RippleRap

Whilst at LeWeb3 in Paris earlier in December I had the opportunity to test drive RippleRap.com from my buddies over at Osmosoft. Ripple Rap is a note sharing tool that can be used in Conferences, telephone meetings and the like. One missing feature was a mechanism to give feedback, so I thought I'd throw something up on here and send it over to them.

RippleRap is built on TiddlyWiki, a open source, primarily client based all-in-one wiki page and so I was somewhat familiar with the navigation and use of the application.

So, the question that I wanted answered was why I would want something like this instead of a text editor (local or hosted) or a wiki page online? The wifi at LeWeb was up and down and as you run RippleRap from disc you would never get any connection errors. If you were using a hosted solution you would have had to use local based notes and copy and paste all over the place. If that were the case, why not use just a local text editor? Well, when you do have connection, RippleRap automatically publishes any saved notes to anyone else using the app for that conference. This means others can read your notes and conversely, you can read other people's notes.

I got some benefit being able to read other people's notes from the conference. Others had picked up on things I missed and I could read notes from sessions I missed as soon as someone saved their notes (and had connection to publish). Some added quotes, some commentary and thoughts; I think a range of different possibilities will emerge if this grows.

I like the fact I can also get the feeds from agenda points, there's a great example from JPs talk.

There were some things that could be improved upon and new features which could spring up. My thoughts drift the idea of a conference dashboard where I could enter tags which I'm interested in and be presented in feeds from the web tagged with that information. For example, the tag LeWeb3 appeared in Twitter, Flickr and probably a whole bunch more. I'd also like to be able to tune that to get updates from sites which I'm interested in and not to receive updates from sites in which I'm not interested in.

I'd also like to have a permalink to the notes I've and others have made so I can quote those in blog posts.

It'd be cool to be able to go to RippleRap.com to set up a conference with agenda and then pull that down to distribute it, or get the permalink to that for others to download.

Facebook vs Your Favourite RSS Reader

In the last week or so my web life has changed. I thought I was using RSS properly on iGoogle, but considered the change to Google Reader. Now with email like behaviour rather than static like content, I'm getting much more from the web then before.

This all makes me think about the Facebook debate about walled gardens. To be honest, I do have a Facebook account, but find it generally quite annoying. What it is great at is something close to online personal CRM app with lots of people contributing to. I've already used it a few times to get contact information from when I've not had someones number and needed to get in touch with them.

I think for me, although the friend of a friend (FOAF) issues remain, I'd much rather sign up for various web apps (Twitter, del.icio.us, Dopplr, Flickr and blogs) feeds and watch those through my RSS reader than watch those through Facebook.

It frankly amazes me that they're considered worth £10bn or something. It must be through potential advertising channels and otherwise.

In an effort to attempt to circumnavigate Facebook, I've set up a Yahoo! Pipe to grab all my feeds from across the web and suck then all in one place. For now, you can see that here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=8vLND2N03BGbhg_g1vC6Jw&_render=rss

Gamma Testing

I was uploading some piccies on Flickr earlier and noticed that along with their logo, there was a subtle 'gamma' logo. I wonder, is this a dig at the empire known as Google and the perpetual beta program?