Skip to content →

Category: value

Electronic Yellow Sticky Routing Slips: Tweets As Pointers

Published August 1, 2010 by cgerrish

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?

63 Comments

Permanent Markers: Memory And Forgiveness

Published July 27, 2010 by cgerrish

I thought it prudent to write something about Jeffrey Rosen’s Sunday NY Times essay, The Web Means The End Of Forgetting, before it slipped into the past and we’d all forgotten about it. Scott Rosenberg was disappointed in Rosen’s essay and wrote about how it didn’t live up to the large themes it outlined. The essence of Rosen’s piece is that the public information we publish to the web through social network systems like Facebook are permanent markers that may come back to haunt us in unanticipated contexts. Rosenberg’s critique seems to be that there’s not too much evidence of this happening, and that a greater concern is link rot, preservation of the ephemera of the web and general digital preservation.

Of course, there’s a sense in which we seem to have very poor memories indeed. Our universities feature a discipline called archeology in which we dig up our ancestors with the purpose of trying to figure who they were, what they did and how they lived. We lack the ability to simply rewind and replay the ancient past. As each day advances, another slips into time out of mind— or time immemorial as it’s sometimes called.

We use the metaphors memory and forgetting when talking about what computer systems do when they store and retrieve bits from a file system. The human activity of memory and forgetting actually has very little in common with a computer’s storage and retrieval routines. When we say that the Web doesn’t forget, what we mean is that if something is stored in a database, unless there’s a technical problem, it can be retrieved through some kind of search query. If the general public has access to that data store, then information you’ve published will be available to any interested party. It’s not a matter of human remembering or forgetting, but rather one of discovery and random access through querying a system’s indexed data.

At issue in Rosen’s piece, isn’t the fact of personal data retrieved through a search query, but rather the exposure of personal transgressions. Lines that were crossed in the past, behavior from one context made inappropriate by placing it into a new context, some departure from the Puritan norm detected and added into a summary valuation of a person. Rosen even describes this mark as a “scarlet letter in your digital past.” The technical solutions he explores have to do with changing the data or the context of the data to prevent retrieval: the stains of data are scrubbed and removed from relevant databases; additional data is piled in to divert attention from the offending bits; or an expiration policy is enforced on bits that make them unreadable after a set period of time. There’s an idea that at some future point you will own all your personal data (that you’ve published into publicly networked systems) and will have granular access controls over it.

Absent a future of totalitarian personal data control, Rosen moves on to the act of forgiveness. Can we forgive each other in the presence of permanent reminders? I wrote a post about this on the day that MSNBC replayed the events of morning of September 11, 2001. Sometimes we can rewind the past and press play, but wounds cannot heal if we’re constantly picking at them.

While we’re enraptured by the metaphors of memory and forgetting, intelligence and thinking, as we talk about computers, when we speak of forgiveness we tamp down the overtones and resonance of the metaphor. It’s in the cultural practice of western religion that we have the mechanisms for redemption, forgiveness, indulgences and absolution. In the secular rational context of computerized networks of data there’s no basis for forgiveness. It’s all ones or zeros, it’s in the database or it’s not.

Perhaps in our digital secular world we need a system similar to carbon offsets. When we’ve sinned against the environment by virtue of the size of our carbon footprint, we purchase indulgences from TerraPass to offset our trespass. Rather than delete, obscure or divert attention from the bits in question, we might simply offset them with some act of kindness. While the Catholic Church frowns on the idea of online confession, in this model, there would be no person listening to your confession and assigning penance. The service would simply authenticate your good deeds and make sure they were visible as a permanent marker on the Network. It would be up to you to determine the size of the offset, or perhaps you could select from a set of standard offset sizes.

The problem that Rosen describes is not one of technology, but rather one of humanity and human judgment. The question of how we treat each other is fundamental and has been with us since the beginning.

6 Comments

Real-Time Networks, Man-In-The-Middle, And The Misappropriation Of ‘Hot News’

Published June 23, 2010 by cgerrish

Google and Twitter have filed a amicus brief with the appeals court on TheFlyOnTheWall.com case. Briefly, at issue is FlyOnTheWall’s near real-time redistribution of investment bank research ratings. Investment bank research departments spend time, money and resources creating stock ratings and price targets. The purpose of this effort is to create an information asymmetry in the market to the advantage of the i-bank’s clients. FlyOnTheWall does not employ analysts and has no research capability, it discovers stock ratings, aggregates and redistributes them in near real time. Since their cost of production only includes real-time redistribution infrastructure, and therefore they can offer their high-value information feeds at a lower cost than investment banks. Subscribers to FlyOnTheWall pay for these aggregated news feeds, they aren’t free. In their testimony, FlyOnTheWall claimed they only gathered information from publicly available sources and only published tweet-sized snippets summarizing the reports.

Google and Twitter make the following argument in their brief:

News reporting always has been a complex ecosystem, where what is ‘news’ is often driven by certain influential news organizations, with others republishing or broadcasting those facts — all to the benefit of the public,

and further

How, for example, would a court pick a time period during which facts about the recent Times Square bombing attempt would be non-reportable by others?”

At issue is the re-emergence of the hot news doctrine, which was originally put in place in 1918 to stop William Randolf Hearst’s International News Service from taking Associated Press wire news stories and redistributing them as their own. The court set forth five criteria to determine whether ‘hot news’ has been misappropriated:

(i) a plaintiff generates or gathers information at a cost;

(ii) the information is time-sensitive;

(iii) a defendant’s use of the information constitutes free riding on the plaintiff’s efforts;

(iv) the defendant is in direct competition with a product or service offered by the plaintiffs;

(v) the ability of other parties to free-ride on the efforts of the plaintiff or others would so reduce the incentive to produce the product or service that its existence or quality would be substantially threatened.

In the case of TheFlyOnTheWall.com the court ruled for the plaintiffs, Barclays, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, and decided that a 2 hour embargo was a reasonable amount of latency to build into the Network. In the fast-paced world of equity trading, two hours is an eternity. These days trades are often executed in a matter of milliseconds. The enforcement of this kind of rule, however, is problematic. In the brave new world of social media, both individuals and news organizations have interconnected real-time distribution networks. Once bits of information touch this public social network they can spread with breathtaking speed. Twitter, Google and Facebook are currently the media through which this information is dispersed. And each of them can be said to profit by the circulation of high-value information through their networks.

Over the last few days we’ve seen the drama of General Stanley A. McChrystal play out. The events were put into play by a story written by Michael Hastings, a freelancer for Rolling Stone Magazine. The story about McChrystal’s comments began leaking out Monday night. Both Politico and Time magazine posted a PDF of the Rolling Stone article to their web sites before Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone asked the sites to remove the PDF. The New York Times reports:

Will Dana, the magazine’s managing editor, said that the magazine did not always post articles online because it could make more money at the newsstand and that when it did, the articles were typically not posted until Wednesday. But other news organizations made that decision for him.

The McChrystal story is an interesting example of the ‘hot news’ doctrine. Rolling Stone magazine puts out 26 issues of its print magazine per year. Even before the issue hit the newsstands, it dominated cable news, has been fully reported in the New York Times and resulted in McChrystal’s resignation and replacement by General David Petraeus. One could argue that Rolling Stone should have a business model that allows them to benefit from these kind of real-time events. And it’s quite possible that the broad dissemination of this story will lead to a significant increase in newsstand sales and web site traffic.

In this case the ‘hot news’ was so hot that the story itself became a story. Major government policies regarding the conduct of the war in Afghanistan had to be decided in real time. There was no hesitation, no waiting for Rolling Stone’s newsstand business model to play out. By the time we finally see the printed magazine it will have become an artifact of history. With the advantage of hindsight, we may even wonder why the headline writer put McChrystal’s story third after Lady Gaga’s tell all and the final days of Dennis Hopper.

The question about the ‘hot news’ doctrine isn’t going away; and the decision of the appeals court will be closely watched. In the meanwhile, the marketplace is searching for a solution to the fact of real-time aggregation and relay of digitally-copied work product. The return of the pay wall is an attempt by producers of stories about the news to create a firewall around their work product. Most corporations employ a firewall to keep their valuable internal discussion from reaching the public networks. Limiting access of your product to paying customers isn’t a new idea. However, when your work product is a story about news events or ideas encoded in digital media, creating reliable access controls is problematic. Where in the early days of the Network the focus was on direct access and disintermediation of the middle man; now the economics favor the man-in-the-middle. Meta-data can be sold at a fraction of the price of the data to which it points. The complex ecosystem of ‘the news’ is looking for a new equilibrium in which both data and meta-data can flourish.

2 Comments

Apple’s UX Strategy: I Want To Hold Your Hand

Published June 15, 2010 by cgerrish

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.

Comments closed