Tag: twitter

Writing to the Stream: As Time Goes By

Published July 7, 2008 by cgerrish

Jon Udell talks about teaching civilians about syndication. This, of course, makes me think of Heraclitus. Udell would like his local school to stop posting calendars in PDF format and start using something like iCal, a format with a more formal structure. The idea is to write events that stream across a calendar– something that can be subscribed to, parsed, mixed and mashed up. The reason that it’s hard to change the way people think about data is that the stream is not part of the metaphor we put in front of our operating systems.

There is nothing permanent except change.
– Heraclitus

“The file system is dead,” The guy who said that agrees with Jon Udell. His name is David Gelernter, and he’s one of the first people to talk about organizing data in terms of time rather than space. Lifestreams was something Gelernter talked about before there was Flickr, FaceBook, Twitter or FriendFeed. It’s simply a matter of changing the metaphor of the file system from a desk, file cabinets and a trashcan to something that more adequately fits the contours of our lives. In case you hadn’t noticed, we live our lives in both space and time.

What if instead of saving to a file or printing something out, we saved to a stream. What if that was acting within the normal metaphor for Human-Computer Interaction? We’ve come a long way with the graphic user interface metaphors developed by Doug Engelbart and the folks at Xerox Parc, but we’re in a period of transition. We’re moving from the solipsistic unNetworked desktop computer to the always already connected Network dashboard. We have an opportunity to expand the user interface metaphor we place between ourselves and the new internet operating system to include the concepts of time and the stream.

The other starting point for thinking about time-bound, documented objects in a stream is with Bruce Sterling’s idea of Spimes. He discusses the kind of design thinking that might go in to creating Spimes in his book Shaping Things. Boing Boing offers this summary:

A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities. A universe of Spimes is an informational universe…

Sterling is speaking to the culture of industrial designers and the ecosystem of the manufactured object. But, of course, this doesn’t help with the problem of Jon Udell’s local school calendar.

Just as we’re always already part of the Network, all the marks we make are part of a stream. We keep the stream private and the make sections of it public when we choose to. It’s with Ward Cunningham’s idea of the Wiki that the document as a current public version begins to get purchase. Google Docs extends the metaphor to the typical office application suite. As Microsoft moves into the Network with Live Mesh, it has some opportunities to create foundational pieces of the new metaphor.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
– Heraclitus

To understand the state of writing to the stream, all we need to do is look at what FriendFeed aggregates. To understand what the most common writing implements are, we can examine what makes up the flow that passes through FriendFeed. No doubt we’d find the usual suspects, Blogs via RSS, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, etc. Upcoming is the tool that writes events to the stream. Where, you may ask, is Microsoft’s Office in all this? While Outlook can export an iCal file, it is unable to publish it to a stream. It’s as though the program is unaware that it’s part of a Network and meant to serve humans who live their lives in a stream of space and time. The writing implements and storage metaphors of the new internet operating system must take the stream of time into the foundation of their UI metaphor. Once our tools understand and inhabit their proper ecosystem, Jon Udell’s local school will stop posting calendars as PDFs.

Of course, there is a psychological hurdle when it comes to incorporating time into our new tool set. It reminds us that we are mortals, and our time is not unlimited.

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Bootstrapping the Live Web: Declaring Independence from the Selfish Meme

Published July 4, 2008 by cgerrish

There are some distinctions that need to be made when thinking about the creation of new modes of interaction on the Network. A number of metaphors are currently employed when talking about services like Twitter (Identi.ca imitation is the sincerest form of flattery). The judgement we seem to be trying to make is whether this new thing will go viral, or will gain broad market acceptance. When we answer questions about the new thing in this way, we’re pretending to be venture capitalists. What we’re asking is: will my investment pay off? And since we have no real skin in the game, we’re really asking, will Fred Wilson’s investment pay off for his investors? There’s an assumption at the base of the question about what’s really important. In a sense, it’s a moral position about what’s most valuable and a definition of the fundamental drivers of innovation. Thus the endless questions about “business model.”

After the money question, we’ll ask what most people will do. Will this new thing be adopted and become common practice? There are a number of binary oppositions we use as sledgehammers to beat the daylights out of any emerging form of life. These tools are a substitute for thought and discovery, they stand between us and what is unfolding before our eyes.

Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants
Young People vs. Old People
Early Adopters vs. Most People
The Enterprise vs. The Consumer
Geeks vs. Jocks
You vs. Your Grandmother

Tools for thought need to be put into question even as we employ them. When we thoughtlessly pick them up and use them as a hammer, we’re just repeating memes. The meme is speaking us and just asserting its evolutionary destiny as a selfish gene. When a meme is repeated to a group in conversation and all heads nod knowingly, no thought has taken place. Rather, this is an example as language as a virus.

So when does thinking begin as we continue our conversation on these new modes of the Network? It starts with a question and the deepening of the question. The Answer puts an end to the dialogue. Think of an answer like a software release; there’s alpha, beta, release candidates, golden masters — but in the end everything launches with bugs and has a version number assigned to it. The only way to move the ball down the field is to return to the question.

We’re starting to see the emergence of the Live Web from the established Static Web. The mistakes we make at this point give us important information about the future landscape. Twitter built a static web application using a content management system metaphor. But by opening pipes to the live web through SMS, XMPP and Track, Twitter enabled a compelling live web experience. Twitter’s ensuing stability problems have taught us that static web architecture can’t support live web usage at scale. The team there now has to start over with a live messaging architecture that can support the experience that was discovered. In this effort, Twitter’s simplicity is its friend. Oddly, the imitators don’t seem to have comprehended this lesson.

The interesting conversation around Twitter isn’t about whether it will make someone money or whether your grandmother will use it. Rather it’s the question about whether it’s a real foundational piece in bootstrapping the coming Live Web. Twitter’s Follow and Track relationship models have uncovered a much larger social space for real time interaction. Where the real-time web as IM is largely point-to-point, allowing two previously connected individuals to trade messages, Twitter enables a space where meeting someone new is a possibility. Our bootstrapping activity is only partially about technology, fundamentally it has to be about how we use the service right now and our ongoing conversation about its possibilities.

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Track: The Future Tense of ‘To Search’

Published June 23, 2008 by cgerrish

Trying to understand what track might become if it emerges again. Every time I start to deepen the question, a new train of thought is unleashed. Track is not a well known gesture on the Network, but its potential value is unlimited.

A glint in a riverbed, images of the goldrush, Das Rheingold and Deadwood rush through my mind’s eye. Certain basic commodities are so rare and valuable that men are moved to desperate action to acquire them. Track is more like water or search, it’s rare now, but will eventually be as common as clicking on a link. It will be a primary mode for hunter-gatherers on the Network trying to find something in this particular moment. And in this moment, the glint remains obscured from vision.

Walking down the street with an economist. I spot a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk. “Hey look,” I say, ” a twenty dollar bill.” My friend the economist snorts, “don’t be ridiculous, if it really was a twenty dollar bill someone would have picked it up by now.”

Karoli Kuns says “I’ll drop a link in Twitter” as part of a live conversation across the Network. I’m listening on time delay via RSS/Sync/iPhone. It’s just a casual gesture, no one questions what she means. Think about the ripple effect of really simple publishing, and the simple findability of the item.

A commercial rolls across the television screen in the background, a bank commercial:

Real-time info matters.
Chase what matters.

Certain elements of the periodic table only appear under very special circumstances, they’re called transuranic elements. They don’t appear naturally, to the extent they exist they’ve been artificially produced in nuclear reactors or particle accelerators. Track only exists in a rarified air, a particular set of environmental conditions had to occur. The basic requirement is the real-time web, where there’s enough volume of traffic to allow track to return valuable results. Twitter is relatively small, but it has established itself as a primary gesture market with enough data structure to allow for some interesting queries to return satisfying results.

Given the general instability of Twitter, one assumes the staff there is concentrating on the basic publish and subscribe capabilities. As they discuss the new architecture, they’ve made mention of messaging rather than a traditional CMS. That suggests that track could be meaningfully supported, but they don’t seem to have an expansive understanding of what they’ve enabled.

The gesture space around track is completely new. While it’s difficult to explain what Twitter is, a solid definition of track is even more elusive. The initial use case is the extension of a directed social graph through keywords to create a listener in the live web’s primary gesture market. This creates opportunities for interactions in real time.

While chat might be the obvious first interaction, there are others that will emerge:

A clarification
Extension of a concept
A negotiation
Relaying a message to a different social graph
An agreement on a transaction

Complex structures can be built from simple gestures. A primary market for gestures combined with track could be the primary mechanism to enable VRM. When connecting customers and vendors in real time, it will be easier to filter a single stream of gestures rather than the whole web. Now some might argue for a special stream just for VRM transactions, but I disagree. When thinking of categories, I tend to agree with that guy who said something like — categories are important, but “everything is miscellaneous.”

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@SteveGillmor : Plan B, and Playing ‘Dealer’ in Real Time

Published June 3, 2008 by cgerrish

There are moments when a crucible unleashes both light and heat. In Michael Hiltzik’s book Dealers of Lightning there’s a description of a weekly meeting run by Bob Taylor at Xerox Parc’s Computer Science Lab in the 1970s. The meeting was just known as “Dealer.” The name was derived from the book about blackjack called “Beat the Dealer,” by an MIT Math professor named Edmund O. Thorpe.

In casino blackjack the dealer plays against everyone at the table. In Taylor’s variant a single researcher would propose an idea or project, then stand alone to defend it from dissection by his peers. …The pitiless judgements dispensed at Dealer derived from the ethos of the engineer, who is taught that an answer can be right or wrong, “one” or “zero,” but not anything in between. It was felt that if you were wrong you were done no favor in being told you were right, or half right, or had made a decent try.

The output of Xerox Parc and Bob Taylor’s meetings was nothing short of personal computing as we know it today. Every element of the graphic user interface, networking, social behavior over electronic communication media, the laptop, the Macintosh, object oriented programing, ethernet — found its origin in that fertile period.

I thought of ‘Dealer’ while listening to the Gillmor Gang talk to FriendFeed co-founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit. The Gang was trying to teach Bret and Paul the old lesson that the street has its own uses for things. Feeding friends is one thing, but understanding that you have an opportunity to tap into a strong current of the zeitgeist is another.

You can listen to Dealer Live here:

Gillmor Gang 20080530

To understand the show’s theme of Plan B, you sorta needed to be listening all along. The writing is a sound check of the ongoing jam session, the riffs are well established and the players all have distinctive sounds. It’s a textual interlude in the orchestral maneuvers of the fierce urgency of now. If you have an “A,” it’s the “B” that creates the positive bid-to-cover ratio. The basic idea is that markets create the demand for common technical standards. And there’s an irresistible movement of the Network toward the real time flow of interactions. Real time interactions on the Network have had a limited scope. The “track” function in Twitter has opened a window to a powerful set of new interactions. “Track” works because Twitter is a primary market for gestures, but if @Ev, @Biz and @Jack don’t understand the lightning they’ve unleashed, those of us who’ve had a taste will need to consider Plan B.

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