iPhone rants and raves

On twitter, @mparekh (Michael Parekh) lamented the other day:

Had my 3G iPhone Crash 5 times so far, hanging up on boot screen. Full Restore every time, each taking 2 hours. On 6th restore. Anyone else?
...
On 3G iPhone crash (cont.), using Mobile Me sync, and have over 60 paid and free Apps installed. Last hang up was while on-air App upgrade.

There are lots more folks with similar complaints on twitter or getsatisfaction.

Meanwhile, over on Dave Farber's IP list, Lauren Weinstein wrote:

Given the iPhone's expensive to replace (for non-hackers) "permanent" battery, I'm interested in reports of rapid battery decline associated with the rash of new iPhone applications, many of which involve keeping the display lit, long-period data streaming, etc.

Question: Will the new applications make the non-user-replaceable battery much less palatable than previously, given that many users may burn through its available cycle life much more rapidly than before?

But at the same time, how can you not love this device? Also on IP, Linda Stone wrote:

Nearly everyone who had an iPhone at the TED Conference this year, also had a Blackberry. I had the STRONG feeling that the Blackberry was the wife and iPhone was the mistress.....

(I'd reverse that: I've seen lots of blackberry users who've added an iphone, but not lots of iphone users who've added a blackberry.)

I'm wondering if this is a trend: devices and services that people love so much that they even love to hate them. We've seen this with twitter. People are so passionate about it that they put up with problems that would kill a lesser product.

Meanwhile, at the Web 2.0 Summit preview dinner the other night, former Yahoo EVP Jeff Weiner was raving to me about his new iPhone, urging me to write something that explains why the iPhone is such a paradigm-shifting device. He hit on themes that we've talked about on radar: incorporation of sensors into the UI, sweet integration with the cloud, design as competitive advantage. But he's right. I need to write more on this topic.

Disclosure: O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor in GetSatisfaction.

Radar Roundup: Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp)

• The Street as Platform (Dan Hill): amazing essay by Dan Hill (yet another genius formerly at the BBC) about the invisible cloud of data in a city street. "We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. [...] This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street."
• Service Design Notes: Tools, not Services (Chris Heathcote): frustrated by the limited functionality in his Nike+ because the service is intentionally feebly aimed at feeble "typical" consumers, Chris dashed off a quick rant about the trap of designing services. Users want tools, not services. And by building tools, you can build a service people want. The last two paragraphs are gold: "Tools will be bent and misused - which means you sell even more. And you don't have design in the usefulness - just find the useful functionality and package it up in an open-enough way to show possibilities."
• A Very Long Conversation with Dopplr's Matt Jones (SecondVerse): a long interview, mostly about design stuff, with Matt Jones. The bit that resonated with me was "Mother Box is not in the Box", which I translate as "you buy products that are front-ends to services", which is a short hop away from "these days a device needs a network to be useful". If you think of ubicomp as "it's about sensors, outputs, and computation", you can't forget the network that connects them all--and what life is like when that network disappears.
• Review of Everyware by Adam Greenfield (heyblog): a very detailed review of "Everyware" by Adam Greenfield. Matt Jones recommended Everyware to me as the first stop in a quick catchup of ubiquitous computing. "Everyware strikes a good balance between the impenetrable proceedings of the UBICOMP conferences and design writing. Adam expects the reader to get references to “Ctrl-Zing something away, “elevator pitches”, and “user experience” and something about how people behave with mobile phones".
• Being Human (Microsoft Research): subtitled "Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020". Love the "Transformations in Interaction" section: "The End of Interface Stability; The Growth of Techno-Dependence; The Growth of Hyper-Connectivity; The End of the Ephemeral; The Growth of Creative Engagement".
• William Gibson - The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview: "One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi. In a world of superubiquitous computing, you're not gonna know when you're on or when you're off. You're always going to be on, in some sort of blended-reality state. You only think about it when something goes wrong and it goes off. And then it's a drag." I linked to it from the first Radar Roundup but I know you skipped it, so I had to quote it all here. You made me do it.

The LiveScribe Pulse Smartpen

The coolest thing I saw at our Tools of Change for Publishing Conference last week was the LiveScribe SmartPen. This amazing pen includes a microphone and an optical sensor that synchronizes the audio with any notes you take on special microdot paper using the pen. Touch the appropriate point on your notes to replay the relevant section of the audio stream. The quality of the recording was good, and it was really uncanny to point the pen at words written on the paper and hear what actually happened. The 1 gigabyte model can record 100 hours; the two gigabyte model can record 200 hours.

This device is one more sign of what I've been calling ambient computing, the interpenetration of computing with the physical world via sensors. I've tended to focus on cloud computing ambience, though, and this is a personal device. It's also a fulfillment of projects such as Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits, the idea that decreasing storage costs will eventually mean that we'll have the ability to record our entire lives in digital form.

It's also a sign that the physical computing revolution, whose alpha-geek stage we've been documenting in Make:, is entering its next phase, in which entrepreneurial opportunities emerge. It's so wonderful to see an invention that is so much "on trend" that in retrospect it seems inevitable, yet in its first appearance is so unexpected and remarkable!

I've put in my pre-order. This is the coolest device I've seen in a long time. Especially cool that they are opening it up as a platform, with an SDK for developers to build new applications for the device.

Sandy, remind me about that New Year's resolution @sms

Rael Dornfest's Sandy, an email and sms-based personal assistant (whose name, I should confess, was inspired by Sandy Torre, my executive assistant at O'Reilly when Rael was CTO here) has just added what I think is a killer feature. Rather than setting Sandy to send all your reminders to email or SMS, you can now ask Sandy to route reminders (and other data) to email, SMS, or even twitter, on a per-item basis.

You ask Sandy for help via email or SMS, sending her a short message like "Sandy, remind me at 9 am tomorrow to call Mike." Previously, that reminder would be sent to you via your pre-set mechanism (mail or sms.) Now, you can add "@sms," "@email" or "@twitter" to have your reminder sent via that channel. I get most of my reminders sent by default to my email, but sometimes I really want to get them on my phone!

Sandy has a fairly rich vocabulary of tasks you can ask her to help out with, but the four core primitives are "remember," "lookup," "forget," and "remind." @ tags act as modifiers. In addition to the channel modifiers mentioned above, there are also time-based modifiers like @daily, @weekly, or @monthly. (Sandy also recognizes dates and times.) @todo and @done are also predefined tags. You can create any of your own tags simply by prefixing any word with an @ sign. An * turns an entry into a bulleted list item. So, for example, you might say to Sandy:

• "Remember Bill's phone number is xxx-yyyy."
• "Lookup Bill's phone number @sms" to get that number back via text message
• "Take out the garbage Monday night at 9 pm @weekly @sms" to get a reminder on your cell phone at 9 pm every Monday night.
• "Remind me about my New Year's Resolutions on January 15th * Leave ten minutes earlier for meetings * Reach out to friends I haven't talked with in a while * Show appreciation before rushing to improve on an idea @monthly" to be reminded of your New Years' resolutions on the 15th of every month.

Even better, if you ask Sandy to remind you of something, and cc someone else on the message, they'll get a reminder as well. This only works right now for email, I think, as there's no way to cc someone on an SMS message. I'm not sure what happens if I tell Sandy to remind me by SMS but all she has for the other person is an email address.

If you get something wrong, Sandy will respond with a message telling you she's confused. She also lets Rael and his team know about it, so they can help teach her how to do the right thing in future. There's a useful cheatsheet as well as a more extensive guide to Sandy's vocabulary online.

FWIW, one of the really interesting things about Sandy from a Radar perspective is the exploration of conversational interfaces. I know Rael has been very much influenced by The Jack Principles, but I still see him feeling his way, and having to learn, with Sandy, just what kind of conversation works best.

Disclosure: I am on the board of ValuesOfN, Rael (and Sandy's) company, and an investor.

Finding opportunities

Tim Bray has been analyzing forms of communication. He's been looking at twitter, mail, IRC, etc. in terms of immediacy, lifespan, and audience. He says, "I’m going to keep fooling with this. You see, if you draw the right graph, maybe you’ll see the gaping hole in it, the Next Big Thing." He's got some cool graphs, but I think the new stuff comes from realizing there are axes you didn't know about. E.g., Flickr suddenly added "sharing" where that category didn't exist before. Twitter pushed the immediacy axis out a long way. That said, I'd love to be proven wrong ...

Chart Junk in the New York Times

Checking out the New York Times's infographic on the housing bubble, I thought "wow! Look at how much prices climbed!". Then I read the fine print and realized they've completely distorted the vertical scale to make the increase look enormous.

The Y-axis is the house price. 100=the 1987 price of a house, so if in 1992 the line of the graph is at 92 then a house that sold for $100,000 in 1987 sells for $92,000 in 1992. The problem is that it's about an inch from $0 (the bottom of the graph) to $100,000. But then each inch on the Y-axis corresponds to about $10,000 in price gain. In effect, they've zoomed in on the area from 100-150 and magnified the growth in the last 15 years.

I'm the first to say the housing market was overinflated and is now crashing—I took a bath when I sold my house in Colorado—but shame on the NYT for using misleading graphics to build its case. Perhaps they should invest in a copy of Darrell Huff's magnificent How to Lie with Statistics—on page 62 this exact issue is illustrated and decried.

Clever UI: Subway Map for Intranet

"A Map-based Approach to Content Inventory" caught my eye. I love the aesthetics of subway maps, the clever way in which they distort space while still presenting a more aesthetically true representation of the relationships between places. Patrick Walsh used the subway map metaphor to understand the gnarly structure of the intranet he was redesigning. (found via Matt Jones)

I wonder whether this would be useful as a general daily-use navigational aid for any web site. It wouldn't be hard to implement this as a Firefox plugin—a sidebar that puts heads on the x axis, external links on the y, and links within the same site on the diagonal. Daily use would let you know whether it's useful to have, to borrow Patrick's metaphor, a GPS in your web browser.

What Does It Mean For Public Space to Go Digital?

Over on Genuine VC, David Beisel has written a thought-provoking piece entitled What Does It Mean For Public Space to Go Digital? about the future of advertising in public spaces. Here are some of the tidbits he includes:

• figures on the growth of the outdoor ad market from PQ Media ($1.69 billion in 2006, 27% growth)
• "Is there a day in the future when property owners with public space, like shopping malls, become media companies focusing on selling not just physical store inventory but also ad inventory? " (Simon Property group is already talking about this as "very promising" in their annual report.)
• "Next time you walk outside in public, consider the fact that there’s visual real estate inventory available wherever you look."
• "Judith Perrolle, a professor of sociology at Northeastern Univ., has called coined the phrase 'solid state spam' to label unwanted and unwelcome messages appearing in a public area"
• "As outdoor digital signage continues to proliferate, we’re going to need some public discourse to reach a consensus about what is acceptable public real estate for these media."

When you put together all the possibilities for the future of advertising, you realize how little we've seen yet as digital life truly spreads beyond the computer and becomes pervasive. As digital display surfaces proliferate, so too will portable sensors (and your cell phone is becoming one of those) and controllers (your cell phone is becoming one of those as well). As David warns, we're going to need some public discourse about how much is enough. But there are also going to be huge opportunities for companies to do what Google did with its early, uncompromising stand on relevant contextual advertising rather than blaring display ads, and to find ways to use those new digital environments in a way that is consumer-friendly and ultimately empowering. David mentions one of those in his piece:

On Thursday, the Taxi and Limousine Commission of New York approved a plan to install touch-screen monitors in their entire fleet of taxis. These screens will allow riders to pay by credit card, check on news stories, map out where the cab is going and find information about eateries and bars. To me, this example use of a public space for digital screen media seems more than appropriate - it delivers contextually relevant content to people who need it at that moment, and the advertising messages which follow are (presumably) relevant.

Never mind a genuine VC. Those are also words of wisdom from a relevant one!

New Content Preview Features on oreilly.com

Allen Noren, our director of online marketing, just let us know that the Copyright Clearance Center's RightsLink feature is now live on oreilly.com. While this feature is designed to make it easier for us to handle reprint requests via user self-service, the same tools we used to provide the preview for RightsLink purchasers also makes it easy for our readers to browse much more of our books online before deciding to make a purchase.

Allen wrote a bit about the CCC and RightsLink on an internal O'Reilly mailing list:

The CCC was established by the Library of Congress to facilitate the clearance of copyrighted content, and publishers sign up for their services. The CCC has a website, copyright.com, where anyone interested in reusing publisher's content can clear and pay to reuse material. It's a 20th century process, however, where someone has to have our content in-hand, know that the CCC exists and that they have a website, and that copyright can be cleared. RightsLink is different because it's implemented on our site. For example, go to any one of the following books' online Table of Contents page

CSS: The Missing Manual
The Rails Cookbook
Learning Perl

and you'll see that, along with the ability to purchase a book in print or pdf (if that's available), or view it on Safari, a customer can now purchase the rights to reuse chapters, recipes, hacks, and images. A typical customer for this will be corporations, teachers, magazines, and websites that want to reuse our content on their intranets, newsletters, print and online publications, and course packs.

The Table of Contents link on the catalog page for each book now lets you preview top level sections in each chapter, as shown in the screen shot below:

The previewing ability we've added is driven by an internal application we refer to as the content "deli", an Xquery database that allows us to serve up all our content in alternate forms. The RightLink preview implementation is the first of many new features we expect to be rolling out now that we have this infrastructure in place. (It's a generalization of the tools we built for SafariU last year.) Stay tuned!

P.S. This is a good chance to give some public props to the folks at O'Reilly (in addition to Allen) who made this happen. Allen wrote: "Many people helped with this project. Laura Baldwin [our CFO/COO] backed it from the crazy idea stage. CJ Rayhill [our CIO] and Laurie Petrycki [publisher for our Missing Manuals, Head First, and Dynamic Media publishing programs] helped with the early pricing models. Pascal Honscher helped define and drive the implementation, and came up with a number of innovative processes that surprised the CCC folks. Charles Greer, Ben Bangert, and Jeff Boyd harnessed the power of the MarkLogic database to generate the dynamic TOC pages. John Haren, Eric Parker, Laura Adair, Julie Delany, and Mace Bergmann were instrumental in making this work programatically." I'll also add Ryan Grimm and Andy Bruno, as well as Jason Hunter at MarkLogic, who developed a lot of the original SafariU code that made this possible. Nice work, guys.

Ten Things I Want From My Phone

Ian Hay wrote an interesting cell-phone-related blog post entitled Ten Things I want from You, the result of a survey he sent out to a number of friends (including those of us at Radar) about what people want from their telcos. Ian's takeaway:

What strikes me is that there is a lot of talk on Voice2.0, Fixed Mobile convergence, the rise of VoIP, minutes arbitrage and how telephony in general needs to evolve and yet the two most desired things are effectively:

Improve the basics (and make it work better)

Transparent (clear consistent) pricing

The general ‘tone’ of the replies leads me to believe that the majority are quite happy to pay a reasonable cost for the basics as long as they are done well and that the rise in alternatives we see now are simply because people are finding ways around the problems they have with Telcos.

Doesn't that say it all? Bad service, bad pricing as the drivers for competitive innovation :-)

Check out Ian's complete summarized lists at the link above. In addition, I've included the Radar responses below. We wanted those basics too, but we wanted a lot more as well, which we'll be exploring at the Emerging Telephony Conference in March.

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A Plague of Floats on Your Browser

Now that Firefox 2.0 is out, I've heard a few people asking "is that it?" I remember how awesome it felt to have Firefox 1.0's popup blocking working for me—it felt like the browser was on my side. Now it's time to look ahead and see what else can help us take back the web.

One of the really big issues facing us, IMHO, is the new Javascript-driven ad technology called "floats". They're not separate windows popped up, they're in-window divs that move up to obscure the web page and force the user to click to dismiss them. They can't trivially be blocked because they're generated by Javascript code within the page, and identifying such code is a similar problem to identifying viruses. They ruin the user's experience by being unavoidable and maximally intrusive.

At the moment they're rare (e.g., TVNZ and MSN only show them once per user per day) but if we learned anything from 2001 it's that greed will ruin user experience if it can get an extra buck in ad revenue. We got popup blockers as a result of the 2001 popup orgy. What's going to save us from the 2007 float invasion?

Yahoo! Support for Microformats

Yahoo! Local Blog: "Starting today, we’re happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews." Ultimately, standards for open data interchange (including but not limited to microformats) will turn out to be more important for the web than open APIs or even open source software...

EyeSpot: Cool!

I never thought I'd ever see a Javascript-based film editor but it's here. EyeSpot is the latest from mp3.com's Michael Roberts' Ajax binge. We weren't impressed with the first two Ajax apps (Word and Paint in Ajax) but this is something different and something cool.

I foresee a rocky road for EyeSpot, despite the technology being cool. As techcrunch pointed out, there are a lot of video sites. Some are pure archives, like YouTube, but others have video editing capability. What distinguishes EyeSpot? It has to be more than just "we did it all in Javascript"--users don't typically care what tech is under the hood, so long as the job gets done.

Technologists, however ... we can look at EyeSpot and go "oooh" all day long.

Microsoft and "current web style"

Marc Hedlund noted in email: "It's interesting how closely the Mix06 web site hews to these observations on current web style: It was *not* like that when it launched." Microsoft has always been a great learning organization when challenged, and the quick evolution of the site about their conference on their "Web 2.0" catchup strategy may be another good sign that they are in fast learning mode.

Pull the Plug on Tech Distractions

U.S. News & World Report groks Life Hacking, featuring some suggestions by our friend Danny O'Brien. While I don't necessarily agree with the analog tilt of the piece--the focus being too much on pulling the electronic plug and eliminating tech as distraction rather than attenuation of information in whatever form it takes in your life--it's obviously great to see attention paid to the subject. The reporter actually dropped me a line asking for my top tips: if they don't end up appearing online in some form, I'll be sure to post them here.

Hacking for Kids

I want software and a book that'll help me get my 4-6 year old kids into programming. Gerv wants something similar but for twelve year olds. In my best of all possible worlds, there'd be an O'Reilly Radar reader out there with kids who wants to teach them how to program. That person would then document what works in book form for us. This site tells what to expect as an author if you think you're that person.

re: sensible email messages

Plowing through proposals for and discussions around ETech 2006, and with our focus in this upcoming edition on affordances and attenuation, I've been thinking a great deal about email of late. To that end, I've kept meaning to point to Merlin Mann's excellent contribution to the usabilty of email, "Writing sensible email messages". His missive was brought to mind this morning by a possibly dated but nonetheless useful article, 12 tips for better e-mail etiquette, at Microsoft Office Online (I was surveying the new Office 12 deets at the time). This also put me in mind of O'Reilly's (and I don't say "our" since it predates my O'Reilly existence) lovely little book, "Using Email Effectively (What You Need to Know)" by Linda Lamb and Jerry Peek. It's a decade old, but has aged surprisingly well--and with used editions starting at just $0.72, it's a steal!

OSCON: Kim Polese Keynote Up on IT Conversations

IT Conversations has put up Kim Polese's keynote on collaborative testing. I know what I'm listening to on the flight to Portland tomorrow!

Rails Movie Launched

OSCON keynoter David Heinemeier Hansson just launched The New Rails Movie. It's a walk-through of building a blog engine with Rails. Whether or not you think Rails is the bee's knees and the wasp's nipples, you have to admit that the 37 Signals crew are master marketers. In many ways, more amazing than the technology of Rails is the way these guys have created buzz and build a community by lowering barriers to entry. They have lots of documentation, a happy vibe on the community forums, and quickly created an active and passionate user community.

Designing for Web 2.0

Via the blog of my ever-interesting friend Mr Coates, comes the slides for Matt Biddulph's XTech 2005 presentation The Application of Weblike Design to Data, which references Web 2.0 for Designers, an article in Digital Web magazine by Richard McManus and Joshua Porter. Both talk about the implications of RSS, Ajax, and web services on the design of web sites.

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