“webapps”
49 posts under this tag.
I’ve been drooling as much as anyone for one ever since Jobs announced it last January 9 in a brilliant demo (just for some historical fun, compare it with the 1968 “Mother of all demos”), and an interesting, in-depth review of it by Bruce Tognazzi got me thinking more deeply about it and all the possibilities it foretells. But just as I was guzzling the last Kool-aid dregs I started choking: I found out, to my unending disbelief, that it’s going to be a closed platform—meaning one won’t be able to independently develop software for it. This matters. It’s not a chink in the diamond, it’s a rupture—tantamount to forcing you to surf only within apple.com. The web could of course be an innovation lifeline but I’m skeptical of Safari—it’s not a good web 2.0 base at the desktop, I doubt it’ll be one for the palmtop. And my experience with the Blackberry is that mobile-device webapps demand more speed and immediacy (and ubiquity!) than the current web can provide. So no, it will at best be only a partial solution. (The reason given for the apartheid, security, has—to use a commenter’s phrase—the faint whiff of horse manure.)
So that’s that. I now want to remark a little on that iPhone review I just mentioned. Bruce Tognazzi is no Joe Blogger, he was Apple employee #66 and is a famous interaction designer. His website, AskTog, is a classic resource on interface design. But it’s not his interaction insights I want to point out now—though there are plenty of good ones. What impressed me most was his language. Three quotes in particular strike me as true language-forging moments.
What strikes me about the iPhone interface in general is that it gives ordinary people access to features that have been the private purview of the young and the geeky. For example, cell phones have long had contact lists, but they were typically difficult to build, maintain, and sync.
The young and the geeky. Witness the birth of a new wordchain. It won’t be the last time you’ll hear it.
The industrial design is brilliant. Apple has created another piece of high-tech jewelry. Some fogies of advancing years have suggested the initial price point of $499 is too high. They fail to understand: The “cool” of owning this phone, particularly for the early adopters, is worth an easy $497, bringing the phone itself down to $2 even.
High-tech jewelry. That’s a beautiful, zeit-geist defining phrase—electronics “becoming… works of art to be fondled in stores before a purchase.”E
Those of you young and technologically inclined may find this difficult to believe, but the average cell phone user cannot use many features you may find standard, such as call-waiting, call-forwarding, and conferencing. Apple has made these features completely accessible to all but those dangling their legs off the far end of the bell shaped curve.
There’s an image! It reminds me a lot, both alluding to pseudo-scientific science WP, WP, of that classic Spanish insult, ” No tener ni dos dedos de frente!” (“Not have even two fingers of forehead!”)—trying to find an appropriate translation, btw, I stumbled upon an instant new classic, ” Tiraron al niño y se quedaron con la placentaF” (“They threw the child and kept the placenta!”).
Three good, non-obvious answers:
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That we participate in it.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
You can use words like ‘platform’ and ‘web application’ and ‘Ajax’ and ‘desktop functionality’ but really in essence the most amazing thing about the web today is the concept of sharing is becoming increasingly OK. We are slowly coming out of our cocoons, testing the waters and sharing out things that we know, and things that we love or hate.
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That we can make (some) sense of it at all.
People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs). In some ways I find this the most surprising of all. For years we assumed people had trouble with trees, never mind graphs. And suddenly hyperlinks come along, and as long as there is a Back button, they work.
I would argue that the “back” button is one of the two or three defining constraints of interaction design. I’d even go so far to say that it’s more significant than the hyperlink.
“Back” doesn’t just mean “go backwards”: it stands for the entire paradigm of user-controlled navigation, arbitrary hyperlinking, and back-as-undo that everyone has come to expect from the behavior of software.. The back button is a contract web design has with our users.
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That it is a universal namespace.
The most important thing about the Web is that it is a universal namespace, something that has not been available before, not at this level of precision.
Benny Gustavsson, On the Semantic Web languagePDF
Click a message checkbox, then, holding shift, click another one a couple of messages apart—all intermediate checkboxes are automatically checked.
One of the most universal uses of the ShiftWP key is to aid in selecting ranges (think how you use it to select text or several files) and yet it was only today that it occurred to me that it just might work for checkboxes. I blame years of crappy webmail for that. I checked Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail (the “standard version”, the cool beta version does implement something along these lines), and my university mail and it won’t work there—which is bollocks: it’s a tremendously useful feature that costs near nothing to implement.
I doubt someone would find this too useful but I smiled today when I found about the guess YubNub command. You feed it text, it gulps the language it’s in. A great way to showcase YubNub’s open-ended fun, courtesy of Xerox research. It would have been a godsend when I was dealing with Imagery’s multilingual rush (Oh, how GMail angered me then! Smart enough to correctly spellcheck anything I gave her, yet coyly keeping the language name to herself!). Hope I need it again soon.
For all of you that aren’t on the YubNub wagon yet, you can play with it here—but it won’t be even half as much fun ;).
And since we already seem to be on a language landslide, some months ago I found out playing with Google Translate that when you translate a website from Chinese to English (which is currently beta), you can hover on a sentence to get the original Chinese fragment in a quick popup. Mighty cool. All the more impressive a feature coming from a website. (Now let’s only hope they plan to add it to the other language pairs too…)
Final language tidbit: translate “Hello, how are you?” to Spanish with Google. Your immediate response is “¿Hola, cómo eres?,” sucking the life out of even the hardiest machine-translation enthusiast.
This is, I think, a pretty good glimpse of one of the roles I want to play the next decade—don’t give up on me! :)
Something else is going on here. To a large extent, value on the Internet is not being created by businesses, as much as they want all kinds of credit and money for creating this wonderful value. Inventors, folks who are coming up with new tools, are creating it. Some of them are well harnessed by businesses, but it turns out that businesses don’t have to exist for them to harness themselves with the Net and get these things out there. For example, the person who created Eudora is a University of Illinois fellow who did it basically for himself and people he knew. In terms of quality, Eudora is visibly beyond any other email program. It makes you wonder what’s wrong with companies, what prevents them from doing the right thing when a random person puts his exquisite tool out on the Net for free. This happened with Eudora, and later with Mosaic, which led to a commercial version, Netscape Navigator.
The inventors of these tools are not crazed codgers in basements. They are, by-and-large, young people with a sense of social and cultural responsibility who want things to be better for everybody. They are as valuable as our snazziest scientists, but are not accorded the respect or rewards of the snazzy scientists. They are taken for granted more than they should be. Something is wrong if we think inventors are a lower order of being than theoretical scientists.
Lo! I am weary of my wisdom,
like the bee that hath gathered too much honey;
I need hands outstretched to take it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra EEM
Whoa, just discovered SongMeanings an hour ago. Excellent idea (add criticism to lyrics), clean interface (several ads notwithstanding), massive execution (Artists: 25,245 | Lyrics: 295,933 | Albums: 11,073 | Members: 228,392 | Comments: 723,538). Can’t believe never heard of it before.
Perhaps most intriguing is how clearly it shows the possibilities (instant participation, individuality, the work is the history, evolution is visible, filtering by time is easy, contributions are isolated) and limitations (signal-to-noise ratio, self-healing’s hard or impossible, the work is the history, lack of structure, lack of pruning, parallelism, unnecessary repetition, digressiveness) of criticism based on sequential comments. Reddit’s comment pages are good examples of how simple voting can advance the medium (because though we lack a name for it, “sequential comments/notes” is a medium, just like comics is the medium of sequential images), but, fuck, for the purposes of criticism my bets for medium still go to collaborative-writing, wiki, (my) WikiCriticism. (If only I could fork myself into better, harder-working, single-minded mes…)
From the surprise interview of Sergey BrinWP, Google’s cofounder, at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference. The notes ↓ here are just to guide you, you have to hear either the clip or the full interview at ITConversations to get how wittyEEM this is.
John Battelle: There’s been a dialogue throughout the conference, Google’s come up once or twice, and I wanted to sort of pin some of the highlights of that dialogue and ask you to respond to them.
One of the first that comes to mind is a conversation I had with Terry SemelWP, where he—I asked him about Google—and he said, very respectfully, how much he thinks the technology is extraordinary, and of course how Yahoo! build their search technology, and so on. But, then he pulled back and said: “Let’s judge Google as what it is. Google is now a portal and by my estimation,”—and I may quote him not exactly word for word—”Google is number four.” How do you respond to that framing?
Sergey Brin: Yeah, and I just wasn’t here to see him, but I read a couple of news stories on points like that, but based on my reading of that, that also’d make us the underdog.
Battelle: Um-ha-ha! Very wise! You knew my next question…
Brin: And… I think that’s where we are. Further I’d add to that if you’ve… you’ve had the pleasure of being at the Google cafe…
Battelle: Yeah…
Brin: I think our food is pretty good, we continuously try to improve it, but in terms of… [laughs] kind of the volume…
Battelle: Was that a non sequitur?
Brin: Well the volume and the quantity we try to deliver if we were to rank among cafes and restaurant chains, I mean, I don’t know, we’re not in the top 100 or 1000 even, probably.
Silence. Laughing uproar.
danah boyd’s new essay on digital privacy and intimacy seems to be everywhere right now and yet (or because of that?) I had been studiously avoiding it. It was negligent of me, because it really is that good (and that unsettling).
If gossip is too delicious to turn your back on and Flickr, Bloglines, Xanga, Facebook, etc. provide you with an infinite stream of gossip, you’ll tune in. Yet, the reason that gossip is in your genes is because it’s the human equivalent to grooming. By sharing and receiving gossip, you build a social bond between another human. Yet, what happens when the computer is providing you that gossip asynchronously? I doubt i’m building a meaningful relationship with you when i read your MySpace CuteKitten78. You don’t even know that i’m watching your life. Are you really going to be there when i need you?
Sure, strangers are one thing but what about people you sorta know? I have no doubt that strong ties can be maintained through these systems, provided that other forms of synchronous engagement complement the gossip feed. But i also believe that it gives you a fake sense of intimacy for people you don’t really know that well. And that fake sense of intimacy is both misleading and dreadfully disappointing.
At Blogher, i moderated a panel on “Sensitive Topics” and one of the things that the panelists said over and over again was how hard it was to handle the strangers who contacted them wanting their help. The thing is that to those public bloggers, these are strangers… but those strangers have been following that blogger’s life for quite some time, drawing parallels, finding common ground, feeling connected. It’s a devastating blow to realize that the blogger doesn’t feel the same way. Without that connection, why should they get involved? Often, they do out of a desire to be helpful, a desire to not see someone in pain. This is manageable the first few times. But what happens when there are new people every day? What happens when there are hundreds of people every day?
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Being faced with information overload can be a curse. You want to react, you want to notice. But it can make you exhausted. Worse, it can devastate you.
Facebook is giving me the “gift” of infinite gossip. But i don’t want it. I can’t handle it. And i’m not sure anyone’s really ready to receive the One Ring. But it sure sounds precious upfront.
So again it all comes down to “celebrity”, doesn’t it? I for one didn’t notice that weird, contorted word creeping in but it has become the talisman. It’s what danah is talking about in the above paragraphs: celebrity, painfully confused with intimacy. You can now obsess and lurk Jane Blog as you did Jennifer Aniston through the tabloids—and it will be just as fun and just as empty.
Unless you interact, that is. (And that’s the digital promise and perhaps one possible counter-measure for sanity: to limit your feed to those people you engage meaningfully with.)
Blogging for dollars is the pretty good, pretty interesting cover article from this month’s Business 2.0 about how the mainstream blogs (MSB?WP) like Boing Boing, Fark, Metafilter, TechCrunch ELZR, Digg or Dooce are monetizing their traffic. Thorough and filled with lots of $ data, what surprised me the most about it was how obviously promotional it was. It’s basically an extended infomercial on blog-advertising, which doesn’t take away that it makes several good insights on media and how technology is turning us into one-man-bandsELZR, but, still, deliberately mislabeling content is just an euphemism for lying.
Ever since I read Paul Graham’s The Submarine I had been on the lookout for PR campaigns and this is one of the clearest (or should I say most blatant?) examples of it I’ve seen. The client? That’s an easy one, John Battelle’s Federated Media1.
Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren’t about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms..
Trend articles.. are almost always the work of PR firms. Once you know how to read them, it’s straightforward to figure out who the client is.
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