I call Twitter a “Social Messaging Service” – yes, another SMS – because it allows me to communicate much the same sorts things I would with a text message – but, rather than going to just one other person, I can send that message to over 530 of my followers. Many of these people are known to me – in person, or by reputation – but some follow me simply because they’re interested in what I have to say. Though most of the chatter on Twitter is inane – like the world’s weirdest cocktail party – some of it is incredibly immediate, vital and important.
As, for example, last Monday. Just before I left the house for the evening, I received a few tweets talking about the earthquake in China. What earthquake? I wondered – there’d been nothing about it on the telly, or on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, or the New York Times, or BBC News. Even the Associate Press hadn’t burped up an initial report. But I have one follower (whom I follow in return), Dedric Lam, who lives just outside Shanghai. Everyone in Shanghai felt the shaking, and, as they connected with one another, they all knew that everyone else in Shanghai had felt it, too. As they received tweets from places further away, they knew the shaking had been felt in Beijing – and quickly realized that Sichuan had gone dark. No tweets, no websites, no phone service. All of this flew by on Twitter a full thirty minutes before the first reports made their way onto the wire. When I met up with friends that night, I asked them if they had any news about the earthquake in China. They said, “What earthquake?”
Twitter, connecting people across boundaries of politics, culture and language through its social messaging service, has – quite accidentally – become a human early-warning system. One tweet might not have the ring of truth, unless it comes from a particularly well-trusted source. A thousand tweets, all saying more-or-less the same thing, possess enormous authenticity.
Presently, Kaplak has a need for an internal, simple yet powerful online file sharing utility. We’re talking about simple intranet stuff, but without the complexity of setting up an intranet. We don’t need an intranet. We need to read and save documents and spreadsheets.
We can get it now with Gmail and the Gmail Drive Shell extension by Bjarke Viksøe. As a hack, this extension has some limitations, but it is a great temporary solution. I wondered if we’d be able to search through attachments, but alas, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
They should do that had an interesting article from two years back discussing the extension of Gmail into an attachments browsing utility, which I roughly translate into a storage & sharing facility for attachments - also known as files. This is essentially a simple filesharing movement building out of Gmail, building on the simple needs of people with free storage on their hands.
It should be obvious the need is there. This is simply the most needed functionality for lots of people and businesses. Forget the Google Apps, Google Groups or Google Sites. We need a GDrive, a simple place to place stuff, where people we work with can get it and upload their stuff too. No profiles, no more social networks or group functionality, we have lots of that - simply storage available for simple filesharing.
I can think of one reason Google won’t move down that alley, and that’s fear of intellectual property problems and the threats of litigation costs etc. The same reason why Google Books never took off, and why most books are not fully readable or available to non-US residents. Why “snippets”?
Well, that ought to leave this window of opportunity open to others, but noone has the power of the Gmail apparatus already in place.
Another reason might be the risk of undermining Google’s own business in intranet and local search for businesses, as well as their Groups and Apps product ranges. But as Google earns most of the company’s revenue from advertising (including ads in Gmail), this should be a small camel to swallow.
Thanks for the tip about GDrive to Anders! (Anders Nicolaisen and Jesper Lund have recently joined the Kaplak Team - a formal introduction will follow shortly :-) )
We’ve applied now for becoming an Amazon.com Associate site, which is one type of income stream for Kaplak in our current phase. I wanted to test one of the Amazon widgets here. This one creates contextual links, i.e. figures out what the content around it is about, and lists products which should be somewhat in accordance with what we’re writing about.
I’m quoting a piece by Yochai Benkler in order to create a little more context for the widget :
As economic policy, allowing yesterday’s winners to dictate the terms of tomorrow’s economic competition would be disastrous. As social policy, missing an opportunity to enrich democracy, freedom, and justice in our society while maintaining or even enhancing our productivity would be unforgivable. (The Wealth of Networks, p. 28)
Erm… this didn’t seem to work very well. This is what happens when you do experiments in complete public. Let’s try this instead :
That was better, but the “hovering” doesn’t seem to work… Will do more experiments in the following time. Please stay tuned, and support us by buying these great books :-)
Too much is happening these days in the Kaplak universe for this blog to keep up to speed. We have attended a pre-springboard (early investor’s presentation, still among “friends”), attended a conference for computer game producers and have met with some great people. We’ve also interviewed 8 applicants for a designer position in the core Kaplak team, and have invited 3 candidates to further talks. This is a very exciting process.
The slowness of getting all this information out to the right people is highly dissatisfying to me. I come from a wiki background where small changes or huge revolutions can be done rapidly, by one or several people. The architecture is open, which means that anyone can add to the growing pile of hyperlinks and information. A blog is somewhat different, it’s a lot slower for me. In Kaplak, we need both. We need the wiki for rapid information gathering and sharing, and we need the blog as a core official communications channel instrument. We also need email to play a functional role. Our mailing list has long served primarily as a filtering mechanism for people interested in Kaplak - it has not been a practical instrument as a communications channel, as I so far prefer contacting our customers personally, and not mass mailing some message out. We’ve also been slow on our survey, which are not yet flying.
In other words, there’s much to improve and much to be done. I’m looking forward to rolling out more of our online presence in the coming time and hope to remedy the shortcomings of our present online communications shortly.
In the meantime, please follow our kaplak “tweets” on Twitter which I’ve found to be a tremendously valuable tool in fast communication with a lot of people simultanously. We’ve also begun to systematically use del.icio.us for Kaplak’s growing bookmark collection. These are the latest added links on our del.icio.us profile :
Both Twitter and del.icio.us are fast and tremendous tools for following Kaplak for the time being. For those of you, who don’t know or use del.icio.us yet, it is a wonderful “social bookmarking” service, which lets you instantly share the things you find of value on the web. All you need is a small browser plugin and it is just as easy as bookmarking pages in your browser. The huge advantage of this of course being, that since your bookmarks are online, your collaborators, fans and employees will be able to follow your sources, without you having to ship every link to them via email. And vice versa. If you, for instance, tag something with the tag “kaplak” on del.icio.us, it will rapidly get my attention. Please do, if you find something we should take a look at.
