Flow *

So to start off with Touchstone is something like I imagine when talking about user generated pipelines and flow. Its acts like a widget engine, so it sits on your desktop and you can interact with it directly using a very slick user interface. But as the website likes to remind us - its not a widget engine, its a alerts/updates and attention management platform. The platform can also can do things on your behalf like pulling down RSS feeds and posting files to the internet. Its also arranges its self like a series of pipes.

Subscriptions (Input) pull down Feeds and other types of data from the web. At the moment only it only has a Feed adapter plugin installed so you can only All types of RSS and ATOM feeds. But you could write a input adapter for almost anything online or offline on your computer. Some of the ideas are here, the Azureus one I'm very interested in. The Feed adapter plugin also gives you the option to subscribe to a OPML file (not URL which is great shame). In my current setup I have subscribed to over 300+ feeds and Touchstone seems to be as slow as it was with one feed. But memory usage is crazy (320meg), luckly I have a gig of memory and don't use my desktop machine for much more that a download and file server.

Priorities (Transform or as Touchstone calls it Items) allows you to filter and transform feed data using a range of plugins. Out of the box you have Phrases to look out for, Rank your sources and Auto-Attention Profiling Results. Phrases will urge Touchstone to look for user defined phrases in subscriptions. Even my desktop aggregator (greatnews) does this, but the Rank your sources I've only seen in blogbridge and this allows you to give certain sources a higher emphase over others. When you mix this with the phrases you can see how much more powerful it is that a standard desktop aggregator. The Auto-Attention I've not played with yet, because I'm currently looking into the U-AR (Universal AttentionData Reader) and I-AM (Inferred Applicability to Me) stuff.

Interruptions (Output) is pretty much what you see or what the platform does with the sources once there transformed/filtered. This is also where things get very interesting. Like Input adapters there is a list of ideas here. But Touchstone Alpha comes with Popup Alerts, Pebbles, News Ticker and Breaking News. All are very configurable, even down to transparency levels and size. Starting with Popup Alert, this does what it says. Little short 2sec popsups at the bottom right of the screen (all configurable). Breaking News is almost the same but pops up in the left corner and has a slightly different emphases. How you config that emphases is still unknown but the adapter is still work in progress. Pop up alert is more complete and configurable. News Ticker controls that large black bar which sits on the top of the desktop (all configurable of course). Most of the time its sits there saying waiting for content but once in a while it will have a scrolling feed on it. You can hover over the headline in question to pause it and a click will open the browser with the permalink or url in question. The most interesting one is Pebbles which republishes your output as another public feed. This means you can subscribe with a standard rss reader and get all the benefit Touchstone gives you with the Transform stage. Which is very useful for example if your wanting to get whats important on your Mobile phone or mini aggregator. I'm subscribed to the feed on my RSS reader on my phone currently, and to be honest its not working out that great at the moment but I'm sure that will change as I teach it my taste more..

Be warned Touchstone Alpha is not very stable but I usually find it stays up if you don't mess with the settings too much. Also running it on my 2.8ghz desktop made it stable enough to work with. I would have it on my desktop machine at work (Intel duo processor) but it does seem to support Proxys correctly yet. And my poor 1.3ghz laptop just couldn't cope with the stress of Touchstone. Even under the 2.8ghz machine Touchstone remains very slow and non-responsive to multiple clicks and drags within a short period. Its CPU usage also flickrs back and forth between idle and 75% at the worst of times.

So generally I really do like Touchstone. The concept works but it needs more work and polishing before releasing on the public. It also needs more adapters to make it very different from desktop aggregators. I think once it can read data from the web in non syndication format like APIs and have outputs to IM and Email. We'll start to see Touchstone really come into its own.

Its not exactly what a application for pipelines and flow but its not that far off either. U-AR and I-AM are very interesting things which could be used to define a USER pipeline. For example I could give away or even sell my APML (attention profiling mark-up language) if it churned out such useful data from a range of sources. So they really have thought about the shareable side of this. Touchstone are keen to make APML like OPML, so it won't be owned by one corp and there for rights free, maybe standardised (if someone body picks it up) and hopefully extendable using namespaces.
But taking a step back a moment, this only defines the middle part of the pipeline not the input or output, I would love to see XProc or something like it used to define the whole process which goes on in Touchstone.

Its also important not to get caught up in the hype of Touchstone. Its still only working with pools of data and its output adapters can not for example automatically download the latest web video which everyone might be talking about. I'm interested to see what's possible outside of pools of data. Currently its focus on Feeds makes a lot of sense, otherwise it would be too abstract a concept and product. But also currently Touchstone has only one feature beyond Blogware, the attention engine. Yes it looks a hell of a lot nicer and easier to use but the basic adapters in Blogwave and Touchstone are a like. Also the experience is simlar, but remember Blogwave had a definable pipeline using batch scripting. Touchstone currently does not.

I look forward to seeing what the next Alpha build brings... Good work Touchstone guys!

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