Web 2.0 for non-experts

Web 2.0 technologies intrigue me most with their social aspect. I always promote services which enable collaboration and sharing. It is difficult, though, to speak about Web 2.0 with people who consider the services and the web sites as a just another stupid social network. Moreover, some of the people who I talk with do not have technical background. Their knowledge of Internet is limited. That is the reason why often they can not understand me. The people need to see a considerable advantage in order to start using any new service or web site. So I had to think what value Web 2.0 technologies can add to the people's life.

The approach which proved to be successful was to connect the technologies which I like and use with the hobbies of the people whom I spoke to.

Flickr for a hobby painter

First, I talked with my mother. Her hobby is painting. For a while she used to send photos on Skype when she finished an art work. She needed something to share her paintings and to get feedback from the others. I showed her how to use flickr for that. Because she was really interested, she got everything very quickly and in less than a month all of her works were online.
On the left is the photo of the painting which my mother likes most.

Personalized start page

The start was quite successful. It motivated me to talk with others as well. The topic which I chose was the personalized start page. The combination of RSS feeds and widgets in the start page saves me enormous amount of time and enables me to follow a long list of blogs. I use Netbvibes for a start page. In my opinion Netbives and iGoogle are the best possibilities. The choice depends on the individual case. I was quite excited with the social features in the Netvibes Ginger release. If all my friends would use Netvibes Ginger then we could share what we read in a unobtrusive way, something which would improve collaboration and help me with new ideas. My friends and colleagues tried it out, but only a couple of people liked it. The adoption rate was low. In most cases, Netvibes did not add a value to my friends' lives in the way Flickr helped my mother.

The reason I was not successful was my motivation. It was important for me to follow what my friends read. I had to change my motivation: to focus on the advantage my family, friends and colleagues will receive and not on what I will get. At that time I registered on FriendFeed which helped me follow what my friends read the need for Netvibes. I could then think more concentrated on their needs and not on my own.

I discussed with my mother how uses Internet. Most important for her were her email, her photos on flickr, the photos of her contacts, the links to the web sites she visited regularly and the translation tools. I did not try to persuade her to use other new technology, for example RSS feeds. I focused on what she used at the moment. She registered in del.icio.us in order to save her favourite sites. Then she used the widgets available on Netvibes to add Flickr and translation toosl on her start page. She saw the advantages immediately.

Then I though how I could help my father. I decided that iGoogle was more suited for him than Netvibes. He used Internet for his emaill, for the news and for the web sites of health institutions. I though that iGoogle would be really helpful for him. However, I was wrong. Because my father used Internet in quite simple ways there was nothing that iGoogle would help him. Instead, my father felt overwhelmed by the huse information flow from the RSS feeds of the news web sites. It was another lesson for me that sometimes old ways are better suited.

The next person I talked with about personalized start page was a 18-years old boy. He was quite curious to try out new things but I needed some time to find out what is most interesting for him. I spent some showing him how I use Netvibes. I saw that it was boring. Then we started talking about his interests. I got it then: the magic word was "torrents". I checked the web sites which the guy used and saw that all of them support RSS feeds. This was the link between his hobby and Web 2.0 technologies. We integrated these feeds using tags or lables based on their thematics in his iGoogle start page. His enthusiasm was great, I had never thought before that such simple thing as RSS could make such a great difference. I hope that he will figure out by his own how such a technology could be useful for his studies ;-).

What comes next?

Now my aim is somehow to find out what service useful for my friends. I need to ask them what is most important for them, I have to listen to them and never to forget that what matters is the needs of the others.

Google Reader as Middleware

Google Reader is quite a useful web site from Google. It can follow the feeds from other web sites and the user will be informed for any news transmitted in the feed. For those who do not know what a feed is - it is a XML file in RSS or Atom format which contains the latest information added on some web site.
One can insert feeds in Google Reader and later read the news from there without the need to go to the specific web site. Google Reader is very useful because it saves a lot of time and delivers information which we are normally interested in. However, it is often the case that the information is just too much. The problem can be solved with tags or folders.

Google Reader enables the user to assign such tags to different feeds, so that the information has some structure and is easily perceived. One can set up Google Reader such that it sends notifications per mail containing the new information items.

For heavy Google Reader users as me, even the tags do not work. I have subscribed for hundreds of feeds and I have thousands of unread items in my Google Reader account. If I try to read everything regularly I'll spend hours and hours reading without doing anything useful. In such case a web site which was designed to save time will be the reason for wasting time. What is the point then of Google Reader and all similar web applications ? The answer reveals the beauty of Google Reader - it emits its own feeds including feeds for the tags!

You may ask, what is the beauty here ? The answer is: Google Reader can be used as a middleware, as a service which aggregates the information but is not used for rendering it. Instead a new application which is better suited for visualization will present the information items to the user.

Here are the drawbacks of the interface of Google Reader:

• the items are displayed in a sequential order, having the title and a bit of details - it would be much better to have only the title and to use the saved space for displaying another item.
  
• if the user chooses one feed then the new items will often be too few and if the user chooses one tag then the items will sometimes be too much - better would be an aggregate + truncate approach. It would be nice to use tags for aggregation and then to display only the first 10 or 20 items. Ignore the rest! You may say that the information is lost then. I admit it could be the case. However, we can not be able to follow everything. Even if we read all the items, we will forget the information which is not relevant for us. We have to learn to let things go. Moreover, if a piece of information is really important it will be inevitably repeated. Especially if it is trend-setting news.
• the information in Google Reader is out of context. We can much easier remember and apply certain information if it is the proper context, if we can make associations. Our aim is then to deliver the information items from Google Reader in the proper context using its feeds.

What I did was to use Google Reader in conjunction with Netvibes. First I set up my start page in Netvibes and created tabs there which corresponded to different cotnexts : work, home, hobby, web applications which I use and so on. Then I inserted my Google Reader feeds in the appropriate tabs. In this way I solved both the problem with the linear presentation and the problem of the lack of context. Netvibes allows to arrange the elements of the start page spatially. I could have then up to 7 boxes with Google Reader feeds in one tab which I could scan immediately, saving enormous amount of time and absorbing a lot of information. Reading the feeds in context helps me filter, assimilate and remember the useful items. I could configure as well how much items will be displayed in order not to feel overwhelmed. Interestingly, if the boxes for the Google Reader feeds are spatially distributed - one left, one right for example, the information is perceived much easier.

That is how I use Google Reader as middleware. I utilize its feeds by inserting them in my Netvibes start page. It turned to be an exceptionally useful combination. Now I am up-to-date with everything I am interested in without feeling overwhelmed or spending too much time.
Of course, that combination is not unique. One could use any other feed reader instead of Google Reader as well as any other customizable start page. Google Reader + Netvibes is my personal choice which I do not insist to be the best one.