A journalist friend asked me for some things to watch in the online world. Here’s what I came up with off the top of my head:
1. Internet TV
BitTorrent, YouTube, Blip.tv, Toodou, MetaCafe, Google Video, the ‘Venice project‘
2. Webware
3. Aggregators
4. Places
5. Recommendation-based music
6. Mobile 2.0
7. Lightweight project management
8. Open IM
9. Presence
10. Shared calendars
11. Structured data
12. Classfifieds
13. Toys
14. Customization
Phew… what did I miss?
Matt Biddulph kindly agreed to give an Aula Talk while he’s visiting Helsinki this coming week.
The talk is on the Open Data Movement and it will take place on Thursday, August 17th, 18:00 at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT). HIIT is located on the 6th floor in the Pinta-building at High Tech Center (HTC) in Ruoholahti. The address is Tammasaarenkatu 3, Helsinki.
Here’s a leader to the talk:
The Wikipedia is only the tip of the iceberg of information that is becoming freely accessible on the internet. Following the success of open source, an open data movement is occurring online that seeks to gather, publish and enable the reuse of rich machine-readable datasets – like all programs ever broadcasted by the BBC.
By opening up these wellsprings of information, which were previously only accessible to large institutions, the open data movement has unleashed a new wave of creativity on the Web. Programmers, students, and companies are building mashups by overlaying photos, blog posts, and other objects to open datasets like the BBC Programme Catalogue, Wikipedia, Open Streetmap, and Thinglink.
As a case in point, Biddulph will describe how the BBC’s database of programming from the 1920s to the present day was transformed from an internal green-screen application to a public Web 2.0 service using Ruby on Rails.
Expect to see some playful examples of what you can do with the BBC Programme Catalogue, Thinglink, and other open datasets.
Big thanks to Ulla for organizing this.
Tantek, I, Ryan, and Ulla looking jovial after lunch in SoMa (photo by Kevin)
Episode 2 of the Verkko2 podcast is now available for download. The topic is microformats, featuring Tantec Çelik and Ryan King from microformats.org and Technorati. There’s a Finnish intro but the interview is in English. It was recorded in April when Ulla and I visited Technorati. Towards the end, I ask Tantek and Ryan to describe the future of microformats. Tantek calls it a revolution:
I think we’ll see more and more sites publishing their data in microformats. And that is the start of the real revolution. Just like RSS has enabled complete decentralization of episodic content on the Web, we see microformats as enabling total decentralization of contact information, of event information, of reviews.
According to Tantek, the microformat revolution benefits everybody:
The beauty is that even in a situation like that, where all the data is distributed, all these centralized sites that are currently keeping this data, by syndicating their data out, they become part of this larger network of information. So it’s good for them as well. It’s good for everybody – not just individuals; we think it’s good for corporations as well.
He sees three waves in the rise of microformats: the microformats themselves emerging first, then a growth in the quantity of microformatted content, and third the appearance of new microformat-specific tools:
The first wave is the rise of different kinds of microformats. We’re seeing the rise of that now and we think it’ll totally take off in the next year. Trailing that is a wave of content published using microformats. And trailing that is a third wave of tools. You’ll start to see toolvendors say ‘Hey, there are millions of hCards out there! Maybe I should start developing tools that could read those and do interesting things with them.’
In the long run, Tantek believes microformats will become as ubiquitous as HTML:
At some point we’re just going to take microformats for granted, like we now take HTML for granted. I truly believe that’s the path we’re on and that this is only a matter of time.
To learn more about microformats, check the Wikipedia. There’s more about microformats on microformats.org. And here’s a slide presentation titled ‘What Are Microformats?‘ by Tantek Çelik.
A quote from Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters starts off one of the chapters in my PhD thesis. Now Graham’s got some tips on presenting to investors. Hear him out.
This situation is constantly repeated when startups present to investors: people who are bad at explaining, talking to people who are bad at understanding.
I guess that’s the voice of experience talking.
Here are Graham’s tips:
1. Explain what you’re doing
2. Get rapidly to demo
3. Better a narrow description than a vague one
4. Don’t talk and drive (my favorite!)
5. Don’t talk about secondary matters at length
6. Don’t get too deeply into business models
7. Talk slowly and clearly at the audience
8. Have one person talk
9. Seem confident
10. Don’t try to seem more than you are
11. Don’t put too many words on slides
12. Specific numbers are good
13. Tell stories about users
14. Make a soundbite stick in their heads
Amy Jo Kim wrote one of the classics on Web community design. AJ and Scott her puzzlemaster husband and their vivacious 7-year old son were in town for AJ’s consulting work, and the four of us had delicious breakfast at Scandic. I like AJ’s take on community. She has a background in psychology and it shows. These are her nine timeless design strategies:
1. Define and articulate your PURPOSE
2. Build flexible, extensible gathering PLACES
3. Create meaningful and evolving member PROFILES
4. Design for a range of ROLES
5. Develop a strong LEADERSHIP program
6. Encourage appropriate ETIQUETTE
7. Promote cyclic EVENTS
8. Integrate the RITUALS of community life
9. Facilitate member-run SUBGROUPS
More excerpts here.
Jaiku is the new startup I co-founded with Petteri Koponen, Mika Raento and Teemu Kurppa. It’s a social phonebook that displays the real-time availability and location of your contacts. We call this rich presence.
With the Jaiku mobile application, you can share your location (neighborhood, city, country) based on cell tower positioning; your availability (based on whether your phone’s ringer is on or off); an IM-style presence line; current and upcoming calendar events; people and devices nearby (based on Bluetooth scanning); and how long your phone has been idle.
You can share this information with your contacts’ mobile phones. You can also create a badge for your blog, MySpace profile or any other Web page that shows your real-time presence on the Web.
Here’s my real-time presence badge:
The beta version of the mobile application is for Nokia S60 Second Edition phones only (see the list of compatible models). We’re planning to make versions for other models in the future, and enable anybody to update their rich presence on the Web or from any mobile by sending in simple text messages.
Jaiku doesn’t include rich presence from Web feeds yet – but I think it will be cool to show the latest blog post / photo / bookmark, or the music track you last listened to.
Give it a spin and post your comments on the Jaikido blog!
Together with Janne Jalkanen of ButtUgly we’ve been working on a Finnish-language podcast titled Verkko2 on and off for a couple of months. The first episode is now out – so fellow Finns, we suggest a headlong rush to download the show while it’s still hot!
We’ll be dissecting the Web 2.0 meme, interviewing key movers and shakers, and making a general ruckus. The plan is to loosely dedicate one episode to each of the seven principles in Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0 article. The first episode is about the Web as a platform.
We also serve you this appetizing trailer that dramatizes how the Seven Theses were really created…
I gave this presentation at Reboot 8. I’ve also presented parts of it on a couple of other occasions, including a session with Nokia’s CTO and at Aula 2006. A video from Aula is available on Blip.tv.
Hi, my name is Jyri Engeström. I work as an entrepreneur, I’m trained as a sociologist, and I blog at zengestrom.com. I’m going to talk about the social importance of peripheral vision. This talk is part of the trio of talks on Mobile 2.0, the other two being by Marko Ahtisaari yesterday and Chris Heatchote later this afternoon.
So what about baseball? Well, the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear someone say ‘baseball’ is the headwear. Next I think about hotdogs. And where there’s baseball, there’s usually also beer – picture the ocean of Budweiser that gets guzzled on the bleachers during an American Major League season. But although a Major League game would be unthinkable in the absence of the caps, the dogs, and the kegs, they’re not the aspect of baseball I want to discuss with you today.
The aspect of baseball that I want to focus on is peripheral vision. Imagine the pitcher eyeing the game from his mound at the center of the diamond. He makes eye contact with the batter, twitches his eybrow, maybe signaling something about the spin he’s about to cast. But at the same time, from the corner of his eye, he’s watching the infielder on second base, ready to spin around and take him out with a lightning pass to the second base man.
My first point is that peripheral vision is about seeing the surrounding space, in real time. Baseball legend Babe Ruth was exceptional at this. He could tell what ball ‘looked good’ faster than I can blink my eyes.
In baseball, like in real life, a staggering number of things are happening all at the same time. Great players like Babe Ruth develop an ability to see the whole at once. They can notice the important cues and ignore the details that don’t matter.
Seeing the game as a whole means they can wait for the right time to act. And when that time comes, they can perform quickly, precisely, and decisively.
What would happen if one completely lacked peripheral vision? To illustrate this, recall the story about the blind men and the elephant. The blind men got into an argument about what sort of creature the elephant is. So they decided to feel an elephant to determine what it was like.
The first blind man approached the elephant from the front. He felt the squirming trunk of the animal and declared ‘an elephant is like a snake!’
The second blind man approached the elephant from the side. He walked into the animal’s broad flank and declared ‘no, an elephant is like a wall!’
The third blind man approached the elephant from behind. He grabbed the animal’s wiry tail and declared ‘you are both wrong – an elephant is like a rope!’
Now imagine the blind men got bored of arguing about the elephant, and decided to get some exercise. What if they decided to resolve their quarrel by playing a game of baseball? Lacking vision, the only way they could communicate to their teammates would be by shouting.
Without peripheral vision, like the blind men of the story, we are left navigating in the dark without a way to see the whole situation.
Now consider telephones. From the beginning, phones were designed with the assumption that when a person picks up the receiver to dial a number, they already know who they want to call.
In the hundred years that phones have been around, this assumption hasn’t changed. The latest mobile phone models are still designed the same way. The assumption is: just pick up the phone and call.
Except it’s not always a good idea to just ring someone up. Before dialing, you need to decide if now is a good time to call the person or not.
How do we know if it’s a good time to ring someone? By using our social peripheral vision. Like the baseball players, we too are constantly processing signals from the periphery of our social network.
The questions we must answer are the same as in baseball: where are the people who matter to us right now? And what are they up to?
Yet, right now, our phones don’t offer much in the way of an answer.
So we just have to try our luck, and make lots of blind calls. I do this all the time. Some my friends travel alot, so I have no idea what time zone they are in – which doesn’t exactly improve the situation.
So if a researcher asked everyone in this room to write down the two phrases with which we most often begin our phone conversations, what would be yours? I can tell you what mine would be. First, ‘Where are you now?’ And second, ‘Can you talk?’
But does it really need to be like that?
Instant messaging can clue us to solving the problem. IM developers had to figure out a way to communicate availability from the start because when person A wanted to chat with person B, the likelyhood was pretty high that person B was away from their computer or didn’t want to be disturbed.
The inventors of IM came up with a neat solution. They copied the idea of traffic lights from the real world, and pasted the lights into the IM buddy list: green for available, red for away, and yellow for idle. For cases when traffic lights couldn’t say enough, they added a freeform away line.
The contacts list on phones is remarkably similar to an IM buddy list. All we need to do is copy the traffic light and the away line from the buddy list…
… and paste them into the phone’s address book. Voila! We have peripheral vision.
Living a social life is like driving in traffic on the freeway. We have to constantly adjust our speed and driving style to keep in harmony with the people around us. Clear visibility to our periphery can save us from a lot of minor dents and even serious accidents.
But having clear visibility to the immediate surrounding space at a given moment is not enough. To make plans and navigate in the social space, we need to know what’s coming up further along the road.
This is the second point of my talk. That peripheral vision is not just about seeing what’s around you in the present – it’s also about seeing how the situation will be like in the future. Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky was excellent at this. He knew that what differentiated a truly great player in a team where everyone was physically equally good was the ability to see past the spot where the puck was at the moment, and skate to where it would soon be going.
Navigating in social space is a complex calculation where we try to approximate other people’s motion in space and in time. There’s a great example about the importance of the temporal dimension in an episode in Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs. I’d like to play it to you now.
In the episode Lord Helmet, the evil leader of Spaceballs, and his general try to locate Lone Starr and his group using a radar, which is a spatial method. But it’s not effective. So they figure out an innovative way to extend their peripheral vision in the temporal dimension: by watching the home video of their own movie, Spaceballs.
The lesson from Lord Helmet is simple: if we have no visibility into other people’s plans, we aren’t able to plan anything ourselves.
Now consider the phone calendar. It displays your own plans only. There is no way to know what others are planning.
Again, the online world offers a solution. Event-sharing services like Yahoo’s Upcoming provide a handy list of the events your friends are planning to attend. We could copy that interface and paste it into the phone.
To summarize. What I want to suggest is that unlike some handset manufacturers, mobile operators, and software companies want us to believe, Mobile 2.0 is not about streaming video, high-resolution displays, and music players that try to mimic the iPod. Instead, Mobile 2.0 is about enabling social peripheral vision. This is the next frontier for mobile developers, and it is where I believe the real advances in human mobile communication will happen in the next couple of years.
To close, I’d like to probe a bit further into the future of mobile communication.
The best example of peripheral vision-enhancing technology that I know are the built-in widgets and player-created mods in World of Warcraft.
This screenshot is from Joichi Ito, who, as many of you know, plays a level 60 mage gnome in WoW and is the custodian of a guild named We Know. The interface is full of information laid on top of the actual 3D world: The physical condition of Joi’s character; the condition of his teammates; a map; a chat; events; and more.
What might this look like in the mobile device and the real world a decade or two from now? I don’t know, but I know for sure that today’s kids, who are growing up on WoW and other MMORPGs, will start to wonder what really keeps them from using and developing similar technologies in and for real life.
As a final point, I want to turn over the flip side of the coin. I believe the ability to participate in services that provide peripheral vision will become a condition for citizenship in society. Informal social citizenship first, and eventually also actual formal citizenship.
Those who lack the technical skills, the money, or the cultural disposition to participate in these services may well fall out of step with the rest of society. To illustrate how funny, but beneath the comical surface also tragic this can be, I’d like to play the classic baseball skit Who’s on First by Abbot and Costello. When you listen to the routine, observe how Costello falls more and more out of step with Abbot’s made-up language.
When designing these services, please don’t forget to ask yourself, who will be the Abbots and who will be the Costellos of the future you are creating.
Comments elsewhere:
Notes from the talk by Karls Alfrink
Johnnie Moore connects peripheral vision to games
Jürgen Ahting’s comments on E-Valuation of Information Systems
David Smith connects peripheral vision with being heedful in his Reboot summary
Anne Van Kesteren picks up the punchline in her short post
Summary and comments in Dutch on Frank-ly.nl (I wish I knew what they’re saying :)
Donatella della Ratta, a reporter for Il Manifesto, the well-known Italian leftist newspaper, spoke at Aula 2006 about Al-Jazeera and the revolution in Arab media. Il Manifesto published Donatella’s report about Aula on June 18th. As of last week the paper has started an emergency fundraising campaign at risk of closure due to financial difficulties. In an email Donatella writes:
“We are a daily newspaper that publishes a national newspaper every day in 80.000 copies but we don’t have any publisher. The newspaper belongs to a cooperative of journalists and citizens… we need more financial support from citizens, we don’t want to be acquired by any corporation.”
Il Manifesto made international headline news through its involvement in the Calipari affair last year, when a reporter for Il Manifesto was taken hostage by insurgents and later wounded by a stray bullet at a U.S. checkpoint. Calipari, the Italian agent with the reporter, was killed in the shooting.
The paper is accepting donations. On the donate page a placard reads: “You support a common good.”
Whoopee, we’re back online!