We live in an era of overabundance in every possible way; well, at least we the lucky ones are. We have the internet, access to drinking water and more food than we can eat, cars, planes, boats, you name it. We also have an app for every possible task we can imagine, hence the “there’s an app for that” saying.

I am really happy that people are building apps and services solving small problems, we are not all born into this world to cure cancer, after all.

I see nothing wrong with having an app for reminders, a task manager, and a project management SaaS, or having a specific app for writing, and another app for publishing that writing in.

However, as the list of the apps we use daily grows, a new problem emmerges: the problem of remembering where the hell that thing I worked on yesterday is?!

Organization of our assets is becoming a real challenge, so most of us turn to apps that serve more than one purpose. Evernote is a quintessential example of such an app. It is of übermost importance to me for its storage, capturing, and search features — and the fact that I have it on my phone, computer, and tablet — but boy do I hate writing in it.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an app that would provide me a comfortable environment for writing, but that would hook into Evernote in order to save a copy of the document there for safe–keeping? Also, how cool would it be if it synced the documents in real–time?

Well it turns out there is such an app, and it’s called Draft and it’s a typical example of my point to which I am getting at: it is what I am now calling a glue service.

I see these glue services emerging more and more in the near future. Services like Zapier, ifttt, and Cloudwork enable us to connect otherwise hopelessly disconnected software services, and I couldn’t be happier to be using them.

I understand this is a really geeky thing to be excited about, but I really feel that more connected your service is to other services, more successful it is likely to become.

Repeat after me:

• The mockup is not sacred.
• The mockup will change as we learn more about the customer’s needs.
• The mockup process is a winding road, not a finite–number step process.
• The mockup will be swiftly discarded in light of an alternative solution.
• Iterations will be quick and plentiful.
• Trust no one. Question everything.
• The mockup is not sacred.

There has been a lot of debate on the topic of comments on websites. They are usually meant to bring discussion and conversation to the article, but more than usually they just end up being a tool for spam, or a place to have a flame war (just look at the comments section of YouTube videos).

Lately I have seen some websites taking the commenting concept and giving it a new spin, making them useful tools for collaboration and expression.

Google Docs

Google has made an excellent commenting workflow for collaborating on documents. To date it is my favorite way to get feedback and discuss writing, also super–useful for things like clearing up feature requests as you can see from my example above.

Medium

The Medium folks have implemented comments in–line with the content. This approach is not too different from standard annotation as people can comment on specific paragraphs of the post. In addition to that, making the comments hidden by default thoughtful attributions to the post are encouraged, instead of trolling.

iO9

This is likely a feature across all Gawker sites, however I’ve noticed it only on the new iO9 so far (they call this new platform “Kinja”). These guys are going a step further, and allowing their visitors to annotate the images within their posts, which is really cool and adds a whole new use for comments when used on a popular site like this.

All in all, I am glad that comments are making a come back, and that online discussion is evolving. We went from standard blog comments and forums, to advanced and improved commenting systems like in the examples above, and services like Branch and StackExchange are truly redefining how we communicate online.