Eleanor Rants on Tool Openness

Eleanor Kruszewski has some great thoughts:

I love the idea of a published calendar, but really think that a simple ical is the easiest. No social networking, no searching, no appearance in a central way - but it’s a hell of a lot easier for me.

Hear you loud and clear. Simplicity. Simplicity. Simplicity. For me, as a tool maker, the tough part is adding complex features while maintaining the basic ease-of-use for new users. Part of the pitch of blogging is that it's simple, easy publishing. But when you get into log types, graphs, episodes, time periods and social networking things get necessarily complex. What's interesting to me is that people who've been around blogging get it very quickly... because they already understand the basic blogging. But for new users it can be overwhelming.

I could have a blog just of the interesting new project du jour.

No doubt.

It’s clear we’re deep in the remix culture, a “let 100 (thousand) flowers bloom” period of mismash api ferment.

Nice! Very interesting way to put it! Yep. Dave Winer said a couple days ago that RSS is essentially stabilized. We've all spent a few years getting basic blogging mastered. Now it's time to extend the underlying mechanism. For us at reger.com that means letting a 100 (thousand) log types bloom.

Based on some other of her comments it's clear that we need to extend posting capability to the api level. Currently reger.com users can create custom log types that can publish the data to RSS and charts/graphs, but we don't the inbound piece. Certainly a critical part of the puzzle. We're beginning to have social networking features based on log types. But making inbound machine-based is important. Closes the loop, if you will.

Eleanor's main beef with toolmakers is the openness factor. I can't agree more. We've also got to get the plugin documentation happening. We've got three or four critical places in the system that we built to be extended by third parties haven't created any explanation on how to do so. Eleanor highlights how bad this is and motivates me to get going.

The amazing thing about all these tools - and innovation itself right now - is that it’s become so personal. It’s become a question of whether it works for me, despite the fact that I can see there are great ideas here and we’re breaking new ground. I rant here about how Evite and MeetUp don’t meet my needs, ignoring the wider innovations they’ve brought.

Wow. She's 100% correct. With so many options out there one single "gotcha" with a tool sends you a' packin'. Ouch. Am I focusing too much on the innovation of log type social networking at reger.com? Am I missing basics like comment spam blocking, backups, etc.? On the positive side, this is a capitalist system at its best... finding the products that people want. Will enough people want the dog food to make room for many players, or is consolidation inevitable?

Part of it might be because it’s all so hard to “get”. Understanding the pros-cons of each project is difficult because they are subtle and there are usually a dozen flavors. Throw in the fact that we’re used to being marketed to as consumers, expecting to be told who this stuff is right for and the setting is ripe for religion.

These aren’t really companies that market themselves and field products; they’re itches being publicly scratched. So we look to blogs, where people like me discuss nits (because it’s about the nits), but what I hate may work well for your needs.

Again, very interesting insight. I'm still waiting for enough people to dive into reger.com and get to some of the features. My expectation is that reger.com will appeal to a certain group of users, but I haven't yet found those users. Been so head down scratching the itch.

Great post! Very insightful. Thanks Eleanor. You got me thinking. And, as always, great to see datablogging/structured blogging hitting the airwaves. More on reger.com's take on it here.