This pass weekend, my wonderful wife got me a shiny new MacBook Pro for our anniversary. If you’ve ever seen my old laptop, you know it’s been a long time coming.

I’m now looking for a IM application for the Mac (I’m testing out Adium now), and thought I’d write about how IM applications have grow stagnate of late. I know, we now have the ability to instant message people from a browser or mobile phone, but outside of that, everything else have been aesthetic bells, whistle, doo-hickeys, and thingamabobs.

It’s time for someone to revisit what it means to instant message someone. The current model is definitely flawed and is failing as an effective tool communication. This is why we have services like twitter Today. Here are some of the flaws of current instant messenger applications:

Roster Lists Suck

In the early days of IMs, roster lists were sufficient. But now, everybody’s on the internet. As a result, my roster list is now long and unmanageable. Scrolling through my roster list now would be like if I had to scroll my whole address book to find the exact person I want to send an email to. There should be an easier way find the person I want to instant message.

Also, the roster list is a poor representation of how we connect with people today. Instant communication today is such a major part of what we do online today, so it’s amazing to me that it is constraint to such a small and confined window.

I Want a Connect to People, not their Identities

Most clients treat contacts on different IM networks differently. IM applications should treat all my buddies identities as one. Adium seems to do this pretty well. IM should be about connecting with real people, and separating them by what network they’re coming from is impersonal.

The Concept of Instant Messaging should be Expanded

Services like Twitter and Jaiku suggest that there is a communications gap that instant messaging currently doesn’t provide. Instant messaging networks are getting more and more inter-operable. Instant messaging applications should be looked at as a conduit for all informal communication. Users don’t care what network they’re using to communicate – they care that they can connect to the person they want when they want.

Some of you might have noticed that I recently added a What I’m up to feature on my blog. While I’m not normally a frequent blogger (I actually consider that a feature of this blog), I am pretty active elsewhere on the internet. So I thought it would be cool to create an aggregated feed of my online activities, commonly referred to as a Lifestream. This seemed like the perfect job for Yahoo! Pipes and apparently I’m not alone in that thought.

In case you’ve been in a non-WIFI enabled cave the last few months, here’s Yahoo!’s description of what Pipes does:

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Essentially, Pipes is an ETL tool for web data, with resulting output being an RSS feed, JSON data, or web widget.

Being that I’m already using Web version 2.0, most of my activity on the internet culminates into some sort of RSS feed. Off the top of my head, I chose to compose my lifestream from my twitter and delicious accounts, as well as a couple of forums that I monitor (shameless plug — Boardista is a forums website I’m currently working on).

So here’s how I created my Lifestream feed. Here’s my Pipes page if you want to follow along. Initially, I had everything in one large Pipe, but quickly decided to break them up to make things more maintainable. One really cool thing about Pipes is that it allows you to break up large Pipes into smaller, interconnected ones, making things easier to manage.

First, I fetched my twitter, delicious, and forum feeds using the Fetch Feed module. I do this in the LifeStream: Twitter/Delicious/Forums Pipes. I separated them out because each type of feed had some characteristics that I wanted to transform from so that when I merged them individual items had some level of consistency with each other. I also wanted to modify the author of each item so that I could later render an icon to identify the source of the item.

Second, I merged the individual feeds into one large one (Pipe Lifestream: Merge Sources):

Then, I sorted the feeds, chopped the feed to only show the last 5 items, and truncated the description to 150 characters if necessary (Pipe LifeStream).

Finally, I needed a way to show this on my blog. I really liked how Andy Bennett showed his latest twitter on his blog, so I wanted to have something like that. Doing some research online, I was able to find the KB Advanced RSS Widget which did mostly what I wanted, all I had to do is tweak it to show the correct icon based on the author I set in the first step.

So after few hours of work, I had a pretty cool Lifestream feed. Overtime, I expect to add more feeds to make my lifestream more complete (I would love to add my coComment feed, if I can only get my actual comment in the feed).

I’ve also learned quite a bit about Yahoo! Pipes:

• It’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish with such a finite set of functionality.
• I’m skeptical that your average internet users is going to be able to build truly useful Pipe without help. I was often frustrated by how Pipes wouldn’t let me connect some modules, and by how some controls were enabled/disabled by some seemingly illogical condition.
• Being able to interconnect Pipes can potentially create some amazing results. It would be even cooler if I can plug in other people’s Pipes.
• There’s a Web Service functionality available that allow developers to provide some custom transformations for Pipes, which gives Pipes virtually unlimited capabilities. It also means that you can potentially use Pipes to push data to your application.

[Note: This is a repost of a post I made a few weeks ago -- I just noticed it was missing, probably from upgrading WP a couple of days ago.]

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Scott Burkett’s rant about Twitter, and have been wanting to do a post about it.

It isn’t that I disagree with Scott’s assessment of Twitter’s usefulness – I do disagree, but will leave it others to offer their reasons to Twitter’s usefulness.

It isn’t that I disagree with Scott’s assessment of the need for building a better Twitter – I agree with him here, there’s a very fine niche that Twitter in it’s simplest form fills, and I don’t see room for a better Twitter. And its very hard to succeed just by building a better mousetrap, unless it is a damn good one.

But let’s start with what Scott says here:

Here’s a novel idea. Unless your business idea solves a painpoint for someone, or otherwise introduces an efficiency into their lives or business, it is most likely a novelty. And while they may be easily bootstrapped, novelties are rarely venture-backable.

Novel ideas have a way of easily becoming a future necessity. At one point ideas such as blogging, e-commerce, and even the Internet were considered novelties, but once they were there users were able to see it for was it is and leverage it to solve their own painpoint and utilized it to introduce efficiency in their own lives or business. If we don’t encourage the creation of these novel ideas, we’re potentially killing off future innovation.

Here’s another quote:

My advice? If you really want to be a successful entrepreneur, stop worrying about creating mindless tools to keep track of everything your friends are doing, and start solving real problems.

In other more ‘startup friendly’ scenes, you do see these novelty and meme startups, and they are accepted and encouraged. If we want a more vibrant startup culture here in Atlanta, maybe what we needs is to encourage a little more naivete and little more foolishness. Am I saying that we should all going into this blindly? Of course not, you should definitely do you own due diligence, but sometimes ignorance is bliss, and failure is a part of success.

Here’s my advice (for what its worth) for that young entrepreneur: don’t stop, go for it. If it fails, learn from it, then try again.

Inspired by this workstreaming post on WWD, I thought it would be a great if I could use Twitter as a way to keep track my current yet-to-be-released project. Twitter is a pretty good fit for workstreaming because it constrains you to a maximum number of characters — if you’re doing something that requires more than that, it really should be in posted in a more formalized medium, such as in an email, blog, or Backpack. For the sake of the people reading your workstream, posts to be short and to the point.

So the first thing I wanted to try is to post Subversion commits Twitter. An initial Google search pointed me to this post about using rake to post to Twitter, but I think having to use rake to do your commits is very inconvenient, so I decided to write it as an Subversion post-commit hook instead. Fortunately, I found this script which posts SVN updates to Basecamp, which got me started. Here’s the final script.

So what’s next? How about:

• Update Capistrano to post deploy events.
• Post updates to Backpack, Writeboards, or Basecamp
• Post updates on important application events and/or errors

Granted, this isn’t exactly workstreaming — I could update the hook to make posts based on the committer (any takers?), but I think this is good enough. Unfortunately, I can’t link to what the output of the script looks like because I’m posting to protected Twitter accounts, but if you look at the script it’s pretty basic message.