Category: zettel

scraps of paper

A Separate Reality: Identi.ca on the Brink

Published September 21, 2008 by cgerrish

Sometimes it takes a few days for the dust to settle, for all the threads to become untangled, and for the bright lines of an event to emerge. BearHug Camp defined the silhouettes of two alternate futures.

To paraphrase a politician’s recent comment, the fundamentals of microblogging are sound. The 140 character standard message length seems safe for the moment. But one senses there’s an uncomfortable feeling about the randomness of that specific constraint and its origin in SMS. Access to APIs and the ecosystem of multiple end clients providing and discovering unique new value propositions filtered from the fire hose of the full microblogging stream is pretty stable. But there’s a fear that access may be cut off, or that the economics of API access may change radically. System stability has improved measurably, but is still below acceptable major league standards. Real time messaging and track are still on the critical list, either absent or cobbled together as a pencil sketch (everything works for a small N).

Convergence on a unified microblogging standard is key to the foundation of a larger ecosystem, what Dave Winer calls a coral reef. Currently that convergence owes its existence to the mirroring of Twitter’s feature set. The distribution of power within the political economy of the system leaves this as the only avenue for progress. An open standard that departed from Twitter wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

The first possible future belongs to Twitter. It’s a future where scaling a real time microblogging messaging system with track is key to success. The transition of the economic model of API access from free to one with some kind of usage tax will lay the foundation for a potentially dominant business model. As long as the tax is low enough and the volume high enough, Twitter will prosper and the friction they’ve introduced won’t slow down viral growth.

Oblique Strategy: Think Garden instead of Architecture

The second possible future belongs to a distributed network of players. The big scale required by Twitter’s architecture is redistributed to multiple players with different roles and responsibilities within a networked system. It’s not Identi.ca that competes with Twitter, but an ecosystem of sites that cooperate to provide the identical feature/function set along with a fertile ground for new innovation. But there’s a fly in the ointment, there is no ecosystem. Currently there are only unscalable instances of Laconi.ca that don’t connect to each other very well. In order for there to be viral growth in the Open Microblogging ecosystem the individual nodes actually need to form a network of connections. Today they don’t. The nodes aren’t nodes so they can’t grow as a network. Many aren’t competing against One.

There are couple of things missing from this garden:

Name resolution across Open Microblogging nodes
Inter-node real time public and direct messaging
Full network real time track (Aggregate XMPP Firehose)
Multiple clients for multiple devices

To the extent that these items aren’t at the top of the Open Microblogging project priority list, Identi.ca/Laconi.ca and Open Microblogging stand on the brink of an abyss. The “growth” of disconnected nodes is the illusion of growth. In a few weeks Twitter will turn on all services, introduce a small tax and the game could well be over. The acolytes of Open Source believe they will win the war because they have a structural advantage that over time will prevail. The metaphor that was used was “flipping the iceberg.” Except for the fact that there is no structural advantage and they don’t have a critical mass of users, nor a method to virally attract them. They’re living in a separate reality, their watches have stopped and their eyes aren’t on the prize.

BearHug camp showed us all the shape of the playing field, that the game was underway, and the ball was pointedly handed to the key players. Can they keep their eyes on the prize? From the opening gun, this game is being played in sudden death. The next move is crucial.

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Tree Planting and the Politics of the Soil

Published September 15, 2008 by cgerrish

Japanese Maple

I recently planted a new Japanese maple tree in my back garden. The new one replaced an old one that had died a suspicious death. Over the last few seasons its growth had slowed to a crawl. It had always put on a fine display of maple leaves that turned bright orange-red in the Autumn. When they fell to the ground, the leaves scattered across the green grass making beautiful patterns.

This Spring the maple tree barely sprouted leaves; clearly something wasn’t right. We love to grow different and unique tree in our garden, we have the full equipment to take care of them, even have a good electric pole trimmer reviews, but this tree is a disaster for us because we don’t know what kills it. We consulted with our gardener and we took some measures to try and bring the tree back to health. In the end, the battle was lost. A preliminary post-mortem concluded that a gopher had eaten the roots of the tree and therefore it was unable to take in water and nourishment from the soil.

A month or so passed and the Japanese maple turned into a stark and brittle wooden sculpture. Slowly, bit by bit, the life was drained from it. My wife and I drove down to Half Moon Bay to a large nursery to pick out a replacement tree to be planted to celebrate my birthday. After a few stops, and auditioning a number of trees, we found a perfectly formed Japanese Maple — an Emperor I variety.

When we planted the new tree, the mystery of the previous tree’s death was revealed. The gopher was exonerated by a more thorough investigation. The large Italian cyprus tree nearby, a tree planted in the 1920s, had strangled the maple. It was murder. The cyprus sends out shallow roots in a fine dense mesh. The roots of the large tree surrounded, enclosed, and cut off the water supply of the smaller maple. The Japanese maple has woody roots that are meant to grow deep. They never had a chance.

This war of the root systems had been going on underground all along, invisible to us. We suddenly discovered that our garden is also a kind of battlefield. We were about to plant a new tree and place it in harm’s way. We realized that we couldn’t do what we’d done before. If we simply went ahead and planted the tree, it would meet the same fate as its predecessor. It was the end of the era of naive tree planting.

Our gardner came up with a solution. The new Japanese maple came in a large 10 gallon plastic container. The plan was to cut the bottom from the container and plant the tree along with the container. The container’s plastic sides would serve as a barrier which would protect the new roots from the Cyprus root’s smothering embrace. This new arrangement gave the maple’s roots the chance to grow deep into the open soil below.

As we plant new trees, and start new ventures, sometimes we aren’t attuned to the political currents flowing just below the surface. Our naive first attempt at tree planting assumed we were entering a neutral and nurturing space. Who could take exception to the addition of a beautiful tree to our garden? We won’t know for some time whether the strong move by the federal government of our garden will have effectively given the new maple tree the chance to grow and prosper. But so far, so good.

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Remembrance and Forgetting

Published September 12, 2008 by cgerrish

Prometheus bound

This morning MSNBC aired a minimally edited replay of their broadcast from the morning of September 11, 2001. I remember watching those images on that morning. I remember worrying about my colleagues who would be arriving at our New York office in the World Trade Center. I’d visited them a few months before, spending all day in the building– from early morning to early evening.

At the time, on that morning seven years ago, I viewed the images with disbelief, as in a dream. Now as I view them again, the emotions are still strong, but I see them with clear eyes. On the day of the actual event, I didn’t think we lived in a world where such a thing could happen; today I know such a thing has happened.

Prometheus, in eternal punishment, is chained to a rock, where his liver is eaten daily by a vulture, only to be regenerated, due to his immortality, by night.

But my topic is not the possibility of terrorist acts, but rather the replaying of memories and something Nietzsche called ressentiment, or the spirit of revenge. When we act out of the spirit of revenge, filled with the pain of the moment, we act out of weakness. In our digital age, if everything is recorded, can we ever forget the past? Will we be like Prometheus bound to a rock, our wounds forever raw? Will all human motivation be reduced to acting from the spirit of revenge, as no perceived slight or hurt ever fades from memory? The digital doesn’t fade, it’s on or off. The challenge to overcome the spirit of revenge grows larger as memory is displaced into our digital systems and networks. The digital is immortal and can be replayed endlessly at the click of a mouse.

I think perhaps we forget the meaning and power of forgetting. Manu Bazzano in his book “Buddha is Dead” discusses the modes of forgetting:

“There is forgetting and forgetting. We subconsciously remove from our memory unpleasant experiences, and we tend to ‘forget’ by sheer inertia. On a super-conscious level, however, we keep our consciousness fresh and vibrant by actively ‘forgetting.’ The noble person knows how to forget, not solely out of compassion (‘forgive and forget’), but also because there can be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present without forgetfulness. Life would drag on, forever unresolved, a life that ‘cannot have done with anything,’ a life of ressentiment, a sick life.”

In our digital age, with perfect replays, can we learn to digest and properly metabolize events and turn them into experience? When we act and create from experience, we’ve listened, reflected and responded. We’ve created something new to fill the present moment. To truly embrace change, we must not look back in anger, but walk purposefully into the future.

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The Party Line Revisited

Published September 9, 2008 by cgerrish

Rotary Telephone

The phrase “Time out of mind” refers to the distant past beyond memory. While we think of computer networks as laying the foundation of electronic social networks, it’s the telephone that first connected the country. And the user interface challenges and the viral qualities of that once new medium have slipped beyond the horizon of our living memory.

We assume that the user interface for the telephone is known and has always been known. But there was a time when people had to be taught to use the phone. What’s a dial tone? What’s a busy signal? Where do you find a number for a particular person or business? How do you dial a rotary phone? Why do you need to wait until the dial returns to its starting position before inputting the next number? What’s that ringing sound mean?

Why should anyone understand these interface elements? The film above was shown in movie theaters to help people with the change from operator assisted to direct dial calls.

We think of the party line as quaint artifact of the past, but like certain modern online services, it was used as a source of entertainment and gossip, as well as a means of quickly alerting entire neighbourhoods in case of emergencies such as fires.

In 20th century telephone systems, a party line (also multiparty line or Shared Service Line) is an arrangement in which two or more customers are connected directly to the same local loop. Prior to World War II in the United States, party lines were the primary way residential subscribers acquired local phone service.

Sometimes pundits like to make the argument that microblogging services like Twitter or Identi.ca are too difficult or obscure for “most ordinary people” to learn. Compare using Twitter to learning how to direct dial a telephone. If there’s value returned, people are will to invest the time and learn enough to profit.

There are other interesting comparisons between the phone network and the internet. The dystopian visions about The Phone Company match our current fears about the harvesting of our personal and attention data. Once we’ve internalized a user interface like the telephone’s, we begin to fear that it will be literally internalized into our bodies. The 1967 film The President’s Analyst envisioned the Cerebrum Communicator, a device that is located in, and power by, our brains. It also showed us a technology company secretly at the center of political power.

The telphone has become the mobile computer, and voice is now one of many data types transmitted through the Network. But the basic pattern of relating through an electronic network remains the same. The telephone still has a lot to teach us about the meaning of electronic social networks.

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