homespun

Personal Brain v4

Well, TheBrain folks are developing version 4 of their Personal Brain product. A number of people have been beta testing the software, and I'm reading some nice comments. There are a couple of new developments in this version - it's been totally re-written as a java application. The developers recommend java 6 runtime for best results. Also, because the app was developed in java, there are two new versions of PersonalBrain available - for Mac and for Linux!! Great news!

Indeed!

Very cool. A new website that aggregates job postings, called Indeed. And a new blog to discuss the product as well. This will come in very handy as I start searching for new positions in 2005!

UPDATE: I added the RSS feed from Indeed! streaming media jobs to my homepage.

Groupware Toolkits

Phil Windley has written an article entitled "Groupware Toolkits and the Benefits of Being Open"

Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog

Phil, I like your "blog this" feature also...

This whole idea of Groupware Toolkits really sank in as I was reading Jon Udell's "Practical Internet Groupware". Yeah, it's been out of print for a while, but I only recently acquired a copy for myself. Although it's a little dated in the technology area, in the social aspects of groupware I thought it was still right on. And one of the things that I began to fully understand was that endusers really don't care about what's under the hood, so to speak. Low level technology just isn't interesting (even after you bury it in a useful application).

As a concrete example, I really don't know anyone around me who gets as excited as I do over RSS and syndication. But, once I built a specific example of how they could receive email updates of recent business developments, I got some interested folks. One interesting observation that I've had - once you associate two concepts together (such as RSS and newsfeeds) then people will become blinded to some of the other possible applications of syndication. I'm sure I do it, too, it's just that I *notice* when other people do it.

[For the "motorheads" out there, I just put together some tools (a Nucleus weblog, rss2email, a majordomo mailing list, grabnews, and cron job) to allow users a choice of ways in which to receive their news - RSS feed, email, or HTML.]

Social Software

There's been so much hype lately about Social Software. It's now way up there on the hype curve. This is the point where the hype promises so much more than the current crop of tools can deliver. The pumped-up expectations of the users so exceeds the actual capability of the tools that eventually the bubble pops. Then expectations drop through the floor, and users wander away to find another new techie trend. But, removal of the spotlight actually allows the real work to get done. Developers can go back to what they do best - developing the tools.

What separates the fads from the trends is whether the actual product (probably delivered years after the height of hype) can meet a realistic level of expectation, somewhere in the middle.