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The intent/purpose problem (& an appeal to @scobleizer)November 2 2009

Since Facebook bought FriendFeed several months ago, there has been much lamentation by the FriendFeed community. Reactions from members have taken several forms:

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 le

The Point You’re Missing About Google WaveOctober 2 2009

Now that I’ve had a chance to play with Google Wave a bit and to hear what other people have to say about it I’ve noticed that a lot of people are disappointed and it seems to me that they have missed the point.

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 Exper

Five Features that would Awesomify EvernoteDecember 27 2008

Yes, I love Evernote. It is my newest obsession, and I just posted about how I think it has the potential for greatness. I also mentioned that there is still much room for improvement in Evernote’s offerings. I have been impressed with how quickly the development team puts out releases and new features so I am sure that they already have a roadmap for 2009 of enhancements. But I would like to propose a feature list of my own, some of which I am almost certain are already planned, but a couple of others they might not have thought of that I think could make a huge difference in the adoptability of the application.

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

Get it while it’s hot: Evernote Web Quickstart for C#December 26 2008

As a slightly late Christmas present to other C# web developers out there I’m releasing a project I put together that is a reference implementation with everything you need to get started with the Evernote web API for .Net 3.5 in Visual Studio 2008. The project has several helper wrapper classes to make your life easier: one for OAuth authentication, one for accessing the Evernote User and Note stores and a base page to use on any .ASPX page that automatically handles the OAuth plumbing for you.

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�

High on Evernote: Cloud Storage for ConsumersDecember 26 2008

Over the past few months I have become an addict of a service called Evernote. It was originally created a few years ago as a note keeping application as an alternative to Microsoft’s OneNote and other similar software. In mid 2008, Evernote’s creators revamped the application so that it kept a duplicate of your note data on their web servers and automatically synced the local copies of the notes. Subscriber data is accessible both via the Evernote web interface and the local machine client, which can be installed (and synchronized) between as many computers as the subscriber wishes.

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 di