that meant ‘by a factor of popular usage’. I remembered the meaning but I am unable to recall the exact Latin phrase exactly it is. After some severe thinking and brain storming, I concluded it must be one of ‘de facto’ or ‘de jour’.

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On the topic of ’social search’, I want to say that, Google has only scratched the surface so far, when it comes to ’social search’. Yesterday I saw a New York Times article that projected Aardvark (a social Q&A site) as the ‘pioneer’ in ’social search’. I think the author of that piece did not understand the concept of ’social search’ clearly. What Aardvark is doing is “social realtime Q&A by connecting the right people at the right time’. For example, I could have posted the question I had about my latin quote to a group of registered journalists who would more easily be able to answer my query.

On this tangent of direction of my thought synapse, everybody who can write a blog entry for themselves is a journalist these days, on the web.

What I meant to say is that, the concept of social search needs to evolve to a large extent. What Google has done is adding all your Gmail contacts as your ’social circle’ so content produced by them ranks higher in your search results. I dont exactly like the second part but I think Google is on the right tracks with its concept of first defining the concept of ’social circle’ – this will merge with the concept of ‘people whom you choose to follow’ and will remain separate and distinct from the people in your ‘email contacts’ and ‘address book’. My idea of social search is that you should be able to see somebody else’s search queries in real time (if they have chosen to share it with their social circle in order to allow the possibility of someone recommending them good search results, a knowledgeable person perhaps). You could choose to ’share’ your searches with the public world with the hope that some knowledgeable person out there, somewhere, would be able to point you in the right direction in real time, with the answer you are seeking to your query, or be able to help you out in other ways. If you think about it, this concept is not new, this is how people have been posting their doubts and queries and things they need to help with, in forums all over the Internet.

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I think the reason the Internet and web browsing is so addictive is because, it generates some chemical signals when you browse various sites that is akin to hunting and gathering, in pre-historic times. Just imagine, you have your email application or gmail or yahoo mail tab open the whole time you are connected digitally to other people. That can be considered as your ‘home cave’. As you start wandering about on the internet in places like Facebook, forums, etc. you visit public places to gather with fellow hunter-gatherers. Then when you browse and take your time visiting several web pages you do hunting-gathering of knowledge and information. If a particular piece of info, text or picture sounds interesting, you immediately copy it and email it to yourself by switching your focus to the email tab or application. When I think about it, we have now evolved from a primitive hunter-gatherer stage towards a corporate culture and from then onwards, to ‘work at home’ / telecommuting stage. So now, theoretically, you should have your cave evolved into an archive of information that matters to you but everything else (read: social) should be kept in a separate room (like your drawing room). For this, we need the concept of an information dashboard, a centralized place, or a ‘nerve centre’ that can be kept open at all times when we are connected to the Internet. This has to be based on email – the first correctly-executed and well-known, widely understood application on the Web. My idea is like a ‘nerve centre’ or ‘information consumption HQ’ or simply ‘cave home’ where somebody drops things you would like to see (home delivery of pizza – akin to – email coming in to your cave). Then there is inevitably the ‘horde’ or ‘archive’ of useful information which you build up over a period of time. What current email implementations lack is a way to integrate email with this common nerve centre. I had an idea day before yesterday which I would call the “Cranium” which I will describe below if you are interested.

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Different Idea bulb There could be a way to highlight, comment and annotate text in web pages in a social way. For example, instead of commenting on an article at the very end, you could place your inline comments within the piece itself, sorta like Word’s revision tracking feature. People will willingly highlight and strive to place constructive quality comments in web pages they come across in order to spread their name recognition far and wide (personal branding), and also to gain ‘more followers’ if there is the ability to embed your ~UserID easily in the places where you leave comments on. Currently all blog commenting systems need your email address, and some like Lifehacker send verification emails for comments to that email address. There should be a way to just disclose only your public Google ID (~UserID) without revealing your hidden email id behind it.

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My idea of “Cranium” or “information nerve centre” is as follows. Google has added “Buzz” below the “Inbox” link in gmail. What I would do, if I had control of gmail UI, will be adding the following links and their corresponding functions described below below the “Inbox” link.

These will be

NoteWiki
Feeds
Society

I feel this will be the best solution for information overload- that is consuming the right amount of necessary info at the appropriate time can be achieved with this setup.

NoteWiki - this will serve as an online notebook of everything you want noted and saved – including links, pictures, videos, etc. It seems to me an enormous waste of waste of 8 GB of gmail space when you are only using 400 MB of it. By opening up the same space to notes, people will use more of that storage space. Notes can have labels or tags attached to them, but there will not be a tree system of organization of those labels or tags. Just like in Gmail labels system, there will be only one top-level of labels or tags for your notes. You can add as many notes as you like, and everything will be searchable. You could ‘note down’ username/password/login info for other sites that you use, duly noted and searchable and archived in the NoteWiki. If you forget your password, all you have to do is to do a search with the name of the website and you will see the note where you have entered your login info.

Feeds - This is where you will keep track of blogs and websites you follow via RSS/Atom feeds. The current method of RSS reading in Google Reader typically gives the impression of overwhelmingness and information overload. There seem to be no ‘delete’ buttons so you can remove a particular feed item from view once and for all. There seem to be no ‘archive’ buttons to save particularly interesting feed items so they become part of your personal archive which you can search for later using keywords.

My user interface for feeds will be like a chat window, a way of representing status updates from the information sources you are subscribed to , one line or row per source, and no more. There will not be a vertically long list of feeds you are subscribed to in a Treeview towards the left. Instead, what you will see is an ‘RSS inbox’ with only the last 3-4 updates per source (headline only) and the number of sources will be the number of rows in your RSS inbox. There will be delete links (’X') for each and every feed item in every feed. You will be able to save or archive individual feed items because they will have an ‘archive’ link or you would be able to copy the text off them and put it in your NoteWiki. You should be able to group your feeds into tabs based on subject areas or categories.

Society - This is where you will get status updates from people whom you choose to follow, culled from other sources like Friendfeed, Facebook and Twitter. But it wont be a long vertically scrolling stream of updates like what you have seen in twitter web interface (or in Google Buzz). It will be one row per contact or person whom you are following. The first column in each row will be the contact’s public handle (either their ~GoogleUserID or @TwitterUserID or !OtherHandle). Their latest status update will appear in the second column with a timestamp. (Or this could be configurable to display about the latest 3-4 status updates from that person). Then there will be “< Previous” and “> Next” buttons to horizontally scroll through previous or latter status updates for the same person. (Like the “<” “>” buttons in the Web clips that appear above gmail inbox). Status updates will not be limited to 140 characters. You wont need somebody’s email address to ‘follow’ them, just their Google Profile Id would be sufficient. Journalists and columnists can put their most recent published work with a link, as their status update. You should be able to group the people whom you are friends with and whom you’re following, into ‘tabs’. For example, you could see something similar to this appearing as tab headers. The numbers in brackets denote the number of new status updates in that group.

Brands and Businesses (1)
Celebrities (3)
Other Personalities (5)
Family (7)
Friends (9)
FoAF (11)
Other Contacts I know personally (13)

There may also be a public timeline of Google status updates, just like the twitter public timeline, or the Google Wave “public” area (”with:public” search string) which you may view to view public conversations and Q&A and you may choose to ‘follow’ any other user in those conversations and then move them into the appropriate group.

I am all against ’sharing’ items from Google Reader, it only leads to confusion as to where and whom you are following, due to the introduction of Google Buzz. If you want to share something, you can copy+paste the item and link to your Buzz page status update textbox and share from there. The “Share” link, if it is allowed to appear in the “Feeds” section what I have described above, would only lead to more ‘occupied’ real estate. You are not going to share everything that you come across in Feeds. You will typically share only 2-4% of the items you come across in feeds. So it makes sense to remove the “Share” link altogether from Google Reader individual feed items.

Eventually, I would like to add “Personal Finance” as one of the links below the “Inbox” where you will have access to a web app for managing personal finances, and money management, on the lines of Mint. You could also have a “Health” link to maintain your health records. There could be a “Pets” link to keep track of vet visits, vaccination dates, etc. for your pets. There could be a Baby/Parenting link where you keep track of vaccinations and school records for your children. All these in combination will take a fixed allotted storage space that is currently alloted only for Gmail purpose in Google’s web mail interface.

As this evolves, we will begin to see Firefox/Chrome plugins from Google where you can simply select text from a web page and have it “jotted down to your NoteWiki” with the tags you specify. You can simply right click on a picture you want to keep and select “jot to NoteWiki” option and it will be saved with tags to your NoteWiki. Note I didnt put a “Photo Album” link below the “Inbox”, photos will be treated just like Notes with tags and everything.

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