Published on Wednesday, February 15 2006
A new service has been announced on the ruby on rails mailing list, 9cays which allows any registered user to start a micro mailing list by simply adding the go@9cays.com to a message destinations. 9Cays then generates a dedicated email address and a page to hold all the messages which belong to this conversation. Any partecipant (e.g. those present on the first email) will receive an invitation to join it and all the messages sent to the conversation address will get forwarded to all the partecipants and will be archived on the page (more here).
I was surprised reading this since I was actually thinking about the same kind of interaction for a small application I’m going to build, albeit more focused on business-customer relations. So kudos to the authors for being first at it (I’ll use it for sure!).
While 9cays is still a bit rough on some edge (e.g. no password for the conversation pages) It has the right twist on usability, making it trivially easy to start a conversation and getting non-users involved in the system, all of this without forcing anyone to leave his email client which is THE interface on the net for many users.
This approach of capturing casual interactions which happens so frequently on the net is exactly what i’d whish many more services would adopt while it is too often overlook in many systems.
Another sign that usefulness (and elegance) can come from small, simple and well thought softwares.
Published on Friday, February 10 2006
From what I read about edgeio (also here and here) this seems to be a wonderful implementation of the edge-content ideas. It seems so exactly because it is built to leverage some common behaviour.
There will be no need to use a different interface for entering content into the system (other than simply tagging the posts), thus it will be immediately available to millions of bloggers without the need to enter the classified into the system.
The challenge will be how to deal with potential spam abuse of the system, but i guess that it has already been tought out…
I also see potential fallbacks of this idea in other areas e.g. that of review collection (anyone thought about edgeviews??), the simplicity and elegance of this tagging technique could solve the un-edgy feeling of most web2 peer production efforts.
P.S. having DW on board might have helped in getting syndacation right…
Published on Thursday, February 9 2006
So, maybe I’m just the last to say this, but I feel that GPack feels like the wrong solution for a real issue.
A week ago i did have to reinstall my notebook and going through a page long list of software which i was using to download and reinstall it was a tedious task (and this gets more difficult the more you use your pc).
But while giving a fixed pack of software is something which will NOT be useful t expert pc users (everyone of them will have different view of what is essential) this isn’t something which can be attractive to newbies as well.
When you are a new computer user you want essentially simplicity and easiness, thus the less software you find in your way the best you can (learn how to) use your PC.
I think that the tools and the way to use them to solve this problem should be clear, but i haven’t heard anyone speaking yet…so I’ll wait some more weeks, maybe I’ll try to do it, then in any case I’ll explain better what I mean…
Published on Tuesday, February 7 2006
vs 
It seems that the web IM space is heating up lately, it will be interesting to watch how the latest two additions will compare to each other ( I would bet on campfire ;-) ).
