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Chrome: Mapping The Metaphor of Browsing

Published September 7, 2008 by cgerrish

The discussion around Chrome, Google’s new web browser, was kicked into a different dimension for me while listening to some comments by Marc Canter. Canter was excited about the idea of the browser serving as an orchestration point for a market of web services. And he was speaking of services consumed by regular users: a search engine, a mapping service, an rss reader, a social bookmarking service, etc. As a developer, Canter is interested in competing in an open marketplace for services supplied through and to the browser.

There’s an underlying shift in the role of the web browser, and a more telling shift at the level of naming and metaphor. Think about the common names for web browsers:

Navigator
Explorer
Safari
Camino

Metaphorically these names describe the process of traversing the terrain of the Network. It’s a world-wide web out there — you’ll need a compass and a map to find the place you’re looking for. Originally the Network of web sites had to be traversed on foot, link by link. Portal sites like Yahoo created maps in the form of a tables of contents, locations on the Network thought of as reference points in a big book. Librarians were employed to create a sensible taxonomy, a dewey decimal system for the Network. Effective web search effectively changed that playing field.

Think about the name “Chrome” and the way it relates to the web-based application container that Canter envisions. For those who don’t know, the word chrome is often used to describe the UI/presentation layer of an application. It’s the thing that surrounds the feature/function set making it pretty and usable — from an engineering perspective, it’s the shiny bits that are added around the edges. Does the name chrome extend the metaphor of navigation and exploration for the browser?

For most users, the internet is located in Google’s big database. Your only, or let’s say primary, access to the Network is through querying Google. (Micro-communities are changing this model as a primary source of links) The “browser” is now a frame around the services that Google, and other providers bring to you. No need to get off the couch, no need to don a pith helmet, no need to keep that passport up to date. The browsing you’ll be doing is flipping through the selections delivered to your door.

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Multi-Tasking While I Multi-Task, I Pause, to Multi-Task

Published September 6, 2008 by cgerrish

Many headed hydra

The limits of my world are the limits of my language.

At the limits of my world there are the boundaries of time and my capacity for attention.

As the marketplace for attention has filled up with an almost infinite number candidates for my finite attention, the idea of multitasking has taken hold.

If there are 24 hours in a day, and I must be asleep for some percentage of them, and I must earn my living during some percentage of them, there are a limited number of remaining hours to be filled with what the technologist like to call “content.”

Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

If multitasking were a reality, it would increase the number of available hours for the consumption of content. Potentially, they are doubled.

The trait of multitasking is most often applied to “young people” and “Type A personalities.”

Applying the trait of multi-tasking to young people gives it the appearance of an evolutionary adaptation of the capacity for attention. We like to believe that young people are different from the rest of us in this regard.

Before you cross the street,
Take my hand,
Life is just what happens to you,
While you’re busy making other plans

As mortals, we strain against our limitations. As mortals, time defines us.

While there is such a thing as background tasking, like listening to music while knitting; this is not what we think of when we think of multitasking.

We can rapidly switch between tasks, but it’s near impossible bring deep attention to anything in that context. This is sometimes described as continuous partial attention. In addition, we rarely take the switching cost into account as we bounce between this and that.

Who would benefit from keeping the idea and expectation of multitasking alive?

While you’re doing whatever you’re doing, why not also do the thing that I’d like you to do. You’re hip to the multitasking thing aren’t you? All the kids are doing it.

TS Eliot

Here is the third section of T.S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, a meditation on time and mortality. Can you read it while you watch television?

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

T.S. Eliot
Burnt Norton

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Continental Congress: Notes From the Bearhug Underground

Published September 2, 2008 by cgerrish

First Continental Congress

I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts about the terrain unfolding around the politics and technology of real-time microblogging. Here are my notes from the underground.

Sun Tzu said:

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

1.0 Gillmor and Winer have called for a meetup, a camp, to bring the conversation about microblogging into the open.

1.1 As Winer noted, the users are ahead of the developers and product owners at this point in the timeline. That’s a unique opportunity.

1.2 Twitter prototyped an experience of the real-time web, giving us a glimpse of the power of IM and Track. It was withdrawn to attempt to insert a business model and reconfigure their infrastructure to support high volume real time messaging.

1.2.1 Track is the ability to follow keywords rather than specific people. This allows for vision into both sides of conversations happening outside a directed social graph and the ability to discover new relevant connections. When combined with a real-time feed it allows for the discovery of current events and conversations happening right now.

1.3 Previously, Twitter recognized the value of Track by purchasing Summize for a 10% stake in its future valuation.

1.4 When IM and Track were withdrawn, Twitter substituted an illustration of a whale for a user dialogue. Users were locked out of the dialogue and potentially about to be locked in the trunk.

2.0 Identi.ca begins to build a decentralized microblogging model that re-instates the real-time web, when combined with Dustin Salling’s Spy extensions.

2.1 Of the two services, only Identi.ca offers up the full XMPP stream to enable real-time Track. For the moment, this gives Identi.ca (Laconi.ca) the superior feature set.

2.2 To the extent that Laconi.ca deviates from Twitter’s interaction model it will destroy itself. With the exception of decentralization and Track, it has no advantages over Twitter.

2.2.1 It’s about users and network effects, not software features.

2.3 The addition of new features outside the current Twitter interaction model will not create growth. It will create confused users trying to understand the difference between Twitter and Identi.ca.

2.3.1 Some users are confused about the role of Open Source in the competition for users between Identi.ca and Twitter. If Identi.ca manages to grow to critical mass, it will have nothing to do with Open Source. Open Source is a good way to produce and maintain software; it doesn’t motivate users.

2.4 A bridge was extended across the divide between Identi.ca and Twitter. Messages, and half conversations pushed through into the Twittersphere, pointing back to the real-time web.

2.5 A two-way bridge would have the effect of flooding Identi.ca with Tweets and sucking the conversation back over to Twitter.

3.0 Twitter adds the “refers to” meta-data element. This is the piece of the puzzle that begins to radically change the shape of conversations unfolding through the Network. Tweets and Dents now addressable as URIs on the Network. Conversations potentially can be aggregated across platforms.

3.1 Gillmor proposes a three-party system including Twitter, Identi.ca (and other Laconi.ca installations) and aggregation and Track in the client (Twhirl, Gchat, etc.).

3.2 If Twitter has its own brand of Track and Identi.ca has its own brand of Track. Twitter demolishes Identi.ca. Only a three-party system will preserve Identi.ca and the ecosystem.

3.3 If neither Twitter nor Identi.ca have Track and real-time messaging. Twitter demolishes Identi.ca. Identi.ca’s highest priority has to be maintain its real-time Track advantage over Twitter. That window will close soon.

4.0 If you’re wondering why Twitter is winning, it’s because they don’t have to care about establishing a multi-party ecosystem for micro-blogging. They can simply wait until their competitors destroy themselves. (See quote by Sun Tzu at the top of the post)

4.1 All Continental Congresses start as a brawl. But as with Internet Identity, once the vendors understand they can’t, and shouldn’t own the space, cooperation is engendered.

4.2 Winer called Twitter a Corral Reef. Now we’d like the whole micro-blogging ecosystem to be a Corral Reef. It’s an opportunity happening right now in real time.

4.3 A strong bear hug at the right time, with the right players and the right conversation could create a solid foundation, a Corral Reef.

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These Are No Ordinary Times: Time Becomes Real

Published August 24, 2008 by cgerrish

Bunuel: Chien Andalou

As we may think about the real time web, the image goes in and out of focus. Pieces of the dream materialize for a moment and then are withdrawn. The solid experience of Track and IM on Twitter start to reveal the contours of the possibility of discovery on the real time web– and then in the blink of an eye, they dissolve into nothingness. Twitter pulls the experience back into the darkness, and we set out as a band of gypsies attempting to recreate it from the resources we find in the commons.

“Real time” puts time itself into the frame. In a simple sense, real time means what’s happening right now. It’s the conscious moment that cleaves the past from the future. It’s the thread of our lives being pulled through the eye of a needle.

Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.

We see the past through the future, as it comes rushing toward us, asking us to make a judgment about this present moment. David Byrne and Brian Eno have released some recordings called “Everything that happens will happen today.” I’d go further and say that everything that happens, happens right now. Your only opportunity to act is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to do the right thing is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to connect with another person is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to pick up the thread of the conversation is in the present moment.

As we stand at the crossroads between the past and the future, we must act, and through our actions express a judgement. Do we act in the present moment only for the present moment? Or do we think both of ourselves and our posterity as we make this gesture or that one? There’s a sense in which a person acting in the present moment for the sake of an unknown future is the essence of morality.

As we deepen the questions about the real time web, we uncover the startling fact that underneath all the layers of technology and specialized lingo, we find only ourselves. Human beings, mortals, gathering together to share our joys and sorrows, our dreams and aspirations, our humanity. As we pound out, hammer and tongs, the basic shape of our experience through the real time Network, we would do well to heed the words of that guy who said, “what if all this stuff really matters?”

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