1. Declaring their support for FriendFeed till the plug is pulled
2. Continuing to post and participate as if nothing has happened
3. Leaving “quietly” by just no longer using the service
4. Spending their time posting about how FriendFeed is dead and everyone worth paying attention to has already left

Reactions #1-#3 are appropriate to various degrees, but reaction #4 is getting old fast. It’s insulting to the people who are still using the service actively and insulting to the whole idea of online community, and I would like to see it stop. I’m mainly making this appeal to Robert Scoble because he is the most influential person who is kicking FriendFeed while it’s down:

<plea>
Please, Robert, I know that you’re disappointed in what has happened to FriendFeed and you feel like you need to take out your frustrations on something, but it’s time to take your own advice and leave quietly if you’re going to leave. FriendFeed may not serve your particular needs anymore but your needs seem to be very specific, decidedly not mainstream, and difficult to comply to. That doesn’t mean that FriendFeed is not a valuable service to others with different needs. You don’t have to leave, but there’s no point in making things harder for the rest of us who support the service by trying to hammer the nails in the coffin while we are still pushing up the the lid for air.

You are actively fulfilling your own prophecy by chasing people away from FriendFeed and inciting people there to unsub and block you so that your feed is less and less interesting. And then you are insulting the rest of us by declaring that all the geeks have left when it’s your own efforts in sabotage (or lack of in pruning your feeds) that are making your experience worse, while claiming that you’re trying to spur someone into action to be FriendFeed’s new hero. But we don’t have that knight in shining armor to champion for FriendFeed and return it to its former glory. If anything, you were the most likely candidate. Now we just want to be left alone to use FriendFeed the way we are comfortable to using it. It’s time to stop the abuse.
</plea>

Yes, FriendFeed’s future is uncertain, even with vague assurances that it is not going away any time soon from its founders. And yes, there are frustrations because of the lack of attention to bug fixes, performance and innovation that were so much a part of the early days of the service. But there is still a community at FriendFeed, and a pretty cohesive one at that. Maybe it is a community that has a lot more “fluff” than Robert is looking for but that’s because it best serves a purpose that is not something that he is focused on: making connections on a personal level.

It’s all about your intentions online. Most intentions can be grouped into 3 categories: knowledge gathering, broadcasting and conversation. There are many services on the web that can potentially serve those intentions. It depends on your purpose as to whether or not a service brings you value. Scoble has talked about a “chat room/forum” service type, there is also a “blog/micro-blog” type, and a “knowledge repository/collaboration” type. In some ways these cross over, but they also have distinctions that make specific tools more likely to serve them than others.

The web started out as knowledge gathering tools for building archives. Websites, wikis, link repositories like Del.icio.us, an untold number of file archives, search, RSS and all the tools that bring it to you like GoogleReader… All that is the heart of the web. There is little personal connection in knowledge gathering tools though some of them have “social” aspects. They are not about community, but about sharing and collating information.

Blogs and Twitter (and Twitter clones) are about broadcasting. You post and presumably there are people out there listening and who might react to your post through commenting. You control all aspects of your accounts and who you interact with and therefore you are exposed to a lot less noise, but you also have a very limited audience, unless you are already popular. This model works fine for people like Robert, who, no matter what tool he picks, is going to have a lot of people ready to comment on his posts. But it can be extremely unrewarding for people who don’t already have a posse following them around. A lot of people don’t care: the model serves their intent of having a “presence online” and they are not interested in much conversation, just putting their own views out there.

Can some conversation occur on blogs and Twitter? Of course… but the conversation is a lot more limited and a lot harder to follow (especially on Twitter). If conversation happens it is more like the discussions in a lecture hall or classroom where one person is guiding all the other participants and seems to be less personal because of the inequality of the participants and dictatorial position of the poster which invokes the Snafu principle. Real conversation is the exception, not the rule for broadcast mediums.

Forums are about conversation. They are a place for people with a common interest to gather and share information or just share a bond based on that initial connection. Some services even support “Friend of a Friend” (FoaF) features that easily connect you to others who may have similar interests. There is a lot more drama, a lot more noise, a lot more fluff to wade through on forums but you also make stronger connections. When you interact with people through conversation (more than 140 character snippets) you actually get to know them. And you become friends, even offline. That’s the power and appeal of forums to a lot of people. It’s what makes tools that support it, like FriendFeed, more valuable to people who’s intent is conversation than tools like blogs or Twitter. For people who are looking to make those kind of connections with others, to seek out people who “get them” and who they can share their lives with (because such people may not be available to them in their physical location), conversation services are the best tool to support that purpose.

The beauty of FriendFeed is that it can really serve all three intents, if you want it to:

• If you want to use it as a knowledge gathering and archive tool you can create your own private room and share posts to it, clip web snippets to it or store links in it.
• If you simply want to broadcast, then you can use groups and set them up so you are the only poster. Only invite people that you want to hear from. You can delete comments you don’t like in your threads. It’s very similar to a blog. Your experience will be limited to only the people who you want to interact with (who reciprocate). None of that pesky FoaF stuff, but all the conversation limitations that blogs offer.
• If you want to use it as a forum, just create an account, subscribe to interesting people, and you’re ready to go.

I’ve said before that FriendFeed is not dead, it’s just an orphan. I stick by that assessment. Yes, there is a void in leadership for it right now, but it will find it’s own way and grow into a nice, healthy adult (a productive citizen, if not a super-star), if only people will stop beating it over the head. I’m constantly reminded of the plague scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. FriendFeed is saying “I’m not dead yet! I feel fine! I think I’ll go for a walk”. So quit trying to throw it on the cart!

Google Wave is a platform, a framework, an infrastructure. It has a front end, but that’s not really what is impressive about it (which is a good thing considering the complexity and bugginess right now). What is amazing is that Google has developed a real-time communication framework that can work in a federated environment. Why is this cool? Because it means that I can use it at work behind firewalls, at home for my family and personal projects, set it up at school with the right privacy to comply with child protection laws and also participate in it publicly on Google’s servers or anyone else’s I prefer. And it will still work in real time, across these servers transparently to me or securely within them. It won’t be “a Wave clone” that I have to beg everyone else to sign up for. It will just be Wave on a different server. All my contacts can be shared and my communications flow as freely between them, or I can create a walled garden. The choice is will be up to me.

People aren’t getting it right now because they’re expecting the beta to all be about polishing the User Experience. But it’s not about polishing: it’s about defining. This is similar to the introduction of Microsoft Surface: here is a great big flashy table with a powerful computer in it that responds to touch. At first exposure it sounds awesome, but what can you do with it? How will people be most comfortable interacting with it? What practical tasks can it facilitate? What fun can be had with it? The potential is there, but the only way to really know how it should best be used is to have a lot of people attempt to interact with it, without preconceptions, to figure out what the natural ways to interact with it actually are. There have been a lot of surprises as more and more people are able to play with it. A whole new set of gestures and user interface elements have been developed for Surface and refined as more and more people actually use them. I had the opportunity to participate in part of that process and it was fascinating.

I see Google Wave’s release as very similar to Microsoft Surface’s. There is a really powerful back-end underneath the UI that is capable of some amazing things, yet there haven’t been enough people exposed to it for the development team to really know the best way to provide efficient interaction with that engine. I think that is the purpose of the closed beta, to figure those things out. But people have these unrealistic expectations based on the misuse of the whole “beta” concept that what Google has is just a tiny step away from being ready for release to the world. That’s just not the case. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a ton of potential in Wave, and, to those of us out there than can appreciate the magnificence of the accomplishment of the platform that Google Wave is built on, it is very impressive indeed.

To all you fellow beta testers out there: give it some time and give Google some feedback and you will see Wave become much more intuitive to use (as well as less buggy and more performant). Developers will build alternative clients and more and more widgets for it. Waves will become just one more format for communication that we won’t even think about, we’ll just use in the way that’s most appropriate for the type of communication we need at the time. There will be “client views” for particular tasks based on who you are communicating with and their accessibility. If they’re offline you will use an email-like view to compose messages to them. If they’re online, you’ll use something more akin to IM or Twitter. All the stuff that is currently confusing and gets in your way (scrolling down huge waves just to find the new messages) will be fixed to no longer clutter your experience. And you will eventually be able to customize your client to make it even more efficient for how you want to receive your information, not just how you create and share it. These things will come as more people are exposed to Wave and see the potential and write their own solutions to the new problems that are becoming obvious now that there are enough other people to interact with on the service.

It’s new, and in closed beta. It’s not fair to write it off as “over-hyped”, especially when the hype has been coming from people who were interpreting screen shots or didn’t really understand that Wave is a new platform and not really a new UI to “fix the problem of email” or become the next social media magnet site. Google let us beta testers try it out to figure out how we’re reacting to the new communications capabilities Wave’s framework offers. Give Google the feedback they need to make it better for everyone.

Wave offers us a new way to communicate digitally that is adaptable to our immediate situation and needs. Wave is not out to replace Twitter, Facebook, IM or email: the point is to render them obsolete. That will happen without a lot of protest once someone figures out the ulitimate client for the already amazing platform Google has built… it will just seem natural.

1. Sharing notes with users and/or groups:
This one is a given… lots of people have been asking for it, so I’m sure it’s on the high priority list. Being able to share your Evernote notes or notebooks with other Evernote users in native format so that you can collaborate through your Evernote clients would open up a whole new realm of uses for the application and attract a lot of new users who would be interested in that feature-set by itself. It might also push a few more people over the fence in migrating from Microsoft’s OneNote and even SharePoint. This won’t be easy to figure out from a user interface design perspective, nor a security architecture design perspective, and I am very anxious to see how Evernote will implement it. But the payoff would be a big one for them so I hope it comes soon.

2. Expanding the monthly bandwidth allotment and/or allowing you to choose your data storage location:
Two related ideas here… Now that Premium subscribers have the ability to store any type of file in their notes as attachments, it makes sense to use Evernote as a single place to keep all your files and data. If that’s the case, then 500mb a month is not going to handle it for a lot of people. Either Evernote needs to allow you to “seed” your notes with a one-time upload of all your relevant files (for a one-time fee according to bandwidth) or allow you to pay more to up your monthly allotment. As an alternative, it would be nice if you could choose to store your data in a 3rd party data store like Amazon S3. That way, Evernote could offload the storage overage to another service, and you would also have even more control over your data. Evernote could be responsible for making it easy to link to that file wherever it is (and let’s face it, Amazon S3 really needs a good client anyway!).

3. Better note formatting control
There are several aspects I think are important here, and I understand the limitations of the XML format that Evernote has chosen to represent notes in, which, like most XML schemas, is intended to be very generic and define the content, not the presentation. However, this is a consumer application and consumers want things to be pretty, and because attractive things are more usable, it makes sense to offer the users some formatting options. Here are three features that I think would improve user experience a great deal:

• Canned “themes” for notes or note content: a predefined format for a content type. A good example here is code snippets, which are most readable in a mono-spaced font and, even better, with color coding for specific keywords and operators.
• The ability to add tables and other HTML formatting structures such as super and sub tags and definition lists. This could be done via the WYSIWYG editor Evernote currently uses or, for more advanced users…
• The ability to edit the HTML structure of a note. Technically it’s XHTML, but sometimes editing that is the only way to really “clean up” a note’s formatting, especially notes that are clipped from the web and get kind of crazy with the hidden (ie, unable to delete from Evernote’s editor) paragraph tags and other formatting. It would be nice to be able to just go in and simplify the HTML without having to battle the editor.

Here are a couple of features I want and think would put Evernote over the top, but which I’d be surprised if they’re considering…

4. Linking and embedding notes:
Before I found Evernote I was a TiddlyWiki addict. I was totally enamored with the javascript implementation of micro-content in a wiki-like HTML based data storage application. One of the beautiful features of TiddlyWiki is that you can create a link from one tiddler (the term for note) to any other tiddler. You can create tiddlers that are basically catalogs of other tiddlers and you can also embed tiddlers in other tiddlers. The embedded tiddlers can be displayed as full or partial content, in tabs, or in collapsible panels. It is a very intuitive way to navigate and organize your data. If Evernote took TiddlyWiki’s example and gave users the functionality to treat their notes as micro-content, it would finally be a contender to OneNote in the actual functionality of taking and organizing notes (which, ironically, is not currently Evernote’s strong suit!).

5. Extendable clients (let us make plug-ins!):
I am sure that every Evernote user has their own list of features they’d like to see the development team focus on. Releasing an API is a great step in offloading some of that development effort from Evernote’s developers, since now you can develop your own client for Evernote. The problem is that most people don’t want to develop a whole new client. The Windows, Mac, and iPhone clients already do 90% of what most people want and need, but they’d like to add another feature. Mozilla figured this problem out a long time ago by allowing people to develop plug-ins for their web browsers. If Evernote could make their clients able to integrate with plug-ins, they would open up a huge amount of possibilities. It would generate customer loyalty by giving people their pet features faster. It would generate geek-cred by letting developers bling out Evernote with their pet projects. And it would potentially offset even more development effort from Evernote’s team and allow them pick and choose the best new stuff to integrate into future releases. A win-win for everyone.

Finally, here are a few more nice-to-have features that don’t need much explanation:

• The ability to edit notes (especially todo checklist notes) in the mobile web client
• Notebooks that can be nested
• An app for the Android G1
• The ability to comment on public notes (why not make Evernote an alternative to a blog??)
• The ability to specify tags when adding notes via email and/or specify auto-tags when email received from particular address.
• The ability to encrypt a whole note, and a whole notebook
• PDF preview thumbnails on the web client (especially public notebooks)

That covers my main Evernote feature wishlist. I would love to see some of these things added to Evernote in 2009 and if they are they will make an already great application even more awesome. If you have other ideas please leave them in the comments, or if you are on FriendFeed join our Evernote Addicts group and post your thoughts.

Update [01/01/2009]: I recieved a newsletter from Evernote with some promising information. Looks like I might get a few things on my list, especially #1:

Dear Evernoters,

Thank you for making 2008 a great year for Evernote! I wanted to let you know about some of the things you can expect from us in 2009. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Think of it as our top New Year’s Resolutions, except unlike my resolution to learn the harpsichord, we’ll actually get these done!

….

Ok, on to the plans for ‘09:

1. Sharing and Collaboration

The public notebooks functionality that we launched in 2008 was a timid, first step in our ambitious plans for making Evernote a great tool for sharing your memories and collaborating with your friends and coworkers. In 2009, we’re going to greatly expand what you can do with your memories, documents, files, photos and anything else you throw into Evernote. If you’re the social type, we’re going to grow up from being your external brain to being a telepathic-mutant-super-brain, but with good manners. Of course, you’ll always have the option to keep any or all of your info totally private.

2. More Mobile Phones

We’ll be adding new Evernote native clients for a bunch of popular mobile phones. Right now, Evernote works great with iPhone or Windows Mobile devices. All other types of phones can use our mobile web and email interface ( http://www.evernote.com/m ), which is good for reading notes, but not as slick or full-featured as the native clients. If you’re hankering for the full Evernote experience on your favorite phone, there’s a good chance that you’ll get it in 2009.

Hopefully the Android G1 is on that list of phones to get Evernote clients this year. Exciting stuff!

The email also included the generic

4. Even Better Desktop Clients
6. Third-Party Apps
7. More Premium Features

Any of which could encompass some of my other requests above… so I’ll just wait and see, and cross my fingers.

This code is released under an MIT/X license so feel free to use and modify it as you see fit. At the very least it should provide a good example and launching point for your own projects.

To get started grab and unzip this Evernote note export file:

Once you’ve unzipped the .ENEX file it open your Evernote client and go to File > Import > Evernote Export Files… and import the note. You’ll find a zip file with the project source code as well as illustrated instructions for project setup steps.

If you have any questions please leave a comment or contact me at EvernoteAddict at Donaghe dot com.

Enjoy!

Update - If you don’t have a premium subscription you may not be able to import the note since it has a zip file attachment… you can get the code here instead.

The Evernote team has added a feature recently to premium subscriptions allowing the attachment and “in-note editing” of any type of file. I think this is the step that may make Evernote the first full realization of Cloud storage for mainstream consumers, and may put them on the road to be to personal data what Google is to public data.

For years now we’ve been told that it won’t be long until our digital life is completely “in the Cloud”, and that’s been something I have anxiously awaited. The Cloud means different things to different people, but some of the basic definitions include the ability to store our data somewhere decentralized so that it is accessible from anywhere that has an internet connection. I have always visualized the implementation of Cloud storage as relieving me from worrying about where my data is, or whether it’s safe and backed up, and being able to access it wherever I am on whatever device I am using.

The promise of the Cloud:
There are several ideas that come along with the Cloud storage promise such as -

• agnosticism about what type of data (and metadata) we’re storing
• redundancy (automatic backup or sync with multiple stores) of our data to ensure consistency
• the ability to share our data with others and control what’s shared and how
• the ability to easily store any data that we create immediately
• the ability to easily search for and retrieve that data when we need it again
• the ability to interact with our data from any platform as long as it has a pipe to the Cloud

Until now there hasn’t been a single service available that addresses all of these issues. There have been plenty of products and services that provide partial solutions which are divided among the lines of the type of data (and metadata) they allow you to store, the format of the data and/or the method of access. There are 3 main categories of these services and most of them cater to specific types of data:

Online file storage/sync/backup/sharing:
Amazon S3, Dropbox, Mozy, Carbonite, Flickr, YouTube and lots of other services to store our data in the Cloud. They offer services for packaged data (files) to backup from your PC, synchronize multiple computers, store and share data online or any combination of these things. Some of them (synchronization and backup services typically) do things in the background so you set them and forget them. Others are cumbersome to use (Amazon S3) but provide more flexibility in how your data is stored and retrieved. And some only allow you to store specific types of data (Flickr, YouTube) which, while allowing more focus on the content and communities around it to develop, is inconvenient for the individual because your data is spread around multiple services. Services that are data type agnostic usually don’t allow you to choose what metadata you want to store with your files or group related files for intuitive retrieval, while the file-type specific sites generally do.

Bookmarking:
There is copious amounts of data on the internet, but it is all transient. Websites, blogs, discussion boards, aggregators: there is terabytes of data being created on a daily basis for us to consume. Many people spend a good part of every day wading through that information to find pieces that are relevant to them, and it’s a natural idea to keep a copy of that hard-won data once it’s found. A multitude of services are available to create an archive of links to that data so that you can find it again such as Del.icio.us, Diigo, Ma.gnolia, Clipmarks and others. These services have popularized the idea of tagging information with metadata to make it easier to find and share with others. But they are flawed in that they don’t save copies of the data you find, or if they do, only parts (the non-binary parts). When the source goes away, your links become worthless.

File Systems and Databases:
Since most software is designed to consume data from files or data sets, file systems and databases are still the most popular ways to store data. Cloud storage will eventually be a major factor in making dependence on particular flavors of operating systems to manipulate your data irrelevant. And it’s been coming for a while… In 2003 I attended Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference. The attendees were presented with visions of the next version of the Windows operating system that would offer users file storage built on top of a database. Of course that never materialized, but the idea is still a great one. The advantage of databases is that they can be set up so that with indexes to search them quickly. Data structures can be defined to store data and metadata in the way that makes the most sense for the data itself and relationships between the data defined. The data itself is not constrained in a way that it is by storage in a file system file and the user has control over what metadata is stored and how the data is organized. Cloud storage, because it is a service that runs on a web server somewhere lends itself to being a large database with all the benefits a database offers. Currently most people keep the majority of their data on local hard drives, and are subject to all the limitations that imposes.

So we’ve got Cloud services and products, what’s the problem?
As much as some of us take advantage of online file storage and bookmarking services, they have yet to appeal to the majority of folks in the mainstream. To use them effectively generally takes a lot of time, discipline, dedication, effort and, in some cases, technical knowledge. Most late-adopters don’t want to have to learn how to use something, they just want it to work and work intuitively. And if it doesn’t make their life easier in the short term then it’s not something they’re going to use.

But now we have Evernote. Evernote is the first comprehensive realization of Cloud storage that is intuitive enough for mainstream consumers.

What is so great about Evernote?
Evernote covers all the bases of Cloud storage:

• It doesn’t care what kind of data you put in it, it supports any file type as well as raw text.
• It is storage online and an automatic backup of local files.
• It is available online and offline.
• It allows you to edit your from “within” the application (even files, when opened from the interface).
• It is a bookmarking system that allows you to organize all your data with tags and retrieve it via search or browsing.
• It keeps a full copy of any data you find interesting on the web that you can capture through a bookmarklet.
• It allows you to structure your data in a free form way, and keep meta data about the data with the data.
• It allows you to share your data with others, either in bulk (through public notebooks) or in batches (exporting notes).
• It is accessible from clients on platforms that people interact with almost constantly which makes it available to gather your created data from wherever you are and whatever format the data is in.
• It is extendable through it’s developer API so that third-party clients can be written against it to manipulate your data from even more platforms and combine it with other services that you already use to collect, create or modify data (with the ability to auto sync with those services).

This is the promise of the Cloud - being able to access and store any data you have from wherever you are whenever you want.

Evernote isn’t perfect. Currently the full Cloud storage enabling features are only available to paid subscribers, and subscribers can only upload up to 500mb a month (storage is unlimited once the data is uploaded). There are some improvements to be made in both the features to create data within Evernote and to share that data with specific people, but the team is continually releasing enhancements so the potential is there to be the one-stop Cloud storage application.

If Evernote addresses the ability to store more data in subscriber accounts they could have a chance to become the biggest player in the consumer Cloud storage market. With nearly 2,000 notes and 100s of files in my notebooks in a few months, I am already addicted to Evernote, and riding high in that Cloud. I don’t plan to come back down and I think that many others will be joining me and the other more than half a million new Evernote subscribers in 2008. If they build their user-base quick enough, offering a very addicting service that quickly becomes indispensable, in a few years Evernote could become just as important as Google in people’s daily lives.