Tech Products I Couldn’t Live Without in 2011
Inspired by Michael Arrington’s 2009: Products I Can’t Live Without, here are my vital tech products of last year:
- iPhone 4S — specifically the 8 megapixel camera, iCloud, and Siri. I take a LOT more pictures now. iCloud has saved me a couple times when I had to hard reset my iPhone while on the road. Siri has allowed me to move several apps off of my homescreen, including Phone, Find My Friends, Reminders, Notes, Clock, Weather.
- iPad — to save money, I limited my traveling and stopped paying for the 3G data plan. The iPad became more of a household device that I’d use in bed or on the couch. I also started using it as I stretch before my morning runs to make the stretching routine more enjoyable.
- Google — Chrome, Gmail, Reader, Voice
- Flipboard for iPad/iPhone — still, by far, the best way to stay up-to-date with Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and now Tumblr.
- Trillian — Replaced Adium as my default chat client because of its seamless chat syncing and chat logging in the cloud. While chatting, I could easily switch to a different device and not worry about missing any IMs.
- Instagram — started using this even more when I got the 4S (8 megapixels, baby!)
- Tweetbot — the best Twitter iPhone app out there; its push notifications replaced my Boxcar app
- Instapaper — because I was overseas for 10 weeks in a country with spotty internet, I started downloading articles and blog posts to read offline. Also kept me amused on my 16 hour flight.
- Tumblr
- Skype — absolutely necessary for sharing intimate moments with someone that you can’t be with physically.
- Dropbox — came in really handy when I constantly needed to share large files with my friends.
Honorable Mentions: Backblaze, Find My Friends, PostMate for iPhone (shameless plug), Slingbox
Heating Up for 2012: bitcasa, iTunes Match, Siri, Voxer
Losing That Loving Feeling: BlogTV, Foursquare, Path
Dismissed: Adium, Boxcar for iPhone, Mozy, TokBox, Twitter for iPad, Hootsuite
Multiple Social Graphs
Last year I attended two reunions — one with my childhood friends and the other being my High School reunion. While I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping in touch with my childhood friends, most of my high school friends I hadn’t talked to since graduation.
But if there is one thing that I have in common with both groups of friends, it’s Facebook.
It came up several times in conversation. Friends would tell me how much they loved my status updates.
“Mel, I saw your status about a bee attacking you while you were peeing. HILARIOUS!”
“Mel, I love your food pics! Keep posting those!”
Sweet! I’m e-popular at my high school reunion, hahah. But not all of it was positive. One of my friends came up to me:
“Mel, I don’t fucking understand half of your status updates. What the hell is ‘RT’? And what’s up with the ‘@’ signs? And what are the #’s for?”
At the time I was pushing all of my Tweets from my personal account straight to my Facebook. I spent 15 minutes trying to explain to her the concepts of retweets, hashtags and @mentions…but she ended up even more confused and walked away.
So that’s when it hit me. That is when I realized that even though most of my Twitter followers are my personal friends on Facebook, the two are very different audiences. Or rather, different social graphs.
The reality is we have a social network for just about every possible social graph these days:
- Personal friends? Got ‘em on Facebook.
- Colleagues and business contacts? Got ‘em on LinkedIn.
- Friends that enjoy my food pics? Instagram (for me, anyway)
- Local friends that wanna know where the party is at? Foursquare.
Even with Twitter, I have two very distinct accounts. One that is for professional topics and the other for personal tweeting…kinda like having a Facebook Profile for personal friends and a Facebook Page for fans.
It’s something that I started doing because I realized that most of my personal friends don’t have an interest in my professional/geek side. The few friends of mine that are interested? They’ll follow both of my accounts. And the few times that a tweet overlaps both social graphs? I’ll tweet it on one and retweet it on the other. Or I’ll just tweet the same thing on both.
@AndyBudd once asked, “is there a right way to tweet?”
My response? There is a time and a place for everything — the wisdom comes from knowing when and where.
Before you start whipping me with “it’s my Twitter account, I can tweet whatever I want!” ask yourself this:
Do my Facebook friends really care about #FollowFriday?
Do my Twitter followers really care if I check into a gas station to fill up gas?
Do my Twitter followers really care to click a non-descriptive “Photo: http://tumblr.com/asdfghj”?
There are so many damn social graphs, some of us don’t know what to do with all of them. But, these graphs are separate for a reason, so we should treat them as such.
If a person is really interested in your location, they’ll follow you on Foursquare. If they’re really interested on your Tumblr posts, they’ll follow you on Tumblr.
So disable all that cross-site auto-posting stuff. Be selective when cross-posting on Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and Tumblr. Realize the context of who are you talking to, why the follow you and what you are sharing with them. Or simply, before sharing anything on any social network, just ask yourself:
“Who would care about this?”
"It Just Works"
MG Siegler:
With Chrome OS, everything is always there because everything only exists in the cloud. But Google has been bending over backwards to tack on a file management system to Chrome OS. That weakens their cloud argument, in my view. But again, their aim is to ease the transition of current PC users to the cloud.
Google seems to be aiming more for users who understand current computing paradigms and want to transition that knowledge to the future of computing, the cloud. Power users, if you will. Many of the people reading this post are in this camp. But there are many more who are not.
Apple has rethought and rewritten their apps — including their desktop apps — from the ground up to be woven with iCloud fabric that a user won’t see. Google wants the users to be able to see that fabric if they choose to, and in many ways, encourages it as sort of a safety net in the transition to the cloud.
Same cloud concept. Totally different execution.
Proximity-Aware Push Notifications
Back in 2006, when I was sporting a nifty little Sony Ericsson. I had this desktop app called BluePhoneElite that would push notifications from my phone to my computer screen via bluetooth.
It was great! When I got a text message, I’d see an unobtrusive growl notification pop up. When someone called me, same thing; a casual little growl notification to nudge me and then fade away.
It was elegant. I could keep my eyes on the screen and not have to pick up my phone every time it beeped. And the notifications would only show up on my screen when my phone was nearby.
Fast forward to today.
Phones are way more capable. We have a hot new category of mobile devices in tablets. And with the announcement of iCloud, Apple clearly envisions consumers having more of these multiple devices.
We are now living in era of real-time information and always-connected mobile devices. Push notifications will continue to grow more and more a part of our lives.
So when you combine these two trends of push notifications and multiple devices, what do you get? I bet it’s something like this:
Text messages only beep on your phone.
New emails beep on Sparrow, your iPhone and iPad (but sound different on each).
IMs only beep on your Mac.
@mentions beep on both your phone and Mac but not your iPad.
Farmville beeps your iPhone and iPad but not your Mac.
Why do we have to look at different devices for different notifications? Why do we have to deal with different alert tones on each device for the exact same notification?
There has to be a better way. Something more elegant, like BluePhoneElite, but with that iCloud magic. Something that takes into account what device I am currently using. Maybe something like:
Proximity-Aware Push Notifications.
On Monday, Apple unveiled their new location-aware app, Reminders, which let’s you assign locations to your tasks:
Say you need to remember to pick up milk during your next grocery trip. Since Reminders can be location based, you’ll get an alert as soon as you pull into the supermarket parking lot.
Proximity-awareness is a similar idea. But instead of having your location defined as calculated GPS region, it’d be defined by where you are in relation to your other devices. Or specifically, where your mobile device is in relation to your primary computer.
Examples:
When you get a new email and your iPhone is not within 5 feet of your Mac, the notification is only pushed to the iPhone.
When you receive a text message and your iPhone is close to your Mac, the notification is only displayed on the Mac.
You get the idea.
A system like this means when we’re at the desktop, we can keep our eyes on the monitor. When we walk away from the desk, we bring our notifications with us. (Hell, just for kicks: when we walk away from the desk, make our screensavers and lock screens go up as well.)
You see, with push notifications, we have signals that facilitate interactions in our digital lives. A few years ago, things were simple: new text messages beeped on our phones, new email notifications beeped on our PCs. But now we are in an age of information overload with multiple devices and too many social web services.
Push helped us keep up with important messages. But now we need help keeping up with the push notifications themselves. We need something smarter system.
And proximity-awareness is the perfect place to start.
Steve Jobs:
I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90% of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it.
Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size, and it won’t really be sustainable. So we decided not to get into it. If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod. We probably wouldn’t have seen it coming.
The Safest Flash Drive Ever.
Mobile Devices: Remote or Primary?
Fred Wilson:
If your friend has an MLB.com subscription on his or her tablet and they come over to your house, you could watch the game on your TV via your friend’s tablet.
Wow, I’ve never thought of it that way. Now if only NBA games weren’t subject to blackout policies…
One Night Out with GroupMe
Karol: The show starts at 7pm, right?
Mel: Yeah. I’m heading there 5:45ish with Marlo.
Mel: Ness, are we supposed to save seats for you or you guys gonna be backstage the whole time?
Nessa: We’re in the first act, so we’ll sit with you guys after intermission.
Krystal: Save two seats for Karol.
That is a texting conversation I had with my friends on Saturday with the group texting app, GroupMe. We actually started playing with the app a couple nights before, but Saturday we finally saw its true value.
GroupMe as a Utility
As shown in the conversation above, GroupMe comes in super handy when going out with friends. Simple situations like, “Hey, I just got parked. Where are you guys?” can be easily addressed with GroupMe.
Without a group texting app, how would you solve this situation?
Twitter? You can, but you’ll easily piss off your mutual followers because you’re spamming their timelines with a private conversation that doesn’t concern them.
Call/Text people individually? Messy and inefficient. Plus, it leaves the possibility of someone accidentally getting left in the dark.
With group texting, you’re in touch with everyone that needs to be informed. Everyone is on the same page. Everyone is in sync.
GroupMe as Entertainment
During the concert, GroupMe switched from being a utility to pure entertainment. In a setting where it’s rude to talk to each other while the performer is on stage, GroupMe gave us the freedom we wanted.
(Okay, texting each other during a performance isn’t exactly the most polite thing to do either, but hey, at least it’s discrete.)
Because the chat is private and everything goes directly to everyone’s phones, the experience is a lot more intimate than Twitter ever could be.
What about Beluga, Disco, Fast Society, etc?
One thing that made GroupMe stand out to me over its competitors: it’s compatible with Google Voice.
Personally, I am a very, very loyal user of Google Voice. It’s the only number that I give out. I am absolutely addicted to how I can type out & send text messages from my computer. And so far with all of the competing apps I’ve tested, GroupMe is the only app the lets me use my GV number.
This is important to me because when friends install GroupMe and the app scans their Address Books, I will actually show up as a suggested friend.
With the competing apps, I simply couldn’t use my GV number; I was forced to use my cell phone number, which is the number that nobody has.
Closing Thoughts
With just one full day of using GroupMe in the real world, I can tell this app has serious potential for my nights out with friends.
Will it go mainstream? I hope so but I’m not sure.
There is always the possibility that Facebook might integrate their Messages 2.0 feature with Groups, Places, Events, etc. And we all know how Facebook has a knack for making early adopter ideas into mainstream hits.
Google has the opportunity to come up with something too. They have all the pieces: Gmail, GTalk, Google Voice, Disco for iPhone…I’d LOVE to see them integrate all of those technologies into one seamless experience.
Hell, Apple has the same opportunity as well, with Facetime, iChat, and iPhones. It’d be like adding that Steve Jobs magic to RIM’s precious BlackBerry Messenger.
But those are all pipe dreams of mine; 100% speculation on my part based on zero insider information.
In the meantime, I’ve got a group of close friends on GroupMe. The cool thing is, if I want more friends to get on this, I don’t even have to wait for them to install the app — I can just add them to a group.
Even if the app never catches on with the rest of my friends, I’ve already got my closest friends on it.
That’s good enough for me.
Apple: The 4-Foot Walled Garden
Victor Agreda reported:
From where I sat, Apple was on the defensive — but in a good way. The defense was primarily “we own the store, we own the rules for the store, and our goal is to protect the consumer.” Working to Apple’s advantage is the tight control of the App Store, which some (including TUAW at times) have bemoaned as draconian. But I think today’s hearings show how a tightly-controlled store can benefit consumers if the entity controlling the store is genuinely proactive about protecting the privacy of consumers.
Google took a beating in the hearings, basically admitting that the Google app market is a Wild West of applications. With the Android Marketplace’s openness, developers can and do write apps that encourage or enable illegal activity. Also, Google’s policies on who does what with your data (be it location or email or whatever) are there, but each app developer can pretty much do as they please with only the vaguest notion that Google might (in case of malware, for example) come down on you and remove your app from the store.
By explicitly stating that the aim of the Android Marketplace is not for Google’s team to be gatekeepers, Google puts the onus on consumers to be aware of who is using their data and how they are using it.
I’ve always thought of the Apple ecosystem as a 4-foot walled garden.
For us Apple heads, we love everything in here. The Apple garden doesn’t have EVERYTHING but it has everything we need. Everything in here compliments everything else that’s in here.
Sure, there is a big wild world outside of our walls, filled with all sorts of things that we don’t have. And if we ever had to leave this place, it’ll take some effort to get all of our things over that 4-foot wall.
But hey, we feel protected by it. Nothing is forcing us to stay.
We just really like it here.
