Out In The World

It’s really gratifying to get to ruminate on things here on my blog and see echoes of those ideas the great work that other people do. Some recent bits of gratification:

  • After talking about the open data from Health and Human Services as a “Health Graph” last year, and updating on its progress a few weeks ago, I’m absolutely delighted to see the smart folks at Runkeeper actually introduce a service called the health graph API. There’s a ton of smart thinking that’s been put in, and it’s well worth exploring.
  • Want even more momentum around health data startups? There’s Aza Raskin’s Massive Health. Jane McGonigal’s SuperBetter. Buster Benson’s Health Month. I was mesmerized by Tom Lee’s One Medical Group principles when I spoke at Gel with a few weeks ago. I’m smacking my forehead as I write this, because I know there are at least a handful of other health startups that I’ve missed — feel free to plug them in the comments.
  • Meanwhile, we’d just talked about Apple’s Twitter, spawning some great conversation with MG Siegler where he’d hoped for something aimed more directliy at SMS, and Darrell Etherington, who’d said Apple simply wouldn’t copy Twitter by introducing a realtime messaging platform. As it turns out, they did, and it is fairly tightly aligned to compete with SMS, and that sort of surprise is what makes this tech pontificating fun.
  • And finally, our Activate presentation that I mentioned in Redefining the Problem has inspired some great conversations; Mathew Ingram’s take was one of my favorites.