Day One has become not so much my journal as my personal log full of all the stuff that I could be posting on twitter or Foursquare or Flickr but that I don’t want or need to be in the public domain. Who cares where I went yesterday or what I had for lunch or how my son looked when he rode the swings at the playground? Honestly, probably only me, and that’s why having a place to easily capture, backup and search these memories is terrific.
I’m also using Slogger which takes the concept of personal logging further in making sure that all the stuff I’m sharing publicly also gets added to Day One. In my case that means Flickr images, app.net posts and books that I’ve marked as read in goodreads (complete with book cover images).
What Day One does great is capture and sync. What I’d like to see more of us ways to visualize all the information that’s in there. Wouldn’t it be great to see a map with pins on all the places that entries were logged? What if Day One could handle not only tags but quantified tags, a la Folding Text? This all may be going to far from the purpose of Day One but it’s fun to think about.
Gabe over at Macdrifter stands up for the “thanks” email, and Ben Brooks strongly disagrees. I’m with Brooks on this one in finding the extra email annoying and not wanting to clog up others’ inboxes with the same. Basically I trust that my emails are being received and that if somebody is expecting something from me and doesn’t get it they will let me know. Likewise, if I need confirmation of receipt of a message I can ask for it.
The short of it is this: I’ve never wished I had received a thank you message when I didn’t.
Given all the hooplah over Twitter trying transform itself into a truly advertising supported business you’d be forgiven for thinking that advertising was the most evil source of revenue imaginable. But what’s wrong with it? The Television broadcasting business is still doing well and TV, at least network and much of cable TV, has always been supported by advertising. Yet I’ve never heard anybody complaining that they were the “product” that a network was selling to its sponsor “customers”. The television business has continued to thrive with advertising at its center without much controversy. Why the outrage when Twitter wants to follow the same model?
There’s a few reasons why television advertising seems so less odious to us than ads online:
We’re used to it
In the USA television was ad supported almost from day one. From the The Colgate Comedy Hour to American Idol corporate sponsors have paid for programming in return for the eyeballs of viewers. If you went to a cinema and your movie were interrupted every ten minutes for an ad it would drive you crazy but on television it somehow seems okay. It’s not the only way we see television - public tv was always a part of the mix and DVRs now allow us to watch almost ad free - but television commercials seem natural even when we don’t like them. Conversely, pretty much all content on the web was free for a long time and many sites (especially those of newspapers and magazines) have only added paywalls more recently.
TV Ads are better
Commercials on TV are not all bad. Occasionally they are amusing, entertaining or informative. Sometimes they can even be said to have artistic merit. As television has matured the medium of the commercial has improved as well and advertisers have made a real effort to make us want to pay attention to their spots. Online ads on the other hand are sometimes useful but rarely interesting or entertaining. There have been exceptions (the nytimes ads for apple spring to mind) but given that Internet ads are usually miscrotargeted and automated there’s little room to craft something of quality.
Ownership
We have a different relationship to the Internet than we do to television. We feel that television is a medium essentially owned and operated by the broadcasters but that the Internet belongs to all of us. Which leads me to the next point.
Content
Television, radio and print are different than the web in that they provide us with unique content. In exchange for that content we’re willing to consume ads as a sort of tax. But the web features content by all of us, especially when we’re talking about Twitter in which so many of the users are also the content creators. We might be willing to pay a fixed price for the use of the “pipes” that carry that content (the business model of app.net) but advertising served up everywhere all the time seems like too steep a price to pay when the medium isn’t creating the message. It’s as if we were forced to listen to advertisements every time we picked up the phone to talk to somebody. The Internet as a whole, and Twitter in particular, is a telecommunications technology and advertising just seems wrong in that context. Twitter is trying to remake itself as a media company but it’s not clear that the shoe fits.
I don’t think there’s anything ethically wrong with Twitter trying to use advertising as a way to generate revenue. The vast majority of its users probably won’t be puy out out by the consequences, such as fewer third party clients and less integration with other services. The big question is whether advertising is a business model that can sustain Twitter as an important platform for years to come. I wouldn’t bet on it.
Full Disclosure: I have a Twitter account but have essentially stopped using the service since I purchased an account on app.net. More on that in another post.
I started with Instapaper like many people do. It was harmless: I saw something online I wanted to read later, hit a link in my browser toolbar and voila, I could open up Instapaper on my iPhone later and read it. Then came the integrations with twitter clients and other apps. Great! Now there’s even more stuff for me to read!
And then came the competitors.
Not happy with just making web pages easier to read, Readability added its own reading list. And then Read Later got tired of being an also ran, changed its name to Pocket and added some whiz bang UI and extra features to its own service. Like a sucker I signed up for all of it and have found ways to send links to all these services simultaneously (with ifttt of course).
So what happens to all those pages after I’ve read them? Surely they should be archived and searchable for all time. So those links also go into Pinboard and Kippt. Why two bookmarking services? Because the former is widely supported by third party apps and the latter is pretty, that’s why. Plus even though I’m liking Kippt a little more I don’t quite trust it as much as Pinboard because I don’t have to pay for it. Funny how that works.
So now I have a problem on my hands: three read it later services and two social bookmarking services with all the same links. Do I use all of them? Sadly the answer is yes. I don’t want to give up on any of the features that all this great software provides, from the groovy iPhone app for Kippt (called Clippt just to confuse us) to the awesome Instapaper Beyond web extension.
Too many great tech products. Not such a bad problem to have.
I’m with Ben Brooks in ditching Google for DuckDuckGo. He talks about replacing the default search for Safari and Chrome, which I’ve already done. I would add the suggestion that you use Cyberspace, a great web browser for iPad and iPhone that uses DuckDuckGo as its default search engine.