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Month: March 2008

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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Terminal Imagination: Doug Engelbart and Human/Computer Interface

Published March 11, 2008 by cgerrish

John Markoff’s article in the Sunday Times about PicLens Software from Cool Iris is a nice preview of the evolution of the human-computer interface. I like Doug Engelbart as much as the next guy, but you’d think we could move beyond 1968, the icon, the mouse and the window. Multi-touch, Surface, Coverflow and PicLens point the way toward other methods of navigating through collections of objects.

The point of interest for me is that PicLens was written for the web, not the desktop. And not the web of the browser window, but a space outside of that comfortable frame. Once the web becomes the primary environment for innovation in human/computer interaction, the function of the desktop changes. Even the metaphor of a “desktop” starts to make less sense.

There are many examples of terminal imaginations, visions so strong and so complete they leave no oxygen for followers. Shakespeare, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett left no room for others. (See Bloom’s Ruin the Sacred Truths) Engelbart’s vision has dominated a generation.

As the network is extended to more devices and more locations, historically this has meant a return to cruder interaction models. The introduction and success of the iPhone may have broken the pattern, it actually expands the available modes of interaction over the desktop. We are at the edge of an expansion of our interaction models; it’s generational, and digital natives will have to carry the torch.

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More Rules for Startups: Embrace Error

Published March 10, 2008 by cgerrish

Here are some of my rules for startups:

  • Have a great product that everyone wants
  • Enable huge margins by creating great value
  • Reduce the production cost of your product to as close to zero as possible
  • Sell lots of your product
  • Make it easy for your customers to pay you
  • If you don’t have a hit product, preserve your ability to make errors

Efficiency in a start up business has to do with your margin for error. The larger your margin for error, the better your chance of success. You want to use resources wisely so that you can make more errors. If you are a model of efficiency and save money on all the right things and don’t invest in making errors, it won’t matter.

When you find the right product or service, and the stars align, you’ll want to be able to put your foot on the gas. That takes money, it’s the moment when you test your belief in your product. It’s hiring at the right time, scaling infrastructure, buying advertising and providing adequate customer service. If your company has money, you maintain control. If you don’t, you’ll lose equity to investors in exchange for the funds to go from beta to launch.

And a final piece of advice, understand what the words ‘burn rate’ mean. Until your burn rate has crossed over the zero point, and your model is delivering on the margins in your plan, you’re on the clock. It works just like basketball, you miss every shot you don’t take. If you’re open and you have your shot, you’ve got to take it.

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