BuzzMe Equals Game Changer

I want to share a moment of revelation that I experienced recently. It occurred earlier this week when I watched Robert Scoble’s interview with Ajay Madhok, CEO of Equals. In the demo embedded below Ajay describes a new product they will introduce in a few months – BuzzMe. I think its going to be a game changer.

The basic idea of BuzzMe is to optimize the use of existing communication channels by making the selection of said channels context and relationship dependent. The premise is the following:

We have and use a vast array of communication tools/ channels: voice, email, SMS, IM, etc. There is a time and place for each of these tools, but unfortunately sometimes we find ourselves making use of a channel at the wrong time/place.

We all communicate with many different individuals, and our relationships with each one is unique. We communicate differently with each person depending on the relationship we establish with them. For example, you might communicate differently to a colleague than to a friend or your boss. Furthermore, communication is also influenced by our context. Where are we, what are we doing, how busy we are – these all make a difference as to how we communicate.

BuzzMe is basically a virtual agent that will keep track of your context (via Google calendar or your tweets, for instance), analyze incoming communication, and determine the optimal communication channel for you to use given your current situation and your relationship with whoever is trying to reach you.

So let’s say you are at a meeting or conference. You probably don’t want to get calls, at least not from everyone. So BuzzMe will send the average Joe to your voicemail, but will transfer through really important people whose call you cannot miss.

Say you are driving and shouldn’t really be reading emails. BuzzMe will transcribe the email to voice and read it to you while in the car. Alternatively, you may be in a situation where you can’t pick up the phone, but would like to get voicemails transcribed into text and sent to your email.

Say you are abroad. The BuzzMe agent will forward calls to a local phone.

In short, BuzzMe will know who your friends are, will know what you are doing, and will be able to provide you the optimal communication channel based on these two things.

What they didn’t cover in the video is blogging as a communication channel. I think it plays well into what they are doing. I may for instance, want to respond to a comment from a prominent fellow blogger more promptly than to a comment from Anonymous. BuzzMe could adequately push comments to my attention based on that information.

In my opinion, part of the genius of this whole idea is the safety benefit inherent in the service. Sharing your phone number, arguably sensitive information, with the public is no longer an issue because you have the BuzzMe virtual agent to buffer you from anyone trying to reach you.

Translate this to social networks as I think will inevitably happen. With an agent in the middle to determine how your profile is viewed it doesn’t matter what kind of information you dump into the virtual abyss.

It’s almost as if thinking about this whole social networking space as walled gardens is incorrect or insufficient. The visual is not enough. If my identity or profile is like a garden then I don’t really care to wall it off, but I want to present it differently to whoever chooses to look in. I want a transforming garden. An agent like BuzzMe could help me do that – a gardener to customize my garden for each and every one of my visitors.

What I find interesting is the thought that perhaps Google, with its FriendConnect initiative, is looking to become this middleman. Facebook seems to be thinking they own the data/ profiles/ gardens. Wrong, the users do. Google, on the other hand, seems content with being the gardener. I think this will make all the difference.

I’m now ranting and this is too long. Thoughts?

New domain name

My blog just underwent a major overhaul. It loaded too slowly and I was not too happy with its domain name. www.mymemestream.blogspot.com was simply too much. Also, as unlikely as it would be, I did not want someone else to buy my name’s url www.carlosbuitelaar.com. So I bought it through Google and transferred over my blog to it. This was simple enough. The problem here was getting my disqus comments back in synch with the blog. Jason at disqus was gracious enough to help me there. Thanks Jason and thanks disqus!

The RSS feed remains the same; too much of a hassle (for me and you) to have to deal with that at this point.

So having said that, lets test this baby out and see if this post will flow through to my tumblr, facebook, etc.

I Live Barefoot

Typically I would not write about shoes. It’s just not my style. That makes today an exceptional day.

A few weeks ago I read this post by Dylan Tweney on Wired – Are your shoes killing your feet. The take away was basically that shoes are “messing up the perfectly-balanced, coordinated bipedal gait that our species evolved over millions of years.” No good. So a company called Tierra Plana is selling shoes by the brand of Vivo Barefoot that are essentially the closest thing to being barefoot. A piece came out as well on the New York Magazine.

So I decided to go check out these mystery shoes. Tierra Plana currently only has stores in two locations worldwide. So I guess it’s lucky that New York is one of them. The first time I dropped by their locale in Elizabeth street I was frustrated to find that they had sold out of their entire season stock a mere three days after the New York Magazine coverage came out. A second (larger) season stock was ordered. I went back yesterday to find that they were almost sold out again. I think I might have gotten the last green aqua model on size 12. This was lucky because they will not be receiving any more Vivo’s until next season in September. Production of the existing season cannot be renewed, or production of the upcoming season will be delayed.

The shoes are actually incredible. They are by far the most comfortable shoes I have ever worn. They are super light, flexible and, of coarse, have no heel support to mess up that perfectly evolved gait.

Apparently the heel support on shoes forces a slight bending of the knees, hips and back to regain a vertical posture. Without the heel support a body is naturally straight. Needless to say, this is better on a number of levels. And after walking in them for five minutes you can notice the difference.

The lady at the Tierra Plana store, who I’m assuming is the manager, mentioned that the company had relatively recently been bought out by Galahad Clark – of Clark shoes. In my opinion this was probably a good investment, particularly given the fact that I may not ever purchase any other casual shoe. The Vivo’s were designed by a tennis player to avoid all forms of ankle injury. So you can actually do any type of sport activity in them. I may not even purchase sport shoes anymore.

If you can, I’d suggest checking these out – probably in September when the new season comes out.

Targeting disqus

I think Google should (and possibly already is) looking at disqus as an acquisition target.

Why? Well for one, I would be.

So Google just came out with a new development for their beta product Google Reader. Users can now include messages on the items they share. I’ve been sharing items for a little while and I really enjoy reading the news that my friends deem “important” enough to share. But sometimes sharing itself is not enough. Sometimes you want to include why you are sharing this particular piece of information or any insights you might have on the subject. So a great step forward for Google Reader.

This development really was the next logical step for Reader, and it should have been developed a lot earlier. We need more than just notes, we need conversation. According to Duncan Riley “The ability to have a discussion around shared feeds is still missing, but/ is being developed by Google.”

The importance lays in the fact that comment systems are arguably becoming more important than the actual blog posts they are built on. I had a brief comment/reply exchange with another blogger (PH Bradley) about this. He suggested that comment platforms, specifically disqus, were akin to parasites living off of blogging platforms. Bottom line, if parasites become powerful enough they kill their host which is how he was arguing in favor of a vertical integration upwards from a comment platform.

I think the parasite analogy is right on target, and it should be the natural evolution of things. Here you have Google who with two platforms, an RSS reader and a blogging platform, is trying to weave a social web between them. If done properly a better solution might be to simply acquire discuss and integrate it fully into blogger and Google Reader.

This would be in line with Google’s general strategy of acquiring early stage startups, and it would provide a much more robust social web based on its existing products.

As a user I think I would benefit from this. I’m already using Firefox’s disqus add-on to comment on blogs directly from Google Reader, however, it would all be much simpler if the comment platform were directly integrated in the first place.

Any thoughts?

Another thing that should be integrated are email platforms and virtual rooms. Take Gmail and Google Groups. I use both but wish I could just have a space within Gmail that would do version tracking of documents I share with my groups. Browser add-ons like Xoopit have taken the first steps, but a fully integrated virtual room within Gmail would be so nice to have.

Penn's Self-Assembling Robots

Even though I have nothing to do with this project (I'm not even an engineer), stuff like this makes me proud of being a Penn Alumnus.