Jose Arocha's blog » Innovation

No excuses.

jose.arocha — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:37:55 +0000

Twitter interface agents – Life streaming from your lunch meeting

jose.arocha — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:57:56 +0000

When I see users either taking their attention off the presentation in a conference to tweet a comment, or dropping their utensils and their lively dinner conversation to update their Facebook and Twitter status, I see a user interface that is quickly becoming obsolete. When I have to stop the car to update my status “driving to Palo Alto to pitch a twitter idea to @jeffclavier” or simply trick the life part of life streaming by waiting to arrive Palo Alto to tweet it from my desktop, I see a life streaming interface already exposing its limitations and its need to evolve.

There are certainly good user experiences like Tweetie, Twitterfon or TwitterBerry when we have the time to thumb our status from our phones but as we start making this open discourse a natural behavior of our daily lives and find ourselves taking a shower, running a marathon, performing surgery or cooking with the urgent need to publish and distribute an idea or simply message our network, suddently our current mobile apps are not sufficient anymore.

Early-adopting, intensive twitter users and those using Twitter assistants are revealing how limited these interfaces are to stream their thoughts, ideas, life. Do we have dinner and chat, and tweet later our post-mortem, or we tweet as we chew and brake our conversation flow? We can get trapped into these contradictions or we can use them to invent new interfaces: Twitter interface agents.

What if our car-embedded app had voice recognition and voice tagging?

Mary: “Tweet open”
Agent: beep
Mary: “I think Tom is about to propose me… and I am thinking about it.”
Mary: “Tweet close”
Agent: beep beep

Or the agent in parsing your dinner chat and is already trained to recognize the needles in the haystack and can act as an advisor:

Tom, CEO: “I believe I need to shrink the company back to the core team.”
Agent: “Should I tweet that “?”
Tom, CEO: “No way!”
Tom, CEO: “Tweet Filter”
Agent: beep
Tom, CEO: “shrink the company – tweet filter close”
Agent: beep beep

Embedding Twitter interface agents in the physical world around us, eg. cars, cubicles, meeting rooms, etc could make streaming easier. And though twittering from your shower may certainly look a stretch, addressing these extreme user cases offers an idea of what the future of Twitter interfaces may be.

What awkward or funny situation have you twittered from? Do you need one of these interface agents?

Here’s My App for That!

jose.arocha — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:31:14 +0000

Need to scratch your back? There is an App for That – you may think. Well, not yet*. But the iPhone TV Ad reminds me of the times we live in when users just think of a need or problem and the web cornucopia seems to have an “App for That” at the other side of the search query. When not, the frustrated users build it and start to market it by themselves, at their own expense.

I was recently looking for an App to manage my 2 twitter accounts and avoid the inconvenience of logging in and out between accounts. I asked both my Twitter followers and Google.com for alternative apps and got several responses: Matt , Splitweet and Tweet3 on the web, Tweetie for the iPhone, MultiTweetDeck and Twhirl for desktops. I felt as if I was shopping for a pair of shoes in Zappos.com. There’s [already] an App for That: purple, free-spirit, minimalist, etc. Not only the variety but the “time to market” of these Apps grabbed my attention:

“And all in one single page (and all in less than a week, but it was only a silly personal challenge…) While we were developing the tool for ourselves, we thought that maybe it could be useful to other people with our same needs, and that was the origin of Splitweet. I think that the main value of Splitweet is that people can save time having all these features together in a simple interface. And, well, we are only 5 days old…”, says Albert of Splitweet.com

“And just as a fun fact we built it in 4 days. It was a challenge we set for ourselves…”, says @RyanCarson of Carsonified.com in this video.

“Multiple accounts have been really missing from TweetDeck. My frustration lead me to spend a day creating a small utility that lets me switch between multiple TweetDeck profiles…”, says Guy Rosen of Guyro.typepad.com

Years of building infrastructure layers, from semiconductors to web standards and APIs, are now paying off for any of us to create and be a part of the internet economy. Crisis and all, the possibilities for internet developers and entrepreneurs seem endless if we make up our minds. In a matter of days, you may also want to say: “Here’s My App for That!”

(*) This one is close! . But it may need a case with a surface like this.