seanmonstar

Android Babel API?

The communication situation on Android has gotten worse with the introduction of Google+. We used to have just Messaging (SMS), and Gtalk, and then they added Messenger. And they did this after Apple introduced iMessage, which simplified messaging. It seemed so counter-productive. So when I read things like this, I jump for joy:

Rumors have been swirling that Google is working on a cross-platform messaging service called Babel that will tie together all of its existing communication products, from Google Talk and Hangouts to Voice and Google+ Messenger.

It sounds like it could fall slightly short of everything that I would hope for, though. Android is in a perfect place to make their system even better, for everyone, not only when in Googleland. Android already has an API to allow any app to sync their contact details into your People app. What if they made a communication API, that any app could tie into, that would allow you to use just the native Android communication app, and be able to talk to everyone on all platforms. It could be SMS, Gtalk, WhatsApp, and Facebook, and I wouldn’t have to care how.

Someone on the Android team, please do it!

Additionally, this global app needs to behave similar to Facebook’s new Chatheads. Being able to keep browsing and doing other things while my chat is minimized, and then opening it partly to answer, and get right back to it: that is the way messaging must work on Android going forward. No butts.

I’ve always enjoyed Android messaging more than iOS, and a big reason is because the Android Messaging app shows the person’s picture next to their messages. For that reason, I’ve always assigned people I message frequently with a photo, if they haven’t chosen one themselves. This new API (call it Babel) would be really push it into the new age of text communication.

Information Obsession

I’m a week late to the “Google Reader dies” news, but I wanted to collect my thoughts and read other people’s knee-jerk reactions first.

I am quite interested in human data consumption. Obsessed, even. Like, I constantly re-analyze my current setup, making sure I’m getting all the information I want, while keep as much junk out as possible. Maybe sometimes also re-analyzing my obsession with information obsession.

My Current Digs

1. I subscribe to high signal-to-noise blogs where I want to read just about every article using RSS. These are typically opinion blogs where I enjoy reading what the author has to say. Pretty much nothing in here talks about the latest news. Of all the available choice, I’ve always used Google Reader, since… eh, who’s kidding who, there was no other proper choice. It had the added benefit of being syncable with Flipboard, Feedly, and any other mobile feed reader I tried.

2. I get my latest news, and otherwise follow “blogs” or personas that post interesting links via Twitter. This seems like the least-worst way to battle all the noise, since I only have to see 140 characters to decide if it’s interesting to me. Plus, if it’s not, I don’t need to bother with “Mark All as Read” bah-log-na.

3. That’s it.

With Google Reader dying, I need a new place to move my “must reads” RSS subscriptions. Some of the Internet seems to think we shouldn’t need that anymore, but I’ve always seen my consumption as being from 2 buckets: high-signal must-reads, and abysmally low-signal may-be-interesting-but-oh-god-I’m-sinking snacks.

I’ve put a lot of thought into this obsession, and have 2 key objectives when it comes my reading: try to never miss anything I’d truly enjoy, and ruthlessly remove anything that I won’t enjoy.

To that end, a couple years ago, I started working on my own idea of a feed reader, that would try to solve these issues, and not just be a simple interface on “dumb pipes”.

feedmonstar

You’ve likely heard of Fever. It has a cool concept of grouping sites together when they share links to a “hot” topic. I found this to be genius, but then was quickly let down when I wished it would do more. I didn’t want a separate list of what’s currently “hot”. I simply wanted to read my list at the end of the day, letting a tool group up articles that were talking about the same thing. That way, I could read them all at once, or skip them all at once, and have them removed from my river of news.

Additionally, I wanted something like Google Reader’s “Sort by magic”, only that was magical about you, not the greater hive mind. So many times, it would tell me that an article on Smashing Magazine about “Top jQuery Plugins” was the most important thing to read. Clearly, it knew nothing about me.

So that was the goal of feedmonstar, and the prototype really started to do just that in an alpha state, before I got busy at Mozilla, plus my server was having issues as my “magic” sorting required a lot of memory to dynamically sort, score, and group the feed on each request.

If that sort of thing interests you, get in contact with me. I still have all the code, and could be bothered to set it up on another host to try and work on, if there’s interest.

Tent.io

With the recent actions of Twitter, there’s a lot of interest in finding the right answer to our social status. We realize that there is a great deal of importance to our shorter status messages, and don’t want them “owned” by a company that is more interested in its own well-being¹ than our ability to share them. It’s part of our identity. It’s becoming increasingly fundamental, such that we’ve started to look elsewhere.

App.net isn’t the solution. Besides the points I made previously, App.net is in the same group as Twitter: it owns our status messages inside a vault, and we simply hope that it will be more trustworthy than Twitter was. That can’t be the right way.

As I said previously, we need a de-centralized open standard, like e-mail or RSS.

Enter Tent.io

Tent.io is a realization of that promise. I can run my own Tent server, and host and publish my own status messages on my own property. You can do the same. And our friends who aren’t as technically-savvy can use a hosted provider that’s perhaps offset by ads. We can all subscribe to each other, and see each others statuses, just like we currently can on Twitter.

The first client to consume this new Tent protocol is Tent.is. They describe the both of these like so:

Tent.io is a protocol like email, and Tent.is is a service like gmail.

Anyone can setup an account at tent.is right now. I could then setup a Tent server at tent.seanmonstar.com or something, and we could still follow each other seemlessly. This is huge. This is The Way forward.

Here’s an example with systems we already have: My friends can set up a blog on wordpress.com or tumblr, and I can subscribe to their RSS feed in Google Reader. In turn, I can host a blog myself, and my friends can subscribe to my RSS feed in whichever reader they’d prefer. This is what Tent.io is, but with less friction, a little more structure, and some privacy controls. It’s clearly much more than a simple Twitter clone.

You can continue to use App.net all you like², but please realize that Tent.io is the real solution, one where a single company no longer owns our status and identity.