So, once I got done talking (very very quietly) about how Raindrop sounds awesome, but also kind Chandler-ishly vague, I saw this Twitter from Sonny, “Raindrop is the innovative idea that Google Wave was hoping to be.”

Which got me all kinds of excited again. And also musing on the failures of Wave. Really hoping that Raindrop can be useful to me, whether or not you’re also using it, Google is qualified to build boil the sea solutions, but they lack elegances.

Just the name Raindrop sort of sounds to me like something that could build slowly to a crescendo, a “delicious play”: a tool useful long before its adoption curve cross the plane where its latent social dimension is revealed. (my imaginary friend is old school, he pointed out that IM tools successfully required people to opt-in to build value and they’ve done fairly well, to which I can only say times were simpler when ICQ was launched and we were all more desperate for better tools, and AOL already had a meaningful desktop internet install base they could upgrade largely in place)

And then Raindrop has all this buzz about personal/people centricity, but I’m worried not to see much acknowledgement on the failure of RSS readers. Its easy to get confused by the real time web buzz and think people actually want real time, comprehensive information. Fuck that. I want a tool that delivers meaningful, timely information, everything else is just anxiety producing.

Blaine has done a lot of good thinking, and talking, and not nearly enough good writing on the game changing, sea change that is the switch from pull-to-push, that perhaps the white-list vs black-list is the most important kladistic trait, and I’m wondering if papering over those divides in a single client misses the point. (Blaine useful refers to this as, “the total fucking brokenness which is email” or words to that effect) It’s something I’ve been meditating on a late into the night recently having just opened a new push communication channel on Flickr.

“Raindrop uses a mini web server” is also old school. Wow. There was a really wild and wooly bunch of apps being evolved at the end of the 20th century that largely died out, interesting to see that design idea still kicking out interesting creatures. (this is what Aaron calls the I-hate-to-admit-it-but-Dave-Winer-was-right principle)

And while I love to see Flickr get love, “flickr arrives, your messaging client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message”, it really raises the question in a system of social object sharing, what is the object? Just the photo? Something else? (and smacks a bit of the one-system-to-rule them all, which is cool, but again, see Chandler, and Dreaming in Code)

What can I say, that’s the sort of thing my imaginary friend and I talk about. Now I guess I should go finish reading those docs.

“…it should take energy and thought to push issues upstream due to the associated costs of having to deal with them once they are propagated… when you optimise something you always do so at the expense of something else.” – Bill de hOra

“Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention. Cost does not have to be about money. … Spending time with someone is a valuable signal that you care.” – Danah Boyd

Photo by bowbrick