I spent Saturday hanging out with about a dozen hackers building Tagmindr: Remember the future.  Here’s the site’s self-description:

Put any bookmark in a time capsule and we’ll send it to your future self.

Give us your del.icio.us username and we’ll feed you anything that you’ve tagged as: "tagmindr" and "remind:YYYY-MM-DD". We’ll remind you via RSS, SMS, Email or IM, so long as it’s RSS.

(SMS, Email and IM coming later.)

The use case is that you find a page about a product or service that you’d like to look at sometime later so you tag it into del.icio.us thinking you’ll get back to it, but of course you never will.  With Tagmindr you can set a specific date when it will pop up in your feed reader so you will remember to check it out again.

Brian Dorsey came up with the idea and gathered a bunch of us together at his house with the goal of building a web 2.0 app in 6 hours.  We spent an hour or two setting up our dev environments and talking over the goals of what we were going to do.  Then we did a skills inventory, and divided up into teams to start doing the work.  I worked on the back-end team which was a ton of fun.  The project is written using Django, an MVC-based web application framework for Python, which is conceptually quite similar to Rails.  It’s got a few things that are way cooler than rails and a few things that are definitely lacking.  From noon to 6pm we coded, while others did graphic design, HTML layout, and wrote copy.  I had to leave fairly promptly but at the time it seemed we had slipped just a bit — there were still a few issues rendering the design on the production server, and the back-end code still had a couple of bugs.  It seemed like another hour or two’s work total.

Thanks and props to all the wonderful people I met and got to work with.  Special thanks to Anders for holding my hand through basic Python and Django to a level of minor productivity.  I gotta say that Python is really clean.  Makes me realize how much Ruby can look like incomprehensible Perl.

Other alternatives include forwarding list-mail to another list-only account and deleting it, but that is frankly kinda lame.  Or if there was a way to create a filter that runs only on messages left in the inbox after the other rules have run, then I could forward the inbox messages to another account that I read with my phone.  But I don’t think that option is currently available either.

FeedHub is promising in that it is explicitly trying to solve this exact problem that I’ve identified.  Scoble refers to it as a Custom Techmeme.  But I’m fairly sure FeedHub won’t succeed as it currently exists. Why?  Because it doesn’t incorporate collective intelligence from the social network.  If they write it as a Facebook app, then they’d get here quickly.  But I just don’t believe that enough people will be willing to train this thing for its own sake.  Moreover, there’s no leverage — no network effect.  So even if millions of users have personally trained feedhub for themselves, that doesn’t make it any better for a new user who hasn’t started yet.  It’s just not Web 2.0 enough.

Overall I have to say "Good try."  One thing business school has taught me is that identifying a genuine and solvable need is about the most important thing to creating a business, and they’ve hit on that well.  But the execution seems to fall just a bit short of what’s needed these days.

What I’ve been thinking about building in my copious spare time is a web-based feed-reader that assumes you over-subscribe to feeds.  That is, it expects you to "subscribe" to more feeds than you can fully consume.  These days many of the most popular feeds on the web meet this criterion even if that’s all you subscribe too.  I don’t have time to follow any one of TechCrunch, Scobleizer, Engadget, or even Radar in their entirety — I generally don’t even get to skim all their headlines.  But I know people in my social network do, and when they do it would be a small extra effort for them to help me identify the posts that are worth me reading.

This could be done by explicitly recommending articles to friends, or by tagging, or rating, or any of a number of well-understood-yet-often-poorly-implemented mechanisms.  Additionally, I could subscribe to a meta-feed coming out of a single-friend or a set of people in the social network graph that could expand several levels.  And of course there would be meta-feeds covering the aggregate opinions of all users.  The result would be that I could "express mild interest" in a feed by "subscribing to it" and the system would help me figure out which of the voluminous posts were actually worth reading.  Or if other users tagged posts, I could find good posts on a particular topic.  It would encompass a lot of the utility of digg, techmeme and link blogs all at once.  Another step in the process of democratizing information consumption.

I’ve been talking with friends about building this in the context of a facebook app for reasonably obvious reasons.  I’d call it "the outside world" as a reference to the fact that college kids are generally so isolated from external news, and this would be a social way for those few who do read the traditional-news to share good things with their friends.  Facebook’s restrictions on apps processing social networking metadata would make somegood features difficult, but the advantages in marketing and lower barrier to entry probably outweigh that.  Now my idea is out there for the world, so I’m not getting a jump on anybody.  If anybody wants to take this idea and run with it, drop me a line and I’d be happy to help advise.  I might just do it anyway because the Facebook market and the Google Reader market are both healthy and the basics just aren’t that hard.

But it sounds like you’ll have stiff competition.  Quoting from Blogoscoped’s analysis of the video:

Google’s recent big social effort is called Mocha-Mocha (or
Mocka-Mocka?), and will become the infrastructure for all social stuff
across all of their applications. As a part of this, a new
feature called Activity Streams will be introduced or at least
implemented in Reader this quarter. This will be comparable to
Facebook’s News Feed (Minifeed?) feature, and integrate Gmail’s
addressbook and contact list.

Also there will be some other Gmail and Orkut integration, but this might just mean there will be links to Reader.

Hearing that Brad Fitzpatrick has joined Google and because it’s the kind of thing I do, I’ve been putting some thought into how Google could reasonably add social networking features to their services.  I’ve been talking to folks about how Facebook is currently Google’s biggest strategic threat because they’ve done such a good job integrating the social network into new feature development, and in doing so have democratized new feature development in a way the world has never before seen.  This need struck me as a good way to start integrating social networking features into Google. 

Orkut is and only ever will be a toy IMHO.  Let the Brazilians keep playing with it and don’t push it on the rest of us.  Between contacts and knowledge about whom we chat and e-mail with, gmail has vastly more meaningful set of social networking data.  As we’ve learned watching LinkedIn and okcupid and other social networks thrive side by side, it makes sense to have different social networks for different purposes.  Orkut is a toy network and should not be the basis of anything more meaningful.  Sorry, Orkut.