So what is Thounds? Well read on…

What is Thounds?
Well firstly, it’s a silly word that I’m not a big fan of. It doesn’t do the site or what they are trying to achieve any justice, but like others before them the folks at thounds have come up with a great idea and any domain name that would have been any good is taken so they have ended up with thounds.com (well that’s my opinion at least).

In a nutshell, Thounds is a collaborative recording interface, simple enough, but looking at the tour very powerful. Now it’s been a while since I’ve used any of the recording gear I have around the place, but I have to say this enthuses me to do so. I wouldn’t need to though, obviously any microphone plugged into your computer will do the job, but if you have good kit you may as well use it right?

Using Thounds
Using thounds is a simple as throwing on some headphones (simply to prevent audio leakage), and then hitting the record button on a little flash widget they have on the site. The widget includes the useful ability to have a metronome playing in the background (note this gets a little screwy on linux – I had a funk rhythm section going instead of a steady beat) which will keep you in time for your loop you are recording.

Now I would say, thounds is targeted at capturing musical ideas and making the collaboration part of creating music fun and enjoyable. If you are a pro muso I think you will get value out of it, but for more serious online music creation I would probably recommend you check out something like Indaba instead.

Why Super Cool?
Why is thounds super cool? Well in my very recently formulated super cool checklist it gets a tick in every box (for now at least):

• It does one thing, and one thing very well (see Apple)
• It attempts to engage all people through a clever idea – it gives people a sense of being something bigger (clever tour video captures this nicely).
• It has a low “barrier to entry”. While something like Indaba is brilliant in both its technical execution and presentation, it doesn’t hit people where they are at, and give them one simple thing to get started with. Thounds does that.

Anyway, just my thoughts, recommend you go check it out and make up your own mind. I’m going to see if I can get time to grab the guitar out between coding and have a play on there – feel free to look me up

I would say that noise is pretty much deafening, not deafening in the way that makes you want to lock yourself in a room (well sometimes maybe) – maybe noise is not the right word. It is more like the deafening you experience when you go to a concert or gig and everything else just seems to disappear. When you are busy networking, other goals and objectives can simply cease to be…

So how does Gist help?

Well in my opinion, Gist is the perfect social aggregator and what I’m calling a social navigation device (like a portable navigation device or PND but for social media). I’ve tried a few, some of which have been very good, but Gist is the best out there at the moment. Why do believe it is so good? Well basically for the following reasons:

• Gist has highlighted information from my social networks that would have taken me quite a while by myself.
• Gist has enabled me to prioritize my connections so that information from individuals and company that I need to build my business can viewed simply in one place, very easily.
• The implementation and feel of Gist is very, very solid. Definitely makes me rethink when we as software developers should consider calling our product a Beta release these days. My experience of Gist so far has been near on perfect.

Some Gist Features
When you login to Gist the first thing you see is the dashboard. Now this is a well thought-out and really well implemented screen.

The dashboard shows the social media activity from all of your contacts. By default the level of importance to qualify for inclusion on your dashboard view is set to 25, but that can be jacked up very simply and I would recommend pushing that up to about 60 to start getting value from Gist.

Using the people and company lists within Gist, you are able to quantify the importance of each of your contacts. Additionally, some of the importers for will automatically attribute levels of importance based on the amount of engagement you have with a contact via that channel (or a default importance level based on the channel).

The list is simple to navigate, and simple to update the details of people and companies. Merging the same contact that has been important can be achieved simply by editing the contact and selecting the merge option. My advice, spend some time here identifying those contacts that are “important” to you and assigning some appropriate importance rankings. Given that all twitter contacts are pulled in at importance 50 and twitter, I would suggest those networking contacts you need to give priority to get given a higher importance rating than 50.

As a rough guide for importance, I’m going with a scale like:

• >= 90 : Business partner or current client.
• 80 – 89: Someone I do business with regularly, or a previous client, or a close friend.
• 70 – 79: Previous business associates, and good intel sources (like those people who tweet about something new and cool).
• 60 – 69: People how generally say pretty useful things, and I like to keep in contact with.
• 50 – 59: Not sure yet…

I guess one thing I will ask the Gist guys to roadmap (and I must admit it’s possible I just haven’t found the feature yet), is for me to be able to qualify the context in which I have attributed the importance. As Gist allows me to import connections from various social networks, I have a coming together of both business and personal contacts. I don’t mind this, as certainly the lines are becoming more and more blurry as time goes on. What I would like to be able to do though, is let Gist know whether I am in the personal or business context and it could customize my dashboard to suit. This could also be used to assist those who run multiple businesses to have those as separate contexts.

In terms of features, I really have only looked at the core functionality that I believe makes Gist truly great. There are lots of other interesting things in there, including calendars, dossiers (sounds secret agent like right) and other cool things.

My recommendation – head on over to Gist, sign up for the beta and start having a play around. My expectation is that Gist will enable all of us to achieve more in the social networking space in a fraction of the time that we do now.

Grasshopper’s approach to using traditional methods such as Snail mail to engage some potential product advocates is fantastic. Would these people have taken notice if Grasshopper had dropped them an email or DM’d them in Twitter? Absolutely not, or at least highly unlikely. But a fedex package containing a tasty and somewhat unconventional treat (I know it’s debatable – grasshoppers are quite conventional), that’s something that catches someone’s attention.

In terms of my own learnings, this really reinforces the need to be different in our current market. The more I look, the more blogs I read, the more I realise how many people there are trying to achieve the same goals that I am – and that is something to be celebrated rather than lamented. My response to that, however, is to strive to be different and thus noticable in a very noisy digital world of email, blogs, tweets and everything else.

Congratulations Grasshopper on a successful campaign, and thanks for reminding me that being different is a good thing.

On doing a bit of a trawl through the web, it’s not that it hasn’t been tried in the past (see things like LineBuzz and Probloggers comments on LineBuzz). In general, I think the concept makes sense and there are definitely times that I would like to comment specifically about a particular paragraph or phrase in some text rather than the entire article. So why hasn’t it worked in the past?

A Look at LineBuzz

Using LineBuzz is pretty simple and just requires the import of some javascript from their site. This is great, simple to implement and it means that you can potentially use it on any site, and could include something like a Tumblr blog (as an example I’ve set it up @ http://damonoehlman.tumblr.com/) which doesn’t support comments out of the box. It is however a little on the ugly and clunky side (a screenshot of the buzz window is displayed below):

The Line Buzz Comment Display

Additionally LineBuzz gives you the ability to delete a comment that has been made on your site as a means of moderation:

Some comments on the Problogger post expressed concerns around moderation, so this is probably something that could use some tweaking (maybe just to simply allow users not to auto-approve comments).

Why didn’t it work?

Does it just come down to how well it has been implemented in the past? Was the implementation that LineBuzz came up with too clunky for people, or are people just not that interested in targeting their comments at particular pieces of text in an article? Is it more natural to comment on the whole text of an article and thus inline commenting only has value in a collaborative editing space rather than publish and feedback space?

Not sure that I have the answers to the above, but I do know that we humans are fairly shallow creatures so if something doesn’t look and feel nice we aren’t likely to use it. Add a few functionality flaws on top and you have a recipe for poor product uptake.

Could something like it work now?

Personally, I think it will. With a strong trend towards twitter and micro-blogging, I believe people will be more likely to micro-comment on things they have read. Integration with existing social media is key though, and if was implementing an inline commenting solution myself I would definitely be looking to use something like twitter as the delivery mechanism. Basic flow for use would be something like:

1. Read article on web, and be compelled to comment on a part of that article
2. Select the appropriate portion of the article
3. Input comment on text, submit comment.
4. Tweet is delivered regardless, and comment is submitted for approval by article author. (I guess there could be a problem here with people responding to the tweet and the comment not being approved, might just need a moderator “kill comment” function).
5. Other approved (not killed) comments are also displayed on the article.

In my opinion, it could work. If the guys at LineBuzz were to put a fresh coat of paint on their interface and actively improve the product, I think there is real potential for some success. It’s not Google Wave, but it is something that could be useful right now. Should LineBuzz improve their product and give us something to talk about? Should someone build an alternative? Maybe.

Have thoughts on the above topic? Leave a comment below.

1. Twitter is gaining mass appeal and is going mainstream.
2. Corporates are either looking to use or are already using twitter as a method of communicating with their customers

Which leaves me with a single question:
How are they managing the quality of their communication via this channel?

Why bother? Well to prevent blunders that have the potential to damage a reputation.

An Overview of Workflow
Traditionally, organisations are using workflows in systems to manage the quality of their communication. In general, most users involved with workflow in these systems admit the process is somewhat slow and cumbersome to manage. I remember once when speaking with James Robertson of StepTwo, he felt there was a general unstated acceptance in organisations that workflow doesn’t work (his post is well worth a read).

Whether workflow works or not for the current applications it is being used for is beyond the scope of this post, and not something I will go into. Will it work for the time sensitive “What are you doing now?” style applications like Twitter? I don’t think so. Applying a workflow process that has many eyes checking even 140 characters for correctness, alignment to brand, compliance, etc, will probably turn a “What are you doing now?” into “What I was doing 3 days ago”.

A Twitter Friendly Alternative
So what’s the solution? Well honestly, I don’t know – but I do have an idea or two. I believe workflow processes should only be used to handle information or data that has a relevant flow from A to B to C, and relevant quality checking can happen along the way. Information that needs to be dispersed to a wide audience such as an enterprise’s customer base should travel a different path. Certainly in the case of a tweet I believe using a different paradigm for quality checking is warranted.

One of the primary methods for speeding up the total time an item spends in workflow, is to use parallel workflows where possible. This enables multiple approvers to approve / reject the changes implemented. I believe this can be taken further, where a single parallel step with a wide number of participants can speed up the process even further. A single parallel workflow…. sounds just like a vote – and that’s what I’m thinking of. I will try and elaborate on the ins and outs of the process below.

The Vote Process
In the case of a tweet, let’s say I think my organisation’s (the ficticious Acme Widgets) customers should know that “Launch a new range of widgets, and the first 50 retweeters win one free”. I would then submit that to the twitter queue and the vote process would begin. My co-workers in the organisation would either vote-up my tweet to the point at which is was published, or vote it down so it wasn’t published.

In my mind I would see the voting process supporting two different publishing triggers:

1. Item published once x votes were received.
2. Item published automatically in x business minutes/hours, if 0 decline votes are received.

The reason the second publishing rule exists to keep people attentive to the process. With only the first process in place, I believe that individuals would be all too keen to defer their responsibility for voting something up to others rather than take on any risk themselves. With the second voting rule in place, it means people have to make an effort to monitor the content stream as all defined parties would have the chance to prevent a content blunder from occuring.

Defined Voting Groups and Weighted Voting
Obviously, nothing in this world is ever simple. I don’t for one second think this is as simple as pushing all corporate communications through a single voting engine with no ability to configure rules for content publishing and review. Different types of communications require different sets of eyes to review the content, and thus the system needs to support this. Additionally, I believe the voting process needs to make allowance for weighted votes (as this is relative to the way the real world works). For instance, if the CEO of Acme Widgets felt that the announcement was ok, then his/her vote would carry enough weight to mean it’s published as soon as the CEO ok vote is received.

Feedback
At this stage, what I have proposed here is a very raw concept. Does anyone else have ideas about alternative quality management solution that would suit a twitter style application?

One piece of tech that is particularly interesting is their product called present.ly – which in their own words is “Twitter meets LinkedIn”. Now whilst I believe these guys have done a good job building the technology I have to wonder if the product will make the dent in the market I believe they would like it to.

So many questions in my head around this space…

Will corporates show interest in microblogging? I can just imagine the CEO of some large multinational just microblogging about some aggressive job cuts he is having to make given the financial environment.

If enterprise microblogging becomes something to investigate, will the new kids on the block get to play, or will twitter take that business?

Still, kudos for the build of the app – it feels and looks good; and good luck to the guys at Intridea with the project. From what I’ve seen on their site, they definitely are pulling some great stuff together, so I’m going to keep an eye out for more interesting projects from them – their labs area is a good place to start if you are interested.