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No this is not a fanboy post. :) Bear with me. This is just a story that ends with me giddily jumping with joy the day Google buzz arrived.
A few years ago a service called friendfeed was born. The brain child of the creator of gmail, friendfeed is a fairly simple web app. It served as a central place to aggregate all your online streams (blog, picture uploads, online bookmarks) under one super stream and share it with other friendfeed users’s super-streams. It turned out to be a brilliant idea, but I only saw it then as a “simplified” version of Google reader. I was a big fan of Gooole reader, and its big and growing feature set. But as in the case of twitter, in that simplicity lied the genius of friendfeed. With no fancy features to get in the way, simply, it was just a stream of what people were writing/uploading/bookmarking/saying or simply, sharing online.
From the point of view of a technology enthusiast (raises hands). It was a great way to follow interesting people on friendfeed and what they were sharing. But there’s another thing about friendfeed that made it great — if your friends or contacts are on it too, conversations can start around some of the items in people’s streams. Unfortunately I saw this from the point of view of an observer. Having Nikki (forever, w00t!) as my sole real-world friend who’s also on friendfeed, our conversations never actually went far. Just rare, short bursts of to and fro.
The creators of friendfeed knew though that though some of your contacts/friends may not be in friendfeed, you may still want to follow their what-would-be super stream. You may already know their blog, their twitter account, public Picassa web albums or other sources of streams. So friendfeed allowed you to add “imaginary friends” and manually create their super stream too. Oh joy. :p But just with real imaginary friends (whoa), you have to imagine having conversations with them. (And I didn’t need friendfeed for that, ;p )
I had many friendfeed imaginary friends (a lot more than real imaginary friends i ever had, since I can’t remember ever having one). Apologies if this list is incomplete. After realizing how “fun” one-way sharing of stream is, I lost interest in updating them.
This is actually a little online secret that I was keeping: I have online imaginary friends! Of course I didn’t tell you, my real-world friends, that in a very cool place called friendfeed where our super streams intersect, you were my imaginary friends. (But hey, I got a quick bird’s-eye view of what everyone were sharing)
Then Google launched Buzz. Imagine your imaginary friends (and brother!) coming to life, actually sharing their (not yet so) super stream, you being able to comment to what they were sharing and they, replying back. At a risk of bordering on the pathetic, I will say that I felt ecstatic when Google Buzz launched. It brought me back to the blogspot days when everyone were blogging and commenting on each other’s posts (voluntarily or forced).
There are other (probably more technical) reasons why I love Buzz, but they probably don’t have a long story that comes with them.
The Imaginary friends (click for a larger view in Picasaweb):
Is this the future of the workplace?
Symbian’s innovative UI, that is, in a world without the iPhone.
Ten years of BlackBerry -- Engadget -
A great read if you want to know the roots of the Blackberry. :)
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24 ways: Make Your Mockup in Markup
Time to stop showing clients static design visuals | For A Beautiful Web
“…Product reviews are without question the best part of Gizmodo (and Engadget). But that’s not how Lam’s diatribe reads. Lam feels insulted, but rather than say so, he says instead that RIM has insulted Gizmodo’s readers, which I find humorous in that Lam is the guy who has so much respect for Gizmodo readers that, for instance, when he found out that Cisco was going to announce some sort of slapdash “iPhone” VOIP dingus in December 2006 in an effort to protect their iPhone trademark, Lam let them (i.e. trusting Gizmodo readers) believe for an entire weekend that Apple was announcing the iPhone that coming Monday — a stunt that converted trust into extra page views.” — Daring Fireball’s John Gruber on Brian Lam’s tirade against RIM because they didn’t give Gizmodo a review unit. This was exactly my thoughts about Gizmodo stupidly pretending that they care about their readers (and not the page views they lost because of not having a Blackberry Storm 2 review unit).
There’s a reason why despite iPhone’s success, the idea of a multi-touch GUI hasn’t really taken the desktop computing space by storm. Ergonomics and bunch of other things poses serious problems in adapting the multi-touch gui in the desktop.
Now a company called 10/GUI thinks they have the solution to these problems. Take the time to watch their video. These guys must be on to something.