With Wordpress.com’s latest announcement, Google has now achieved dominance in real-time RSS. It’s PubSubHubbub for the win.

This Wednesday, the official Wordpress.com blog announced that their huge blogging network would now universally be implementing Google’s PubSubHubbub protocol alongside Wordpress’s competing plugin rssCloud.

There’s been a bit of a race to determine the web-standard in real-time RSS feeds. Moving RSS to a push service has been a story of parallel development. A lot of folks realized that sending RSS updates to a reader, instead of waiting for the reader to pick them up, was the future. For a while though, no one knew how. There were a bunch of work-arounds out there, but not a full solution.

However, the two leaders in RSS production came out with competing real-time RSS APIs around the same time. Wordpress released the rssCloud plugin on Wordpress.com, pushing towards their vision of real-time RSS. Around the same time, Google announced that it would unleash the awkwardly named PubSubHubbub as the push-RSS for Blogger.com and Google Reader. Of course, there was some confusion among developers. Part of this was that the protocolls were being implemented on the two largest blogging sites and though gReader was going PubSubHubbub, rssCloud was developed by the father of RSS.

It was an uphill battle for Wordpress when it seemed like no one was adopting their protocol. While the thousands of Wordpress.com blogs might be pushing out real-time feeds, the only folks set to catch them were Dave Winer’s own software and Lazyfeed. On the other hand, not only had the biggest reader gone for PubSubHubbub, so had many of the web’s largest blogs.

With this latest announcement that Wordpress.com intends to make their feeds PubSubHubbub compatible, it’s clear that the search monolith has overpowered the alternatives. While in this case Google has quickly resolved the confusion of real-time RSS for the better, I can’t feel comfortable with how quickly and completely they were able to outweigh the competition.

Do you think this has all turned out for the best?

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Yesterday, Tuesday, December 30, 2008, was a landmark for Twitter as a service and for the world of digital public policy. The Israeli Consulate in New York held a citizens press conference on Twitter. Lasting two hours, it engaged everyone on Twitter, led trending topics, and allowed Israel to directly answer questions from one of the web’s biggest communities.

David Saranga, consul of media and public affairs in New York, is the primary force behind the Twitter conference. Consul Saranga is no stranger to the world of new media; he began the consulate’s social networking initiative in 2006. He also was the mind behind the ‘beer ‘n’ babes’ Maxim in Israel campaign.

“There is a lot of public interest regarding the operations in Israel,” Saranga said. “So we decided that if these people want to know about the events in Israel, the best way to do it is to ask us directly.”

Brave words, considering that some of the people he was seeking to engage in conversation had been standing outside his office the day before the conference with signs saying “Allah (SWT) will destroy the terrorist state of Israel.” Consul Saranga wasn’t worried.

“I don’t have a problem with any question,” he said.

“It’s the right of everyone to be informed and to hear what the people on the Israeli side will have to say,” Saranga emphasized.

With its 140 character limit, at first glance Twitter seems an odd choice for a Q&A, but there were good reasons for the choice.

“I definitely think that Twitter is on the ascent,” said Joshua S. Fouts the chief global strategist for Dancing Ink Productions and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Fouts is is currently working on a report for the Obama administration on Understanding Islam in Virtual Worlds. “It allows busy people to check in and see their questions in a time space that is more in-keeping with their flexibility or availability.”

“I think this [Twitter] is just another great avenue for communication,” said Tamar Weinberg, a blogger and social media consultant, who does some pro-bono consulting for the New York-based Israeli Consulate. “If there is one broadcast tool that everyone in the world should be using, maybe it should be Twitter.”

There were good PR reasons for using Twitter as well.

“Exposure for Twitter is heightened, especially among those who are less likely to use traditional media to get this kind of news,” Weinberg said.

Fouts has worked on communicating public policy through new media for the US State department in the 1990s.

“The more that governments steps outside of their comfort zones and experiments with the rapidly evolving technology, the better,” he said. “It behooves governments to use taxpayer dollars in a way that is current with the way the rest of the world is communicating.”

News of the event worked well for the Consulate–increasing its Twitter followers, hits on their websites, and visitors to their other web properties. Not only that, but people began to ask if this was the event that would make Twitter mainstream, resulting in coverage from a number of popular sources including Boing Boing, Wired and ArsTechnica.

Weinberg pointed out one of the best indications that the Consulate’s event was really bringing Twitter to the common man, or in this case, mom.

The Twitter conference began promptly at 1 p.m., but it was rough going at first. Shel Israel, a social media and Twitter expert who had intended to retweet the entire conference, publicly left 30 minutes into the event, tweeting “No real chance for interchange of ideas or to gain new insights. I’m checking out.”

At that point the Consulate’s twitter account was typing out answers about every five minutes, in comparison to the dozens of questions coming in every single minute. In addition to that, the first answers lacked the hash-tag marking them as part of the #askisrael topic, forcing many to turn to Tweet Grid, TweetDeck, FriendFeed or Tweettree to track the whole conversation.

Even with a program like Tweet Grid, some of the answers were phrased confusingly, as the Consulate attempted to compress highly complex discussions into 140 characters, including this early example: “MV DIg dnt respond 2 Calls 2 hult & rammed an IDF ship. it was escorted out 2 intl waters. till this opt. ships were let.” Which, with some work, might translate to “Medical Vessel Dignity didn’t respond to calls to halt and rammed an IDF ship. It was escorted out into international water. Until this operation, ships were let in.”

However, by 2:08 p.m., ‘askisrael’ was the top trending topic on  TwitScoop, as ever increasing numbers of Twitter members joined the discussion and the Consulate’s replies increased in frequency and coherency.

“We really try to get as many questions as we can. We had so many of them and we tried to separate between the repeated questions and the original ones.” said Moriel Schottlender, the internet applications development manager for the consulate general of Israel in New York, one of the primary organizers for the event. “This was a little bigger than what we thought in terms of the amount of people that asked questions.”

With so many questions, even with a team behind the account the Consulate couldn’t keep up and had to ask for patience.

Trying to keep up with all the questions, the single twitter account had around five people running the show. Schottlender used TweetDeck to track and organize the questions. Then the other team members wrote down and compressed Consul Saranga’s answers and sent them back for Schottlender to post online. When the group realized just how large the pool of questions they had to deal with was, they sent another member to Twitter’s web interface to help track questions and send tweets.

“The capacity to manage the flow of questions going through is often times difficult.” Fouts said. “Twitter, in particular, allows the people who are hosting the questions to receive and organize them in a way that is more structured and it allows the participants to participate in a way that is more manageable for them, because its asynchronous.”

Schottlender was familiar with TweetDeck and found it the best tool for the job for a number of reasons.

Related posts:

1. On UPI: Israel Tweets the Gaza Conflict
2. The #AskIsrael Conference
3. Talking about the #AskIsrael Conference

The problem with Evernote is that it is absolutely horrible at taking notes. Actually there are more problems than just that, but the core of the issue is that, for a program that has the word ‘note’ in its name, it is pretty bad at just that.

For those of you not in the know, Evernote is an application for Macs, PCs and iPhones that is built for users to “Capture. Sync. Find” and “remember everything.” This sounded pretty cool to me, even without an iPhone. There was one problem, I already use note-taking software. OneNote has been my digital life partner since I first discovered it and I consider it the one piece of essential software on my computer. I use Microsoft’s OneNote for everything from work to play and its database goes deep.

However, right before the semester began, my aging Acer laptop literally melted down and I lost an entire summer’s worth of notes. It was devastating. I hadn’t backed up all of my OneNote directory and to lose as much as I did was horrifying. Evernote’s ability to sync up to the web was so attractive that I considered buying a subscription right away.

I decided it would only be fair to try the two products, side by side. So, I put OneNote on my new computer and restored my last backup. Then I installed Evernote and decided to split my classes between them. Evernote, I figured, should be targeted towards the student market segment, so it should work just fine.

The first thing I tried to do was import some of my old OneNote notebooks into the program. This did not work very well. OneNote uses a system recessed pages and my average notebook has sub-pages within pages within tabs. This just didn’t import into Evernote in a usable manor. That plan nixed, I went on to use Evernote in two out of my five classes.

The top six problems I encountered:

1. I missed half of my first class just trying to figure out how to add bulleted lists without copying and pasting them from another program. Also, I found that once I’d created a bullet, increasing the indent was an exercise in annoyance and using enter to exit out of indented lists was counter-intuitive.
2. Manipulating indents was a huge pain, because Evernote created them as a set of spaces.
3. Tagging my notes was a waste of time compared to the ability to recess notes in OneNote. I do like tagging, but doing so in class is a waste of time. Putting in enough tags to make class notes useful takes forever and not doing so makes notes impossible to find. I take notes because later I know I’m not going to remember what is in them, without tags I wouldn’t know what to search for.
4. Navigation was both counter-intuitive and difficult. There is a reason no one has ever tried to use two scroll bars for one axis before and it made navigating longer notes simply impossible, which had me almost screaming in frustration during mid-term reviews.
5. It had no sense of citation and pasting content in from other programs was just weird, often causing odd paragraph spacing.
6. Without OneNote’s multi-level structure, notes were just hard to find. Even with a search bar.

One of Evernote’s unique features is its ability to take photos, recognize text, and make them searchable. Everything I do on the web is already tagged and categorized. I never had the opportunity to use this feature of Evernote in the wild. When is there anything I need to take a picture of that I couldn’t just type out on my cell phone or text to twitter? I can even take a voice memo if I need to. What would I ever need to use this feature for? Every example I’ve seen has been on the level of “oh this is cool” but I’ve yet to see a useful photo. I certainly haven’t encountered one myself.

I already tag websites through services like Delicious, Digg, Friendfeed and Ma.gnolia and photos in Facebook, Picasa and Flickr; why would I want to keep them on my hard drive just to search their images? How much textual information is kept in images that this would even matter?

Is Evernote riding a hot air balloon of hype to the top?

I can’t imagine Evernote could ever become anything but a minor player without extensive adoption in the student community. Most PC users don’t know enough to care about the synchronize feature or are knowledgeable enough to use the photo feature if they even had the opportunity. With that in mined the only other thing Evernote has going for it is the writing recognition for tablets. One problem–almost all Tablet PCs ship with a very good handwriting-input program–OneNote.

The Apple student

The argument can be made that Evernote has a good chance with the growing segment of students using Apple computers, as OneNote doesn’t exist outside of Windows. However, almost all students who have Apples don’t bring them to class because of their weight and would never need a note-taking program. Of course there’s also the fact that for what the average student needs to do, Apple computers are high on price and low on function. While there was an increase in Mac users with this year’s freshman class, network compatibility problems and software issues have been driving them away. With the economy in the shape it is, I expect we will see a significantly smaller number of new students with Apple laptops next year.

Where’s the beef?

If all this is true and Evernote fails in appealing to what should be (in my opinion at least) its target market segment, who is it appealing to and why is there all this hype?

The reason Evernote has been so noticeable as of late is for one reason (besides the iPhone):

It is the perfect tool for hard-core bloggers who like pulling random info from the web to write about and sharing it with their audience and don’t like paying for OneNote or use Macs. These happen to be the same people who are writing the reviews. Unfortunately this function is essentially duplicated with a website like FriendFeed. This begs the question: what are people using it for?

Why is it still installed on my computer?

I discovered one amazing use for Evernote. Writing fiction. Especially this month, which is National Novel Writing Month. Evernote’s lack of formatting options, non-existent spell-check, and reassuring synchronization mean that this is a perfect tool for short fiction or speed writers. If Evernote added a word-count tool, I have no doubt they’d be able to capture the NaNoWriMo crowd with ease.

Other than that, I don’t understand what possible real-life use people have for Evernote, unless they own an iPhone. As for its future? I can’t see it going far without some serious changes, no matter how many people sign up for the service. No one will pay for it unless it is useful as a tool for… well… notetaking.

I’d like to know, how are you using Evernote? Is it in a way that actually helps your workflow or is it just a toy? I’m open to being proved wrong, but I just can’t see a way that Evernote in its current form can succeed as anything but a plaything for the techno-elite and perhaps some savvy writers.

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