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April 7, 2009

Can you 'cover' a feature?

People writing about software love this word: 'cloning'. Friendfeed's new beta allegedly cloned Twitter's activity feeds feature, but Facebook allegedly cloned Friendfeed's aggregation feature earlier . I do not like the notion of cloning or copying a feature, because the metaphor is utterly inaccurate.

From my point of view, a better term would be 'covering' a feature. For one, I love cover versions in music, I could spend hours browsing secondhandsongs or finding rare gems in the last.fm covers tag radio. And just as in music, there can be a lot more variation when covering a feature then when simply cloning it.

So Friendfeed's new beta is really a bit like twitter, but they are covering it just like Franz Ferdinand is covering the Beatles' "This Boy", giving it new energy and speed.

On the other hand, covers can simply go wrong. This applies to software as well as to music, but the difference is that awkward covers in music can be quite entertaining, while in software they are most of the time embarrassing to all involved parties.

Next time you are covering a feature, try to make the best out of the cover version, so that your software is able to fit into this equation.
Joe Cocker and your Software
Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Filed under  //   beatles   erdmöbel   feature   franz ferdinand   friendfeed   innovation   joe cocker   product management   twitter  
Posted by Lars Trieloff 

Comments [2]

April 3, 2009

So, how dead is personal blogging exactly?

The announcement of closing my blog at weblogs.goshaky.com and posting new blog entries either here or at dev.day.com has invited a number of comments. As I expected, my "personal blogging is dead" remark caused a backslash, on the one hand from Tom Johnson, who writes about the constrains a blogger has to face that moves from personal blogging to corporate blogging. And on the other hand from Irina Guseva, who has been questioning my assessment both in the CMSWire article on our CQ Social Collaboration 5.2 launch and on twitter.

Ironically, the most commented article regarding the Day CQ 5.2 launch is on Irina's personal blog, whereas I would have expected the discussion to take place at a more frequently visited professional blog like the CMSWire blog.

Does this show that I am completely wrong, and that personal blogging is not dead, but what we see are the best days of personal blogging? Or is personal blogging 'undead' - it is still moving and causing disruption, but desperately looking for outside inspiration, for 'brains'?

If this is the case, then the 'brains' that undead personal blogs are looking for can be found at Twitter. The microblogging service is fueling discussions, is driving blog traffic and is in many regards a much faster medium than blogging, which already had a disruptive speed compared to traditional online media (which in turn had a disruptive speed compared to print, radio and TV). Not only is microblogging faster, it is also more connected. With Twitter you know who is following you, whereas a blog author never knows who his readers are or if the bloggers that are being linked in a post are actually reading it. Trackback as a technology that allowed to close this feedback loop is nearly irrelevant now, because the mechanism that keeps the Blogosphere together is no longer a technical attribute of blogging, but a new category - microblogging.

Stefano Mazzocchi thinks that Twitter is like sending an instant message to the world, and personal blogging is sending an email to the world, and I agree very much. This means with Twitter becoming the motor of discussions (another case of this pattern is the CMS Vendor Meme) in the Blogosphere (it is obviously to limited for providing all the content) we have a situation that would be similar to sending an email and then sending a second instant message to alert the recipient of the email of the fact that there is an email and to incite a discussion. 

Filed under  //   blogging   microblogging   twitter  
Posted by Lars Trieloff 

Comments [3]