I had an interesting experience yesterday when my company laptop bricked up on the way into the office. I went immediately to blackberry not just to scan my email (which I usually do when I’m not at a desk), but also for everything else. And by “everything else” I mean scheduling meetings, viewing and commenting on powerpoints, looking things up on the web,and (now) even writing this blog post.

while I missed the pc for a few things that are more efficient with that form factor (multiwindow activities, typing fast, mousing) and I have a few mail server folders to optimize for getting stuff out of my inbox once processed a la GTD, overall I’m pretty pleased by how well synced up the RIM curve let’s me be.

I haven’t yet posted about the new Wesabe API, but I’m very excited about it.

Aside from enabling 3rd-party developers to build apps that can help users manage their financial data and get on top of their financial lives (think of a SaaS version of Quicken mashed with all manner of GTD apps), there’s a major shift going on here. Banks and credit agencies are no longer the (only) owners of all the data about us - now we own it too, and have the right to pool it with other users’ data to do interesting things with aggregated data from the community.

MyBlogLog flipped a similar switch by giving users benefits from analytics that have historically been publisher only - now you can’t see my history, and I can’t see yours, but when we’re in the same place, we can see each other’s tracks if we both expose them; I can see what other people are doing at my favorite websites, etc.

Wesabe’s API enables similar opportunities for patrons of the same merchant to connect, and for patterns to be extracted in a way that creates value for all sides. I look forward to seeing what comes of it.

After I accepted a colleague’s invitation to join his network today, LinkedIn gave me a list of ten other people I might know. Historically, those lists have been utterly useless for me — “other people who have worked at Self Employed”, etc.

Today, amazingly, 10 out of 10 were people I knew personally. Quite a few of them were non-obvious - people I’d met at conferences, or had specific business communications with. Most of them were people I knew well enough to add to my network.

Maybe it was a lucky batch, but it sure seems like LinkedIn’s algorithm found the people in my connections’ networks that I was most likely to know. If I had to guess, I would hazard they are extracting some kind of parameters from the kind of people already in my network and applying them to the set of people (in my network’s 1st-degree network + matching my employers). The approach is obvious, the execution is probably hard to nail, and the effect is exactly what it should be: magic.

It’s a good reminder that, despite all the exciting things Facebook is doing these days, LinkedIn is a very effective “social graph” for my business network. If they innovate fast enough, there’s a lot more they could do with it — and I look forward to it.

If you’re not already in my network, btw, the link is in the column to the right.

Like a number of my friends and colleagues here, I re-initiated my Twitter account at SXSW (here’s my profile). Having dry-tested it a few months ago without getting the aha, I figured I’d take advantage of the momentum it seems to be picking up here to see if I could make it useful.

Despite the fact that I can’t seem to get it to actually send SMS updates to my phone (probably a blessing given the volume of posts going around among the harder-core users), I am finding it useful as a way to update multiple people I’m trying to coordinate with simultaneously. (Not to mention fun.)

At a party last night, talk turned to the question of whether mobile was finally happening, given that here were a bunch of mid-to-late-30’s-plus year olds using their cell phones like a bunch of high-school students. My answer, from the 3rd beer party of the night I’d converged on with multiple different but overlapping friend groups, where 80’s hits were playing and people were running around in fur hats and underwear? Only because we’re behaving like them in the physical world.

I had nothing to do with it whatsoever, but I’ve been watching from the sidelines with near-amazement a new Yahoo! service called Pipes.

It’s a stunning visual editor for web data services - reducing the friction required to normalize multiple data inputs, apply operations and parameters to them, and extract standardized outputs.  The benefit, of course, is to enable unexpected data mashups and new kinds of visualizations, along the lines I’ve talked about before here.  Jeremy Z and Tim O’Reilly do it better justice than I do.  I’m delighted to see a few others are picking up on it - to the point, it appears, that the service is down at the moment.

Congratulations to Pasha (who seems to have taken the opportunity to launch a blog) and the rest of the team that made this happen.

This is a taste of the power of a seamless client/web app, and a great example of some of the things I was talking about here.  It is what the whole widget thing will become it grows up.

It is the future.

(And Chris Shipley should take a cue from Fred W. and provide embed code for her videos.)

Wow, enough’s been written about widgets in the last week to fill a year’s worth of predictions. Fred is for them (subject to user happiness); Nick is apparently against them; and the New York Times just got around to discovering them.

Clearly they’re already the focus of some investor thinking and attention (Yahoo! corp dev folks are even talking about them publicly), and Newsweek has called 2007 the Year of the Widget, so it would be superfluous to call this a prediction from here. But I do think this ties into a broader trend that’s of interest, and that the market may resolve itself in unexpected ways.

This trend is about data visualization, presentation, syndication, and control. After all, publisher widgets are basically just websites - really small websites. And desktop widgets are client apps with small windows. (Though I don’t think client web apps are the future, given that there’s already a very effective client app called a “browser” on most pc’s today that do everything a widget client could do.)

What we’re seeing in the explosion of activity around widgets and embedded apps on MySpace is really the convergence of several trends that I think will all be (or continue to be) important this year: The portability of data streams, and the corresponding ability to aggregate them from around the web, apply rules to them, and ultimately control them at the consumer level. This broad trend leads to:

• New ways of visualizing data streams, especially as led by widgets right now. I’m also including “widgety” experienes like Netvibes here - but this is just a small part of a much bigger trend, as are Ambient devices and RSS-enabled rabbits. To build on the above comment about really small web pages, widget carriages are ultimately just like blog templates - rich presentation layers into which you pump your choice of content. People have lots of data available and will need lots of ways to view it.
• Social transparency and syndication. I can choose what content I expose in “publishery” applications, and I am almost automatically “publishery” in my social applications and digital self-expression because my friends can consume and subscribe to my stuff in reader-like ways. I have increasing ability to apply degree-based rules to this publication (let my friends but not my contacts see data, etc.).
• Data and content pushing upstream into communications. Aren’t IM windows and “you’ve got mail” pop-ups just desktop widgets? I can already subscribe to RSS alerts in IM and integrate messaging at the user & data level into my Yahoo! email in a way that provides a rich, seamless experience. I already consume my RSS feeds into my Outlook client (via Newsgator). There will be much more of this.
• On a related note, presence. That tv commercial where the guy’s watching a show on his laptop, big screen, and mobile window will happen for internet apps and presence-based communications first.
• Information control and data productivity. New apps and platforms are emerging to let users apply these trends to each other. Wesabe lets users do something interesting and valuable by combining a feed of their personal financial data and a social pool of user-generated content about merchants and transaction types, with a high level of security and control. Touchstone is about creating a high degree of control and intelligent automation over how communication and presence data are presented and consumed. These are platforms that allow user data mashups, and you don’t have to be a developer to leverage their power.
• I will probably post at greater length about the specific problem of productivity and Getting Things Done, but the kernel of the idea is, more and more of our communications are digital, more and more of our “to do’s” live in emails and IMs, and more and more important actions and decisions in our lives can be driven off of open-standards-based data and content (like digital wallets. . . or automatic mortgage re-fis). Managing personal and business productivity against all this data is thus more and more of a challenge - and a huge business opportunity. We’ll see how far Microsoft moves the ball forward with Vista - my bet is I still won’t be able to get my RSS, email, calendar, and to-do list to play perfectly with each other even in the same application, let alone across windows.
• That also touches on the issue of synchronization. Much has been said lately about web-based apps vs. client apps. It’s kind of a no-brainer to me that we need the power of the real-time web in all of our business applications now; lightning-fast access to our document data; access to our data via all our windows, even when we’re offline; automatic synching of docs modified offline; and always-safe, always-secure automatic backup of our precious data to the co-lo of our choice, be that an internet cloud or an expensive box in the basement. What’s so hard about that?
• Smart systems. By the way, I really don’t want to have to spend weekends at a time reorganizing my digital photo collection and figuring out 1,001 Lifehacker iTunes hacks.
• Oh, did I mention search? Hehehe.

A propos of my previous post. . . In a funny twist of timing, Jonathan Weber, my former employer at New West, just wrote a column in the Times of London in which he reflects on exactly the issue of Expression Engine vs. other publishing tools that I touched on in my welcome post.

I am somewhat amused by his wondering whether he made the right choice in building on EE — I sure hope he’s happy enough with it, since I was a primary driver of that call — but I think his results so far speak for themselves. And ultimately he comes to the right conclusions, which are that these things are still way too hard to use and “way” not good enough for non-developers to really customize.

Though he refers to Yahoo! and Google as wanting to own this space (and we certainly have pounded a few collective stakes in the ground there), I still see lots of room for innovation from the edges. Last weekend at Gnomedex, I got a demo and met the founder of a product called Wetpaint, which is a really easy-to-use, pretty, WYSIWYG version of Typepad, and its getting easier to blend 3rd-party developer tools with many platforms due to entries from PostApp (aka WidgetBox), Ning, and the like. Just a couple of examples among many; I look forward to seeing more emerge.