from Christopher Nolan's film "Memento"

PR pro, author, blogger, quantum physics’ excellent guy and friend Joel Postman just posted a new article What Do They Mean by Social Any Way?

I recommend you to go read it first.

OK, welcome back. As I read Joel’s post I was processing some ideas in the background which may or may not be unrelated, these are the thoughts his post triggered, anyway:

1) “More” social network features don’t necessarily translate into “better” social networks. Hence the socialness of a network is not necessarily helped by tons of social features. Facebook have also been proof of it, doing regular dashboard cleanups, throwing all those fancy apps to the background. Thank God.

It can be argued that if you throw in more social features, your sample of good social features should also grow, because you’re trying many more new ideas at once and more of them will stick. the problem with this approach is that you’re at risk of making the thing cluttered and incomprehensible. Facebook was this close to getting there at some point, they reverted course since then.

2) On the other hand, producing applications that are poor in features greatly reduces your potential of being useful for a wide public. Overload of features is dubbed by some “featuritis” but this problem is really debatable. What they’re frequently arguing against is really against clutter and making too many features available at once, at the wrong time or the wrong places.

Two main desirable features of any application on any platform are discoverability and user interface simplicity. When succesful, these usually go together.

The key to success in these matters is threefold:

1. Empower users, give them all the features they need, never less of it, don’t subestimate your users. “featuritis” is misplaced. those who use that term are actually talking about clutter, which is a different kind of problem.
2. Hide the less frequently used features so that the main functions don’t become incomprehensible, or difficult to tell from those that are rarely used.
3. Make the less frequently used features discoverable. human beings are unable to learn everything at once, they generally do progress bit by bit. Your features are hidden, but they’re not too far away that they become a buried treasure. You encourage your users to discover more bit by bit after they learn the basics, with a learning curve that is not too steep.

I’ts strange to me how poorly understood this still is in year 2010, after decades of application design.
The Web 2.0 was beneficial in some ways, and has been detrimental in many others, one of them is a “Memento”-like sense of always being discovering things for the first time, when in actuality these findings are what we’ve collectively known all along.

Not a critique to Joel, obviously… he’s not a designer after all… but the voodoo way of dealing with these matters in many Web 2.0 circles is really remarkable.

                          

Image via Wikipedia

In the news today:

At Mobile World Congress™ 2010, Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced advancements to the Adobe® Flash® Platform including the unveiling of Adobe® AIR® on mobile devices, a consistent runtime for standalone applications to come out of the Open Screen Project™, an industry-wide initiative led by Adobe that has grown to close to 70 ecosystem partners. With support for the Android™ platform expected in 2010, AIR provides developers with a feature-rich environment for delivering rich applications outside the mobile browser and across multiple operating systems via mobile marketplaces and app stores. AIR leverages mobile specific features from Flash® Player 10.1, is optimized for high performance on mobile screens and designed to take advantage of native device capabilities for a richer and more immersive user experience.

Adobe also announced that a beta of Flash Player 10.1 was made available to content providers and mobile developers worldwide. With the general availability expected in the first half of 2010, Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent runtime release of the Open Screen Project enabling uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and high definition (HD) videos across screens including new tablet devices, smartphones, netbooks, smartbooks, desktops and other consumer electronics.

This is a game changer with big repercussions:

1. Google/HTC Nexus One is only first of a generation of Android phones to support Adobe Flash, with many other supporting platforms to come.
2. Adobe Flash brings in 6 million developers, all video content and Flash-based applications and online games available on the web… to all platforms but iPhone.  Some dozen million apps are low quality, right… just like bad and extremely successful Youtube videos.
3. Apple continue to tout HTML5 and native apps for iPhone and iPad. Steve continues to be hypocritical and lure the faithful macheadkind only.
4. Google do both HTML5 and native apps, but Flash content is still massively popular and supported by Android
5. Security hazzards happen on the Android and Flash fronts, which threaten to make a lot of bad noise, but they’re a good trade-off for openness for most people.
6. Apple become (once again) a boutique shop for the US and Europe, without markets of global scale comparable to the Android family (you know… the other 5.5 billion people out there)
7. Microsoft continue to be largely irrelevant, they attempt to make another iteration of Windows Mobile on Zune or something as b0rk3d as that, and try to tie it in with Windows 8   (a ’sh*t halo’ effect of sorts)
8. A few stupid network operators and stupid smartphone builders  make Android forks with different UI and different apps, possibly even different application markets but they stupidly die soon enough. This tends to favour Flash apps that run more or less the same on all Androids, but reality will be more heterogeneous with a few great native-Android apps and a larger number of Flash ones.

UPDATE:  a few hours after I posted this article,  prediction #7 is already ongoing… we’ll see 

                          

The other day my friend @cigumo sent me this quote, which was part of an article  posted to Play This Thing:

“Game” is a term that obscures the stark potential of this form, it
sells the world on childish entertainments while delivering the most
potent mechanism of mind control ever conceived.

What else do you call the capacity to develop something in five weeks that results in an average of dozens of hours of compulsive clicking
from tens of millions of people?

I think that’s a negative way to put it, and the mechanicist point of view is nothing to call home about.

Suspension of disbelief has always been the whole point behind works of art, very long before -even thousands of years before-  Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term.

How long does it take a musician pro to compose a song?  How many hum and headbang to that song?
Not to mention how many will dance to it.

Or even further… how does a good cinema auteur manipulate emotions?
How does she transmit a profound philosophical conundrum, or the author in a novel manages to make you ‘feel it’, more than lending it to intellectualisation?

Time is in such cases quite an irrelevant variable, the most surprising thing is not the ability of videogames to cause effects on people (nor that of any other fine arts, for that matter).
The real interesting thing is man’s abilities to create his own experience through information bits projected on his senses.

Hamlet and Horatio at the Graveyard

That’s who we are. Amazingly powerful, autonomous self-replicant machines with amazing information processing power.

What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! — Hamlet (Act II, Scene II)   W.S.

Arts are a part of who we are and it’s up to us to refine our senses, and our appreciation skills to achieve the best of our potential, there’s nothing special about videogames, other than a remarkable ability in some of the artists who create them to achieve something closer to the grial of suspension of disbelief.

Having dominated the physical world that surrounds us, man looks to dominate himself and to create his own novel experiences outside of the physical world.

That’s actually the amazing thing:  the real beauty of man striving to rethink himself, so that he can recreate himself.

In his own image.

                          

No snobbery really.  If you can’t tell the difference between hotmail and a service that cares for their customers, that is technically superior, or well designed, you won’t be able to tell the difference when we’re doing a bad job.  And that’s just not on.

Using a hotmail account for business also means you created that lousy account of yours too many years ago and you haven’t had the curiosity to learn, streamline your workflow, or do anything to improve your online communications.  Bad for business.

You may see things differently, but that doesn’t change the fact that people you want to talk to will notice it,  people who are perfectionists and possibly even more snob than I am.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

What’s worse: in all those years you have been subject to spam, trojan viruses, and have had your account compromised, possibly more than once and you didn’t even notice, or didn’t care. (not to mention to have my inbox spammed by you with a netbot residing in your PCs is BAD).  Bad for business too.

It may seem stupid to some, but for people like me, an email address is a token that can tell a few things about a person’s curiosity, creativity,entreprenurial drive and technical ability.

I’ve told myself not to be so snob too many times, but in the end my suspicions have been confirmed time and time again with incredible accuracy.

It’s not snobbery,  it’s merely the commonsensical, rational, business-savvy thing to do.

                          

As you probably noticed, Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t pass the vruz test of proper e-reader device design.

One key element I mentioned in my feature set of 7 items was support for people with low vision and blindness should be a standard feature.  And I cited not just moral reasons why this should be this way, but also marketing and user experience reasons.  It’s quite shocking to me that no know-it-alls have gotten this right, or provided it as an afterthought.

Now the Feds seem to agree with me on this one at least, as reported by Eric Engleman of Seattle’s Tech Flash

Feds to universities: don’t buy Kindles until they work for blind

The U.S. Justice Department today announced agreements with three universities over their use of Amazon’s electronic reader, the Kindle DX. Under the agreements, Case Western Reserve of Cleveland, Pace University of New York City and Reed College of Portland, Ore., will not buy or promote the Kindle DX or other e-readers “unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision.”

There’s a sore need for human designers who can design for other humans.   I have not lost all hope yet.

                          

Laying around in the previous long-form blog from back in 2007 there’s a few articles I wrote on innovation.  Hindsight and time are powerful teachers, and some things that felt urgent at the time -in the great scheme of things- become irrelevant with time:  the difference between importance and urgence. There’s however a few topics that keep coming back, and we seem to never totally master, perhaps because they an ingredient of the very fabric of what makes us humans.

Wake to a new day striving for perfection knowing  it’s a battle you’ve already lost, but you have to go out there and fight it anyway. Innovation is one of those matters where many people have many things to say every day, never totally mastering it, and few are truly prepared to shed some light and make some progress in the field of ideas.

Just so that I  provide some context on the subjects I’ll be dealing with in subsequent and unevenly distributed posts in the coming months, here’s a mostly unadulterated  repost of my first attempt in talking about these matters.

Repost follows:

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

I’ve posted about Lautréamont before, and how he perceived progress back in 1870, but really… that’s hardly an original thing to do, we could name quite a few others who have been inspired -oftentimes blinded in fascination- by the brilliance of his sayings.

It’s not without a great deal of irony that us technologists/artists/scientists/geeks turned entrepreneurs look back for inspiration in the great revolutionaries of our history when what we’re actually after all the time is gradual, creative destruction, an evolutionary approach to growth through mutation.

Ideally, continuous innovation, or innovation as a process instead of periodical big-bangs would be the perfect approach, to satisfy both a conservative sense of self-preservation and the imperious need for renewal we’re always trying to realise.

Professor VJ, in his great post “The Renewable Tradition – Part III” very evidently agrees with me when quoting Lautréamont, but he goes much farther to say :

As we sit at our Death Terminals and wait for the next big bang of creative potential to immerse ourselves in, we cannot help but wonder: “Is there another way out? Which way is out? This way? This? How do we move beyond the newness of a tradition typecast as being avant-garde but always trending toward the ‘innovative’?”

and he quotes:

Sukenick:

Innovation bears the same relation to the mainstream as does a concept car to a factory model. Or even better, a hot rod to the mass production version. The former comparison stresses the experimental aspect of innovative work; the latter stresses the excitement, the extra intensity, the pure thrill that comes with the riskiness of high stakes.

Rings so true to me. Professor VJ then goes on to try to identify patterns of possible innovation processes (though he doesn’t get to name them this way, or ellaborate on a systematic approach to identifying them)

In other words: remixologists who play with innovative genres are practicing forms of extreme writing. But here the term “innovation” also brings to mind other terms like “technocapitalism,” “market timing,” “fashion statement,” etc., in that the further you can push the envelope, the more entrepreneurial your writing gesture may be, especially in relation to the way one employs new media technologies that challenge the concept of writing to its core. Could it be that the degree one is more likely to find ways to create measurable value to their embodied praxis using new media technologies is directly correlated to the more attracted they will become to the latest innovations being invented in the commercial marketplace?

In the end he leaves us without a clear conclusion, apparently without venturing to offer an opinion, or definitive statement of any kind… which nevertheless still works well for me as some food for thought. So he borrows Suckeniks voice again to say:

Obviously there’s no progress in art. Progress toward what? The avant-garde is a convenient propaganda device, but when it wins the war everything is avant-garde, which leaves us just about where we were before.

There’s no progress in art. There’s no progress in its implementation techniques.

That’s the field of technology. All art has always been preceded by some form of technological advance.

But art is not the same thing as ideas. Art is one possible form of implementation of someone’s ideas, so let me say it:

There can be progress in the field of ideas.

This “remixology” Professor VJ talks about works its magic at implementation level, taking elements from disparate works of art.

But borrowing elements of art, is not the same thing as borrowing the ideas that drove someone to create them.

You could end up borrowing the symbol, but not the context that gives it a meaning… or giving it another meaning entirely.

I’m going well out of bounds there, but interestingly semiotics is one field where the Situationists felt at home (another “revolution”)

And guess who did the Situationists quote ? Well, Debord referred to Lautréamont too, of course.

Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the bringing together of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.

…

Lautréamont advanced so far in this direction that he is still partly misunderstood even by his most ostentatious admirers. In spite of his obvious application of this method to theoretical language in Poésies (drawing particularly on the ethical maxims of Pascal and Vauvenargues) where Lautréamont strives to reduce the argument, through successive concentrations, to maxims alone–a certain Viroux caused considerable astonishment three or four years ago by demonstrating conclusively that Maldoror is one vast detournement of Buffon and other works of natural history, among other things. That the prosaists of Figaro, such as this Viroux himself, were able to see this as a justification for disparaging Lautreamont, and that others believed they had to defend him by praising his insolence, only testifies to the intellectual debility of these two camps of dotards in courtly combat with each other. A slogan like “Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it” is still as poorly understood, and for the same reasons, as the famous phrase about the poetry that “must be made by all.”

Apart from Lautréamont’s work–whose appearance so far ahead of its time has to a great extent preserved it from a precise critique–the tendencies toward detournement that can be observed in contemporary expression are for the most part unconscious or incidental; and it is in the advertising industry, more than in a decaying aesthetic production, that one can find the best examples.

So how do we stop awaiting for innovation to happen unconsciously, incidentally, publicitarianly ?

Nurture and embrace continuous innovation, instead of mere decaying aesthetic production.

The irony is that, again… we will find some clues on how to achieve the holy grail of evolutionary development in the works of revolutionaries like Lautréamont and the Situationists.

                          

And by a product I mean, not e-reader technology, but something human beings can use (and are willing to buy).

Image via Wikipedia

1)  Touchscreen  ( back and forth keys are a definitive no-no). You have to be able to flip pages with your fingers. Still with me?  Remember, touchscreen.  Throw your Kindle thing away.

2) The display must cover the entire surface of the device, with no frame.  Books have no frames.  You can have controls.  Eight of your fingers are always on the back of the book, why place buttons on the front side?

3) Unless you have perfect e-paper (and you most likely don’t have it yet)  it’s better to deliver a high density LCD screen, say 1280×800 in 10″.   A rotary control on the side should serve to control brightness. Or better, the device should come with an auto-brightness mode that self-corrects in tune with ambient light. Make the auto mode optional.

4)  A non-ingredient:  you don’t want an OS,  you want to read things.  So your most recent books should be available on the main screen. Not applications. People don’t want applications the same way they don’t awant shelves, nor book covers.  Shelves and book covers are a minor nuisance when you want to read a book. You must be able to switch between thematic bookshelves that must be readily available with a single gesture or keystroke. A rotary control with three positions (back, forth and select) can do this job. All user interface must be hidden most of the time.

5) Make it easy to share pages with other users. I’m reading this page and I want to beam it over wi-fi to my colleagues, and have that displayed on their screens automatically.  It’s not that hard, the technology is already available, you only have to put it to work for humans.  Extrapolate to the internet:  integrate Wordpress, Typepad and Movable Type api support.   Keep the “social” nuts happy providing Facebook and Twitter support. It’s easy and it doesn’t cost a thing.

6) You need an iTunes-kind of bookstore. Make it open so bookstores from all around the world can publish their stuff.   Make the whole Project Gutenberg catalogue easily accessible.  Forget about DRM. Play embrace and extend game with Amazon and send them customers.  Do the same with Barnes and Noble and with every small player too.  There’s 6 billion people in the world and every one of them on average have a penny to put in your piggy bank.   That’s a lot  more than you are making now.  Mind you, maybe you have to give these e-readers for free.

7) Let me take audio notes and attach them to pages. Include a screen reader. It doesn’t have to be a perfect screen reader, it will be okay as long as it’s understandable what it says.  People with low vision problems and blind people deserve better.  I know it seems that this could cut down on the audio books market.  Not so.  If I want to hear William Gibson reading out loud, I will buy the audio book anyway.   Send the greedy marketer to the closet, you will sell more books by letting people rest whilst listening to any book.

                          

Paul McDougall of InformationWeek sums it up more concisely than I did.

What he sees in Microsoft is the symptoms of the very well known phenomenon called Marketing Myopia.

McDougall writes:

Microsoft’s problem is that it’s failed to innovate at a time when the only acceptable answer to the question of what business you are in is…innovation. Redmond has become the tech industry’s version of Detroit, which is facing oblivion because for the past 100 years it’s done nothing more than deliver iterative versions of the same old Model-T.

I actually think it’s worse than that, I see it as an unfortunate combination of marketing myopia paired with innovator’s dilemma, another very well known phenomenon.  Alone or in twos, none of these diagnostics are promising prospects.

I watch these events unfolding with the same look an astronomer watches galaxies collide, distant and marvelled, at the same time concerned, curious and involved, for nothing that occurs in our cosmos is alien enough, or without consequences and teachings we should take heed of.

It’s astonishing that companies like Microsoft seem pathologically unable to avoid such destiny, like an inertia driven massive planet on a collision course towards an almost certain devastation.

In the end it’s always been about learning what the public wants, make what the public wants and exceed expectations. You can’t do these things well listening to yourself speak with your eyes fixed on your own belly button.

                          

Technological advance in the last five years has given birth to previously unforeseen possibilities in computing, and tablets are here to kickstart what will probably be an effervescent computing decade.

If you’re a technology enthusiast and you haven’t heard about ‘the tablet’ yet -or Apple Inc’s iSlate, as the rumour goes-, you’ve most likely been hiding under a rock. On the moon.

But there was a time long before planets aligned for 2010 to bring you renewed electronic delight when another company you might have heard of -Microsoft Corp.- was a firm believer that this kind of devices would leave the drawing boards and move into our offices and living-rooms, in much the same way Microsoft’s own Bill Gates clairvoyantly predicted the personal computer would make it into our homes, more than thirty years ago.

Microsoft first demonstrated their product Windows XP Tablet PC Edition in year 2001, programming specifications were developed, and real world products by HP, Panasonic and others were produced to match Microsoft’s blueprints.

Unfortunately these tablets as conceived by Microsoft -despite having heightened the hopes of many techies and evangelists for years- so far have proved an elusive rara avis in the real world that is even more rare in the realm of our households.

If Tablet PCs were a reality early on the noughties, and the public seems to be excited about these products, why has it taken so long (in “internet time”, anyway) for them to become more widely used and available?

The public seems to be indicating that the problem is not so much with the tablet bit of the term, but with the PC part of it.

For most of 2009 (and still going strong) there was a leakage of information details dripping from Apple and on technology and gadgets blogs, pointing to the almost certain conclusion that Apple will be making a major product announcement in late january 2010, very likely a slate-type of tablet device. Programmers around the web also saw new code being shared by Apple (as part of the Webkit project that powers Apple’s Safari browser) which left little doubt in their minds that these programming instructions could only be necessary for use in a tablet-like device.

Little else is known about the Apple product at this time, but the rumours seem to be credible enough that Apple’s competitors thought it was necessary to show their cards in advance to Apple’s -real or imagined- big event. The more stunning of the competing rumours surfaced in relation to Google’s partnership with Taiwanese manufacturer HTC and joint announcement of Nexus One -the much awaited Google Phone. It gave rise to the expectations they could be working on a tablet project of their own, running Google’s Chrome OS or a variation of Google’s mobile phone OS Android.

But we had more than just rumours as well this week at CES 2010, with Lenovo, MSI, HP, and -you guessed it?- Microsoft rushing to occupy whatever mindshare is left in tabletspace that Apple has not taken already. Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer in person demonstrated HP’s Slate running a tailored version of Windows 7 with e-reader capabilities, but the specialised press and blogosphere have been largely underwhelmed by this second Microsoft attempt. BusinessWeek reports that Microsoft took a hit in the stock market as a result of this perceived underperforming act.

Other worth-mentioning announcements include Lenovo and MSI who have demoed variations on the tablet theme, months ahead of general availability of their products -as is often the case in tech fairs like CES.

Lenovo are going the way of the hybrid laptop-tablet, an otherwise perfectly normal business notebook can have its display screen removed and used as a slate tablet, which is able to operate independently of the main computer body and comes with an operating system of its own, Lenovo’s SkyLight.

MSI have surprised with a different and completely novel concept: a dual screen tablet, with the ability to fold them together like a book -and presumably use it as an e-reader, of course- but also with the possibility of setting it up horizontally the way you put a laptop on a table, using one of the screens as virtual keyboard and mouse. Not only that, but the virtual keyboard that appears on screen is also a haptic device, meaning that it offers tactile feedback as you touch the surface, producing a sensation on your fingertips similar to the touch of an actual flat keypad.

Is it possible that the more things change the more they become different in computing?

Whilst manufacturers essay their best attempts in their tablet/slate/e-reader endeavours , Microsoft seem unable to escape the centre of gravity of the PC, and continue to advertise the power of Windows as a much necessary tool everywhere.

Counterintuitively so, if we take into account Microsoft’s XBOX -arguably Microsoft’s most succesful hardware product after Microsoft’s Mouse- doesn’t run the familiar -now almost venerable- Windows graphical user interface. Although technically there is a Windows kernel somewhere there underneath, it’s conveniently hidden from the XBOX user.

When Microsoft tried to do the same for mobile phones with Windows Mobile, they failed to translate that familiarity with the brand into marketshare, letting a relatively late comer like Apple’s iPhone to disrupt and dominate the smartphone space.

The public seems to be telling us that they’re as uncomfortable taking a full-blown Windows PC in their pockets as they would be taking a Windows PC to read an e-book in bed.

However impressive on the technology side, so far none of these products, rumours and performances from different companies have been able to capture the same level of expectation Apple Inc. seems to master, steadily building up in emotion towards the grand finale.

That is, if the 90% chance that Apple’s iSlate is a real product turns out to be true, after all.

Whatever is the case, public perceptions seem to be changing, a culture where the TV set is no longer the sole source of information and entertainment was developed in the last ten years, almost inadvertedly making the long-touted convergence so much of a reality that it now doesn’t need to be singled out as a particular event. In the first half of the noughts YouTube was a phenomenon yet-to-be-seen, and video on the Internet in general was a less-than-edificant experience.

But the rise of the so-called web 2.0 paradigm paired with improvements in bandwidth and availability of internet connections helped to deliver a continuum of almost imperceptible changes that have affected forever the usage patterns that we once thought were monolithic and incontestable.

As a result there’s a myriad of new use cases, waiting for a myriad of products to match.

Passing videos around in the living-room? Taking your bookshelf to college with you to give a lecture? Sending your toddler’s fingerpaintings to her grandparents at the other side of the world?

Some of these companies are trying to match these newly developed usage patterns with products to satisfy them. There’s still a lot to be designed, developed and tried and we will see plenty of that in the effervescent computing decade that’s about to begin.

And now, with tablets to get started with.