marks.dk
Why Laterstars is changing the way I read tweets
I use Twitter’s “Favorite”-feature a lot.
Actually, I’ve faved almost 4000 tweets within the last 8 months or so. Almost all of them are faved while reading tweets on the iPhone, because I wanted to check out a link once I’d be back at my laptop.
In the beginning, I read the faved tweets online, but found out that it was a great idea to put a feed of favorites in Google Reader. That’s the way I have been reading faved tweets for months.
Recently, however, people have started tweeting about a service called “Laterstars“. It’s built for people like me who don’t fave because it’s just a great tweet (like this), but because the link in the tweet seems interesting and I want to read it later (like this).
The main advantage in Laterstars is that it strips away the content and present you with easy access to the link in the tweet. You can use the keyboard shortcuts you know from Gmail on the website. It works with Fluid as well, so you get badges, nice favicon etc.
If you subscribe to the atom-feed connected to your profile (here’s mine), you can add it to Google Reader and the title of the item will link to the url found in the faved tweet. Clever!
And it gets even better. Yesterday, the developer, Toby Sterrett, agreed to hear me out about a feature I’d love to see; a bookmarklet that lets you cycle through the links from your faved tweets. And lo and behold; it took him five minutes to make it.
Adding “http://laterstars.com/faved_links/oldest” to your bookmark bar will give you easy access to the links you saved for later, without even visiting laterstars.com. Once you’ve visited a site, it’ll automatically archive the link as well so you don’t visit the same link twice.
If you want to try out Laterstars, here’s a code for the fastest 25 people: MARKS
Pinboard.in as alternative to Delicious.com
I’ve recently started using the bookmarking service “Pinboard” more actively as an alternative to Delicious. It seems as if Yahoo! really doesn’t care about Delicious all that much, and I want to be more in control of my data. Therefore I signed up for Pinboard and the developer keeps adding amazing features I’d wish others would take note of.
First off, it’ll cost you money (MONEY!) to sign up. I don’t remember how much I paid, but currently the price is $6.13 (the price is calculated as number of users * $0.001). This is to discourage spammers and support the costs of running the site, which are both valid arguments for such a nice service.
Another impressive feature set is the ability to auto-add shared items from Google Reader (mine), Twitter favorites (mine), Delicious bookmarks (mine) as well as toread items from Instapaper (mine as RSS). Essentially it saves stuff I mark as great from around the web. Very clever.
The last feature I want to highlight is two bookmarklets that was added yesterday: oldest and random. You can set Pinboard to tag some of your imported bookmarks with “toread” and when clicking either oldest or random, you’re taken to the oldest bookmark you need to read, or a random one.
I hope the features that are added in the future are of equal quality, and that the design gets a bit of an overhaul at some point…
On experiences and the value of those
I’ve started jotting down the ideas I have for blog posts in Things, which is not a groundbreaking idea, but I actually want to fulfill some of the promises I’ve made myself and wrote about last week. One of the promises is to blog a bit more – say, once a week – and this is one of those posts.
So far this year, the biggest change in my everyday intake of information is the “newness” of the stuff I read. I’ve removed almost everything resembling news sites in my Google Reader, and started focusing a lot more on crafted blog posts as well as visual blogs about architecture and interior design. Now, when I flip through the items in Google Reader, I rest more; I spend a bit more time reading every blog post than I did before, and I appreciate the ones that are well-written a whole lot more (plus I get to look at nice photos of people’s homes).
It’s a change that has already happened in other aspects, without me thinking about the pretty obvious connection. I don’t listen to music on CDs and I don’t watch movies on DVDs anymore – I stream it from my iPhone, Mac or a hard disk plugged into my tv (an absolutely beautiful feature), and I do it because it’s easier.
It also means that I tend to rush through it without thinking about what I listen to, or sometimes even what I watch (unless it’s The Wire which is the best series I’ve ever watched – more on that in another blog post).
So, the other day I put on a vinyl, sat down and studied the cover, sleeve, lyrics, artwork. The whole package. And I thought about how much work had gone into making the album – it was so more than the music. It was a complete experience.
An experience I actually want to pay for – and that’s the rub.
The other day, we had a long, and heated, discussion on “Bølgen“, a Danish magazine published and maintained by Bjarne Tveskov on Google Wave, about the future of newspapers. I argue that the problem with newspapers lie in the name; it’s news. On paper. Paper is slow. News are fast. They are mutually exclusive now.
Where did I learn about the earthquake in Haiti? Twitter. Where do I keep getting the latest updates about it? Yes. Twitter. It’s too fast for even the newspaper’s websites, so why do they even keep on fighting the battle? (Oh yeah, advertising. Forgot about that.)
If I want something on paper, it needs to be something more than yesterday’s news, because I won’t appreciate it – nor pay for it.
Make me a weekly magazine in Google Wave, curated by a guy I like to follow on his blog, Twitter-profile etc. and I’ll gladly pay for it. Which I did. Same goes for Daring Fireball; I love that blog and read it religiously, so when John Gruber printed a new round of t-shirts, I bought two. Panic also made a new t-shirt with the leaf from Coda embroidered – bought one of those as well. Mikkel Malmberg releases an EP every year around Christmas and I happily paid for that as well.
It’s the stuff that I feel is of the highest quality, and relevance, I want to pay for. It’s the stuff that I know people cared about creating that I can truly appreciate, and are willing to pay for; whether it’s a magazine in Google Wave, a well-written blog, a piece of software, an iPhone app, an album on 220g luxury vinyl with included poster signed by the band etc.
Create value for me by giving me an experience, and I’d be happy to pay for it. Try to keep up with every startup in the world, give me yesterday’s news, pour gallons of water on the rumor mill or cover every ridiculous celebrity’s latest steps, and I’ll take my money with me elsewhere.
Update: To those of you who want to see what I read in Google Reader, you can follow my shared items at 2kg.dk/shared and/or see the whole list of feeds I subscribe to at marks.dk/greader.
The User Interface of FriendFeed
This is my final paper for the graduate course “Advanced User Interface Design” at Bentley University. I was lucky enough to get in on this course, even though I was only an undergraduate exchange student and I got a 3.7 (A) in the course.
The abstract for the paper which is called “The User Interface of FriendFeed” is as follows:
“The purpose of this paper is to give a qualified answer to the question of whether or not the interface of FriendFeed is bad. A subjective opinion is not adequate as a criteria for determining the quality of the interface, so various theories are applied. With focus on the “Likeâ€-function while still evaluating the interface as a whole, I apply theories on Metaphors, Glanceability, Ambient Information and Affect. Furthermore, to determine the efficiency of FriendFeed as a social network, theories on Groupware and Distributed Cognition are being used. The paper concludes that while the interface may be perceived as aesthetically unpleasing, its purpose of transferring positive emotions and involving the users is fulfilled.”
Basically, I try to give a qualified answer to whether or not there is some sensibility behind the design decisions they made when creating FriendFeed’s UI, and it really is well thought through. The contextual awareness for the content posted is superb, and the “Like” function serves its purpose fantastically well.
That being said, I still don’t like the service and think it’s too much of a conflict between my RSS-reader of choice, Google Reader, and microblog Twitter. It can’t really figure out what it wants, and is not nearly intelligent enough to really serve me those juicy posts I want (I don’t know exactly what I want either, so I don’t blame the FriendFeed-team, but computers in general and my attention span of a millisecond in particular instead).
The whole paper is embedded below:
The User Interface of FriendFeed
How to add a password-protected feed to Google Reader
First, I must come with a warning.
If you want to add a feed to Google Reader that has a password-protection, there probably is a reason for it to be password-protected, and thus be closed to the public. This trick involves using FeedBurner, which doesn’t protect your feed once you’ve created it (only way to close it is to delete it), so it can potentially be found by anyone.
That being said, let’s roll.
I’m spending a lot of time on Twitter, and I want to track what people say, even though that means not getting it in real-time. Enter RSS.
The problem is that Google Reader doesn’t give you the option to enter a username and password for protected feeds, so you’ll want to go to FeedBurner and create a new feed through which your Twitter-friends’ feed will come. They have the option of adding your username and password, as you’ll see can see later.
First, go to your homepage on Twitter, scroll to the bottom of the page and copy this link (it should be something like http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/123456.rss, where 123456 varies from user to user):
Then, go to FeedBurner and paste it into the box where it tells you to.
It will tell you that it’s impossible since you don’t have the username and password for the feed, but also tells you how to do it properly:
The feed address you entered is password protected. You can specify a username and password in the URL like http://user:password@www.website.com/index.xml.
So, what you do is to scroll down and enter the following in the box on that page:
The feed address you entered is password protected. You can specify a username and password in the URL like this:
http://user:password@www.twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/123456.rss
Click on “Next” and either log in or create an account and you’ll now be able to add your feed to Google Reader. Obviously, it’ll work with other feeds as well, but always remember that there is a reason for the feed to be password-protected in the first place.