Category: social graph

The End of the PC: 3 Screens and a Cloud

Published March 18, 2010 by cgerrish

We see the shift beginning to play out as fragments of the picture leak out on to the Network. Presumably the strategy was set 4 or 5 years ago, but the artifacts of its implementation are now appearing in regular release cycles. As we fit more pieces into the puzzle, the picture is coming in to focus.

Most technology is only useful to the extent that people are around it. Some technical experiences are powerful enough to draw people to the technology. Recently we’ve seen a new landscape emerge where powerful technology is created that can follow people around wherever they might go. The big players are positioning themselves to flourish in this new world.

It may have been Ray Ozzie who most succinctly drew the boundaries of this new landscape by coining the phrase: “three screens and a cloud.”

“So, moving forward, again I believe that the world some number of years from now in terms of how we consume IT is really shifting from a machine-centric viewpoint to what we refer to as three screens and a cloud: the phone, the PC, and the TV ultimately, and how we deliver value to them.�?

Ozzie’s phrase assumes the transition from locally-installed software to mostly cloud computing. It equalizes, and puts into the same field, three devices with historically separate development and usage paths. It also reduces all of the physical characteristics of the devices to the virtual, by way of a screen. In addition, the specific historical uses of these devices is replaced with delivering value from the Network. This implies that the functionality of these separate channels has been absorbed, blended, and can be delivered over the Network.

Some assume all of these devices are being absorbed into the personal computer, but if you track the evolution of the PC’s form factor you can see that it’s been reduced to an input (keyboard, mouse, camera, microphone) and an output (screen). The CPU has largely disappeared from the experience, it’s been reduced to the primary user interaction points. This is just a preparation for its ultimate absorption into the new three screen ecosystem.

There’s a fixed screen that creates a large high-definition experience and draws the user to it. This screen is appropriate for individuals or social groups. There’s a small mobile screen that the user takes with her everywhere she goes. This is a private screen, mostly for individual use. And there’s a medium-sized screen that you bring along when there’s a specific work/play purpose requiring a larger interaction surface, or when you need a device that bridges the private and the public.

If you think about the mobile phone market prior to the release of the iPhone; the transition to a platform in which a “small screen delivers value from the Network” seemed an impossibility. The players were entrenched and the carriers controlled the device market. The deal that was cut with AT&T, along with the revaluation of all values in the mobile device market, created a new starting point. There was no evolutionary path from the old mobile telephone to the iPhone. Although technically, it’s a small computer, Jobs was specifically aiming at creating the small personal screen.

“I don’t want people to think of this as a computer,�? he said. “I think of it as reinventing the phone.�?

Apple dropped “Computer” from it’s name and placed a large bet on the post-PC future with the iPhone. They have publicly reset their strategic direction and now describe themselves as a ‘mobile devices company.” The iPad doubles down on mobility and bets that the netbook was a rough sketch of what would be useful as a second screen in a mobile computing context. Both the iPhone and iPad— through multi-touch— have continued to reduce the frame of interaction. The screen is transformed and becomes both the input and the output for the user’s experience.

A key development in the ‘three screens and a cloud’ vision is the elimination of input devices. The screen, and the gesture space around it, serves the user for both input and output.

Google has begun to design their products with a mobile-first sensibility, and has even made public statements indicating that within three years the mobile screen will be the user’s primary interaction point with the Network. Both Chrome and Android point to mobile technology. (It should be pointed out that Android isn’t an operating system, it’s a java-based runtime that sits on top of a Linux OS. In this sense, it’s more similar to Silverlight)

Microsoft made a hard pivot with the Windows Phone 7 product. The “Life in Motion” theme and the кухниtiles and hub user interface moves away from file systems and toward lifestream themes. Add to this the porting of Silverlight to the Symbian, Android and Windows Phone platforms, throw in a connection to Azure, and you have a massive developer pipeline to the small screen.

We all like to paraphrase William Gibson on the future, it’s here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet. Although this isn’t different from most things: the past, the present and any object you’d care to choose from the physical universe. None are distributed evenly. Time, as the old joke goes, is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. And therefore it follows that Space, is nature’s way of keeping everything from being just one big smoothie.

Progress toward the vision of “three screens and a cloud” will be measured in the distribution power of the major technology/media players. Apple has developed a significant channel through its innovative devices, iTunes and its physical stores. Microsoft has a strong base in operating system and office applications, but has expanded their distribution portfolio with Silverlight and Azure. Google’s distribution power is contained in their search index, which is exposed through their search query page. Facebook and Twitter’s distribution power is located in their social graph and the fire hose of their real-time index. All of these players have created vibrant developer ecosystems. This future won’t be distributed evenly, but to break through to mass markets, it will require both distribution power and a high-touch service channel.

The convergence implied in the phrase “three screens and a cloud” will consume the personal computer as well. It will be transformed, blended, and its functionality and services made accessible through any of the three screens. Preparations have long been underway for the a Post-PC future. The productivity once available only through the old devices and channels has been migrating quickly to the new Network-connected screens. Google has now joined Microsoft and Apple in attending to the possibilities of the large screen. These changes aren’t taking place as a gradual evolution, there’s a dangerous leap required to reach this new platform. Not every company will have the strength, capital and will to make that leap. And as the old devices and channels are hollowed out, at some point there will be a major collapse of the old platforms.

In the war rooms around the technology world, there’s a conversation going on about what it will take to get to the other side.

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A Little Bit Louder Now…

Published March 7, 2010 by cgerrish

We move from one metaphor to its opposite, swinging like the bob on a pendulum. As our daily activities start throwing off streams of data, and we aggregate the data of others into composite parallel streams for our consumption— we look across the great divide and gaze at the old metaphor of files, folders, explorer/finder and the desktop. We hop back and forth between the metaphors, juggling streams and file folders. Wondering at what point will we leap across the chasm— and be mostly here in the stream, instead of mostly there on the desktop.

Personal computing is largely a matter of time and where the user spends it. Using applications to manipulate files located in folders has dominated our computing experience for a long while. Perhaps it was the steady stream of emails filling up our inboxes that provided the bridge to the stream of tweets flowing through our selective view of the consolidated lifestream. The metaphor of a desktop, folders and files gave us a handle for managing digital things inside the world of personal computing. A user might have a messy desktop or clean one. One could use up energy keeping things organized, putting them away in the proper folder— or allow them to become messy and spend energy finding things amidst the chaos.

The Desktop, folder, file model corresponds to the outline. Other words we might use to describe this kind of formation include hierarchy, name space or tree structure. The problem with things is that they don’t seem to know where they belong. They don’t take the initiative, always have to be told what to do. But, as long as the numbers stay small— not too many files or folders; not too many streams, or too much velocity, we can manage on either side of chasm. However, to stay small in this context means to exclude possibility. And once the numbers get large, the amount of energy required to keep things organized in outlines exceeds the value derived from the organization.

As David Weinberger points out in his book Everything is Miscellaneous, search transformed the value of the outline as a system of organization. Once everything has been indexed, sorted and ranked by algorithm, the findability of a thing doesn’t depend on its place in a hierarchy of categorization. This was a transition from organization based on the metaphor of extension in physical space to the random access metaphor of computational space.

Moving from Space to Time is another kind of transition. David Gelernter is one of the few who has spent time thinking about organization based on time and stream. Why should we have to give names to digital files or assign them to folders? Can’t things just take the initiative?

Once we shift the axis of organization from Space to Time, we begin to think about how we could relate to dynamic flows of information. We glance again at outlines, files and folder systems. The numbers are too big, if we look a the problem through that lens we’re inevitably lead to the view that there’s information overload. Clay Shirky rebuts that claim, and calls it filter failure. But a filter is only one of the tools we’re missing. The spatial metaphor can’t even give us the basic steps to dance to the music of time. We need a different starting point. Gelernter, in his essay “Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously” improvises on a theme:

17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it’s easy to blend any group of streams, it’s easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for “snow” means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn’t deal with snow. Subtracting the “not snow” stream from the mainstream yields a “snow” stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.

18. Nearly all flowing, changing information on the Internet will move through streams. You will be able to gather and blend together all the streams that interest you. Streams of world news or news about your friends, streams that describe prices or auctions or new findings in any field, or traffic, weather, markets — they will all be gathered and blended into one stream. Then your own personal lifestream will be added. The result is your mainstream: different from all others; a fast-moving river of all the digital information you care about.

19. You can turn a knob and slow down your mainstream: less-important stream-elements will flow past invisibly and won’t distract you, but will remain in the stream and appear when you search for them. You can rewind your lifestream and review the past. If an important-looking document or message sails past and you have no time to deal with it now, you can copy the document or message into the future (copy it to “this evening at 10,” say); when the future arrives, the document appears again. You can turn a different knob to make your fast-flowing stream spread out into several slower streams, if you have space enough on your screen to watch them all. And you can gather those separate streams back together whenever you like.

So, what does the toolset look like? Filters are a part of it. We’ll want to filter the stream based on keywords, selected social circles, location, time period, velocity of flow, media type of hyperlinked citation, authority of a person in particular slice and more. The results of a filtered stream will look like the surfacing of particular elements of the stream and the backgrounding of others. Stream splicing is a pre-requisite of filtering, blending together a bunch of streams doesn’t result in information overload if you have the right tools at your command. You’ll be able to filter and pause; go to super slo-motion; fast foward and even loop a section, manage public and private streams in the same workspace, mix recorded on-demand tracks with live real-time feeds and add in your own commentary in a live chat running alongside.

Music may provide the most developed set of metaphors to think this new landscape through. Here’s Thelonius Monk stream splicing:

Here’s Michael Tilson Thomas blending streams, pulling themes to the surface, modulating the information as it flows past:

The blends and modulations can be sophisticated and complex or rough and full of energy. Some lads from Liverpool get a little bit louder now:

When Gelernter describes the process of searching for ‘snow’ in the composite stream, he gets to the difference between search and track. Search was built on the ability to spider the corpus of web pages and links, build an index, and provide ranked results in response to queries. Track is a tool to help us manage and explore the real-time stream. The days of the world wide web conceived as a static set of hyperlinked pages are coming to an end. The file is a finished product, the stream is always unfinished. Gelernter describes the emergent new cyberstructure:

13. The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The “velocity of information” is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today’s typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it’s not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure.

14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.

Your connection to the item in a stream is open ended— the flow is open, or it is closed. If it is open, there’ll be a next item, and one after that. All these items are unfinished, they need response, routing, to be ignored, or decorated with gestures. We find ourselves in the in-between moment between the photograph and the motion picture. Our tools are at the level of the zoetrope, the praxinoscope, or the magic lantern. But once we start thinking in terms of Time instead of Space, the world looks very different.

At this moment of transition, we now have the tools to analyze our direction. Are we building tools for the static hierarchical namespace of the world wide web, or building tools for the real-time stream of the Network? If we look at Salesforce’s introduction of Chatter, Google’s introduction of Buzz, the expansions of Facebook and Twitter, FourSquare and GoWalla, the augmentation capabilities of Kynetx— we can see a shift in orientation from Space to Time. And while we might expect the leap across the chasm to require the bravery of the early adopter, I think we’ll be surprised at how natural most people find living in the stream of time to be.

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Antagonyms, Social Circles and Chattering about VRM

Published February 19, 2010 by cgerrish

Throwing all the pieces out on the table, we connect the dots to make pictures. It’s a child’s game, creating figures out what look like a random set of numbered points. We tend to visualize the network of our social graph as a series of connected points. The pictures that emerge from those connections tell a story about our lives and experiences.

One of the interesting things about random sets of dots is that we tend to group them based on proximity, similarity, closure and continuation. We project pictures on to the dots, and once we see a particular picture, sometimes it’s hard to realize that someone might put the same set of dots together into something entirely different. It could even be an image that has the exact opposite meaning as the picture we see.

There are a couple of words used to describe a word that can mean the opposite of itself. Here are some examples of Antagonyms (or Contranyms):

Overlook: to pay attention to, to inspect (“We had time to overlook the contract.”) vs. to ignore

Oversight: Watchful and responsible care vs. An omission or error due to carelessness

It’s the context that tilts the meaning of the word this way or that.

When you think about the set of people you may be connected to within a large company, you can overlay several kinds of connections. A person may be a colleague, they might be in the same division, have the same pay grade, be part of a project, be a friend, or even a relative. In fact, we make a virtue out of the idea that the people we work with could also be our friends. Many companies like to talk about their employees as being like a family.

Google tested their Buzz product inside the walls of their company. No doubt it was used for work, play and a whole range of unforeseen kinds of communication. After a while all those modes of communication began to blend together. The boundaries between them broke down. Just as email and IM are used for personal and business purposes, Buzz would naturally be used in the same way. From a business perspective, the dots were connected into a powerful image of collaboration and efficiency. Twitter/FriendFeed clearly worked great as an enterprise application.

The personal, public and business realms are overlapping images that can be mapped to the same set of dots. However, it’s the exclusive disjunction of these sets that defines the boundaries. In some cases, the boundaries need to be strong and impenetrable. These are the cases Google didn’t consider carefully enough in their launch scenario. Other times a co-worker becomes a friend, or someone you went to school with becomes a colleague. Or maybe you just decided to start following your company’s CEO on Twitter. The context of the interaction tilts the meaning of the connection. There’s not a bright line separating our private, public and business lives that can be applied as a definitive rule.

Google launched Buzz as a consumer product, but tested it as an enterprise product. Although they plan to quickly integrate it into their office application suite. But like all messaging tools it will have a public and a private mode. It will address and contain personal, public and business conversation threads. And by flowing data from a user’s social circle and the real-time flow of Buzz (effectively a ping server) into their search algorithm, results pages can be personalized by social graph in real time.

Meanwhile, SalesForce.com introduces Chatter to the enterprise and rolls it out at no extra charge to all employees on the internal network. And while it will start inside the enterprise, Chatter will quickly expand to the boundaries and begin to cross over. From a business perspective, it’ll be used to turbo-charge collaboration and create real-time communication for project teams and business units. But very quickly you’ll see friends sending messages to each other about meeting up for lunch, and a public-personal communications channel will be opened within the enterprise. And the circles will connect and widen from there.

Here are a couple more Contranyms:

clip (attach to) – clip (cut off from)

cleave (to cut apart) – cleave (to seal together)

Salesforce.com calls itself the leader in Customer Relationship Management and Cloud Computing. Chatter may just be the communication medium that ultimately contains both CRM and its opposite number, VRM. Vendor Relationship Management is a reaction to the data toolsets belonging to the enterprise and not to the individual customer.

In a narrow sense, VRM is the reciprocal — the customer side — of CRM (or Customer Relationship Management). VRM tools provide customers with the means to bear their side of the relationship burden. They relieve CRM of the perceived need to “capture,” “acquire,” “lock in,” “manage,” and otherwise employ the language and thinking of slave-owners when dealing with customers. With VRM operating on the customer’s side, CRM systems will no longer be alone in trying to improve the ways companies relate to customers. Customers will be also be involved, as fully empowered participants, rather than as captive followers.

If you were to think about what kind of infrastructure you’d want to run VRM on, Salesforce.com would be ideal. To run the mirror image of CRM, you need the same set of services and scale. The individual Chatter account could be the doorway to a set of VRM services. I can already see developers using the Force.com platform to populate a VRM app store.

Some corporations will attempt to maximize the business value of each individual worker, stripping out all the extraneous human factors. Chinese walls will be erected to keep the outside from the inside, the personal from the business, and the public from the private. But when you put messaging and communications tools into the hands of people they will find ways to talk to each other— about work, life, play, the project, and the joke they just heard at the water cooler.

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Twitter Lists, Track and Broadcasting

Published January 18, 2010 by cgerrish

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)

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