My MacBook Pro died last week (fried logic board). Apple replaced it on the same day, and the next day I got this simple email from them:

No demands, short (and explicit!) time requirements, and a picture of what looks almost like the venue I was in (would be even better if it was).

Now look at the above picture (taken from the website). This was the first page I hit. There was no logging in, no tedious filling in of silly details. I’m a community member (okay, a customer) - they have all that recorded and integrated with this web property. Awesome. Now I want to fill it in - after all I just had to push one button to get here. Nice touch in having the Genius name there too.

As you can see the form is pretty straightforward, easy to fill in, reasonably clear, and short.

I like the addition of the free text entry. Sometimes you want to vent. Sometimes you want to praise. This lets you do it.

Finally the goodbye. Short and sweet. It felt good to take this survey. It was simple to initiate, simple to engage, and didn’t look or feel like the spam we too often see these days.

This was a great lesson for me - I’m now going to look at a few of my other ventures and ensure they have a way of providing this kind of feedback experience. An email address just doesn’t feel nearly as good.

Here are three techniques to consider:

• Automated Manual Filters - online tools that help you filter blog posts by keywords
• Aggregated Global Social Filters - online tools that rank posts in a blog by how the global population treats that post
• Human Filters - online social tools that let you subscribe to posts filtered by friends

These techniques all offer a different type of filtering. Choose whichever suits your needs.

Automated Manual Filters

An obvious technique in adding relevancy is to filter out the irrelevant based on a keyword search. In other words, match each post within a feed against some criteria, and if there’s a match, either keep or remove that post.

I sometimes use Feed Rinse to do this, though there are other filters on the market such as mySyndicaat and more. You can even use Yahoo Pipes. So what does Feed Rinse do? (Feed Rinse is the most intuitive for the everyday blog reader, though I’ve had a few problems with Atom feeds.)

Essentially, it allows you to import your feeds (individually, or via OPML), apply filters to the feeds (only allow a post if it contains the words “Stephen Fry”, or only allow a post if the title contains “Wilde” and so on), and it then spits out a new, filtered feed that you have to subscribe to. This new feed will only contain items that match your filters.

This is an effective way to cut down on the extraneous material, and Feed Rinse tries to make it easy by allowing you to import en masse, apply filters to individual feeds, aggregate individual feeds into channels, apply filters to channels and so on. In other words, I could grab several feeds from various news organizations, add them to a channel, and apply a filter to the channel. The result would be a single feed that only contains items from across all the organizations that match the filter.

Aggregated Global Social Filters

A very different way to look at information coming from a feed is to filter it by ranking the posts within the feed and only viewing those posts that are “good enough”. In other words, instead of consuming the entire feed, you can simply subscribe to a percentage of those posts.

For this kind of filtering, I use aideRSS. aideRSS uses what I call a global social filter - it looks at how the world is reacting to posts within a feed. For each post, it examines at least the following: its digg rating, how many folk tweeted the post, its del.icio.us ranking and how many comments were left on the post. You can then subscribe to a percentage of these posts by subscribing to the “good, great, best or top 20″ posts within that feed.

In other words, aideRSS filters the posts within a feed based on some ranking, and then presents you with a new feed that you have to subscribe to (that contains only those relevant items).

It’s a pretty nifty service, and though you may not want to use this kind of filtering everywhere, it’s an awesome tool to have.

Human Filters

A few blog readers such as Google Reader let you apply the nous of your local social circle to filter posts. In this form of filtering, you let your friends tag or flag or “mark as shared” items that they read in blog posts, and you subscribe to this shared feed.

It’s not ideal: there’s no way to rate an item based on multiple people, nor is there a way to share an item to a “shared feed” to which multiple people can post.

Nevertheless, this can be useful if you have a domain expert reading the posts anyway. He’ll be filtering, and if there’s prior agreement as to what he’s sharing and why, this can be very useful.

See the “Settings/Tags” menu option to set up or change sharing options in Google Reader.

(You could get into a more complicated scenario where you feed multiple human filters through a feed combiner, but that seems a little OTT. What we really want is a social aggregator.)

Postscript

I wish Google Reader or NetNewsWire supported additional features to help readers filter posts. For example, I can’t highlight blog posts that meet certain criteria, which I thought would have been a basic need. In NetNewsWire I can create a “smart feed”, but that’s not quite the same thing. Neither can I automatically filter out duplicates, which is an absolute drag, especially as I subscribe to feeds as well as aggregations of feeds.

There’s still a long way to go in filtering the blog avalanche, and I’ve seen surprisingly few client side features to help. Hopefully these three techniques will help you out while our blog reader clients mature.

Technorati Tags:
blogging, aiderss,
feed rinse, google reader, netnewswire

• the kilt-wearing Ewan Spence who demoed Qik and seesmic. Live streaming from his phone was pretty cool.
• hypernumbers, whose Erlang-implemented system allows you to assign a URL to each cell in a spreadsheet, which you can then surface wherever you like (such as on a web page). Think “spreadsheet cells as a service.” Their website provides a little more details, but rather curiously doesn’t have a blog.
• Dave McClure, who gave a great talk on Startup Metrics and Business Models for [Scottish] Pirates, filled with solid advice. For example, don’t build features for features sake - think conversion - does that feature increase conversion?; and build a trust relationship before you push for referrals. Lots more in the linked presentation.
• Skyskanner, who were not only interesting because they did a splendid job sponsoring the drinks. Their website actually solves a problem I have: find me a flight leaving this city on this day across all airlines. Most travel sites can’t solve that problem - they always demand a destination, which doesn’t allow for much spontaneity now does it! And you’ve got to love their price isobar graph.

I also gave a talk on online communities and some of the ways in which to grow them. All in all, a good two days - thanks to the sponsors and organisers.

Technorati Tags:
barcamp, barcampscotland, erlang

Visit a Best Buy store. Now imagine that store without ANY human beings inside. What do you have? A bankrupt store.

So why when I visit BestBuy.com don’t I see any people? Hear any conversations? Is there any wonder why Amazon has a P/E ratio much higher than Best Buy?

While I’m giving this a different tack here, I think this is a great way to think about a community web site. In a recent talk I gave I spoke about the difference between managing a successful website (rising page views, etc.) and a successful community. They aren’t the same thing.

Many so-called community websites are simply websites. They are empty—devoid of life. Lacking any human beings, as Robert says.

So:

If you’re managing a community website, you need to surface that community on the website. Not only should you enable conversations, but you should highlight those conversations, and the people doing the talking. Show potential community members that you’re a website with real people having real conversations.

How

Some ways in which this can be done:

• Have the community manager call out great conversation that occurred that day/week on his/her blog/newsletter and so on
• Select a few conversations to be highlighted on the home page
• Provide mechanisms that allow your community members to flag great content, and highlight that
• Go semantic. Some sites have great metadata. If a forum message on the forum called “TopicX” is related to blogs on “TopicX”, and your community flags a message as 5 stars, how about highlighting that forum message in the side bar of blogs on that same topic?
• Invest in MVP programs (Microsoft have an interesting MVP program)

Caveats

Sometimes you find websites that do surface the conversations on websites. However, the result is a webpage with dozens of topics and reams of writing. Nobody is going to read all of that.

When doing some of this, keep a few things in mind:

• Think about usability, about how people read websites
• Provide some editorial. Have a community manager select great conversations, perhaps massage descriptions (to read better, shorter - not skew the message) and so on.
• Don’t overdo it. Think about the value you are providing to your audience.

Technorati Tags:
community

Android: Overview

• Type of Community - This is a developer community, and they have an audience of developers.
• Website - clean, clear, wonderfully free of annoying copyright, trademark and other company logos, a touch of graphics. Google is mentioned only once, discretely in the footer, and I think that’s just because it’s hosted on code.google.com. Emphasis is on what matters: Getting Started, the blog, the forums.
• Features - website, documentation, APIs, code samples, videos, downloads, blog, multiple forums (with email subscription and feed support), some identity, SSO
• Lures - a $10 million contest

iPhone: Overview

• Type of Community - This is a not a community site, it’s a resource site for developers
• Website - clean, clear, a touch of graphics. Emphasis is on what they think matters: getting resources into developer hands, not on building community.
• Features - website, documentation, APIs, code samples, SSO, “connect to the experts” tech talk videos
• Lures - Listing in Apple web apps directory

Android: Purpose and Business Goals

The business goals are, I imagine, to support the adoption of Android among developers, and in so doing help the Open Handset Alliance Project succeed.

The site has focus; it’s purpose is clear. They obviously understand that developers want code, want HTML accessible API documentation, sample applications, SDK downloads and a developer forum.

iPhone: Purpose and Business Goals

The business goals are, I imagine, to encourage developers to write applications for the iPhone. There is already a huge audience out there scratching at the walls to do this sort of thing.

The site is clearly a resource site. There is no hint of community here. I suspect they may be wanting to drive ADC registrations either - why else hide developer content links until you’ve logged in.

Android: Supporting the Audience

These guys have gone out of their way to support the audience: All the major operating systems are supported, with emulators, SDKs, code samples and IDEs. They’re going out of their way to make sure there is no excuse. If someone is even remotely interested in this thing, they will be able to write their first application and deploy it to an emulator in 30 minutes.

They’ve tried hard to remove any excuse for getting started and developing on their platform. They want you to succeed and have done a tremendous amount of work before the community was even launched to try and guarantee its success.

iPhone: Supporting the Audience

These guys have produced a rich set of resources that will allow developers to write web apps for the iPhone (SDK support is coming later). Since web applications are OS agnostic, they ostensibly support all platforms.

In contrast to Android, they have not tried all that hard to remove any excuse for getting started. There’s no clear downloads or suggestions of IDEs for example. They do have code samples, but little in the way of how to host them, how to integrate with other platforms etc.

Android: Content

The website has superb documentation. There’s a “what is”, getting started (including tutorials), developing applications, developer toolbox, reference information, sample code and FAQs.

It’s great to see the reference information online. Like most Java-based code bases, it’s all available in HTML format. That means other developers can point to it in discussion. I see so many communities try and do this with PDFs, or worse, with documentation embedded in a download. That just doesn’t work.

iPhone: Content

The website has great content and technical videos (delivered via iTunes). A full reference library documenting all the technologies and a set of sample code. The only other content is a set of iPhone Tech Talk Videos.

I find the video delivery a little distracting actually. Because they’re not embedded, I can’t just “hit play” - it lacks immediacy and means I have material scattered over a website and my iTunes. Then again, I can play them on my future iPhone…

Android: Analysis

Here are a couple of things that may improve the community:

• Integrated Identity - they have some identity. For example, David McLaughlin, who I suspect is part of the community team, has his ID surfaced as David McLaughlin, Android Advocate. That “Android Advocate” is a nice touch. The unfortunate thing is that I cannot click on David’s name and read his bio, find out what else he has written - which will lend to immediately increasing his identity, reputation and history. In fact, I can view his profile via his newsgroup postings, but they’re lacking integrated identity.
• External Resources - while a community blog post does point to external communities publishing material on Android, they don’t do a good job of surfacing this activity on the website. They could do with an article listing, perhaps community rated.
• Content experts, evangelists - while they undoubtedly have them, I don’t know who they are, where they’re speaking, what they’re doing or what they’re saying. It would be great if these folk are blogging. Of course, it’s early days yet.

iPhone: Analysis

It’s rather odd that Apple haven’t engaged the community in any way. Perhaps that will change going forward, but there’s no support for blogs, externally authored articles, or even the most fundamental in a developer community: the forum. In other words, they certainly don’t have the infrastructure surfaced on this site on which to build a community.

They also demand registration before giving developers access to the most basic of resources. A strategy by a company confident in what it’s offering and that this hurdle won’t discourage potential audience members, and a company that obviously wants developers to sign up for their developer program.

All of this may be coming later. Perhaps they’re waiting for the iPhone SDK to come out (next year). Some may ask if it’s even necessary. There’s already hoards of developers chomping at the bit, healthy discussion in external blogs, and perhaps there is a forum hidden on ADC’s forums. Having said all that, it’s hard to believe that a forum and community would not help Apple, or more importantly, these external developers. Sharing expertise, knowledge, tips, best practices—these will all help Apple in the end.

Android: Interesting Developments

Single Forum, Later Split: The community is a week old, and they’ve just split the single group (I think it was single last week) into 5 groups - beginners, developers, internals, challenge and discuss (water cooler).

What’s great is that they started with a single forum, and split it later as demand rose. So many new communities make the mistake of starting with a bunch of forums, all forlornly empty.

Stats: The beginner mailing list now (Nov 17) has 102 messages, and the developer mailing list 3791 messages. It was at 2900 two days ago - that’s a lot of growth.

Last update: 17 November

Update: Carlos Perez has a great take on the two communities.

Technorati Tags:
apple, iPhone, community, google, android

The instruction are simple. Place your (wet) hands in, and draw them out slowly. That’s it. It works too - unbelievably fast.

You can just imagine the engineer that created this. There he was in a loo, trying to dry his hands on those awful wind devices, just before nipping off to have his car washed. Sitting in the car as the dryer blew the water from his slowly moving car, a light went off…

.

My hotel wasn’t particularly good, but I found a number of great patisserias nearby that supplied an alternative breakfast. The first time I walked past one of these I saw a number of Barcelona natives standing around a bar table, eating a pastry and sipping an espresso. I joined them the next morning and every morning after that.

I had a number of memorable meals: a ham dish (obligatory in Spain) at els quatre gats (photo coming), and a superb array of dishes at the Windsor (rather english sounding!) and tapas of course, at various restaurants. Lots of seafood (I generally only eat fish, though I did have another taste of Arròs negre) and I avoided the goats cheese (learned that after visiting Toledo a few years back).

I had a half day to myself the first day I arrived, and so visited Casa Batlló, one of Gaudi’s buildings. It was quite something, and you can see why it’s called the house of bones.

On the final evening, at around 2am, Victoria and Simone decided that we needed to visit the Sagrada Familia, which we duly did. Luckily it’s well lit for the batty tourists. Wow. Describing it, I could only come up with “organic gothic.” It felt a little like a mixture between the architecture and feel of the alien structures in Alien, and some of the cruisers in Babylon 5. Seriously!

Conferences are really about meeting people, and Barcelona’s cafes and tapas bars provided many opportunities. Patrick, Arunabh,Victoria, Quinton, Dain, Simone, Eddie, Pieter, Marcus x 2, Scott, Gary, Catarina, Hussein, Linda, Martin and many more made it even more worthwhile.

• Building Offline Salesforce Applications with Google Gears and Google Web Toolkit

It uses a boatload of interesting technologies: Ajax (via GWT), client side browser database (via Google Gears), RPC between the client and server (Google Web Toolkit), web services between the server and Salesforce.com (apache axis). I’d recommend Gears and GWT - they were a pleasure to use. Some APIs suck. These were intuitive; I hardly looked at the documentation…

SaaS, Google Gears, Google Web Toolkit, Ajax, Salesforce

I then tried to look up the very definition of web 2.0:

Not looking good. So I decided to rely on that poster child of the social aspects of web 2.0, tapping into the wisdom of the crowd. Yep, I thought I’d use twitter. This is what I got:

It really hasn’t been a good day at all.

A while back I wanted a website where I can share and record books that I’m reading. After a few searches, I ended up on goodreads, which has a lot of nice functionality. Cool, I thought. Then I started experimenting with Facebook, and goodreads didn’t have any Facebook integration then so I started using “Visual Bookshelf” on Facebook. Great, now I could share the books I read with friends in my Facebook social network. And it works too. But in my excitement I forgot to check on something: can I export my data from Visual Bookshelf? The answer appears to be a resounding no.

This cuts to the heart of open data. This is what makes Visual Bookshelf iniquitous (I’m reading Wodehouse) - it is utterly unacceptable for a site not to provide export functionality of my data. Flickr does it, which is why I trust it with my photos. Okay, it doesn’t provide an export button, but searching for export in the help makes it clear how easy it is. Visual Bookshelf does not.What’s linking these two thoughts? I recently read this great article on wired, Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up, damning the Facebooks and MySpaces for holding onto our data. Artur Bergman then pointed out the manifesto, Thoughts on the Social Graph, which makes a great point at explaining how these social networks, from Facebook to LinkedIn, are holding on to my social graph, and what you can do about it.

I think the problem area should be expanded a little, especially when social networks become platforms as Facebook has done. I want Facebook to liberate my social graph, but I also want the applications that I use on Facebook to liberate my data too. Trawling around goodreads, I found that they now have an API. So I’m in the process of dumping Visual Bookshelf and returning to goodreads, in the hope that they’ll make it dead simple for me to export my reviews in future, and that they fix their abysmal Facebook integration.But a question remains: What makes people so eager to use an application without thinking about the consequences of what it means to their data? Why do millions of people continue to store their book reviews in goodreads and visual bookshelf and Amazon?

• Do they expect these companies to be around in a decade or two? In other words, do they expect permanence?
• Do they expect that these companies will act in good faith and provide an export feature in future?
• Are they not interested in the data? Perhaps they just want to express themselves now - if it’s temporary well that’s okay.

It’s quite okay to be in the temporary camp. My throwaway data may be your bread and butter; that’s okay.For those in the permanence camp and good faith camps - we need to do a lot more to ensure our data survives the company hosting it. Is it really too much to ask that our contributions to Amazon and LinkedIn and Facebook remain ours? Even if I publish my liberated book reviews on my own site, that’s not going to undermine the true value of Amazon (selling the book) or goodreads (aggregating my book shelves).I’m still willing to make use of these services, just let me have my data.