November 19th, 2009
The Most Important Feature of a Multi-Device Web: Syncing
by Joshua Porter | 
9 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/1570
As the ecosystem of devices proliferates, with the iPhone and Android platforms coming into their own (along with the ever-impending iTablet), we’re seeing a single feature become the most important and critical piece of new technology: syncing.
If you sync seamlessly across devices, people will love you for it. It’s why I love the Apple ecosystem. I add a calendar event to my desktop, iPhone, or web app, and it automagically appears on the others. All of my mail is synced in all of these places so I never have to worry about missing email or knowing whether I replied or having to delete the same messages over again. The amount of time that this saves is invisible, yet invaluable.
Yesterday during dinner with a few tech folks we hit on the topic of Dropbox, a file-syncing application that teams can use to collaborate. Dropbox is as simple as an app gets…simply install it, throw some files into your Dropbox folder, and it syncs to other computers or other people you want to share with. The reason people love it is that it just works, automagically. It simply syncs your files…that’s all it does. But it does it so well that people use the language of love to describe it.
Isn’t that a bit odd? Saying things like “I LOVE Dropbox!”? Well, in a world where we value any time savings like it were gold, seamless syncing becomes the gold standard. There is nothing worse than trying to figure out which copy of data is the latest, best, or primary copy. We know what we did last…if all of our devices knew then software would seem truly smart.
Today Robert Scoble tweeted about his love for the Kindle:
This is not ridiculously sophisticated functionality. It’s straight-forward…when Scoble reads something on his Kindle and then views the same thing on his laptop the software remembers where he was. It’s a bookmark, that’s it. And because it’s such a simple feature it might get overlooked…
So if you’re building an app used across devices consider focusing like gangbusters on the simple ability to seamlessly sync everything, so that people can immediately start in using one device where they left off using another. After seeing the rapturous language people use around this simple feature, I’m convinced it might be THE feature of a multi-device web.
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1. L.A. King 10:45am, Thu 19th, 2009
Syncing is something that Yammer has just recently implemented. Now, I can see which posts I have read and which posts are new across the web, desktop app, and mobile. I wish this was the case with Twitter/Tweetie2-on-iPhone/Tweetdeck-on-desktop, but that would require Twitter to enable it within it’s API.
2. Brian Christiansen 12:01pm, Thu 19th, 2009
Of course, the footnote to all of this is that creating sync that just works is difficult. One mis-sync wipes critical data. That’s why there’s so much love for Dropbox, it’s seamless. It’s that old mantra that good design is invisible. Dropbox doesn’t “sync”, so much as it magically makes files appear in multiple places without use input. Just put a file in a folder on your computer, and it’ll teleported elsewhere, too. That’s great product design.
3. Felipe Vaz 12:38pm, Thu 19th, 2009
So true.
That’s why I don’t get when developers create great apps for the iPhone and Mac and yet don’t care about a Windows counterpart — they’re not only ignoring the Windows market (which I believe in most cases is some kind of proactive political option, but that’s fine), but they’re pissing off their very own iPhone customers that use Windows. The value of their product nears zero for those users.
Things, Tweetie and Simplenote are case of such behavior.
Obviously, the opposite is also true (apps with Windows-only desktop counterparts), but they at least address a larger part of the market.
4. Jordan 11:04pm, Thu 19th, 2009
I’d be quite happy to sync my Outlook files between my laptop and desktop. Apparently, if I get a Blackberry, that will act as the sync for me, go figure.
5. runescape 11:02pm, Mon 30th, 2009
I still don’t know it clearly,but i think i will try act as the sync for me
6. Mohit 9:46am, Tue 1st, 2009
Very true. Although I’d love things to ‘automagically’ get sync’d up, I’d fear any data loss that may happen due to a sync gone bad – To an extent that I may switch away from that app. So here’s a suggestion to the vendors who’d love to put in sync’ing – Please do it right, else don’t do it at all!
7. Gregor 10:03am, Tue 1st, 2009
Yes, syncing is nice to have, although not always easy to implement. Also, consider just how far you have to go for it work nicely. If you have a laptop and a desktop then you have to sync emails, drafts, web history, favourites, music, photos everything. Much easier to use some form of cloud for storage and even online apps like Google apps.
8. Andy Irvine 11:15am, Wed 2nd, 2009
Totally agree. Syncing will become more and more important in an increasingly multi device world and I think will be surpass “nice to have” and become an essential feature.
Not just for storage or access to files but also communication between applications to support behaviors that are particular to the device. This doesn’t necessarily have to be automated. Maybe just a “flag for later”, when I’m at a different device type of thing.
For example, on your mobile device you may want to review a document or some code but actually editing it on this device is a bit of a pain. If you could mark up changes or make a note of ideas, then view these when you’re using a device more appropriate for typing, it’d probably be super handy. Though that’s kind of automated isn’t it. Anyway, you get the gist