With 40% of the online population now having always-on, broadband connections, new types of tools are needed for consumers to better manage the online information that flows through such connections. One such tool that is needed I will call an inter-personal information manager (iPim). Before delving into what this tool does, let me speak first to what the tool does NOT try to do; namely, re-create the wheel. Therefore, where an existing piece of the information management pie is "good enough," the design goal of the iPim is to find a way to hook into it - whether that means through an RSS feed, via screen scraping or a full-blown web service.
This iPim has seven key functions: search, save, organize, share, publish, play and transact. As we all know, searching is a cornerstone of the online experience. Fortunately, search is pretty darn good from the standpoint of Googling for information, and Google provides APIs for programmatically accessing the Google-dom, although Google's API efforts are half-hearted to date. (A note aside, if you haven't downloaded the Google Toolbar 2.0, you are missing out on a high utility offering.) But, search can deliver more, as evidenced by the increased industry focus on extending search support to local business listings, products, and pricing and purchasing information. On the product search front, if you haven't checked out Amazon's new book text search function, do so soon. It definitely adds another dimension to search (related note: there is also a good Wired article on Amazon's support for this functionality).
But there's one fundamental flaw to search from an information management perspective, and here is an area where the iPim fills the gap. By design, search-related activities end up in the 'get it and forget it' bucket, meaning that found information, if it's really useful, has to be re-searched a second and a third time. For the most part, this is no big deal since the cost of a new search is so low. Sometimes, however, you find stories, reviews, consumer opinions and online postings that inspire you or are relevant to an interest that you want to cultivate. Perhaps you encounter products that you are thinking of buying, come across information relevant to places you frequent and trust, or hear good things about products or places from others. How do you plug that type of information into your online workflow and make it persistent? Similarly, how do you represent the character and tenor of the personal and business relationships that you want to maintain and/or improve? Related to this one is the fact that from an operational perspective, there are some times when you are in a formal research mode (e.g., researching a trip - hotels to stay at, airfares, sites to see, places to eat), while others you simply discover a piece of information that you don't want to forget or have to re-find again.
Simply put, saving online information is messy today - do you bookmark it, email it to yourself, do a "save as," or a copy and paste? It's all very ad hoc, suggesting that the vehicles for saving online information and importing shared content have to get better, and that a key driver of Microsoft's success with Longhorn will be whether they get this piece of the puzzle figured out. One thing is for sure. If you use the iPim system regularly, it will grow to many hundreds of megabytes of information - no big deal if you are accessing this information locally on your PC, but a showstopper if you are saving it all remotely. To frame this one, my Microsoft Outlook PST file is more than 900 megabytes.
So how should you go about organizing your online information? A basic premise is to support as many different types of digital content as possible. What are the content types that stand out? Clearly, there's lots of email and web content that we generate, view and/or receive from others on a daily basis. Also, most of us have hundreds of Office and Acrobat files. Then there are your libraries of pictures, MP3s, and digital video content. You can factor in postings (both yours and others), personal and business contacts, products, news feeds, classified ads and job listings into the information management mix as well. Ideally, the iPim can support traditional discussion-style threads, maintain associations between related content items (e.g., a product in your wish list and the article that inspired adding it), generate a map of the inter-relationships between people, their common interests and the specific content that inspires them (this is where social networking players like Friendster, Live Journal, LinkedIn and Tribe.net are heading). I am highly biased on this one, but the iPim must support near real-time filtering of information to quickly enable me to drill down to a specific subset of information (through text strings) that I am looking for. As someone once said to me, "How can Google search the entire Internet in under two seconds, but to find the stuff on my local hard drive takes five minutes and too often doesn't return what I was looking for?" To me, this suggests that there are strong synergies between how many different content types the iPim supports and how unified the meta-information model is across types. Such is the core of the iPim; namely, facilitating new ways of organizing content and information.
How the system makes sharing online information simple, yet functional is dependent on whether the iPim is built around a peer-to-peer, web-based or email-based application model. Each approach has its advantages. Peer to peer can scale to support full workspaces and tightly aligned functionality (in the case of Groove). Web browser models are platform independent and ubiquitous. Email is also ubiquitous, bi-directional (supports send and receive), can support payloads, store and forward connectivity and is multi-modal (think: application based email, browser based email, email enabled mobile devices). The bottom line is that the iPim needs to make it single click easy to share information as an email, RSS feed, web page or native attachment, as this enables the same piece of information to be used in many different contexts.
One of these contexts is publishing. This can take the form of publishing information to a web site, syndicating it to an RSS newsreader, posting it to a blog or writing an online review. An open question is whether the best approach here is to handle such functionality in line (i.e., within the information manager), or out of band via an API to the content creator's favorite publishing tool. Basic publishing support within the information manager seems like a requirement, as it allows private information to easily be converted into public data without changing environments.
The question of inline versus out of band presents a fork in the road of sorts; namely, how far does the information manager need to go as an execution environment for "playing" different types of digital content? Does it need to be an "uber-browser" that can play all sorts of content types? While that seems to be a recipe for being a jack of all trades, master of none, kudos to Apple for what they've done so far with the amalgam of iLife, .Mac and the iPod. My knee jerk on this front is that there's a big difference between robustly dealing with the structure of information and needing to be the display environment for it. Thus, the information manager, must be able to recognize the structure and applicable contexts of all sorts of listing types (e.g., grab all of the for rent listings that fit my price/location parameters on craigslist), enable me to organize my local content store into lists, provide style sheets for different presentation templates and reports (e.g., show the different elements that led to a buying decision on a product) and generate maps that provide graphical views of the information being organized (Groxis is an early leader in the information mapping arena).
The circuit closes at the transaction. We all know that Amazon and eBay have come up with transaction models that work, are customer facing and logistically effective. Even better, both provide web services for interfacing with their functionality. Also, in case you haven't been paying attention, Yahoo has rapidly been putting the end-to-end pieces together to pursue a greater piece of the online transactions pie - from pay per click ads to premium online services to Yahoo stores. And InterActiveCorp is singularly focused in this domain with Expedia, Hotels.com, LendingTree, Match.com, Ticketmaster and Citysearch.
Someone is going to come up with a set of online tools that addresses the iPim space. Me personally, I want one yesterday. And I haven't even broached the topic of how all of this information ties in with both my mobile devices and the equipment in my smart, connected living room. I'll save that one for another post.
Mark Sigal
is a seven-time entrepreneur whose focus these days is on digital media services; namely the re-envisioning of traditional video, audio, and advertising channels in a mobile broadband-enabled world.
Are there products in this area that you consider standout? Does search, save, organize, share, publish, play and transact adequately describe your online information management needs? You must be logged in to the O'Reilly Network to post a comment.
I have been working on something called the Model of Attraction, which includes the idea of a Personal Info Cloud (essentially a rough cloud if digital information that the user has found or has created that follows him/her everywhere and is available when needed.) It seems like the iPIM is a needed resource. I not only use the PIM functionality in my PDA and phone, but use the Internet connection on these devices to check a forwarded e-mail to my self that has the meeting info or happy hour address and time. I also use the mobile Internet to hit my Amazon Wish List to verify that the book I am about to buy at a local store is the one I am actually wanting to buy or to add or remove a book from the Wish List that I have seen in a store and liked or did not like.
I, like many others, want my information with me at all times. I spent time and energy finding the information, but it is no use if I do not have an easy means to retrieve that information when I need to use it. I started (what is now called) a weblog years ago to store ideas and information I found so I can have it at work and home. The current iteration only goes back to December 2000, but I still will search Google to find information only to have my weblog pop-up as the top choice with information from six months prior or longer. Oddly I had found that information previously and wrote a note to myself (and whom ever else may have an interest) using the vocabulary that works for me. It is a system that has worked, but it seems there should be a means to have a more personalized version of this that is even more accessible or portable than Google.
Thanks for your detailed comments, and will give your Model of Attraction document a read. Specific to your comments, I am particularly interested in the question of how related content items get linked together. Clearly, in the optimal world, I or others in my trusted network can grab stories of interest, product listings, product reviews, manufacturer's data, pricing information, etc., pull them into our personal content store, and the logical linkages can autonomously be built between the different items pertaining to a context. One example is, “Show me the five items drive a buying decision on a given product.”
Today, this process can work pretty well manually, and occurs all the time on an ad hoc basis (e.g., ask a friend who recently bought a digital camera what they bought and why). It seems with better tools that more of this process can get automated (caveat: I am a heavy skeptic of applications that are overly dependent on AI type of functionality).
Making information more “magnetic,” as your slide presentation alludes to, seems to be the right way to go. Proving this out in the real world is largely (in my opinion) a question of finding the balance between:
1. Manual vs. automated procedures: algorithmic analysis of text within content/links between documents/aggregate maps of a user’s click steps vs. simpler techniques like user-defined key word stamping
2. Personal, inter-personal and global data sources: personal information vs. trusted network sources vs. Google search-able
3. Information abstraction models vs. optimized for a specific run time environment: Always on and accessible anywhere on any device or within any application just makes sense in the age of mobility and in a world where we all have multiple modalities (home/work is a simple once) and truly good information is re-usable, but there is the lingering question of when highest common denominator vs. lowest common denominator practices prevail. My posting on When client applications matter: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3819 speaks to this one somewhat.
Thanks again.
Mark
"if you haven't downloaded the Google Toolbar 2.0,"
2003-10-29 09:49:02
anonymous2
[Reply | View]
Please do not assume that your audience is using MS Windows, which is needed for the Google Toolbar that you link to. Fortunately there's a cross-platform alternative: The Mozilla googlebar, which is availabe at http://googlebar.mozdev.org
"if you haven't downloaded the Google Toolbar 2.0,"
2003-10-29 10:01:39
Mark Sigal |
[Reply | View]
I don't get it. Are you advising bookmarks? How do you organize them? What happen when you have too many bookmarks? Do you start searching them? And "meta-bookmark" them? And so on? This seems to be a road to nowhere.
Smart search can use advanced "type-ahead" mechanism ala LaunchBar and/or contextual statistics ala ZOE to provide relevant information at a key stroke.
By the way, and not to sound too cynical or anything, but is this blog an infomercial for your product? "Testing the limits of readers"?
What's wrong with search again?
2003-10-29 09:47:13
Mark Sigal |
[Reply | View]
I tend to come at things from a life cycle perspective, and look for solutions that facilitate that life cycle. I think search is great, but when I find stuff that I want to keep, it's all very ad hoc. While I bookmark occasionally, that approach has proven unwieldy. It just doesn’t scale real well. Plus my point is that there is a difference between SITES I visit, where bookmarking is the way to go and INFORMATION I find that I want to keep and categorize. For example, I read a lot and come across articles of interest. I like to write online reviews or blogs. Frequently I come across products of interest that are referenced online and want to put that into a bucket that is meaningful to me and organized so the relevant associated information is connected to it. Plus, I often receive emails that are integral to a topic of interest and want to throw that information in the same bucket, without having to think, “Oh, that’s email, I have another application for managing that.” And I like to share this information. For me, email is the preferred way to do this, but I know lots of people that posting to their blog or web site is their default path. Also, having spent the past year playing with consumer oriented web services, I spend a large chunk of time wanting to being able to actually doing something at the end of the day that leverages the information I find, whether that entails booking a ticket, making a reservation, buying a product, etc. So I am clear, I am not expecting a magical brain to find the relationships, watch my keystrokes and act as my autonomous agent for me. That may indeed be the future but the solutions I have played with have either been disappointing or too low utility for my needs. I just want a better system for performing these types of actions, as I make discoveries of interest. I’ve talked to 100+ people who do this type of stuff manually every day on an ad hoc basis so its clear that I am not the only one with the itch needing to be scratched.
As to your question/comments on infomercial, I am ultra cognizant of maintaining the balance between speaking of what you know and pushing your specific solution. That’s why I mentioned and linked to 16 different solutions, and of course don’t speak to my own (but your point is reasonable regardless). Plus, so I am clear, my company’s solution does not do all of the things that this blog speaks to (it only handles a subset of them).
Keep chiming in with other products, and thanks for the URL to the information clients page.
re: Used to use Enfish Tracker
2003-11-04 07:05:46
hittjw
[Reply | View]
I used to use Enfish Tracker that allowed me to better organize my information resources. It was a console type application that brought email, contacts, files, and contextual elements into one interface. Only problem I had was necessary processor to keep up with gigs of data.
It is important to organize your daily activities around the people which you interact with-- however, sometimes software can let us confuse quantity of information with quality of relationship.
re: Used to use Enfish Tracker
2003-11-06 15:37:34
Mark Sigal |
[Reply | View]
Preaching to the choir, Justin. It's all about context and relevance to the individual. It's also important that whatever approach takes hold doesn't force an artificial discipline on the consumer for some theoretical long term benefit. We are all pretty here and now oriented when it comes to managing information.
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I, like many others, want my information with me at all times. I spent time and energy finding the information, but it is no use if I do not have an easy means to retrieve that information when I need to use it. I started (what is now called) a weblog years ago to store ideas and information I found so I can have it at work and home. The current iteration only goes back to December 2000, but I still will search Google to find information only to have my weblog pop-up as the top choice with information from six months prior or longer. Oddly I had found that information previously and wrote a note to myself (and whom ever else may have an interest) using the vocabulary that works for me. It is a system that has worked, but it seems there should be a means to have a more personalized version of this that is even more accessible or portable than Google.