I’ve been (and so has the rest of the team here) pretty quiet during the last few months. Mostly because we were pretty busy working on Totspot (blog), which we launched with a group of really smart people. Totspot is a social publishing platform for parents and their kids. It’s a pretty niche market, but an exciting one too.

Totspot started out as client work and it became our single focus for months - definitely worth it, for several reasons. One: it’s pretty cool to be working on something that’s usually not your core audience - as you may know, we build solutions for teams much like our own who work on, with and for the web. Second: it gave us an opportunity to engage deeply with an idea. As a team, we usually focus either on planning, or on execution - and we don’t often get the chance to deep dive into a product like we did with Totspot. It was good to get back to thinking exclusively about one core problem, like we had before with Bell Canada, and with our own product, Goplan. Third: kids are awesome.

So I’m pretty excited about this launch. Totspot is now in a private beta stage and we’re slowly inviting moms and dads to check it out - if you want in, head out to Totspot.com and leave us your email address (we respect your privacy, your email address is safe with us). There’s more exciting stuff to talk about really soon, so keep an eye out - I promise I’ll be posting more often (especially next week from Vegas)

Note: Mike over at Techcrunch wrote about Totspot too, and Techmeme’s caught up to the story, so head over there and read up on what people are saying. Oh! And obviously there’s the official Totspot blog, where we’ll post product updates - go check!

This post is philosophical and doesn’t necessarily carry solutions to the problems it presents. I know it’s not my usual kind of writing, but hey, it’s better to get ideas out there than it is to keep them to yourself. Tread carefully.

Brian Oberkirch just posted about the flow of information and where we’re heading to by connecting the web to the objects we carry with us daily. This topic has been on my mind since when I first heard of the Chumby about 2 years ago. Connected devices like the chumby, stuff by Ambient Devices (that I’ve never seen live, unfortunately), the iPhone and Arduino bring us closer to data that we generally pay little attention to.

These days the web isn’t something we’re always plugged into or connected to. We just tap into it when we want information - still some of us do it more than others. The web is leaking into the real world (as Matt Webb hinted at in his Movement presentation) through connected devices and services like Twitter, Dopplr (or Birdie, which we’re building around here - more on it later, promise).

There’s still barriers between now and a future where the online world and the real blend into each other completely. Brian mentions some of the problems we’re solving now like identity and usability. A lot needs to happen in the interaction world as well. The way we connect to the cloud (cloud being online data) is still open, vastly unexplored territory. We’re building devices that get us closer to the data, but I keep feeling like our use of screen-based media is often limiting. We’ll see a lot more of products like BUG labs than we will of services in the future.

My guess is we’ll have specialized devices connected to specific bits of data - much like we use our cellphones to connect to GSM networks and call people. What those will be and how they’ll look is still unknown, but it’s an exciting time to be working on platforms, devices and the web.

Mike calls it a massive win for the project and I agree - OpenID just scored bigtime when Yahoo! opened openid.yahoo.com this morning. If you don’t know what OpenID is, check the OpenID homepage at Openid.net, but for the non-technical people, Openid is a decentralized authentication system that allows you to share login credentials across multiple sites (in theory, this could be any website, in the future). Actually, Yahoo! has a great explanation:

Are you tired of creating a new account on every web site you use? Do you avoid new web sites because they come with yet another username and password? Do you paste stickies with password hints all over your computer monitor?

OpenID is an open technology standard that solves all of these problems. The OpenID technology will allow you to use your Yahoo! account to sign in to hundreds of web sites! And this list is growing every day…

So Yahoo! officially joins the ever-growing list of Openid providers - honestly, I can’t see how players like Google won’t follow this move as well. OpenID makes sense both from a user experience perspective (at least to keep users from having to remember login and password for their websites) as well as a portability and security perspective. Since you can effectively “carry” your personal identity between providers and transparently change providers if you think you can’t trust your current one, it puts control into the hands of the users - which is definitely something we need more of.

Evan Williams has a very good post on evaluating product ideas based on his previous experience (launching Blogger, Odeo - pretty much forgotten in that article - and Twitter). I’ve been thinking about a couple of products as well (have been for a while, actually), so the whole article sort of fell into place with my own criteria. Here are Ev’s:

• Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
• Obviousness: Is it clear why people should use it?
• Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver?
• Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it?
• Discoverability: How will people learn about your product?
• Monetizability: How hard will it be to extract the money?
• Personally compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?

To these I would add two other characteristics that I believe have a great impact on a product’s success: cleverness and trustworthiness. You know when a product is clever because you get the feeling of empowerment and delight. And trustworthiness (although perhaps difficult to assess initially) defines how people look at your product or service - if users can trust it, it is more likely that they’ll become engaged and use it often. People are often skeptical about things that dip into their personal affairs (think Facebook’s Beacon and why it sucks), but will feel at ease to engage and discover new things about a product if they trust it.

Ultimately, it isn’t easy to determine the likeliness of a product being successful by putting it to the test against a series of attributes - but it may help. I’m still a big fan of entrepreneurs following their gut and seeing where it takes them, but depending on the person, that might not be a good plan to stick to.

I definitely recommend you give Ev’s article a read if you’re an entrepreneur - you’re still here so chances are you’ll be interested. Unfortunately Evan still doesn’t allow comments on his blog, because I would imagine the discussion on such an article would be interesting.