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Category: interaction design

Personal Data Management: Mesh, Evernote, the Atom and the Wave

Published April 29, 2008 by cgerrish

A couple of early observations about MS Mesh:

Storage space will need to be unlimited and permanent. Imagine a 7 year old starting to use Mesh today. What will their data storage, connection and organization requirements look like in 20 years? Why should anyone need to delete anything ever?

It’s early yet, but it seems like there’s a missed opportunity around changing the desktop and folders metaphor. The single stream tag and search metaphor allows every object to be tagged (or filed) in many categories at once and retrieved along many facets. As the stream of data that is pointed at the Mesh grows, the idea having to drag things to folders stops making sense.

Although not a platform, Evernote does a good job of allowing you to save things to a storage space using multiple devices. They have Web, Phone, PC and Mac clients and you can send items via email. Tagging is already in place, but it doesn’t current support standard feed protocols or SMS. And it doesn’t support both individual and group storage, or have a newslog of system activity.

The physics of personal data storage seems to come down to the atom and the wave. Are things to be stored individual objects or are they streams? The answer is that they exist as both depending on your perspective. Can you mix the metaphor? Can you put a stream in a folder?

While not strictly competing, it will be interesting to compare these two services as they go forward. Complexity and simplicity are large factors in user acceptance. The service that can be most useful to digital natives will eventually go viral. What would a digital native save? And how would they like to access it?

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Identity is the Key to the Mesh

Published April 24, 2008 by cgerrish

Cloud

The cloud is only politically viable if it is a market auctioning services to users. To the extent that it consolidates to a single player, it will suffer from the paranoia and madness of the prisoner held for too long in solitary confinement. Our society creates our civility. It’s not the mesh, it’s the identity that uses the mesh that is key.

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The 2-Way Web by Starting Small: 6 Word Bios, Twitter & @newsgang

Published March 17, 2008 by cgerrish

Bertolt Brecht

I’d seen it before, but I was reminded again today driving and listening to the radio. It was a show about the 6 word biographies collected by the folks over at Smith Magazine. The 6 word biography is based on a six word novel by Hemingway:

For sale, baby shoes, never used

The interesting thing about the limitation of six words is its liberating effect. Professional writers become addicted, and “everyday writers” are enabled to create great work. This brings to mind the two-way web and the ability of users to write, take photographs, make music, make movies, create complex hypertext documents. But what users have really embraced are things like the structured life narrations via social or interest groups, and short creative forms like Twitter.

With Twitter it’s the simplicity combined with the constraints that produces the outpouring of writing. It’s biography in 140 characters; it’s a novel in 140 characters; it’s a dialog among citizens of a democracy in 140 characters; it’s the conversation about what’s going on right now in 140 characters. Twitter is one of the most successful forms of the two-way web because it stays out of the way and lets the voices come through.

Sometimes it takes a long time for an idea to reach fruition. The names that come to mind are Vannevar Bush (As We May Think), Ted Nelson (Hypertext), and Doug Englebart (GUI HCI), among others. One that you might not think of is Bertolt Brecht. After listening to the Friday, March 14th NewsGang and Gang podcasts, I think Brecht would be smiling. Here’s something that he wrote in 1932:

…radio is one-sided when it should be two It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction.

Radio has begun genuinely moving in two directions. We live in interesting times, and according to Brecht, we seem to be moving in the right direction.

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The Things We Use The Most Have The Worst User Interfaces

Published March 14, 2008 by cgerrish

One by one, Apple is taking on the lousy interfaces we have to deal with every day. The mobile telephone has had a terrible interface forever. When you’re selling the subscription to the pipe, the device is meaningless. The iPhone isn’t really a phone, and that’s the revolution in the device.

Cable television listings are impossible to search and the remote control is ill suited to the task. The economics are the same. The cable business isn’t about the user interface, it’s all about selling cable subscriptions. As long as it’s not an active negative, the method of finding, selecting and recording televisions will never improve.

There’s a revolution hidden in fixing television’s interface, because the new schema will include both hundreds of television channels, on-demand shows, music channels, and all the multiple media channels of the internet. We’ve become so used to working with terrible interfaces that we don’t even understand that something better is possible.

As with the iPhone, software will be the key. Cable television’s interface cannot iterate except in extreme circumstances. The software model is key to moving the interaction forward, and Apple seems to be the only company positioned to the HCI experiments at the edge into the mainstream.

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