Susan Crawford writes about the practice of leaving cards — the politeness of a another age where people presented a request for an appointment of some kind, and the expectation was a response, positive or negative.
The calling card experience is a metaphor we have consciously imitated with iotum Talk-Now, but modified for modern times. You can check the Talk-Now application from your BlackBerry handset, see whether the people you need to speak with are available, and make a request (if they’re not). The other sees your request in an incoming queue (labelled “Waiting to talk to me”), and can make a choice to take the call now, or not. The iotum Relevance Engine performs the function of the butler — it makes judgement calls about how to represent you to various individuals, based on the relationship you have with that person.
Online / offline RSS browsing has been a horrible compromise for a long time. The tools were lousy, synchronization didn't work well, or they made stupid compromises like only downloading headers.
That's why Google Gears and Google Reader are so interesting. Gears is a DLL that you can install in your browser that creates a persistent store for using web applications offline, and synchronizes that store with data on the 'net when the application comes back online. Google Reader has implemented it with a simple button that says "Go Offline". Press the button, and Gears does a quick synch with up to 2000 unread posts, and away you go. Press it again later, when you're back online, and Gears will synch up with the Google Reader database marking the stories you read offline as "read".
Simple, and very effective.
Some pundits are pointing to this as yet another example of Google's assault on Microsoft's turf. The argument is that you can now turn the Google office apps into online and offline apps and have the best of both worlds. Not so fast, say I. Google's spreadsheets and word processors are a far cry from the sophistication of Office 2007. It's going to take a lot more than simply making them useful on an airplane for Google to unseat Microsoft.
But for reading RSS feeds it looks like just what I've been looking for.
