mishmap

Those of you following the rumors around tomorrow’s highly anticipated Mac Tablet unveiling are likely expecting an oversized iPod Touch, ideal for e-reading, videos and gaming. Consensus points to a device running a slightly modified iPhone OS, so current app store applications will find additional real estate.

There’s also been a rumor that iPhone SDK 4.0 will be released, finally introducing true background application functionality. This would bring the iPhone OS on-par with Android, overcoming iPhone’s current limitation of “a single app at a time”. This is important for a slew of powerful “agent” apps that would alert you to nearby friends and retail offers (a buck off your Frappuccino if your walk across the street now!).

Getting back to the title of this post, I’d like to suggest a more important reason for a background-application OS feature to launch alongside the tablet. If background applications are indeed supported, it’s not a big stretch to assume that multiple applications would be supported in the foreground. And that’s what I mean by the iPad having 2 screens, similar to the Microsoft Courier concept video you may have seen.

To visualize this, imagine turning your iPad 90 degrees into landscape mode and clicking a button causing a spiral bound to appear down the screen center. Open the Contacts app on the left side. Open the Map app on the right side. Drag a contact from the contact app into the map app and voila, you see where they live.

Another example – open Safari on the left side and bring up your favorite restaurant blog. Launch the Opentable app on the right side. Drag a restaurant name from Safari into Opentable, which lists reservation availability.

And there you have it, 2 screens delivered through software! Of course, I’d still like to shut my tablet like I do my moleskin notebooks. I guess we’ll have to wait until iPad 2.0 in 2011 for that!

In grade school history class, we learned about the profound change experienced by civilization as we progressed from tribes of hunter-gatherers to more sedentary communities.

It seems ironic that today we observe the reverse shift, as we evolve from a (literally) plugged-in audience to mobile, interacting explorers.

The world wide web began as a bunch of simple, unconnected pages describing various interesting topics like famous dead presidents and upholstering strategies. It was eerily quiet because no one left a trace.  Then through some clever url formatting and the invention of cookies, websites learned to tie together each page click and it made you feel like the website knew who you were (Welcome back little Johnny!).

But the web was still lonely, because although trustworthy newsanchormen and companies urged you to visit Aych Tee Tee Pee Colon Forward Slash Forward Slash Doubleyou Doubleyou Doubleyou Dot Something Dot Com, you still had to slip on your shoes and leave your house to visit friends and family (although you had a special online connection with Aunt Harriet, who forwarded those joke emails regularly sourced from her bridge club).

And then there was Friendster, where you could collect acquaintances like comic books, and even describe what a unique and beautiful individual each and every one of us really is.  MySpace came along and you didn’t have to travel to India and contract intestinal parasites to see what a shanty town looked like. Also, if you turned up your volume, you could hear loud music!

Time Magazine called it social networking, but it was still mostly about the individual.  Your entry page consisted of a deliberately crafted profile enumerating your interests and your activities. Facebook came along with the newsfeed and morphed into something strangely fascinating because it was less omphaloskepsis and more about your friends. Plus, your tech-neophyte high school posse finally came out of their shells, bought a MacBook, and posted cute pictures of their three (and counting) children.

So the Web of Individuals recently transformed into the Friend Web.  This shift will become more prominent as Facebook’s strategy for world domination lets you log into any partner site using your Facebook credentials. As this service gains popularity (and it will), you’ll wake up to a web where your friends are surfing alongside you. This is in Facebook’s best interest since it desperately needs to monetize the social graph you helped it build with every click. Likely, Facebook hopes to overthrow Google as the company that knows the most about your online identity. By mashing up a website’s subject matter with its database of your friends’ behavior and interests, Facebook has a golden opportunity to display extremely focused and relevant ads.

However, while I don’t doubt that Facebook will generate substantial revenue, go public and turn scores of 20-somethings into post-web 2.0 era millionaires, there’s a limitation in the surf-with-your-friends paradigm, at least from an advertiser’s perspective: One cannot confidently conclude that an ad which I find relevant is of similar relevance to my friend (not to mention my friend’s friends). If I click on a BMW banner ad while surfing an auto website, should my friend be presented with the same car ad? Despite the advancements in German engineering, perhaps he prefers American built cars. And what if he’s befriended Facebook’s leading biker gang members, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a machine boasting more than two wheels and might be offended by a car ad?

I believe group affiliations, rather than friends, serve as the best window into an individual’s psyche and are thus most valuable to an advertiser. On the web today, group affiliations are explicitly defined through services including Yahoo Groups or Ning.com’s microsite social networks.  And less obviously, they’re also implicitly defined through actions taken on any website, whether it be by subscribing to a newsletter on a band’s homepage, editing a Wikipedia article, or watching a YouTube video or movie trailer.

As the web becomes more semantic or self-aware, I expect it will become easier to join a group.  Imagine a browser plugin that suggests affiliations based on our clicks around the web. If I routinely map San Francisco addresses and also visit websites for small bands, maybe I’d be interested in joining the Bay Area Local Bands group which, in addition to local music scene discussion, offers bonus MP3 tracks.  If I purchase an April flight to New York, book a hotel, and visit theater related websites, I’d be delighted to receive a message from my personal browser agent recommending that I join the New York tourist Broadway Show (Spring Edition) group.  I might even consider paying for the privilege if promised access to preferred seats and a pre-show cocktail hour.

Since brands happily pay high CPMs to reach a targeted group, I predict that the web will evolve to cater to these affiliations. We’ll roam the web in packs, discussing issues that matter to us as a group with a common interest and purpose. For example, a controversial article or blog posting might spawn a private side conversation amongst the group.  Perhaps the group will collaboratively craft and post an official response.  In a more commerce oriented example, large groups could leverage their buying power and dynamically negotiate discounts on retail sites like amazon.

With Facebook now enabling us to log into other sites and surf with our Facebook friends, the web is reaching a new maturity – the Social Web or Friend Web.  But as discussed in this post, this will naturally give way to the Group Web, where technology connects us and makes it easy to surf not just with friends, but also alongside likeminded people who share our passions and affiliations.

What if it there was a tagging mechanism to annotate content with time relevance?

It might facilitate indexing and exploration of the “recent” web instead of forcing us to drown in antiquated content.  While the Temporal Relevance slider enables human annotation of an item’s projected loss of importance, this decay could alternatively be inferred by graphing taggers’ Time Relevance selections over time.

Viewed in aggregate, can user generated temporal metadata teach machines to predict what humans find important over time?

I watched the N-Judah MUNI bus whiz by last night in San Francisco’s Sunset district. I could easily have caught it if I busted into a quick jog, but with two buddies behind me, I figured it wasn’t worth the collective effort.

Still waiting 25 minutes later in a chilly, damp fog, I regretted my decision.

If I could have frozen time at that “make or break” moment, I would have:

1. Pulled out my iPhone
2. Clicked my Nextbus bookmark and navigated through no less than 4 links to find the right stop and check the arrival time of the next bus (the routesy iphone app might be faster)
3. Convinced my 2 friends to run!

In reality, that would have taken at least 2 minutes and the bus would have been long gone. So…we needed an ambient computing technology that understood my intention to catch that bus. It should deliver the “run or don’t run” response in a split-second.  Complex stuff, but a reasonable guess could be made by these tidbits of information:

• I took public transport earlier in the day to the Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park
• I just finished dinner and at 10:30 PM, was likely heading home (in fact, I told that to my wife on the phone just minutes before)
• Neither of my 2 friends had a car
• We were walking towards a popular bus route

Not sure what this ambient technology might look like, but it probably involves my phone, some communication protocol with the incoming bus, and maybe some supplied context on my part.  Probably not through high effort keyboard input, but maybe a quick voice command like “taking N-Judah home”.

I’d hope for a response like “run now! Next bus won’t arrive for 30 minutes” or maybe an orb-like display color coded with green for “take your time” or red for “run now!”.

I’m impressed by Small Worlds, the virtual world (now in Beta) by New Zealand based Outsmart. Unlike worlds like Second Life, Small Worlds is an in-browser flash application that works without an audience diminishing separate download. As I’ll explain in this post, it has the potential to bring a new social dynamic to the masses.

After creating your avatar, you choose a room and populate it with furniture and gadgets including a radio streaming last.fm, artwork displaysing your flickr feed, YouTube videos or Twitter tweets, and arcade games to challenge your friends. Click on a pool table or a chess board for a quick casual game. The mashup possibilities with other popular Internet services seem endless – I’d love to see an in-game map or globe where I can pinpoint previous or future travel destinations.

But I’m most excited about how easy and natural it feels to interact with other people. The last 5 years of social networking have demonstrated a progression in interactivity. First it was your individual profile – you create a page of self-description (favorite quotes, bands, etc). Then came the testimonial or public wall where you left messages to be discovered by others trolling your page. We then graduated to the Facebook newsfeed, where you can keep tabs on your wide social circle in a less time consuming way (no need to click each profile for the latest updates).

But while a sense of community was formed, it wasn’t real time. With an avatar based paradigm like Small Worlds, it’s natural to communicate with many people in your virtual room and participate in real-time group dialog. The learning curve is much lower than Second Life, where it takes hours to acclimate.

I experienced an AHA! moment, where I envisioned myself sending friends and new contacts a URL link (all rooms have their own web addresses) instead of an email address or Linked In invite. Once clicked, they enter my room and get treated to an online representation of Me – my design aesthetic, latest ideas, projects, photos, playlists, favorite restaurants and reviews. Ringing a bell might alert me through my IM client that I have a visitor so I can open up Small Worlds in my browser and catch up, maybe inviting a few mutual friends to plan a BBQ next weekend.

We haven’t yet reached Snowcrash technology, but Small Worlds is a step closer to a web less about Me and more about Us.

I’m reading Everywhere by Adam Greenfield and came across a few paragraphs that describe today’s facebook/twitter reality. With employers googling and myspacing potential new hires, it’s unrealistic to be both a content publisher and expect a work/play division.

And above all, what happens when the composite view we are offered of our own selves conflicts with the way we would want those selves to be perceived?

Erving Goffman taught us, way back in 1958, that we are all actors. we all have a collection of masks, in other words, to be swapped out as the exigencies of our transit through life require: one hour stern boss, the next anxious lover. who can maintain a custody of the self conscious and consistent enough to read as coherent throughout all the input modes everyware offers?

What we’re headed for, I’m afraid, is a milieu in which sustaining different masks for all the different roles in our lives will prove to be untenable, if simply because too much information about our previous decisions will follow us around. And while certain futurists have been warning us about this for years, for the most part even they hadn’t counted on the emergence of a technology capable of closing the loop between the existence of such information and its actionability in everyday life. For better or worse, everyware is that technology.

Be sure to read Harvey Feldspar’s recent geoblog about the impact of location-awareness:

“Hyperlocality is transforming our lives at every scale: bodyware, roomware, streetware, cityware, nationware, and global ware. From nano to astro!”

Something irks me about the recent hype surrounding the new Facebook Platform. Visually, these new applications all look the same and it feels so bland.

Universally celebrated by both users and programmers, Facebook’s decision to open up its ecosystem to developers certainly spiced up a social network formerly known for its cool way of tagging photos. Now you can superpoke me, Flixster or Flickr, read my fortune (or horoscope), PET MY LOLCAT (PURR!), digg! me, pirate music that you iLike, and stalk me all over the globe.

And you can do all of this from your comfy 1024 x 768 pixel easy-chair, branded with that trustworthy (heck, it must be safe – your friends are all here!) blue and white Facebook design motif.

And therein lies the problem, at least with the initial batch of applications; they’re so uniform, void of individuality as they all pipe the same tune of riches through Facebook monetization (?). Some of these apps do too much, trying to recreate the well-designed functionality of their full-blown website, but tamed in an awkward foreign environment.

On one hand, I commend Facebook on the (calculated) courage it took to lead the anti-myspace dance and embrace an open platform. Their API would make any VC firm salivate since their web 2.0 investment can now interact with 25+ million users (”fantastic demographics for our advertisers!”) through special text markup and custom database queries (”FQL” makes me snicker).

However, third party applications would be better served by focusing on the golden nugget offered by Facebook, which is the “network of friends” and the viral opportunity presented by “news feeds”. If Johnny sent Sarah a free gift, it must be worth something and I must click on the free gift application and send one to Marcus right now!

Just as Twitter’s gift to the community was the text messaging infrastructure, Facebook blessed us with the social network infrastructure and viral nature easily leveraged by existing websites to drive up their page impressions.

So instead of reproducing your website’s functionality on Facebook, write a Facebook application to be a simple “dashboard”, highlighting how a user’s network of friends interacts with your website.

You might consider headings like:

• Most active friends in your network
• Recent reviews by friends in your network
• Photos (or artists or books) most popular in your network

The items under the headings would link to the appropriate page on the destination website. This way, logging onto Facebook is all about checking your friends’ updates (as usual) on your start page and then maybe clicking on a few of these (new) applications to see what your friends are watching, reading or listening to, depending on the nature of the application. The Facebook application acts as a quick preview, but if you want more detail, click a link to visit a separate website.

In effect, Facebook becomes your social aggregator – an easy to read dashboard into your friends’ lives.

A mobile social network can recommend events of interest by analyzing information from users with similar profiles. For example:
Miguel, a gay 30 year old New Yorker vacationing in San Francisco, wakes up on Sunday morning wondering what to do. His cell phone beeps with a text message suggesting that he visits Dolores Park later that afternoon.

This suggestion was made because his social network has data that on hot and sunny Sunday afternoons in San Francisco, hundreds of gay men in a social network spend time in Dolores Park.

Let’s deconstruct how the social network arrived at this conclusion:

• In the past 6 months, hundreds of people used their mobile device to access the network from Dolores Park. It knows this because the phone communicates the user’s GPS coordinate. Many phones already have this capability, either built in or through a bluetooth connection with a GPS.
• Whenever a member accesses the social network, it logs the time. Many of these accesses from Dolores Park occur on Sunday afternoons, between 2pm and 5pm.
• On each access, the network contacts an online weather service and logs the weather condition and temperature. Many of these accesses from Dolores Park on Sunday afternoons occur on sunny days above 65°.
• Many of these network accesses correspond to gay men between 25 and 40 years old, as specified in their user profile under “orientation” and “age”.

By collecting data about how and when members use a service, social networks can creatively analyze and find patterns useful to the community. Furthermore, when Miguel arrives at Dolores Park, I would expect the network to facilitate a meeting with other like-minded members nearby.

Update: Related to this, check out this posting describing GyPSii, a social network that tracks users’ GPS location