http://revcanonical.appspot.com

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/01/myspace_alleged.html

For a while there was largely nothing, then there was Allconsuming which was wonderful, but slowly died, and went dark before being re-incarnated in the mold of a 43x tool. And I have this memory of there being a nifty little $14/mo tool, back in the days when I didn’t pay for websites, but I wasn’t able to find it.

Last Fall, I started sketching down notes towards building my own, and in the intervening year its become an interestingly crowded space. (who knew so many other people felt the pull) Even in the 6 weeks since I first started jotting down sites for this blog post, the space has evolved with LibraryThing coming out solidly on top as the most active: most actively developed, most actively used, and most actively engaged developer.

That said, in a cursory search (mostly of my del.icio.us links) I turned up 5 other very similar services

• Allconsuming: the Next Generation
• Bibliophil
• Books We Like – “activist e-commerce and collective intelligence”
• Listal – where “all” is defined as DVDs, Books, Music, and Games
• Reader2 – repurposing of the MyProgs codebase

Also the Bookshelf example app from 24L, and the intersting related services What Should I Read Next?, and Library Elf

None of them are quite there yet, and I want more, more, more!

LibraryThing

• So like I said, LT is rocking out in terms of development and growth. When I first found it, it lacked import, ratings, and feeds. Wow.

• Additionally the search is amazingly comprehensive, fast, and accurate. Search is where LibraryThing originally shined, and it blows every other service out of the water. LT was the only service to successfully come up with “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town” when I searched for “someone comes”. Which is good, because there is no way I’m typing in full titles. (just re-tested, and Allconsuming which wasn’t finding anything last time I checked, also came up with the correct results)

• Surprisingly zippy.

• One-click export. Sweet.

LibraryThings: The Downside

• No per-tag feeds, apparently on the todo list, but I need per feed tags.

• No feed of reviews, also on the todo list, but I’m simply not willing to create content without an RSS feed. (which is why I’ve stopped writing $0.02 reviews on Netflix)

• Feeds lack anything beyond basic data. No structured meta-data (authors, isbn/asin, cover art, etc), so very limited usefulness.

• One dimensional tags. (no tag combos)

• Ugly, and awkward. Totally in the eye of the beholder, but I find the interface consistently confusing and awkward to use. I only have a handful of books in my catalog, but already its feeling unmanageable. Not a designer, so I can’t do much more then complain.

• One comment/review per book, meaning you can’t use it to blog your ongoing experience with a book. One of my use cases for a book service is that I can use it to power a book blog.

• Uses frames!?!?? In this day and age? Meaning it can’t be the that “definitive URI for books” that I keep looking for.

Listal

• More then just books if you’re in to that thing. I’m not really, and find it kind of frustrating that I sometimes end up searching DVDs.

• Slick, clean, attractive.

• Allows browsing by author! (key missing feature for LibraryThing)

• Per tag feeds, multiple reviews/comments per book.

Listal: Cons

• Feels sluggish, aggravated by a click heavy interface.

• Limited import.

• Not run by a book nut, and in general the site is voiceless failing to expose either the developer, or the user community. Feels stagnant.

• Search failed the “Someone Comes” test.

Bookshelf

I thought I was going to like Bookshelf. I love the concept of the Ning “Pivot”, if not the implementation. Unfortunately Bookshelf is very slow, and buggy. I dived into the code (I can do that with Ning, whoohoo!!!), and unfortunately rather then the domain specific langauge for building social webapps I expected to find, I just found a messy of PHP code.

What I Still Want/Need/Dream About

I wrote down a list of things I wanted a while back, and LT is converging on it very quickly, and for that I’m inclined to overlook the interface.

Syndication

I need more feeds. Per tag feeds allow for intelligent interaction with the site. Beyond topical tags, functional tags (e.g. *to:read) allow me to syndicate the information out in useful ways

And richer feeds please. E.g. if you can’t syndicate the cover art give me the necessary metadata so I can pull it from AWS.

More data and Webservices

And note, I’m happy with my primary webservice being a feed, but I need richer way to interact with the data before I can make it work for me.

I’d like to be able to hook this up to my local library (auto-request books flagged *to:read), Upcoming, and Amazon.

Plus I should be able to power my involvement in What to Read Next/Books We Like/innovative new service from within LT (or at least with my LT data)

More Pivots

I’d like author, and ratings smooshed down into the tag namespace. So I can browse by author, and by rating. Additionally I’d like to be able to browse tag combos, author plus tag combos, and author plus rating combos.

Insta-Community

I love the idea of integrating a forum into the site. And really integrating it.

1. Allow people to start new threads from a book page
2. Tag those threads with the book
3. Display only properly tagged threads on the book page
4. Aggregate all threads in a more standard forum view.

(We’ve discussed doing something similar for Social Source Commons, though haven’t yet)

Book Scanning

Ala Monster’s Delicious

What would be involved I wonder if writing a simple app/Firefox plugin to scan barcodes using something like an iSight or a CueCat, and have it post the data to a URL?

Blue Sky: Peerflix for Books?

Like Bookcrossing for books you want to get back someday.

update: Also Stuffopolis, and Douban

http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/25/127229&tid=32&tid=42

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/would_you_pay_5month_to_use_google.php

http://microformats.org

Anil posits that Flickr’s users, creators of value and “interestingness” are getting short changed, or at least in the future our understanding of Flickr’s value proposition will lead us to conclude their users are being short changed. It’s part of an ongoing struggle to define our norms around participation, community, hosted tools, and ownership. (On a side note, syndication can mix into this explosively, as with this thread last Summer on Meetup and EVDB)

Actually Anil’s point was more interesting and more subtle, and worth reading, but as the signal bounced around the echo chamber, it degraded into “Hey, I make Flickr interesting, pay me!”.

I mean as software tends towards commodification (as t approaches 0), clearly Flickr derives its value from its participants, yes?

No. Quite the opposite.

I could replicate Flickr’s software (call it Flickah, a Boston Flickr derivative), give it away free, and still people would pay to be part of Flickr. And in fact if I ever managed to grow the community to a fraction of Flickr’s size I’d be in trouble. Flickr isn’t a photo hosting site, it’s a salon, and unsurprisingly value accumulates most quickly to the salon owner. Value arises from the centralization.

Community Service Models?

So assuming software, what alternatives models exist for a community to host a service they find useful? How do communities gain and support the values of centralization without handing over control? A Flickr, an Upcoming, or an Audioscrobbler provide value in direct proportion to the size of the community, while the centralization of a Google Maps (or a Geocoder) makes an expensive resource affordable. It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with for a while (community+service). And a question I asked at techdinner recently to surprising results.

I expected to hear about grid computing, alternate economic models, p2p, etc. Instead it was suggested that maintaining such a resource, or at least some subset of such community resources is the role of the Academy in the 21st century. (less surprising given the presence of Berkman-ites in the crowd)

Perhaps not a Google Maps, or Flickr but maybe Harvard should be hosting the definitive URI for books? I was intrigued. (not to mention a little appalled given my stint doing tech for Higher Ed.)

Last thought, in the multitude responses to Anil, it was pointed out that interestingness can be gamed, as can most deployed reputation systems. Yet eBay works? How? By making buy in into the system cost real cash, something Flickr print is poised to do. As a print service not terribly exciting, but what a great way to quantify interestingness.

You see Dot.com 1.0 was probably one of the most expensive, least efficient public education projects in history, but for those of us who lived through it, it was an amazing, free (we called our grants “investments”), world class education in software development, project management, web development, open source, user interaction, and on and on.

Cheap hardware, free (libre) software, and a global market are all major factors, but don’t forget the huge pool of talented, trained individuals, who not only know this stuff, but learned it in the sort of creative, hands on, team oriented environments that educational theorists are so fond of.

(Now if we could just cut out the capitalist circus and realize that education create value for the economy as well as the individual, we’d really be getting somewhere)

In order to make it happen we really need an updated list of what aggregator support which key features. HTTPAuth (at least Basic, if not Digest) and SSL are the fundamental building blocks of private feeds, with the addition that the major aggregator services need to be aware that content could be negoiated at auth time. The only list I know of is from July 2003.

I was puzzled and pleased to see his closing line:

One detail: I think that for this kind of content-critical, all-business feed, Atom is a more attractive choice than any of the RSS flavors.

Which is odd, because all of the time I’ve spent with the Atom community (which was admittedly still called Pie/Echo at the time) was focused on blogs to the exclusion of all else, and all arguments I made about the potential of pushing other forms of data over this new format were ignored/squelched.

For example, an Atom feed, requires every entry to have an author element, which is defined as a Person contruct. Who is the “person” in an Atom feed generated by your “bank account, credit card, or stock portfolio”?

Additionally perhaps the language of the spec needs to be updated with some namespace best practices, and some non-blog examples?

One line that jumped out at me at me was

I do appear to shell out at least $50 per month in internet services beyond my bandwidth bill.

That got me thinking. A few years ago this would have been an unprecedentedly large amount. The idea that we were all going to get rich selling online services was so firmly rejected that it became a commonly accepted truism that “people won’t pay for things online”, and yet, quietly, almost under the radar this seems to be changing.

Looking at my personal expenses online they can be broken down into: paid content, online tools, online services, personal hosting, and net facilitated donations.

Paid content

I maintain a Safari account (which after several years of comp I started paying for last year), I’m a Zmag sustainer, and in the past I’ve subscribed to several premium info sources. 90-95% of my daily information consumption is network mediated — blogs, online newspapers, email newsletters, and radio streams. The bulk of the rest of it comes from magazines. (which I either subscribe to, or pick up on the newsstand depending on whether I want to financially support the publisher).

Monthly cost: ~$15

Online tools

I use a large number of online tools in my daily life, from the ubiquitous Google, to the essential Bloglines. I currently experimenting with using Gmail, having tried nearly all of the webmail products at one point or another over the years. Currently I’m a light weight user of Use Tasks, for online managed tasks, and used to be a regular user of the Anyday.com hosted pim service (I also was an Anyday developer)

For a while I was using All Consuming to facilitate my book reading habit, and in its heyday I was a heavy user of BackFlip, a dotcom era del.icio.us. (I feel like I’m forgetting a handful of key tools here, I’ll have to back fill them later)

Beyond my text editor, most of my work (and most of my day) happens within the confines of a Firefox window. Currently the only tool I’m paying for is Use Tasks.

Monthly cost: ~$4

Online services

Hard to split online services from online tools really, but I guess I’m thinking of net facilitated services. Netflix is a good example, as is the iTunes Music Store. Pobox mail forwarding is a slightly murkier one. Automated clipping services like PubSub are largely indistinguishable from tools. You could argue that webmail, or a provider like Fastmail should actually be in this category.

A chunk of the my monthly online spending goes to this category, mostly Netflix, with handful of change going to various more obscure services.

Monthly cost: ~$27

Personal Hosting

The cost of maintaining an online presence. My primary web and email hosting are covered as a side benefit of some of the tech activism I do, but I do pay for a hosted dev box (a VLS really), and have been contemplating setting up a new solution for email.

Monthly cost: $10

Donations

I make both regular and irregular donations to a number of online services. Some of the donations are towards tech activist projects like Riseup, or Activista. Some are for funding drives for web commons projects (e.g. Wikipedia, or Mirror Project), or blogger bailouts (e.g. the Daring Fireball pledge drive)

Of all the discussed categories, this is my largest expense.

Monthly cost: ~$35

Running the Numbers

Works out to something like $90/month above basic connectivity. (with the single largest line item being Netflix, so embarrassing, I really need to learn how to use Bittorrent) Might sound like a lot, but if you calculate that I spend anywhere from 10-14 hours a day online, thats about $0.25 an hour for a service that provides personal and work communication, information and professional development, news and entertainment. Its significantly less then I spend monthly on food, rent or transportation, and yet I’d say its at least as fundamental to me as any of those. It’s about what I spend on books (a bit less), but given I’m not in school currently that isn’t a good indicator.

Some obvious places to be spending more

It is odd to want to spend more, and frankly, I don’t. In particular the problem in spending more on services means you need to either figure out how to have services swell, and shrink with changing income, or you get stuck having raised the minimum you can live on, which is a dangerous relationship to get into with capitalism.

Still, I really should be spending another $5-$10/monthly on personal hosting in order to get a more functional email setup, as a person who lives largely online spending so little to maintain the presence seems….off.

I really should be paying more for online tools. Another $5 monthly for Bloglines at least in a no brainer. Some amount of money to a meaningful and useful social software/collaboration tool is burning a hole in my pocket. And a good hosted pim/tasks/reminders service still needs to get (re-)built.

Noticeably absent from the list are any self supporting community or discussion spaces. I’m not sure I believe in virtual communities, which doesn’t seem to stop me from being involved in a ridiculously large number of them. Most exist in a nebulous hybrid mailing list/forum/irc space, none of which ever seems to get paid for, and none of which ever seem to improve and become more useful. I know several people, like my brother, who participate in incredibly specialized and erudite online communities. A way of striking a balance between getting the right people into the community, and supporting growth needs to found.

Lastly independent media is still doing a lousy job of developing models to deliver information both locally and globally using the internet, and doing an even worse job of figuring out how to use the net to engage meaningful participation and support. Right now most of my net mediated media consumption is filtered corporate media, the filters are important, interesting, and useful, to a self sustaining alternative it ain’t.

I’ve totally failed to answer Les’ question, but I thought it might be worth re-examining our received wisdom about people’s online spending habits, or at least mine.

Doing some rough calculations based on current income levels, amount of value I’m deriving or wish to be deriving, and looking at the above list, I’d say there is about $150-$250/monthly that I should be spending in one of these 5 categories that I’m not for lack of a meaningful place to spend it.

That said, as we move towards more and more hosted/online services and tools, its going to become increasingly important to develop new models of engagement, and transparency. What do the ideals of free software mean in the context of a hosted service? How do I fork if I don’t like where things are going? What is the role of collective ownership in these projects, or is it assumed I’m simply a consumer? Thats a whole other essay, and one I’m too tired to start right now.

And TeleDyn has an excellent essay Living with Webservices, which seems to be closely related in ways my brain is totally refusing to articulate right now. Good night.