echovar

The company vilified by some as being too closed to be successful in the long run has— in the long run, defined and distributed the dominant model for human-computer interaction. The reality is that all products that brandish the so-called open systems label are operating within the parameters set by Apple.

And while it’s certainly true that Apple didn’t create any of these interaction modes out of whole cloth, they codified them, shipped and sold the products that have turned them into defacto standards.

A de facto standard is a custom, convention, product, or system that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces (such as early entrance to the market). De facto is a Latin phrase meaning “concerning the fact” or “in practice”.

In the beautiful silence emanating from Apple prior to the January 27, 2010 announcements a curious thing has happened. The full attention of the technical intelligensia has been focused on what’s missing from our personal and social computing experience. The announcements will be an interesting test of the ‘wisdom of the crowds.’ Theoretically, the predictions and analysis of the thousands of individuals writing about what will be announced could be distilled into either exactly the device Apple intends to release, or a blueprint for an even better device. My bet is that we will be surprised.

Of course, we can point to Xerox Parc, or Doug Engelbart, and say none of these things are new. But moving ideas from the lab to the street is a matter of knowing which dots to connect. In an interview, Jobs talks about recognizing the valuable waves of technology:

“Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.�

In order to connect dots, you need to be in a position to do so. Sometimes we tend to overlook the core skill set that Apple has amassed. Here’s Jobs talking about what Apple does:

“Well, Apple has a core set of talents, and those talents are: We do, I think, very good hardware design; we do very good industrial design; and we write very good system and application software. And we’re really good at packaging that all together into a product. We’re the only people left in the computer industry that do that. And we’re really the only people in the consumer-electronics industry that go deep in software in consumer products. So those talents can be used to make personal computers, and they can also be used to make things like iPods. And we’re doing both, and we’ll find out what the future holds.�

So, while we live in an era of “organizing without organizations,” can we expect distributed organizations harnessing the crowd to produce, sell and ship products at the same level as Apple? Crowds have a difficult time indicating what should be left out— and this is a key to superior industrial design. Here’s Job’s on Apple’s design process:

“Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.�

In 2007, Apple changed its name from Apple Computer to Apple. In some sense, this signaled the end of the era of the personal computer. The computer has begun its migration and blending into other devices— some existing, others yet to be invented. Here’s Jobs on where the revolution is going:

“I know, it’s not fair. But I think the question is a very simple one, which is how much of the really revolutionary things people are going to do in the next five years are done on the PCs or how much of it is really focused on the post-PC devices. And there’s a real temptation to focus it on the post-PC devices because it’s a clean slate and because they’re more focused devices and because, you know, they don’t have the legacy of these zillions of apps that have to run in zillions of markets.�

While there have been tablet computers for quite a long time, they were primarily designed as an evolution of the personal computer. In thinking about Apple’s announcement, the previous frame of reference is wrong— just as it is for those who believe the iPhone is a telephone. In looking at what’s missing from our social computing environment, we think we know the set of dots that need to be connected. But if we sit with the problem long enough, a whole new set of dots will come into focus. Here’s Jobs on vision and design:

“There’s a phrase in Buddhism,�Beginner’s mind.� It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.�

Plato, the philosopher, captured the sense of the Socratic Dialogue as a process of exploration and teaching. Dialogue becomes the medium through which philosophical thinking is distributed. The computer system called PLATO created a social computing fabric through which educational experiences were allowed to unfold.

The preliminary discussions about what would eventually become the PLATO system began in the shadow of the cold war and the 1957 launch of sputnik. The first PLATO system was launched in 1960 and operated on the Illiac 1 computer at the University of Illinois. Eventually the PLATO system would evolve through four architectures. The system that enabled what we would recognize as social computing was launched as the 60s rambled to a close:

In 1972 a new system named PLATO IV was ready for operation. The PLATO IV terminal was a major innovation. It included Bitzer’s orange plasma display invention which incorporated both memory and bitmapped graphics into one display. This plasma display included fast vector line drawing capability and ran at 1260 baud, rendering 60 lines or 180 characters per second. The display was a 512×512 bitmap, with both character and vector plotting done by hardwired logic. Users could provide their own characters to support rudimentary bitmap graphics. Compressed air powered a piston-driven microfiche image selector that permitted colored images to be projected on the back of the screen under program control. The PLATO IV display also included a 16-by-16 grid infrared touch panel allowing students to answer questions by touching anywhere on the screen.

It was also possible to connect the terminal to peripheral devices. One such peripheral was the Gooch Synthetic Woodwind (named after inventor Sherwin Gooch), a synthesizer that offered 4 voice music synthesis to provide sound in PLATO courseware. This was later supplanted on the PLATO V terminal by the Gooch Cybernetic Synthesizer, which had 16 voices that could be programmed individually or combined to make more complex sounds. This allowed for what today is known as multimedia experiences.

Recently PLATO was thrust into my attention again through Jon Udell’s conversation with Brian Dear about the upcoming 50th Anniversary of the system via ITconversations:

Jon Udell / Brian Dear on PLATO
Plato Turns 50

Brian Dear is working on a book on PLATO and is involved in PLATO HISTORY, remembering the future, the celebration of this innovative system at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Dear began using the system in 1979. In an excerpt from a conversation on the WELL, Dear describes how PLATO planted the seed of social computing:

PLATO was the first computer system, network really, that scaled with lots of people.  It was bigger than ARPANET at least for a while, with many capabilities at a level of usage that we wouldn’t see until the 1990s.  A PLATO user didn’t use a computer, they “belonged” to the system.  It was a community.  For me, I was drawn immediately to this sense that a computer wasn’t for number-crunching or lonely things like word processing, spreadsheets, or video games, the way Apples, Commodores, etc were being used, but it was a “place” where you could meet, interact, stay in touch, get answers to questions, and share and make discoveries.

While PLATO is not well known, even among the current set of social technologists, there are some interesting threads and connections to the current story of our networked real-time computing environment. When we think of the roots of modern computing, we look to Xerox Parc and Doug Englebart’s Augmentation Research Center, but as personal computing expands into social computing, PLATO deserves a place in that pantheon. From the undependable Wikipedia entry we see the connections forming:

Early in 1972, researchers from Xerox PARC were given a tour of the PLATO system at the University of Illinois. At this time they were shown parts of the system such as the Show Display application generator for pictures on PLATO (later translated into a graphics-draw program on the Xerox Star workstation), and the Charset Editor for “painting” new characters (later translated into a “Doodle” program at PARC), and the Term Talk and Monitor Mode communications program. Many of the new technologies they saw were adopted and improved upon when these researchers returned to Palo Alto, California. They subsequently transferred improved versions of this technology to Apple Inc..

The direct link from Plato to the present future of computing runs through a young man from Chicago who began attending the University of Illinois in 1973. Abandoning the punch cards that were the staple of computer science at the time, he was drawn like a moth to the glowing orange gas-plasma screens in CERL (the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory).

Ray Ozzie, now Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, threw himself into the world of Plato. In fact, Plato Notes, was a strong influence on Lotus Notes. Ozzie has understood software from the beginning as operating in a networked social computing environment. But more than that, it gave Ozzie insight into the potential for human contact through this new medium:

One incident in particular introduced Ozzie to the magic that comes when people connect via computer. He had taken a part-time assignment helping a professor finish writing some courseware. The prof lived on the other side of town, so Ozzie collaborated with him remotely. Ozzie came to know and like his boss, save for one annoyance. “He was the worst typist ever,” Ozzie says. “He was very eloquent on email, but on Term Talk it was just dit-dit-dit, sometimes an error, but agonizingly slow.” At the end of the project, the man threw a party at his house, and Ozzie discovered the reason for the typing problem: The professor was a quadriplegic and had been entering text by holding a stick in his teeth and poking it at the keyboard. Ozzie was floored. “I remember really questioning my own attitudes,” Ozzie says. “I had been communicating with him mind to mind.

During the day, the Plato system was dedicated to the task of educating students, but after 10pm the programmers and users were allowed to play on the system.

The Plato system is still alive and has been transplanted to the World Wide Web. You can find it at:

www.cyber1.org

For those of you in the Bay Area, the 50th Anniversary of Plato will be celebrated at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on June 2nd and 3rd, 2010. Dr. Donald Bitzer, the founder of Plato, and Ray Ozzie will be in attendance. I’ll definitely be there to help remember the future of computing.

Pencil Sketch – 20100120

I’ve been trying to understand what Twitter lists are good for. Both Twitter’s new retweet feature and the list feature are imports from FriendFeed. Even in its current state, FriendFeed continues to be the R&D department for social media.

The thing I find uninteresting about lists is the fact that they’re mostly static— they simply serve as a kind of personal taxonomy. These Twitter users belong in this category. This is where we begin to feel the loss of track + filters. The assembly of a network of connected micro-messages around a set of keywords and run through a filter does what lists do dynamically and in real time. With the release of Twitter’s streaming API, nicknamed birddog, it’s possible we’ll start to see track-like features return— at least for subsets of the firehose. Manually curated lists at the level of classification are just a replay of RSS readers.

There are those who will say that if you’re using Twitter in a one-to-many broadcast mode, you’re not doing it right. But I think it’s pretty well established that Twitter is ambiguous and flexible enough to accommodate many modes of use simultaneously. Twitter lists strike me as a particularly good tool for news organizations.

If the New York Times or CNN has a team of journalists, photographers, videographers and radio journalists covering a breaking story like the earthquake in Haiti, a Twitter list would be a compact way to deliver coverage. Hyperlinks within the tweets could send readers off to breaking news, in-depth backgrounders and ongoing live conversations. CNN’s list and the New York Times’s list would be differentiated by who was on each coverage team and the editorial approach of each news organization. The list would exist for the duration of the story.

Rather than serving as part of a taxonomy, or classification of Twitter users— the list would define individuals with a common purpose— covering the Haiti earthquake, or the Senate race in Massachusetts. Each news organization might have a set of active lists ongoing at any time. The more specific and real time the list, the more valuable it would be.

Of course, someone might create a list of all the news organizations covering a breaking story. But I think the effect of this would be to dilute the value of the stream rather than enhance it. You could also make the argument that the hashtag and the wisdom of the crowd would ultimately provide equal or better coverage. However, it’s not necessary to choose between one approach and the other. Each will ultimately include elements of the other.

The television medium is destabilizing and being absorbed into the real-time Network. While newspapers and television used to consider the Internet as a medium for the re-purposing and re-use of content, soon the reverse will be true. The real-time Network will be the primary publication vehicle with television and newspapers becoming containers for re-use.

And, of course, I use the word Twitter as a synecdoche. (A specific class name used to refer to a general set of associated things)

My thoughts have been swirling around the point of interaction for some time now. And by that I mean the point of human-computer interaction. To connect up the threads, at first, I’ve began looking backwards. Perhaps all the way to the Jacquard loom and the punch cards used to control the patterns, and then on to the punch cards used on the early mainframes.

I’m sure there were many steps in between, but my mind races ahead to the command line. This extremely powerful and elegant point of interaction has never really been superseded. It continues to be the favored mode of interaction for a number of software development activities. But it was the graphical user interface that provided a point of interaction that changed the medium.

Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demo of the work undertaken by the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) gives us all the fundamental modes of interaction. The keyboard, the mouse/trackpad, the headset, hypertext and the graphic user interface. Within that set of interaction points, we’ve started to expand the repertoire. With the introduction of the iPhone, the trackpad gesture has gained increasing importance.

On a separate track we’ve seen video games controllers become ever more complex. The point of interaction for the game starts to reflect the kind of speed and complexity we create in our virtual gaming worlds.

It’s with the Wii and Project Natal that we start to see the surface of the trackpad detached from the computing device, extruded into three dimensions, and then dematerialized. The interaction gestures can now be captured in the space around us. Originally, the graphic user interface (mouse clicks, windows, desktop) was criticized for the limitations it imposed.

The other key development was the displacement of computing from the local device to the Network of connected devices. The interaction point is now to a new Networked medium. This is the converged form of what McLuhan understood as television. The development of new interaction modes traces a path toward opening to greater numbers of participants the new medium. Beyond mass media, there is the media of connected micro-communities.

Popular culture and music culture has always had a big impact on the development of cutting-edge technology. When we think of controlling technology through hand gestures, we can start with the ether-wave theremin created by Leon Theremin.

And then there was Jimi Hendrix playing Wild Thing at Monterrey Pop, gesturing wildly to pull sound out his stratocaster.

This is one of those in-between moments. The wave unleashed by xerox-parc and the augmentation research center is about to be followed by a new wave. The signs are all around us.

Pencil Sketch, 2010011

The technology news streams have been filled with coverage of the new Google phone called the Nexus One. It’s impact will be significant. Now there are two “phones” in the new landscape of mobile computing. Two are required to accelerate both innovation and diffusion of the technology. The Nexus One will both spur, and be spurred on by, the iPhone.

Much of the coverage has focused on comparisons of the two devices with regard to feature set and approach to the carriers. On the product strategy side, the story of the early Macintosh vs. Windows battle is being replayed by the pundits with Google cast in the role of Microsoft, and Android as the new Windows. The conventional wisdom is that Apple lost to Microsoft in the battle of operating systems, and that history will repeat itself with the iPhone.

A quick look at the top five U.S. companies by market capitalization shows Microsoft, Google and Apple holding down three of those spots. Apple’s so-called losing strategy has resulted in a market cap of $190 Billion and a strong, vibrant business. If history repeating itself leads to this kind of financial performance, I’m sure Apple would find that more than acceptable.

But it was watching Gary Hustwit’s film Objectified that brought forward a comparison that I haven’t seen in all the crosstalk. Following up his film, Helvetica, which documented the history of the typeface, Hustwit takes a look at the world of industrial design and designers:

Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.

Industrial design used to be about designing the look and feel of a product— the designer was brought in to make it pretty and usable. Now the whole lifecycle of the product is considered in the design process. I’ve found John Thackara’s book In The Bubble, and Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things to be very eloquent on the subject. Looking beyond how the phone works for the user, there’s the environmental impact of the industrial manufacturing process and disposing of the phone at the end of its life.

It was Craig Burton’s Choix Vert Action Card that brought Apple’s policies on industrial design and the environment into view for me. While searching Google for something related to Apple, the Choix Vert card adds a thumbprint logo to socially responsible companies on the results page. Apple sports the Choix Vert mark, HTC, producer of the Nexus One, doesn’t. Currently Apple provides environmental impact reports for each of their products. Apple’s so-called ‘closed’ approach to their products results in a unique ability to control, not only the user experience, but how the product is manufactured, and what happens at the end of its life.

Google’s modular approach to their phone means they can claim they aren’t responsible for manufacturing or disposal. The Android phone run-time will be put on a variety of phones with manufactured by companies with varying degrees of social responsibility.

Early reports from users indicate that the Nexus One’s user interface could use a little more polish. I expect that will happen as the software is iterated and the user experience refined. But beyond feature sets and carrier costs, I hope Nexus One users will ask Google about the environmental impact of their phone.

Every year about 130 million cellphones are retired, for every Nexus One that’s purchased, it’s likely that another cell phone will go out of service. Google is now in the consumer hardware business, and that brings with it some responsibilities they aren’t used to considering. Given their corporate motto, I’m sure they’ll do the right thing.

There’s this idea of standing with your own two feet on the ground. We know which way is up.

I’ve been thinking about the implications of the virtual machine. Our friends at Wikipedia give the following definition:

A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (i.e. a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine.

Of course, then they add that some virtual machines may have no correspondence to actual hardware. One of the more common uses of a virtual machine is to create a software version of a computer operating system. On my Macintosh computer, I run a program called Parallels that allows me to run Windows, and Windows programs, side-by-side with Macintosh programs. The Macintosh runs an application that runs an operating system that runs an application. The ‘two-feet on the ground’ aspect of this is that the Macintosh operating system talks to the hardware— it’s this that provides the ground on which virtual machines can be deployed. The speed of today’s hardware/software systems makes the latency between the machine and the virtual machine almost unnoticeable.

Once the operating system is virtualized it starts to resemble the run-time system. It’s an environment where application code can be run. As we look around, we find a number of things that might fit into this category. For instance, Android, which is called an operating system, is really a virtual operating system that sits on top of the Linux operating system.

When people talk about a Web Operating System, often I’m not sure what they’re referring to. But in the model of the virtual machine, the Web run-times enabled by the operating system include: webkit, gecko and trident. In the sphere of vector graphics animations, the run-times include: Flash and Silverlight. In Silverlight 4.x, an application can contain an HTML page, which is interpreted by the local default Web browser, and that HTML page can contain a Flash object. The in-and-outs of things start to get a little complicated.

Putting our feet firmly on the ground, we can see that it all starts with the hardware and the operating system. Nothing happens without these foundation pieces. This is the bedrock on which we stand. Although this perspective begins to sound a little like the story about turtles from Stephen Hawking‘s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which starts:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever”, said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

While we may look at the computer hardware and operating system as the ground, we could also turn things on their head. What if, instead, we look at the environment where many virtual machines can operate as the new ground. Copernicus rather than Ptolemy. The hardware and its operating system are just and entry point into this Network of virtual machines. The one is a path to the many, and out of the many, there is one (E pluribus unum). Or as someone once said, the Network is the computer.

There’s this new idea of standing with your own two feet on the ground. We know which way is up.

Resolution: Use your pencils more

As we consider ourselves in the flow of the day, we pause, once again, to consider identity. During the rush of the day we move through a thousand states. We flow from this to that as a result of our actions. Our many identities spring from the scenes we string together: the moment when we stop to shield our eyes from the sun; the quick turn of our heads when we think someone has called our name; the curse under our breath as the bus we’ve been waiting for arrives full and passes without stopping. They’re signifiers and contexts that circulate, they flow around us— around the things we do. They assign us a role within the never-ending series of stories that collect around us as we move through the world.

As we attempt to understand identity on the Network, we seem to crave a unified identity— a single container to hold all of our masks. And while we are beginning to transition from the static file to the real-time stream, we still want to draw a solid line around identity. The objects of the Network have been injected with time; we place the cursor here in the stream, a bread crumb to mark the spot, to provide reference for the next time we dip in. The artifacts of Internet identity are, of course, the outerworld of our innerworld— snapshots along the way.

In the book by the same name, there’s a poem entitled: “The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld.” This phrase is a condensation of the style of Peter Handke’s early writing. We can plainly see the outerworld of the innerworld, these are the external artifacts of our internal stream of consciousness. But those objects of the outerworld have their own innerworld (a flux of time). Handke effects a change of perspective, a change of context— from the inside out to the outside in, and then to the inside of that outside. But it’s a poem with a different title in this volume that clarifies this complex perspective: “Changes during the Course of the Day.”

Changes during the Course of the Day
by Peter Handke

As long as I am still alone, I am still alone.
As long as I am still among acquaintances, I am still an acquaintance.
But as soon as I am among strangers—

As soon as I step out on the street— a pedestrian steps out on the street.
As soon as I enter the subway— a subway rider enters the subway
A soon as I enter the jewelry shop— a gentleman enters the jewelry shop.
As soon as I push the shopping cart through the supermarket— a customer pushes the cart through the supermarket.
As soon as I enter the department store— someone on a shopping spree enters the department store.

Then I walk past some children— and the the children see an adult walking past. Then I enter the off-limits zone— and the guards see a trespasser enter the off-limits zone. Then I see children running away from me in the off-limits zone— and I become a guard whom the children flee because they are unauthorized persons in an off-limits zone.

Then I sit in the waiting room as an applicant. Then I write my name on the back of the envelope as a sender. Then I fill out the lottery ticket as a winner.

As soon as I am asked how one gets to BLACK ROAD— I become someone who knows his way around town.
As soon as I see the incredible— I become a witness.
As soon as I enter the church— I become a layman.
As soon as I don’t ignore an accident— I become a busy-body.
As soon as I don’t know how to get to BLACK ROAD— I am again someone who doesn’t know his way to BLACK ROAD.

I have just consumed the meal— already I can say: We consumers!
I have just had something stolen from me— already I can say: We proprietors!
I have just placed the obituary— already I can say: We mourners!
I have just begun to contemplate the universe— already I can say: We human beings!

I read the novel in the mass publication— and become one among millions.
I don’t fulfill my duties toward the authorities— and am no longer a dutiful citizen of the state.
I don’t run away during the riot— and I’m an inciter of riots.
I look up from the novel I’m reading and observe the beauty opposite me— and we become two among millions.

Then someone does not leave the moving train— someone? — A traveler.
Then someone speaks without an accent— someone? — A native.
Then someone has a vis-à-vis— and becoma a vis-à-vis.
Then someone no longer only plays by himself— and becomes an opponent.

Then someone crawls out from under a thicket in the park and becomes a suspicious subject.
Then someone who is being discussed becomes an object of discussion.
Then someone is recognized on a photo— and becomes an X.
Then someone takes a walk in the country— someone? A wanderer.

And then the car makes a sudden stop in front of me— I become an obstacle.
Then I am seen by a figure in the dark— and become a figure in the dark.
And when I am then observed through binoculars— I am an object.
Then someone stumbles over me— and I become a body.
And when I am then stepped upon— I become something soft.
Then I am wrapped up in something— and become a content.

Then one notices that someone has run barefoot over the dirt road and that a right-hander has fired the shot and that someone whose blood group is O has lain there and that I, judging by the my shabby looks, must be a foreigner.

As soon as someone challenges me then— the one who’s been challenged doesn’t stop when challenged.
As soon as I am then far enough away from the observers— the object is nothing but a dot.
As soon as I, as an observer, challenge someone— I give the one who has been challenged quite a fright.

Then, finally, I meet an acquaintance— and a single person remains behind alone.
Then, finally, I am left aone— and a single person remains behind alone.
Then, finally, I sit down next to someone in the grass— and am finally someone else.

From The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld by Peter Handke, translated by Michael Roloff