What’s the difference between RubberSquid and a blog?

No, it’s not a riddle, it’s a frequently asked question.

On the face of it, RubberSquid looks very similar to a blog because both are made up of sequential articles, but that’s really where the similarity ends.

Blogs are usually intended for public consumption and are the equivalent of publishing a newspaper column; one that may never get read by anybody, or one that may represent an authoritive and widely quoted expert opinion on a given topic. The key point here is that the author wants people to read his or her pearls of wisdom; and the more people that do, the better.

As a consequence of this, numerous peripheral technologies are emerging that help blogs reach more readers. including ”feeds” (or RSS) as well as various websites offering bookmarking and blog recommendation services.

So, blogs are all about global online publishing.

RubberSquid on the other hand is private and secure. RubberSquid allows you to record your private thoughts and ideas and to get access to them anywhere, anytime. RubberSquid also gives you the option to share your information securely and privately with a specified set of people – acquaintances, family, club members, fellow thinkers, intimate (and less intimate) friends, etc. It even lets you control whether people that are sharing your information can add to it or invite other people to share it.

Blogs don’t work like that.

Then there’s the intelligence, RubberSquid has it, blogs don’t – it’s as simple as that. Sure, you can do a word search on a blog, but only RubberSquid will answer your questions and give you back relevance ranked answers. This is of immense value on any system, but particularly on the small, difficult to navigate screens of mobile devices  - which brings me onto the next big difference: blogs work on computers, RubberSquid works on anything.

In the jargon of the Internet, RubberSquid is “cross-platform” or, in the language of earth, it works on almost any device that can connect to the Internet. Blogs can’t. True, you can read blog feeds on some mobile phones, but you don’t get much else in the way of interactivity, searching, data input capabilities, etc.

So, in summary, the differences between a blog and RubberSquid are:

• A blog is public, it involves opening the kimono. RubberSquid is intimate, secure and private
• RubberSquid has intelligence behind it that helps make it really powerful on any device, particularly mobile. Blogs aren’t smart.
• RubberSquid lets you get at your information (and other people’s stuff that you’re sharing) via any Internet connected device including mobile phones, PDAs, Internet TVs, etc. Blogs are for computers with a nice big screen, a mouse and a keyboard.

Blogs have their place, and RubberSquid has its place; they are different tools for different jobs. Vive la difference.

Getting RubberSquid on Your Mobile Phone

So just how do you get RubberSquid onto your mobile phone? It’s actually a lot easier than you might think because there are several ways, so here’s an easy to follow guide.

Method 1: Type the Address

This is exactly the same method that you probably use when you visit a website on your PC, i.e. simply type the website address (or URL) into your browser’s address bar and press [return].

Of course, the first challenge on your mobile phone is to find the browser. Each phone is different, even phones from the same manufacturer may have different approaches to accessing the browser. On all the phones we come across, the browser is a top level menu item with a title such as “web” or “Internet”. Increasingly, the mobile phone operators are trying to make mobile Internet services feel more friendly by giving them proprietary names such as “Vodafone Live!” or “O2 Active”, so you might find one of these in your phone’s menu instead.

Once you’ve found your browser, the next challenge is to locate the address bar. Although different on each phone, this is usually quite easy to find through the browser’s menu by selecting something like “Go To” or “Open Page”.

Now you’ve got this far, you can type in the RubberSquid website address which is http://www.rubbersquid.com and then select “Go”, or whatever option takes you to the page (that’s usually pretty self evident).

A bit messy isn’t it? That’s why we have a couple of much easier methods.

Method 2: Send Yourself a Link by Text Message

Sounds impossibly techie? Not at all. Here’s how:

1. Sign-in to your RubberSquid account on a PC and go to your home page.
2. At the top of your home page, you’ll see a link [Send sign-in link to mobile phone]. Click the link.
3. You’ll be taken to a page asking for a mobile phone number – this is the mobile number of the phone that will receive the link
4. Press [Send] and RubberSquid sends a text message to the mobile number (actually, it may send two text messages)
5. Wait for the message to arrive on your phone (it can take several minutes). When it does arrive, open it and follow the link (how you do this depends on your phone but is usually quite simple). If you find your phone won’t let you follow the link, then look for the second message, and try following the link in that one.
6. Once you’ve followed the link, you should be taken to the RubberSquid login page where you will be asked for your PIN.
7. The link that you just used tells RubberSquid your mobile phone number which makes signing-in on a mobile phone a bit quicker because you don’t need to type your mobile number each time, just your PIN. You can bookmark this initial page (the one you arrive at from the link) to make it easy to find in future.

Method 3: Invite a Friend

Like method 2, this involves sending a text message to a mobile phone with a link to RubberSquid. The Invite a Friend function is provided to allow users to securely share RubberSquid channels. It works like this:

1. Sign-in to RubberSquid and go to the channel that you want to share.
2. Look for the [Channel Link] menu on the left side of the screen (you might have to click the down arrow icon to open the menu) and select [Invite a Friend]
3. You’ll be taken to a page asking for the friend’s mobile phone number – this is the mobile number of the phone that will receive the link
4. Press [Send] and RubberSquid sends a text message to the mobile number (actually, it may send two text messages)
5. Wait for the message to arrive on the phone (it can take several minutes). When it does arrive, open it and follow the link (how you do this depends on your phone but is usually quite simple). If you find thephone won’t let you follow the link, then look for the second message, and try following the link in that one.
6. Once she’s followed the link, your friend should be taken to the RubberSquid login page where she’ll either be asked for her PIN (if her phone number is already registered on RubberSquid), or invited to register.
7. After signing in or registering, she’ll be taken to her RubberSquid home page where she can access your channel in the Channel Links list.

RubberSquid Compared with Social Networking Sites (SNSs)

Recently, I was watching a video of the keynote speech given by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to 800 developers at the San Francisco Design Center about Facebook Platform (it’s here if you’re interested), and thought a few words might be in order about how RubberSquid fits with the whole social networking thing.

Zuckerberg’s F8 (that’s Facebook to you and I) keynote is quite a long session, so I’ll para-phrase. Facebook is an SNS that’s growing rapidly in terms of active users (i.e. ones that have logged into their accounts within the last month), and a key part of its strategy for attaining the status of most trafficked website, a position currently occupied by rival SNS MySpace, revolves around Facebook Platform. Facebook Platform, a mechanism by which developers create “applications”, or widgets, that plug into a Facebook profile, could be the first mainstream sign of a paradigm shift in the way software and users interact. On the other hand, it might just be a massive marketing ploy. Probably, it’s somewhere in between.

So just how does RubberSquid differ from SNSs?

The first difference is in orientation – SNSs are ego-centric whereas RubberSquid is information-centric. At their core, SNSs are about the account holder and connecting him or her with a network of friends, some of whom he or she may never actually meet physically. For most users, this involves exchanging messages in one form or another (email, chat, “walls”, etc.), something they could easily achieve outside the SNS; what the SNS gives them is a ready made network of people coupled with a centralized tool bag of communication and personalization capabilities.

RubberSquid, on the other hand is all about making information available anywhere, any time, and, optionally, sharing that information in a controlled way with a specific set of people. In RubberSquid, the person behind the information has full control over it, but does not feature as anything more than a just screen-name – the RubberSquid account holder can be as anonymous or as public with their personal information as they want. Controversially,  most SNSs track, or “stalk” as some would have it, their users - RubberSquid does not and is therefore considerably more private than a typical SNS.

This fundamental difference in orientation means that RubberSquid can be a natural extension to SNSs for users with information to share amongst a specific subset of their social network, and the need to deliver that information via devices other than PCs such as mobile phones, PDAs, etc. – real world examples include sports team coordinators, club organisers, collectors and hobbyists, holidaymakers, even groups of people organising a night out – basically, any individual or group doing activities involving shared information and that may be away from a PC.

This brings me onto the second major difference – ubiquity – or the ability to access information anywhere, any time. RubberSquid uses a series of techniques to determine how best to deliver information to the user’s browser – a more feature-rich page for a PC with its large screens, full keyboard and mouse; a compact, easily navigated page for a small screen device such as a mobile phone with its limited keypad and low precision joystick.

There are other technology differences as well, the vast majority of PCs support the use of one or more scripting language (such as Javascript) for example, whereas scripting support on mobile phones may be patchy at best – amongst other things, being able to leverage scripting gives the developer scope to present the user with a richer user interface such as the roll-down menus you’ll see when using RubberSquid on a PC. SNSs, on the other hand, tend to use rich, and to some eyes cluttered, user interfaces totally unsuited to a small screen with no mouse; MySpace for example allows users to unleash user interface anarchy onto their profile pages by enabling total customization. Nothing wrong with that, it’s a fun capability that clearly appeals to the MySpace demographic, but it would be very difficult to replicate on a mobile phone say, as would the user experience of the Facebook Platform applications that we started out with. That’s why SNSs will need to come up with new ways of delivering their services in a compelling way if they are to migrate successfully to mobile.

One way for a service to remain as compelling on mobile as it is on the desktop is to use of intelligence to deliver information selectively – and that’s my third difference; RubberSquid uses a barrage of sophisticated natural language processing techniques (which may also be tagged “Artificial Intelligence”) to help users find and read information. It is RubberSquid’s intelligence that allows it to generate indicative summaries of information that give users the opportunity to decide whether they want to download the full version of a document, as well as the ability to deliver focused summaries in response to user queries. And we’re not talking about simple keyword searches – RubberSquid’s intelligence allows it to infer relationships between the terms being used in user information and queries.

So, in conclusion, RubberSquid has three key features when compared with SNSs: it is information-centric instead of user-centric; it is fully adapted to working on any class of device; and it has intelligence. These features equip RubberSquid for its primary role of information management and sharing, and make it the ideal information delivery extension to any SNS account - RubberSquid doesn’t compete with SNS, it compliments it.