Nate Koechley

Carpool Conversations – Trip #1

Background Information

This is the first dispatch from Carpool Conversations. I live in San Francisco, but work in Sunnyvale about 43 miles south, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The long drive sucks, but the great thing about it is that it’s an protected time to think, to reflect, to brainstorm, and to explore. There are no distractions in the car; no Internet connection and nobody popping into my cube.

I often carpool with my friend Jon Koshi, and we have great conversations about the web, design, interface, the future, and the present. We both tend to bring complimentary sides of the same topics to the conversation. We both like to think big, and, if I do say so myself, we’re more aware than average of current events, practices, trends, and developments. Jon is a Designer by practice and I’m a technologist by practice, so we’ve got both sides covered in that regard too. (We talk politics and currents and news and life too, but this series will largely focus on technology and human beings.)

Koshi and I both believe in words and word smithing. We believe that examining and designing frameworks for ideas to operate within creates stronger ideas while helping to vet the root concepts. We like to discuss nuance and subtle distinctions, and in the process gain a deeper understanding.

I’m writing this from the road right now. I’d like to resist editing too much, and instead share the thoughts as they appear in the carpool. Hopefully this will be on interest to some of my good readers.

And with that, I can’t resist saying, “start your engines!”.

[Invites] Filangy – Your Personal Search Engine

Filangy is a personal search engine. There are a few startups and companies playing in this space right now, but Filangy is my early favorite. Other’s have written about it, including John Battelle’s Search Blog, Larry Borsato, and a thorough write-up on Rob’s Blog. (You can always check the latest murmurings by running a Technorati search.

Filangy is an intelligent search tool integrated with a search engine to make searching productive. We offer features that allow users to personalize their search experience. Two of the features that we have launched in our beta products are WebMarks and WebCache.

WebCache

This is a secure, web-enabled archive of all your visited webpages.

WebMarks

These are your portable favorites that are accessible from anywhere.

In other words, Filangy captures every page you visit (while it’s enabled — its’ easy to pause it if you’re feeling secretive), and also allows for instantaneous bookmarking while you’re on a page. When you use Filangy to search, you can limit it to either of these groups: pages you’ve been on before; pages you’ve bookmarked.

I’ve got a few extra invites. Leave a comment or send me an email if you’d like one of them. Please include a sentence or two on the root of your curiosity and why you’ll be a good recipient. (I just want to make sure that, like extra pets, they’re going to good homes.)

Like most of my favorite apps these days, the value of the services is only slowly revealed. The more you use it, the more help it’s able to provide. The more you use it, the more advanced features on the interface become visible… While it’s somewhat counter-intuitive to hide value initially, this wonder and dare-i-say glee of discovery pays huge dividends. Anyways, let me know what you think if you’ve been using it, and like I said, let me know if you need an invite.

Depressed Today

Not like that last several years have been happy or anything, but the headlines today really got me down:

• Senate Votes to Open Alaskan Oil Drilling – a sad day for the environment, and to me signifies that the democrats in congress and just overworked. It’s horrible, but in the scheme of things isn’t not even the worst. Makes me realize that BushCo is slowing numbing us to agenda.
• House OKs $81.4 Billion on War Spending – ” the fifth emergency spending plan Bush has sent to Congress for wars”…. how many times can you call wolf/emergency? I wish my bank account was as forgiving.
• Bush Recommends Wolfowitz for World Bank – So now, our peaceful development efforts are headed by our chief war strategist, a raging conservative hawk!? Great, that sends a nice subtle message to the world.

There’s plenty more where those came from, but I can’t bare it anymore right now…

And by the way, not that I’m pro-steroids or anything, but doesn’t the GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTE have anything better to do than get autographs from a bunch of athletes? Even if steroids were the worst thing under the sun, what exactly does it have to do with GOVERNMENT REFORM? It’s not like that don’t have anything to do: Haven’t they heard of DeLay’s illegal and unethical actions, the federal government’s falsification of documents related to the Yucca Mtn Nuclear Waste dump, or that BushCo is prepackaging television news in a blatant propaganda plan? (And then there’s the whole “torture” and “1500 Americans dead” thing…)

May the world forgive us, and accept our apologies.

Total Recall — Desktop Search Products Reviewed

PC Magazine has a nice review of the desktop search space.

Desktop search tools really can make our lives easier, and since so many of them are free, there’s little reason not to give one a try. Your mailbox isn’t getting any more manageable, your hard drive isn’t getting emptier, and after all, finding something on the PC right in front of you should be as easy as finding something on the Web.

And, I’m happy to spoil with their conclusion: “Our favorite, Yahoo! Desktop Search, is actually based on the same core software as the $75 X1 Desktop Search, and it offers almost all the same features.” (The main feature that Yahoo! didn’t pick up in their free version of X1 is the ability to index email outside of Outlook, specifically Eudora and Mozilla/Thunderbird.)

Yahoo! Research Labs Buzz Game

Yahoo! Research Labs and O’Reilly Media Collaborate to Introduce Tech Buzz Game, Inviting Participants to Predict Future Technology Trends Based on Popularity of Yahoo! Search Terms

The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends. As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time. Predictions are made by buying virtual stock in the products or technologies you believe will succeed, and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop. In other words, you “put your play money where your mouth is.

At the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference today, Yahoo’s principal scientist Dr Gary Flake announced, among other things, the Tech Buzz Game, which “leverages search query volume and frequency on Yahoo! Search” and puts that “buzz” in play in a stock market model. Using the 10,000 in play money that you get with a free game username, you can buy and sell shares of technology concepts like “bittorrent”, “podcasting”, “Macintosh Tiger”, “yahoo photos” and other things. Things terms are broken down into markets, which as each zero-sum-game distinct markets “Browser Wars”, “Mobile Development Environments “, and “Rumor Mill”.

Check out this and more at the new Yahoo Research Labs site that launched in conjunction with the ETech conference. You can also read up on this year’s ETech Conference, or read the Tech Buzz Game’s press release.

(By the way, as of this writing I’m in 9th place on the game’s leaderboard – out of 697 currently. We’ll see if my beginner’s luck holds out.)

Internet Explorer and Accessibility

From the IEBlog:

Today I wanted to talk about three aspects of accessibility as they relate to IE and Windows in general. First is access to the Windows OS for individuals with disabilities, second are a couple of hints for users of screen readers using IE in XPSP2 and finally is a request for feedback to help guide our development in IE7 and beyond.

While it’s fun to pan Microsoft, and particularily, in my circles at least, Internet Explorer, I have to give them some credit for leaving comments enabled on their blog. It would be even better if they responded to some of the comments – a comment is more valuable if it initiates dialog – but at least they’re doing an ok job experimenting in the blog space. It can’t be a bad thing.