My predictions My thoughts and predictions on technology and business, and sometimes strong ones at that

This week I want to talk about one of the hands-down best sites on the internet. Mint.com, in case you haven’t heard about Mint yet, it’s like Quicken or Microsoft Money just online. You create an account on the website, login, add your account information. From there mint connects to each of your accounts, pulls down your transaction history, automatically categorizes your spending into categories, and then will send you alerts for budgets or other settings via text or email. Oh, and best of all since it knows where you’re spending your money, it tells you how you can save.

So since mint sounds great and wonderful, and it indeed is, I’m going to jump straight in and start addressing issues people may already have about this kind of site. The first is security, why would I give all of my account information away to a single place so someone could walk in and take every penny I have? Well first account information is hashed, it’s not just sitting in some text file on some desktop, its quite secure. Next, well mint gives you warnings right? So if someone goes and buys a car with you’re credit card you’ll get a text message about it. Now I may be missing something, but my bank has never offered me that kind of service. Oh and best of all, just because you put your account information, you still have the normal security backing of your bank and liability.

Worried about a company having so much information on you? What if I told you in a matter of minutes if I know you’re name I could likely have your past 3 residences, phone numbers, and other information. Or for that matter if you’re concerned with a company having that information, do you pay cash for everything. Because if you don’t the credit card companies have just as much information, and they and other companies often sell this information. Mint.com promises not to do such. So if your argument is that you don’t want people to know that much information about you, its a very valid one, but hypocritical if you don’t always use cash which, which in ways can still be traceable.

Finally I just want to highlight my favorite thing about mint.com. They get web 3.0, sure they have a rich interface, decent categorization, and good alerts. But best of all, they know where I spend my money, they know generic stuff about me, but because of that they can recommend to me ways I can actually save money. Now it may be just me, but I’m pretty sure everyone out there would like to save money. So its great to show ways that I truly can save money, not typical propaganda that is a waste of time for me.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the valley lately around this very small startup, that has a few pretty heavy hitters. Between the four founders they have worked on nearly all of the Google products so many know and love, with the exception of search. Paul Bucheit, is even responsible for Google’s current motto, “don’t be evil”. These four guys not only are visionaries within the web space, they also know how to deliver a product, having helped build and scale gmail and google maps is indeed a noteworthy accomplishment.

But what about their current task at hand, to be web 3.0 and reduce the noise of all of the web 2.0 tools out there. Well, first let me summarize what friendfeed does. When you sign up for friendfeed you add your web 2.0 accounts (currently supporting 35), some of note are: facebook, google talk, iLike, digg, twitter, flickr, picasa, youtube, yelp, and others. Friendfeed then creates a feed of you, so you can send the link to anyone and they can have a single source for updates to all of your web 2.0 interactions. Friendfeed does do a little more than that though, they attempt to filter out some of the noise by grouping your interactions together. For someone like Robert Scoble that on a given day could post 1000 tweets, you likely don’t want to see each one as a single line item. Friendfeed will group these and give you a short preview, then allow you to drill down.

All-in-all friendfeed is a reasonable service and will continue to be talked about in the valley for the coming year and then spread elsewhere in the world. However there are some problems with the service. First is the lag time, due to the restrictions of some of the services they connect to, sometimes your feed is twenty minutes behind your original posts/updates. Though this is no fault of their own, but nonetheless something users will not be excited over.

But more importantly friendfeed doesn’t have a concept of context. This would be my number one complaint that they’re not approaching web 3.0 yet. My most likely favorite site (well second to twitter), which will be reviewed next week, does a great job of understanding you and your context. When it recommends something it’s doing based on your history and it’s knowledge of you, and its often right. Indeed grouping messages together does have value, but until it can show me the messages I want to see and hide the ones I do not I won’t be amazed.

Whether or not you should be on it strictly depends on your involvement in web 2.0 sites. If you’re on more than 5 of the sites listed in their 35, it may be a worthwhile investment. While it won’t make the noise quiet, it will likely reduce it by 10-20%, which is better than nothing.

Other sites to watch out for (if they ever release): socialthing

For those interested, my friendfeed

A recent conversation of someone that was offended when the were introduced to someone new, then was not greeted first since they were a female brought what follows to mind. The above is a train of thought that came from a 70 year old military wife. I do not believe this is common practice today and is quite rarely found as the common etiquette, but nonetheless I think what is proper etiquette in business is changing quite rapidly. Though I’m not sure if all of the older ideas and principles have gone away.

I take as a first example zuckerburg, whom is a notoriously difficult interview. Not because he keeps things hidden, or is sealed tight about the company, but rather that his soft skills are not his strength. His strength is building a web product that millions of people find worthwhile to divulge hours of their day into it.

Even two years ago when you were disgruntled with a company you may have gotten a few drinks in you and talked to a friend about your displeasure. But it certainly was not made fully public for anyone to see. At best you could only hope you were simply privy to things that would be brought to the publics eye from a larger misdoing either legally or that a mass-crowd found a problem with. But for simply being overworked, underpaid, or in some other odd way mistreated there was no politically correct outlet to speak through.

However in the past years it has become extremely common for those that are still employed, or were employed to voice their complaints and bring to light the details that were once hidden. I think of Zed Shaw’s rant on rails which calls out specific companies, or an older blog the diary of a mac genius, who gave detailed behind the scenes information of an apple customer support genius bar. While I’ll concede for the mass majority if it’s published it’s doesn’t mean its consumed, so it’s not a dramatic effect on any single business, I still find it hard to believe that this overall shift of users freely publishing is not going to be able to be stopped by companies. As we approach web 3.0 and have a better ability to pull in a larger base of information that’s more relevant this information may become more and more helpful to users.

Regardless of the effects, it seems the standard procedures for what is proper etiquette are changing. Whether its talking about your place of employment, or HR checking out you’re facebook profile to see if you’d be a risk for the company, the lines are being blurred from both sides and the barriers that once existed are now being torn down.

As I’ve become more or less a web 2.0 whore. I’ve also had a great interest in web 3.0 and what it will fortell. Most believe natural language and the semantic web will play a large role in that. And while it will that will not be the end result of web 3.0. While web 2.0 included AJAX and Flex, that really doesn’t fully encompass what they are. Web 3.0 to sum it up most simply will be about reducing the noise of the web. While I can take very little credit for this idea as I have heard others say the same or at least similar things, there is an interesting side that I believe most have not thought about.

You see, in order to reduce the noise of the web you have to know about me and what I consider noise. In order for someone to do this we have to be willing to give up information about ourselves, some of which people consider private. I still recall a conversation which I posted on a few days ago about users not wanting to give out their private information. I believe this attitude is very quickly becoming old hat, while there are individuals that will stay this way for several decades as a collective whole it’s a fleeting attitude. I think for example of mint.com which I willingly give all of my financial account information to in order for them to simplify my life. Instead of a massive collection of emails and notifications I get summarized views from them. While there still is the chance for noise as I could receive text messages about every transaction that happens, I have the ability now to filter that noise.

Noise is something that some people love, take scoble for example who loves having hundreds of twitter messages fly across his screen every few minutes. Though for the vast majority to reduce the noise to allow us to accomplish more in a day, but also have more time to enjoy it will be the key to the future of the web.

I’ve talked with some that believe that government policy will come after people start to become too open with their information. My perspective is that as long as there are safeguards around that information then there will be little barriers to users giving it away freely very soon. But in truth only time will tell at how well companies and products can reduce this noise and truly learn about a user, and if there will be regulation preventing such improvements.