echovar

“Technology is at its best when it gets out of the way. Good technology blends in.” Most of the top technology firms take these ideas as their credo. This is the way Apple talked about the iPad, and the way Google now talks about their augmented reality appliance, Google Glass. The fact that the highest aim of technological devices is to get out of the way is a clue to how broken technological interfaces and devices have been.

Take Heidegger’s favorite example of the hammer. The hammer blends in, it gets out of the way when we are successfully hammering in a nail. The hammer itself, as a tool, blends into the background of the hammering activity. It’s only when the hammer breaks that it juts back into our world of hammering with its brute physicality as a “hammer.”

Another example used by Heidegger is wearing corrective lenses in the form of glasses. While they appear to be the closest thing, literally resting on your nose — while they are in use, they are the farthest thing from us. They exist in another world entirely.

Google Glass takes an interesting path to the background. The example of the hammer shows us that any tool, whether it contains onboard network-connected computer processing or not, can become a part of the background. Heidegger’s discussion of eyewear tells us something about what is near or far in the context of the person engaged in a project in the midst of the world. Google Glass moves to the background by attempting to move into, or behind, our eyes. Like the example of eyewear, the eye itself is part of the background when it is merely seeing. This technology gets out of the way by positioning itself outside our field of vision and then superimposing augmentation layers on it.

Google’s augmented reality appliance attempts to erase its material presence. Its only trace is the data it projects onto the world. In this sense, it is an metaphysical idealist par excellence. Its camera claims to record the world from a unique subjective perspective. From outside of the world, as it were. Do you see what I see? Well, now you can. Click here.

Of course, while the position of Google’s Glass gets it out of the user’s way, it puts itself directly in everyone else’s way. “Glass” breaks your face for me. It’s no longer operating as a face, now it’s a camera and potentially it’s projecting augmented reality data on or over me. This is the problem with misunderstanding how backgrounds work. Being physically “out of the way” is not the same thing as blending into a background.

Technology yearns to recede into the background just at the moment when the background itself is broken. Global warming and other forms of pollution have resulted in the geological era known as the anthropocene. The combined force of human activity is now part of what we used to call the background. Extreme weather and other strange events jut out of the background and disrupt the status quo of our everyday world. What they’re telling us is that our everyday world has ended. The background is permanently broken. The narrator no longer inscribes his story on the backdrop (augmented reality); it’s the backdrop that inscribes its narrative onto the narrator. These strange weather events are an augmentation of reality from reality’s point of view.

Rather than tools that attempt to blend with background, perhaps we need tools that are partially broken. Tools that are a little weird and occasionally provide unexpected results. Tools that remind us of where they came from and the labor conditions under which they were produced. Tools that start a conversation from the tool-side of the divide. In his letters from the 1940s and 50s, Samuel Beckett writes about his decision to write in French rather than English. He points to:

“le besoin d’être mal armé” (“the need to be ill-equipped”)

Writing in English was starting to “knot him up”, it was a language he knew too well. It was this ill-equipped writer that would one day write “Ill Seen, Ill Said“. In addition to the necessity of using broken tools, Beckett also points another writer with his phrase: Stephane Mallarme. Mallarme was one of the first poets to bring the background into the body of the poem. In his poem “A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance” the white space, the background of the text becomes part of the work. When philosopher Tim Morton talks about “environmental or ecological philosophy” he’s trying to get at just this. It’s not a philosophy that takes the environment or ecology as its topic, but rather a thinking that’s ill-equipped, a little broken, a little twisted, where shards of the background come jutting through.

Google’s Glass is signalling to us about backgrounds and our place in them. It’s a message we can only hear in the moments before we raise the appliance and attach it to our face.

ikoni

If you strip away all of the surface distractions and zoom in on the computing environment using your microscopic vision, you see bits moving back and forth across a wire. If you zoom back out to the macro level, you can see Hewlett Packard and Google making radical changes in strategy and multi-billion dollar bets on how the preponderance of those bits will travel.

Now step into the time machine and move back a few years. The personal computer has just become the business computer. Most of the bits are written and retrieved from local hard drives in the form of files. Files are moved via sneaker-net. Move forward a few years and files are moved over local networks and individual computers are linked together within a single location. Shared files find their way to file servers and now allow multiple users to access and add work product to these common-use files.

Concurrently, the message finds an electronic home in email. Initially email messages can only be transmitted within specific platforms. You need to be on the same network as the people you want to communicate with. Fast forward a few years and email is sent with a common protocol and the networks become a network of networks. Now you only need to know the name of the endpoint to send a message to anyone.

The growth vector of the file’s environment is the size of the hard disk. Larger hard disks in the computing device and on the local network define capacity. As time passes and more files accumulate, they require even more disk space. As computing power increases, file sizes increase as well. As more and more things are digitized, more kinds of things are stored on hard drives in digital form.

The personal computer connects to a local area network, a wide area network and a global network to create a new entity called the Network. Both message traffic and file creation are initiated through the personal computer and start to be pointed at the Network. As the speed of the Network increases, the length of the wire that file bits can workably traverse becomes global in nature. It’s at this point that the message and the file begin to converge. The functionality of the personal computer as a file processing machine begins to be sucked down the wire and reconstituted into the virtual space of the Network. Both the file and computing processes are remote controlled through a set of messages sent back and forth across the wires.

The technology dynasties that were built up around these different ways of treating bits have large investments in both the technical infrastructure and mental models of either files or messages. The roots of these patterns go deep into the corporate structures of these organizations. With the recent moves by HP and Google, we can see the can see that the message and messaging network infrastructure has finally tipped the balance away from the file. The file has become another kind of message for a signaling device pointed at a cloud messaging network. Google attempts to reach across from the cloud to gain a foothold on the device side. HP recognizes that rather than going from personal computer to signaling device, the move from personal computer to custom central computing platforms is a better fit.

It’s worth noting that the message infrastructure has backed off of its most radical formulation and returned to the competing large network platform environment. In the email messaging environment there was an impetus and energy to connect the disparate systems and endpoints so that any two endpoints could connect. The connections between the new era large messaging platforms are purely one-way, instead of the more common “read-only” capability, this is a “write-only” hook up. One has a sense of retreating from a democratic network back to a feudal system of large kingdoms.

There’s a maxim in investing that you should buy at the moment of maximum pessimism. The file, it seems, is on the ropes. The message, messaging networks and signaling devices seem to be firmly in control of the corporate agenda. That’s why it’s interesting that Apple, with its iCloud initiative, is investing in redefining the user’s relationship with the file. The file becomes non-local, it doesn’t travel across the wire, it’s simply wherever it’s needed. Or, at least, it appears that way. All the mechanics of syncing, versioning, reading and writing have been removed from the workflow. The creation device, the file and the file network may be perfectly ripe for rejuvenation as our obsession with the message reaches its peak.

This is a meander, rather than a construction. If it were a house, it would probably fall down. No foundation, no plumbing, no two-by-fours holding up the walls. Just a set of connections, some things that grouped themselves together around an image.

It started with Jon Udell’s essay, published on May 17, 2011, called “Awakened Grains of Sand.” I didn’t read the essay until much later. I’d marked it in an RSS reader, and then sent it to my Text DVR, Instapaper, to read at a later date. In the essay, Udell makes another attempt to explain what he calls “web thinking.” By coming back to this subject again and again, he teases out new threads, new aspects of the real shape of what we call the virtual. His work with calendars, analog and digital, pinpoints a space where a potential connection is missed. Generally speaking, different kinds calendars can’t seem to talk to each other.

It was Udell’s use of ‘grains of sand’ as a metaphor that caught my attention.

In a recent talk I failed (spectacularly) to convey the point I’m about to make, so I’ll try it again and more carefully here. We can make about as many 14-character tags as there are grains of sand on Earth. True, a lot of those won’t be nice mnemonic names like WestStDamKeene, instead they’ll look like good strong unguessable passwords. But there are still unimaginably many mnemonic names to be found in this vast namespace. Each of those can serve as a virtual bucket that we can use to make and share collections of arbitrarily many web resources.

The implications take a while to sink in. Grains of sand are inert physical objects. They just lie around; we can’t do much with them. But names can be activated. I can create a 14-character name today — actually I just did: WestStDamKeene — that won’t be found if you search for it today on Google or Bing. But soon you will be able to find at least one hit for the term. At first the essay I’m now typing will be the only hit from among the 30 billion indexed by Google and 11 billion indexed by Bing. But if others use the same term in documents they post to the web, then those documents will join this one to form a WestStDamKeene cluster.

This took me in two directions. The idea of a grain of sand as an inert physical object in relation to a system of meaning, or set of web services, first pulled in thoughts of Saussurean linguistics and the idea of the arbitrary nature of the signifier in relation to the signified. But a stronger pull was exerted by the opening stanza of William Blake’s poem from 1803, “Auguries of Innocence.”

Auguries of Innocence
William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.

Blake starts with the tiny inert physical object and from it he conjures the whole universe. Udell’s grains of sand have the potential to combine into legible sequences and encode some specific meaning, or refer to an assembly of services. Blake uses parts to stand in for wholes, a rhetorical figure known as synecdoche. An augury is a sign or an omen.

The poet Robert W. Service, known as the Bard of the Yukon, also makes use of the ‘grain of sand.’ While he’s best remembered for “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” in a poem written in the 1950s, he travels the dangerous territory first marked out by Giordano Bruno. If Blake sees the world in a grain of sand, Service notices that the beach is filled with sand. Each grain might be a world, a constellation, a universe. A million grains of sand quickly makes the leap to infinity.

A Grain of Sand
Robert W. Service

If starry space no limit knows
And sun succeeds to sun,
There is no reason to suppose
Our earth the only one.
‘Mid countless constellations cast
A million worlds may be,
With each a God to bless or blast
And steer to destiny.

Just think! A million gods or so
To guide each vital stream,
With over all to boss the show
A Deity supreme.
Such magnitudes oppress my mind;
From cosmic space it swings;
So ultimately glad to find
Relief in little things.

For look! Within my hollow hand,
While round the earth careens,
I hold a single grain of sand
And wonder what it means.
Ah! If I had the eyes to see,
And brain to understand,
I think Life’s mystery might be
Solved in this grain of sand.

Today we speak easily about the possibility of multiple universes, for Giordano Bruno, those thoughts ended in imprisonment and eventually execution. On February 17, 1600, Bruno was burned at the stake for his explorations into the expanses of infinity:

Whatever is an element of the infinite must be infinite also; hence both Earths and Suns are infinite in number. But the infinity of the former, is not greater than of the latter; nor where all are inhabited, are the inhabitants in greater proportion to the infinite than the stars themselves.

Blake sees the world in a grain of sand, Bruno says that whatever is an element of the infinite must be infinite also. For Saussure, the arbitrary nature of the phoneme means that a signifier has no necessary link to the signified. Udell can chain together a sequence of grains of sand and point them at any object, or collection of objects, in the universe. The sleeping and withdrawn grains of sand are awakened when this link is made.

After finishing Udell’s essay, I was also taken with its resonances to my post: Going Orbital: Content and its Discontents. Where Udell tries to explain ‘web thinking,’ I try to examine the differences between the practice of the analog and the digital. It’s a strange land where a thing is a copy at its origin; and by moving it from here to there another copy is created. Even the act of reading it creates another copy. These things have no fixed position, and appear to exist simultaneously in multiple locations—a kind of every day non-locality.

In thinking about this leap from the analog to the digital, Udell considers the example of calendar entries. But another example of this figure pulled itself into this constellation of thoughts. In Ian Bogost’s book, Unit Operations, An Approach to Videogame Criticisim, he recounts some of the early history of computers and computation:

Among the first true high-speed electronic digital computers, ENIAC’s main disadvantage was a considerable one: it contained programmatic instructions in separate segments of the machine. These segments needed to be properly plugged together to route information flow for any given task. Since the connections had to be realigned for each new computation, programming ENIAC required considerable physical effort and maintenance. Noting its limitations, in 1945 ENIAC engineer and renowned mathematician John von Neumann suggested that computers should have a simply physical structure and yet be able to perform any kind of computation through programmable control alone rather than physical alteration of the computer itself. …Stored-programming makes units of each program reusable and executable based on programmatic need rather than physical arrangement. Von Neuman, Eckert, Mauchley, and Goldstine designed a control instruction called the conditional control transfer to achieve these goals. The conditional control transfer allowed programs to execute instructions in any order, not merely in the linear flow in which the program was written.

In this figure, the move from the analog to the digital takes the form of moving from a physical model of computing to a logical model. Here too, we need to take a leap in our understanding of location and how a thing occupies space. The world can be loaded into a grain of sand, and the grains of sand rearranged in arbitrary patterns.

“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools!”
— Marshall McLuhan

While it’s bound to continue on, the latest stop in this chain of thought is with Apple’s iCloud and the end of the file system. The desktop and file folder metaphor breaks down once you find yourself trying to keep things in sync across multiple devices. Source and version control software isn’t a part of the common tool set. This is part of the ‘web thinking’ that Udell has had such difficulty in getting across. Part of the problem is the metaphors we have at our disposal. A metaphor is literally “to carry over.” A broken metaphor no longer carries over, the sense leaks out as it crosses the chasm.

It’ll be interesting to find out whether this transformation can take place without explanation, outside of language. If whatever you’re working on, or listening to, just shows up where ever you need it. That could be enough, understanding it may be beside the point. Does magic need an explanation? The work of synchronization and versions isn’t something you do, it’s just the way certain kinds of digital things behave. If it catches on, we’ll start wondering why all digital things don’t behave that way.

Recently I’ve been using a very simple analytical technique to look at a variety of systems. I’d describe it as a blunt rather than a fine edged tool. The metaphor breaks down around the edges, but the yield is still quite good.

Systems require energy to remain organized, otherwise they fall prey to entropy—they start coming apart. The system must at least match the power of entropy to maintain the status quo. That level must be exceeded to refine the granularity of its organization. For the purposes of the analysis, I’m using electricity as a metaphor for power. The tool is employed like this:

- Does it runs on battery power?
- Must it be plugged into an outlet?

Let’s start with the characteristics of the plugged-in. For these systems, electricity is a utility, an assumption, a constant. Power is commoditized and on tap in the environment. Whatever the system requires is available through the outlet on the wall. Power is unlimited, steady and metered—but in order for the system to be operational, a power cord must be connected to the grid. Another way to think about this is through the economics of abundance.

A system that runs on batteries has a limited store of power. Concepts like standby power, active power use and sharing a limited resource start to come in to play. Batteries need to be recharged and eventually replaced. Active battery life must line up with human cycles of sleeping and waking; working and living; active and passive use. Tilt the battery to a slightly different angle and you can see the economics of scarcity.

The desktop computer was made to be plugged in. Not much has changed there. The hardware and the software assumes unlimited commodity electricity from the environment The first laptops were built for portability, they were easy to move from one outlet to another. The battery’s low capacity resulted in limited usefulness as a un-tethered device. Over time the hardware of the laptop began to change to accommodate the limitations of the battery, but the software was unchanged. It was crucial that the laptop run desktop software without any alterations.

Adobe’s Flash makes an interesting case study for this analytic technique. Flash was built to operate within the plugged-in system of the desktop computer. As such, it moved easily and naturally to the world of laptops and netbooks. In the world of battery-powered devices it shows its roots. It begs the question of whether something built to use power as an infinite commodity can be altered to operate in an environment of finite power. Faith in a Moore’s law-like increase in capacity holds out hope that these kinds of applications can be merely altered. As long as they can conserve just enough power, they should be able to operate successfully in a large finite energy environment. Another way to ask this question might be: is reform sufficient, or is revolution necessary?

It’s with mobile computing devices built from the the ground up like the iPhone and iPad that battery life has been extended to up to 10 hours. That’s a span of time that begins to be available for complex relationships with the rhythms of life. Software for these devices is also built from the ground up to operate within a restricted power environment. Among other things, mobile computing means a device unrestricted by a power cord.

The battery introduces an era of limits against the infinite constant of the electrical outlet. It’s worth taking a moment to consider how something like electricity, water or natural gas could be converted into an assumed resource of the environment. Imagine if any of the plugged-in appliances in your home had to be re-engineered to work on batteries. Would they need to change incrementally or radically?

In 1978, James Burke debuted a television program called ‘Connections.’ It was billed as an ‘alternate view of change.’ The first episode looked at how a vast technical network had become deeply entangled with every aspect of our lives. Burke thought one way to put that entanglement into relief would be to turn the network off, and then review the effects. To accomplish this Burke created a re-enactment of the 1965 blackout of New York City and the entire northeast of the United States.

Not surprisingly, New York needs to be plugged in, it wasn’t designed to run on batteries. This sent Burke on a quest to find out how we arrived at this point. While we can create artificial scarcity through economic incentives and punishments in the billing for electric power use, these efforts take place within a context of an infinite power supply. There’s always the option to pay more for more power. Contrast that with a battery, no matter how much money you have, your battery will drain at the same rate as the next person’s.

The move from desktop to laptop to tablet/handheld traces an evolution from the infinite to the finite. It also traces a line from the finite contents of a hard disk to the infinite contents of the Network. The cloud computing factories that supply the endpoints of the Network are in the process of being retooled. Heretofore they’d just been plugged into the grid like everything else. Now the grid is positioned as backup power and the Network factories are plugged directly into the the standing reserves of the earth. Natural gas is transformed into electricity through local power generation. This isn’t a transformation from outlet to battery, it’s the substitution of one form of outlet for another.

The photograph of the earth that Stewart Brand put on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog made plain the finitude of our planet. There is no infinite reserve of power behind the outlet on the wall. As we continue to build out the electronic Network environment, at some point, we’ll run up against this limit. Of course, we may have already hit the limit, or passed it long ago. But like the space battles in our science fiction films, we expected to hear a great crashing noise as the limit was reached. Surely there would be some sort of sign, some gesture from the earth letting us know that we’ve exceeded our allowance. But as the poet Milosz reminds us, worlds end, and sometimes no one notices.

A Song On the End of the World
by Czeslaw Milosz
translated by Anthony Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.

If “devices” are the entry point to the Network, and the market is settling in to the three screens and a cloud model, all eyes are now on the big screen. The one that occupies the room in your house that used to be called the “living room.” The pattern for the little screen, the telephone, has been set by the iPhone. The middle sized screen is the process of being split between the laptop and the iPad. But the big screen has resisted the Network, the technology industry is already filled with notable failures in this area. Even so, the battle for the living room is billed as the next big convergence event on the Network.

A screen is connected to the Network when being connected is more valuable than remaining separate. We saw this with personal computers and mobile telephones. Cable television, DVD players and DVRs have increased the amount of possible video content an individual can consume through the big screen to practically infinite proportions. If the Network adds more, infinity + infinity, does it really add value? The proposition behind GoogleTV seems to be the insertion of a search-based navigation scheme over the video/audio content accessible through the big screen.

As with the world wide web, findability through a Yahoo-style index gives way to a search-based random access model. Clearly the tools for browsing the program schedule are in need of improvement. The remote channel changer is a crippled and distorted input device, but adding a QWERTY keyboard and mouse will just make the problem worse. Google has shown that getting in between the user and any possible content she wants to access is a pretty good business model. The injection of search into the living room as a gateway to the user’s video experience creates a new advertising surface at the border of the content that traditionally garners our attention. The whole audience is collected prior to releasing it into any particular show.

Before we continue, it might be worth taking a moment to figure out what’s being fought over. There was a time when television dominated the news and entertainment landscape. Huge amounts of attention were concentrated into the prime time hours. But as Horace Deidu of Asymco points out, the living room isn’t about the devices in the physical space of the living room — it’s about the “…time and attention of the audience. The time spent consuming televised content is what’s at stake.” He further points out that the old monolithic audiences have been thoroughly disrupted and splintered by both cable and the Network. The business model of the living room has always been selling sponsored or subscription video content. But that business has been largely hollowed out, there’s really nothing worth fighting for. If there’s something there, it’ll have to be something new.

Steve Jobs, in a recent presentation, said that Apple had made some changes to AppleTV based on user feedback. Apple’s perspective on the living room is noticeably different from the accepted wisdom. They say that users want Hollywood movies and television shows in HD — and they’d like to pay for them. Users don’t want their television turned into a computer, and they don’t want to manage and sync data on hard drives. In essence it’s the new Apple Channel, the linear television programming schedule of cable television splintered into a random access model at the cost of .99¢ per high-definition show. A solid vote in favor of the stream over the enclosure/download model. And when live real-time streams can be routed through this channel, it’ll represent another fundamental change to the environment.

When we say there are three screens and a cloud, there’s an assumption that the interaction model for all three screens will be very similar. The cloud will stream the same essential computing experience to all three venues. However, Jobs and Apple are saying that the big screen is different than the other two. Sometimes this is described as the difference between “lean in” and “lean back” interactions. But it’s a little more than that: the big screen is big so that it can be social— so that family, friends or business associates can gather around it. The interaction environment encourages social applications rather than personal application software. The big screen isn’t a personal computer, it’s a social computer. This is probably what Marshall McLuhan was thinking about when he called the television experience “tribal.” Rather than changing the character of the big screen experience, Apple is attempting to operate within its established interaction modes.

Switching from one channel to another used to be the basic mode of navigation on the television. The advent of the VCR/DVD player changed that. Suddenly there was a higher level of switching involved in operating a television, from the broadcast/cable input to the playback device input. The cable industry has successfully reabsorbed some aspects of the other devices with DVRs and onDemand viewing. But to watch a DVD from your personal collection, or from Netflix, you’ll still need to change the channel to a new input device. AppleTV also requires the user to change the input channel. And it’s at this level, changing the input channel, that the contours of the battleground come in to focus. The viewer will enable and select the Comcast Channel, the Apple Channel, the Google Channel, the Game Console Channel or the locally attached-device channel. Netflix has an interesting position in all of this, their service is distributed through a number of the non-cable input channels. Netflix collects its subscription directly from the customer, whereas HBO and Showtime bundle their subscriptions into the cable company’s monthly bill. This small difference exposes an interesting asymmetry and may provide a catalyst for change in the market.

Because we’ve carried a lot of assumptions along with us into the big screen network computing space, there hasn’t been a lot of new thought about interaction or what kind of software applications make sense. Perhaps we’re too close to it; old technologies tend to become invisible. In general the software solutions aim to solve the problem of what happens in the time between watching slideshows, videos, television shows and movies (both live stream and onDemand). How does the viewer find things, save things, determine whether something is any good or not. A firm like Apple, one that makes all three of the screen devices, can think about distributing the problem among the devices with a technology like AirPlay. Just as a screen connects to the Network when it’s more valuable to be connected than to be separate, each of the three screens will begin to connect to the others when the value of connection exceeds that of remaining separate.

It should be noted that just as the evolution of the big screen is playing out in living rooms around the world, the same thing will happen in the conference rooms of the enterprise. One can easily see the projected Powerpoint presentation replaced with a presentation streamed directly from an iPad/iPhone via AirPlay to an AppleTV-connected big screen.

After all this time, it’s still difficult to say what a tweet is. The generic form of the word has been expressed as microblogging, but this is the wrong metaphor. Blogging and RSS advocates see Twitter as a short-form quick publishing platform. What blogging tools made easy, Twitter, and other similar systems, make even easier. Given this definition, the 140 character limit on tweets seems to be an unnecessary constraint— microblogging could simply be expanded to miniblogging and a 500 character limit for individual posts. Blog posts can be any length, they are as small or large as they need to be.

“All my plays are full length, some are just longer than others.”
- Samuel Beckett

But Twitter didn’t start with blogging or blogging tools as its central metaphor, it began with the message streams that flow through dispatching systems. The tweet isn’t a small blog post, it’s a message in a communications and logistics system. There’s a tendency to say that the tweet is a “micro” something— a very small version of some normally larger thing. But tweets are full sized, complete and lack nothing. Their size allows them to flourish in multiple communications environments, particularly the SMS system and the form factor of the mobile network device (iPhone).

The best metaphor I’ve found for a tweet is the yellow sticky. The optimal post-it note is 3 inches square and canary yellow in color. It’s not a small version of something else, its size is perfect for its purpose. There are no limitations on what can be written on a yellow sticky, but its size places constraints on the form of communication. Generally, one expects a single thought per yellow sticky. And much like Twitter, explaining what a yellow sticky is to someone who’s never used one is a difficult task. Initial market tests for the post-it note showed mixed reactions. However after extensive sampling, 90% of consumers who tried the product wanted to buy it. Like the tweet, the post-it note doesn’t have a specific purpose. Arthur Fry, one of the inventors of the post-it note, wanted a bookmark with a light adhesive to keep his place in his hymnal during church choir. The rapid acceptance of the yellow sticky, in part, had to do with not defining what it should be used for. It’s hard to imagine someone saying that you’re not using a post-it note correctly, although people say that about Twitter all the time.

One thing people use yellow stickies for is as a transmittal. I find a magazine article that I like and I pass it on to you with a short message on a yellow sticky that marks the page. I might send this package to you through the mail, use inter-office mail at work, or I might just leave it on your desk. More formal routing slips might request specific actions be taken on the attached item. Fax cover sheets are another example of this kind of communication. And Twitter is often used in a similar way. The hyperlink is the adhesive that binds the message to article I’d like to pass on to you. With Twitter, and other directed social graph services, the you I pass things on to includes followers, potentially followers of followers and users who track keywords contained in my message. At any given time, the who of the you will describe a different group. The message is passed on without obligation, the listeners may simply let it pass through, or they may take up the citation and peruse its contents.

Just as the special low-tack adhesive on the back of a yellow sticky allows you to attach it to anything without leaving marks or residue, the hyperlink allows the user of Twitter to easily point at something. Hey, look at this! Rather than a long explanation or justification, it’s just my finger pointing at something of interest. That’s interesting to me. It’s the way we talk to each other when the words aren’t the most important part of the communication.

This model of passing along items of interest is fundamentally different from web syndication. Syndication extends the distribution of published content to additional authorized contexts. Some may argue that the mostly defunct form of the ‘link blog‘, or an aggregation of link blogs, offers exactly the same value. The difference is that the tweet, as electronic routing slip, exists in a real-time social media communications system. It operates like the messages in a dispatching system. There’s an item at 3rd and Webster about cute kittens, here’s the hyperlink for interested parties. Syndication implies that I think what I’ve published is valuable, I’ve extended my distribution area and you should have a look at it. With a tweeted electronic routing slip, the value is assigned by the reader who decides to pass something along and the readers who choose to take it up within a real-time (instant) messaging system. Value is external to the thing being evaluated.

As we start to look at new applications like Flipboard, an app that collects routing slips from your social network and lays them out into a magazine format, it’s important to understand the basic unit from which the experience is built. We’re used to a newspaper filled with a combination of syndicated wire stories and proprietary ones. We know about magazines where all the stories are proprietary. A few of us are familiar with web syndication aggregators that allow us to pull in, organize and read feeds from thousands of publication sources. Building an electronic publication from sets of real-time routing slips is a fundamentally different editorial process than we’ve seen before. Of course, it could be that you don’t find the stories that your friends pass on to be very interesting. In the end, this method of  assembling a real-time publication will be judged based on the value it provides. A magazine with a thousand stories isn’t really very useful, just as a Google search result with a million answers doesn’t help you find something. Can you imagine a real-time magazine that captures the ten stories that are worth reading right now? Can you imagine a time when such a thing didn’t exist?

The corporate web site used to have a brilliant excuse for its plain and simple execution. It needed the broadest possible distribution across browsers and operating systems. All customers, regardless of the technical specs of their rig, needed to be served. Some basic HTML, a few images, a conservative dollop of CSS and javascript. Transactions and data are all handled on the back end with a round trip to the server for each and every update of the display. And the display? Order up a screen resolution that serves 90%+ of the installed base as reported by server logs. Make that 800 x 600, just to be sure. This down level, conservative approach has been baked into enterprise content management systems and a boundary has been drawn around what’s possible with a corporate web presence. Mobile web was even simpler, a down level version of a down level experience. Rich internet applications (RIAs) were put into the same category as custom desktop apps, generally not worth the effort.

Back in 1998, Jakob Nielsen reported on the general conservatism of web users:

The usability tests we have conducted during the last year have shown an increasing reluctance among users to accept innovations in Web design. The prevailing attitude is to request designs that are similar to everything else people see on the Web.

When we tested advanced home page concepts we got our fingers slapped hard by the users: I don’t have time to learn special conventions for your site as one user said. Other users said, Just give it to us plain and simple, using interaction techniques we already know from other sites.

The Web is establishing expectations for narrative flow and user options and users want pages to fit within these expectations. A major reason for this evolving genre is that users frequently move back and forth between pages on different sites and that the entire corpus of the Web constitutes a single interwoven user experience rather than a set of separate publications that are accessed one at a time the way traditional books and newspapers are. The Web as a whole is the foundation of the user interface and any individual site is nothing but a speck in the Web universe.

Adoption of modern browsers was thought to be a very slow process. In 1999, Jakob Nielsen insists that we would be stuck with old browsers for a minimum of three years. Here was another reason to keep things plain and simple.

The slow uptake speeds and the bugs and inconsistencies in advanced browser features constitute a cloud with a distinct silver lining: Recognizing that we are stuck with old technology for some time frees sites from being consumed by technology considerations and focuses them on content, customer service, and usability. Back to basics indeed: that’s what sells since that’s what users want.

Over time, a couple things changed. The web standards movement gained traction with the people who build web sites. That meant figuring out what CSS could really do and working through the transition from table-based layouts to div-based layouts. Libraries like Jquery erased the differences between browser implementations of javascript. XMLhttpRequest, originally created for the web version of Microsoft’s Outlook, emerged as AJAX and turned into a defacto browser standard. The page reload could be eliminated as a requirement for a data refresh. The Webkit HTML engine was open sourced by Apple, and Google, along with a number of other mobile device makers, began to release Webkit-based browsers. With Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla all jumping on the HTML5 band wagon, there’s a real motivation to move users off of pre-standards era browsers. Even Microsoft has joined the Kill IE6 movement.

The computing power of the cloud combined with the transition from a web of documents to a web of applications has changed the equation. Throw in the rise of real-time and the emergence of social media: and you’ve got an entirely different ballgame. With the massive user embrace of the iPhone, and an iPad being sold every three seconds, we might want to re-ask the question: what do users want?

Jakob Nielsen, jumps back to 1993 in an effort to preserve his business model of plain and simple:

The first crop of iPad apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not.

It’s the same with iPad apps: anything you can show and touch can be a UI on this device. There are no standards and no expectations.

Worse, there are often no perceived affordances for how various screen elements respond when touched. The prevailing aesthetic is very much that of flat images that fill the screen as if they were etched. There’s no lighting model or pseudo-dimensionality to indicate raised or lowered visual elements that call out to be activated.

Don Norman throws cold water on gestures and natural user interfaces by saying they aren’t new and they aren’t natural:

More important, gestures lack critical clues deemed essential for successful human-computer interaction. Because gestures are ephemeral, they do not leave behind any record of their path, which means that if one makes a gesture and either gets no response or the wrong response, there is little information available to help understand why. The requisite feedback is lacking. Moreover, a pure gestural system makes it difficult to discover the set of possibilities and the precise dynamics of execution. These problems can be overcome, of course, but only by adding conventional interface elements, such as menus, help systems, traces, tutorials, undo operations, and other forms of feedback and guides.

Touch-based interfaces built around natural interaction metaphors have only made a life for themselves outside of the research laboratory for a few years now. However I tend to think that if these interfaces were as baffling for users as Norman and Nielsen make them out to be the iPhone and iPad would have crashed and burned. Instead they can barely make them fast enough to keep up with the orders.

The classic vanilla flavored corporate web site assumes that users have old browsers and don’t want anything that doesn’t look like everything else. All new flavors are inconceivable without years and years of work by standards bodies, research labs, and the odd de facto behavior blessed by extensive usability testing. There’s a big transition ahead for the corporate web presence. Users are way ahead and already enjoying all kinds of exotic flavors.

A few thoughts about the iPhone 4 and why technology does or doesn’t catch on. I’ve yet to hold one in my hand, but like everyone else I’ve got opinions. The typical gadget review takes the device’s feature list and compares using technical measures to other devices deemed competitive. Using this methodology, it would be fairly simple to dismiss the iPhone as introducing no new features. The other lines of attack involve dropped calls on the AT&T network and the App Store approval process. For some people these two items trump any feature or user experience.

Google talks about their mission as organizing the world’s information. When I think of Apple’s mission, at least their mission for the last five years or so, it revolves around getting closer to the user in real time. The technology they build flows from that principle.

I’d like to focus on just two new iPhone 4 features. The first is the new display, here’s John Gruber’s description:

It’s mentioned briefly in Apple’s promotional video about the design of the iPhone 4, but they’re using a new production process that effectively fuses the LCD and touchscreen — there is no longer any air between the two. One result of this is that the iPhone 4 should be impervious to this dust-under-the-glass issue. More importantly, though, is that it looks better. The effect is that the pixels appear to be painted on the surface of the phone; instead of looking at pixels under glass, it’s like looking at pixels on glass. Combined with the incredibly high pixel density, the overall effect is like “live print�.

The phrase that jumped out at me was “the pixels appear to be painted on the surface of the phone; instead of looking at pixels under glass.” While it seems like a small distance, a minor detail, it’s of the utmost importance. It’s the difference between touching something and touching the glass that stands in front of something. Putting the user physically in touch with the interaction surface is a major breakthrough in the emotional value of the user experience. Of course the engineering that made this kind of display is important, but it’s the design decision to get the device ever closer to the user that drove the creation of the technology. Touch creates an emotional relationship with the device, and that makes it more than just a telephone.

In a 2007 interview at the D5 conference, Steve Jobs said:

And, you know, I think of most things in life as either a Bob Dylan or a Beatles song, but there’s that one line in that one Beatles song, “you and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

You could say that Apple’s strategy is encapsulated in the Beatles song: I Want To Hold Your Hand.

The lines that describe the feeling Jobs wants the iPhone and iPad to create are:

And when I touch you i feel happy, inside
It´s such a feeling
That my love
I can’t hide
I can’t hide
I can’t hide

The other new feature is FaceTime. Since the launch of the iPhone 3GS it’s been possible to shoot a video of something and then email it to someone, or post it to a network location that friends and family could access. Other phones had this same capability. That’s a real nice feature in an asynchronous sort of way. One of the problems with it is it has too many steps and it doesn’t work the way telephones work. Except when things are highly dysfunctional, we don’t send each other recorded audio messages to be retrieved later at a convenient time. We want to talk in real time. FaceTime allows talk + visuals in real time.

FaceTime uses phone numbers as the identity layer and works over WiFi with iPhone 4 devices only. That makes it perfectly clear under what circumstances these kind of video calls will work. Device model and kind of connectivity are only things a user needs to know. These constraints sound very limiting, but they dispel any ambiguity around the question of whether the user will be able to get video calls to work or not.

We often look to the network effect to explain the success of a product or a new platform. Has the product reached critical mass, where by virtue of its size and connectedness it continues to expand because new users gain immediate value from its scale. The network must absolutely be in place, but as we look at this window into our new virtual world, the question is: does the product put us in touch, in high definition, in real time? The more FaceTime calls that are made, the more FaceTime calls will be made. But the system will provide full value at the point when a few family members can talk to each other. Critical mass occurs at two.

“Just checking in.” It’s such a neutral phrase. It doesn’t imply any engagement or transaction— the connection has been opened and tested, but no activity is required or expected. From a Unix command line, the ping serves a similar function. The social geo-location services have brought the “check in” into common parlance on the Network. The FourSquare check in can be a neutral communication— no message attached, merely a statement that I’m at such-and-such a location.

The neutrality of the “check in” gesture began to interest me as I started thinking about the explicit gesture of giving a star rating to a restaurant. While I was recently visiting New York City, I decided to try and make use of the Siri and FourSquare apps on my iPhone. I could be observed sitting on a park bench saying ‘good pizza place near here’ into my iPhone and eagerly waiting for Siri to populate a list of restaurant options. I also checked in using FourSquare from several locations around Manhattan. When Siri returned its list of ‘good pizza places’ near me, it used the services of partner web sites that let users rate restaurants and other businesses on a one to five star system. When I asked for good pizza places that translated into the restaurants with the most stars.

The interesting thing about user ratings of businesses by way of the Network is that it’s completely unnecessary for the user to actually visit, or be a customer of, the business. The rating can be entirely fictional. Unless you personally know the reviewer and the context in which the review is proffered— a good, bad or ugly review may be the result of some alternate agenda. There’s no way to determine the authenticity of an unknown, or anonymous, reviewer. Systems like eBay have tried to solve this problem using reputation systems. Newspapers have tried to solve this problem by hiring food critics who have earned the respect of the restaurant ecosystem.

So, while Siri did end up recommending a good Italian restaurant, the Chinese restaurant it recommended was below par. Both restaurants had the same star ratings and number of positive reviews. This got me thinking about the securitization of the networked social gesture. Once a gesture has even a vaguely defined monetary value there’s a motivation to game the system. If more stars equals a higher ranking on Siri’s good pizza place list, then how can a business get more stars? What’s the cost?

I ran across a tweet that summed up the dilemma of wanting a list of ‘good pizza places’ rather than simply ‘pizza places.’ I use FriendFeed as a Twitter client, and while watching the real-time stream I saw an interesting item float by. Tara Hunt retweeted a micro-message from Deanna Zandt referring to a presentation by Randy Farmer at the Web 2.0 conference on Building Web Reputation systems. Deanna’s message read: “If you show ppl their karma, they abuse it.” When reputation is assigned a tradable value, it will be traded. In this case, ‘abuse’ means traded in an unintended market.

Another example of this dilemma cropped up in a story Clay Shirky told at the Gov 2.0 summit about a day care center. The day care center had a problem with parents who arrived late to pick up their children. Wanting to nip the problem in the bud, they instituted a fine for late pick up. What had been a social contract around respecting the value of another person’s time was transformed into a new service with a set price tag. “Late pick up” became a new feature of the day care center, and those parents who could afford it welcomed the flexibility it offered them. Late pick ups tripled, the new feature was selling like hot cakes. Assigning a dollar value to the bad behavior of late pick ups changed the context from one of mutual respect to a payment for service. Interestingly, even when the fines were eliminated, the higher rate of bad behavior continued.

Now let’s tie this back to the neutral gesture of the check in. While in some respect the reporting of geolocation coordinates is a mere statement of fact— there’s also the fact that you’ve chosen to go to the place from which you’ve checked in. There’s a sense in which a neutral check in from a restaurant is a better indicator of its quality than a star rating accompanied by explicit user reviews. If a person in my geo-social network checks in from a restaurant every two weeks, or so, I’d have to assume that they liked the restaurant. The fact that they chose to go there more than once is a valuable piece of information to me. However when game mechanics are assigned to the neutral check in gesture, a separate economics is overlaid. If the game play, rather than the food, provides the motivation for selecting a restaurant, then the signal has been diluted by another agenda.

By binding the check in to the place via the geolocation technology of the device, a dependable, authentic piece of information is produced. Social purchase publishing services, like Blippy, take this to the next level. Members of this network agree to publish a audit trail of their actual purchases. By linking their credit card transaction report in real time to a publishing tool, followers know what a person is actually deciding to purchase. A pattern of purchases would indicate some positive level of satisfaction with a product or service.

The pattern revealed in these examples is that the speech of the agent cannot be trusted. So instead we look to the evidence of the transactions initiated by the agent, and we examine the chain of custody across the wire. A check in, a credit card purchase— these are the authentic raw data from which an algorithm amalgamates some probability of the good. We try to structure the interaction data such that it has the form of a falsifiable proposition. The degree to which a statement of quality can be expressed as an on or off bit defines a machine’s ability to compute with it. A statement that is overdetermined, radiating multiple meanings across multiple contexts doesn’t compute well and results in ambiguous output. The pizza place seems to occupy multiple locations simultaneously across the spectrum of good to bad.

Can speech be rehabilitated as a review gesture? I had a short conversation with Randy Farmer at the recent Internet Identity Workshop (IIW 10) about what he calls the “to: field” in networked communications. The basic idea is that all speech should be directed to some individual or group. A review transmitted to a particular social group acquires the context of the social relations within the group. Outside of that context its value is ambiguous while purporting to be clear. Farmer combines restricted social networks and falsifiable propositions in his post ‘The Cake is a Lie” to get closer to an authentic review gesture and therefore a more trustworthy reputation for a social object.

Moving through this thought experiment one can see the attempt to reduce human behavior and social relations to falsifiable, and therefore computable, statements. Just as a highly complex digital world has been built up out of ones and zeros, the search for a similar fundamental element of The Good is unfolding in laboratories, research centers and start ups across the globe. Capturing the authentic review gesture in a bottle is the new alchemy of the Network.

What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?
Nick Lowe

As I walk through
This wicked world
Searching for light in the darkness of insanity.

I ask myself
Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?

And each time I feel like this inside,
There’s one thing I wanna know:
What’s so funny about peace love & understanding? ohhhh
What’s so funny about peace love & understanding?

And as I walked on
Through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony.

Cause each time I feel it slipping away, just makes me wanna cry.
What’s so funny bout peace love & understanding? ohhhh
What’s so funny bout peace love & understanding?

So where are the strong?
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony.

Cause each time I feel it slippin away, just makes me wanna cry.
What’s so funny bout peace love & understanding? ohhhh
What’s so funny bout peace love & understanding? ohhhh
What’s so funny bout peace love & understanding?

The philosopher George Santayana’s aphorism: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” seems to underlie many of the stories bubbling up around the leap from fixed computing to mobile computing. Especially with regard to Apple’s role in forming the ecosystem, the market and some of the decisions they’ve taken about what to leave behind. Santayana’s aphorism has been restated in a number of ways, another popular formulation is: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” At any rate, there’s an implication that history, the past, should never be repeated— doing so is the occupation of the doomed. There’s also a sense of coming upon a node, as we move through time, that contains the possibility of looping back to a previously experienced stretch of history. Although we don’t replay it note for note, the chord changes seem follow the same pattern.

There are two stories that run through the minds of observers:

1. The Apple and Microsoft story. An integrated computing system that pushed the boundaries of human-computer interaction into the realm of usefulness, and the lower-cost modular computing system (DOS paired with any manufacturer) that provided a ‘good enough’ experience and a solid return on investment. In the end, Microsoft’s Windows became the dominant personal and business computing platform.

2. The Monopoly and Anti-Trust story. From its position of market dominance, Microsoft used its position to maintain power. The law is fine with the use of soft power (you choose it because it’s best, whatever best means to you); but steps in when hard power is exercised (you choose it because it’s the only choice). A settlement was reached: Microsoft’s brand suffered damage, some APIs were opened up and market dominance was largely maintained. The second act of this story has developers starting to route around Microsoft by creating cloud-based applications of ever-increasing sophistication.

And so, as the mobile computing space comes into focus we see:

1. Apple and iPhone/iPad Touch/iPad as an integrated platform and device

2. Google and Android/Chrome across multiple manufacturers

3. Microsoft and Silverlight/Windows Phone across multiple manufacturers

Tech pundits expect an exact replay of The Apple and Microsoft story. Although, Google has been cast in the role of Microsoft this time. Steve Jobs, they say, has not learned from history. Apple will eventually be overtaken by a more “open” and commodified horizontal platform. On the other hand, both Google and Microsoft have learned from Apple and have bought in to integrated design practices while maintaining a multiple-manufacturer production model. And while Apple is thought to be repeating its mistakes on the one hand, on the other, they’ve been cast in the role of Microsoft based on their dominance and control of the new mobile market. On a recent Gillmor Gang, Blaine Cook suggested that Apple is courting an anti-trust action based on their recent behavior. The implication being that there is no choice but the iPhone/iPad, and that competition is hindered by Apple controlling their own device platform.

Google and Microsoft have understood that more control and tighter design integration will be required to compete with Apple. Google has started down that road with the Nexus One. Microsoft, with their Windows Phone 7 announcements, have shown that they’ll be moving in the same direction. They’re very fast followers, some might even say they’re tailgating Apple. As in any race, drafting into the slipstream of the leader provides many advantages.

The term “slipstreaming” describes an object traveling inside the slipstream of another object (most often objects moving through the air though not necessarily flying). If an object is inside the slipstream behind another object, moving at the same speed, the rear object will require less power to maintain its speed than if it were moving independently. In addition, the leading object will be able to move faster than it could independently because the rear object reduces the effect of the low-pressure region on the leading object.

A fast follower wants to put himself into the position to execute a slingshot pass. By drafting in behind the market leader, the follower can exert less energy while keeping pace. The slingshot allows the follower to generate passing speed by optimizing the aerodynamics of their relative positions. The leader wants to adjust position to block this kind of move. The analysis and play-by-play has been based entirely on the assumption the lessons of history have been locked in, and this new race will play out with exactly the same dynamics. The lesson Apple may have learned is that a post-PC approach and strong portfolio of patents could change the outcome of some key points of the narrative.

A subplot to the main story involves Adobe and its Flash runtime. Adobe’s Flash is playing the role of Netscape in the current transition. Although Hal Varian was referring to Netscape in his 1999 book Information Rules, the thought applies equally well to Adobe. They face a classic problem of interconnection. Their competitors control the operating environment in which they are but one component. Adobe owes its current level of success in the fixed computing environment to Microsoft’s dominance.

At a key point, Microsoft had no competitive product and agreed to distribute the Flash runtime along with its operating system and browser. This put Flash on a high percentage of the installed personal computing user base. This kind of market penetration probably could not have been achieved if users had been required to download and install the plugin on their own. Once the Flash player was in place, apps could be pushed over the wire, and there was a high likelihood that they would operate. The Flash runtime could even update itself once it was established on the local Windows machine. The Macintosh and Linux platforms were filled in by Adobe, but were given a much lower priority based on market share.

Adobe has two problems in this transitional environment. The first is that their competitors control both their operating environment— and the distribution channel. Secondly, where they once had a willing partner, Microsoft now has Silverlight which competes directly. Because Adobe has had a high penetration percentage, they claim as much a 99%, they feel entitled to ship with any new operating environment. It used to be that way, but things have changed. The problem that Adobe’s Flash solved now has other solutions in each of the mobile stacks.

In the post-PC mobile computing world all of the original assumptions and agreements are being reassessed. This new environment isn’t an extension or an evolution of the fixed desktop environment– the blackboard has been erased and the project has been built up from scratch. That means you don’t assume Adobe’s Flash runtime, you don’t even assume copy and paste, multi-tasking or a file system.  The first couple of things you might put on the blackboard are 10 hour battery life and always-on wireless network connectivity— that’s what makes the device usable in a mobile context. From there we can add location and streaming services, real-time responsiveness and the rest. But it’s battery life that’s the limiting factor. It’s the invisible tether that eventually draws us back to the power source to recharge. Where silicon once ruled, we now look to lithium.

The assumption that history will repeat itself relieves us of the burden of figuring out what’s going on, of understanding out the differences that make a difference. No doubt some threads of history will repeat themselves, but they may not be the ones we expect. When we come upon a node, as we move through time, a moment that contains the possibility of looping back to a previously experienced stretch of history. We also have the opportunity to take a familiar melody and go off and explore unexpected directions.