Why Apps Are The Future

Dave Winer wants us to ignore the rapid adoption of apps — primarily driven by the genius generation of smart phones now on the market — because he says they ‘are not the future’. This reminds me of the Chico Marx line, ‘Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?’

Leaving aside the astonishing proliferation of apps, what is it that Winer is trying to get at? What would lead to the fall of the applications ecology out there?

Dave Winer, Why Apps Are Not The Future

Linking.

Visualize each of the apps they want you to use on your iPad or iPhone as a silo. A tall vertical building. It might feel very large on the inside, but nothing goes in or out that isn’t well-controlled by the people who created the app. That sucks!  

The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent around it if you want to get my point. 

We pay some people to be Big Thinkers for us, but mostly they just say things that please people with money. It pleases the money folk to think that the wild and crazy and unregulated world of the web is no longer threatening them. That users are happy to live in a highly regulated, Disneyfied app space, without all that messy freedom.  

I’ll stay with the web. 

So when Dave means ‘the web’, he means the generation of the web where we were primarily interested in web pages and how they referenced each other by hyperlinks. This is what I call the Web of Pages, and it was a very productive basis for a decade, during which time we rapidly developed and migrated onto the Web of Flow, which is where we are mostly living now. 

Instead of pages and links, the most important objects in the Web of Flow are people and relationships. Instead of wandering around the web, jumping from page to page using browsers, people now use social apps, and those apps bring information to us through social relationships.

Yes, we still use URLs as convenient IDs for snippets of information, and those are the handles being passed around by apps, but they are increasingly becoming proxies for information that is embedded on the pages, used increasingly as a mechanism to fetch the information and bring it into a social context.

But Dave thinks we want to live in a 2008 era forever. I wrote about some of these arguments a while back in a piece called Why Closed Works: Moving Past Steampunk Thinking About The Future Of Computing, which dealt with the open/closed issue surrounding the rise of apps, and the fall of the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) style of human-computer interaction.

Personally, I want a future where we move farther away from the physical layers of the web and higher into the social layers. Here’s what I think is right around the corner:

1. Social Operating Systems — Apple and Google (and perhaps Microsoft and Facebook, as well) will roll out operating systems in which social communication and connection will be fundamental primitives, just like the file system was part of previous OS’s. Apps will be able to rely on the OS supported notions of identity and connection, instead of every application implementing the basics over independently.
2. The Fall Of The Browser — The browser is an afterthought, still an odd man out in the 2008 era model of computing. In a sense, this is because the web is an afterthought in older OS’s. We are now seeing OS’s where the web is the primary context, and the local hard drive is increasingly treated as a cache. When the web is primary, and all apps navigate and negotiate it, the browser starts to seem more like Apple’s Terminal program, that you will use once in a while when things get broken, and some people will never use it at all.
3. Social is not Disney — Moving into a world of social apps is not necessarily a simplification of the big bad complex web. It is a different web, with different complexities. 

Lastly, Dave seems to have an issue with ‘Big Thinkers’ who supposedly say what they do to make others — those with ‘big money’ — happy. But I don’t see that people advocating a new model of communication and connection through a different sort of web are necessarily doing the work of monied interests. I’m advocating it, personally, because I think it will lead to a richer user experience, and ultimately, stronger social connection in the world.

Source: scripting.com

14 December 2011 41 Permalink

Messiness At Scale

I stumbled onto a hilarious but unenlightening Twitter flame war instigated by Dave Winer — the Godfather of RSS — in response to MG Siegler’s ‘RSS is dead’ wisecrack.

At the risk of putting my fingers in the sausage machine, let me add a touch of nuance:

• RSS has declined in use, as web heads shift their source of ‘things to read’ away from RSS readers — like Google Reader — to tools like Twitter and Flipboard.
• The role of RSS in web infrastructure is being threatened by non-RSS based architectures, like Flipboard’s. That product ignores RSS and fetches through the URL to get directly at images, text, and other content.

Winer is ideologically opposed to closed, proprietary approaches like that of Twitter (or, by extension, of Flipboard):

Dave Winer, What I mean by “the open web”

Anyway, here’s what I meant by “open web.”

I meant not in a corporate blogging silo.

If I put stuff in Twitter, the only way to get it out is through a heavily regulated and always-changing API. It will change a lot in the coming months and years. It will certainly narrow more than it expands. I feel very confident in predicting this, because I understand where Twitter is going.

If you put stuff in Facebook, it’s even more silo’d than it is in Twitter.

However, if you put stuff in WordPress, even on wordpress.com, you have full fluidity. You are not silo’d. You can get data in and out using widely-supported APIs that are implemented by Drupal, Movable Type, TypePad, etc etc. At least there’s some compatibility. And in a pinch you could probably move your content to a static website and have it be useful.

If you write in static HTML and RSS, you’re very portable, there will be no lock-in at all.

So to the extent you’re locked in, that’s the extent you are not on the open web. The perfectly open web has zero lock-in. The silos are totally locked-in and therefore not on the open web.

Winer’s complaints are about control of our content: that we should be able to easily manage what we write. It’s a political argument. 

But his points fly in the face of innovation, where a Twitter or Quora or Facebook create very different — and not solitary — models of open social discourse, which need to be managed in ways that are different from old school blogging. It’s not every man for himself, anymore. Time is a shared resource on today’s web: our time is not our own, anymore. And that’s largely good.

I liken this problem to the trade offs inherent in living in large cities versus towns or the country. There’s more noise, bigger crowds, and longer lines at the DMV: more things that we can’t control, or where our control is restricted, relative to folks living in bucolic Des Moines.

Only in cities we get superlinear scaling, as Geoffrey West and his colleagues have shown:

Jonah Lehrer, A Physicist Turns the City Into an Equation

When a superlinear equation is graphed, it looks like the start of a roller coaster, climbing into the sky. The steep slope emerges from the positive feedback loop of urban life — a growing city makes everyone in that city more productive, which encourages more people to move to the city, and so on. According to West, these superlinear patterns demonstrate why cities are one of the single most important inventions in human history. They are the idea, he says, that enabled our economic potential and unleashed our ingenuity. “When we started living in cities, we did something that had never happened before in the history of life,” West says. “We broke away from the equations of biology, all of which are sublinear. Every other creature gets slower as it gets bigger. That’s why the elephant plods along. But in cities, the opposite happens. As cities get bigger, everything starts accelerating. There is no equivalent for this in nature. It would be like finding an elephant that’s proportionally faster than a mouse.

I maintain that Twitter, Facebook, and other ‘closed’ systems are really something else: they are dense and complex social systems, more like modern cities than Web 1.0 publishing platforms. And, like cities, there is more going on, less being controlled by specifications like RSS, and the food is better, the music is better, and there is more dangerous sex taking place.

Brian Eno uses the term ‘scenius’ to define the quality of the great cities, their ability to foster deep shared understanding and purpose for large networks of people. This collective intellect arises from messiness at scale, not carefully mediated and clearly defined standards. 

Said differently, the best food comes from cities with the highest number of health code violations, and the best art is produced where the largest number of building code infractions are found.

So, if you are looking for clean bathrooms and no traffic jams, stay in Iowa. But it is in cities — dense, loud, unplanned, messy — where the breakthroughs emerge.

Getting back to the specific case, here, let’s look at Flipboard. Flipboard rejects the use of neat-and-tidy RSS, and reaches through the URLs it finds in Twitter to directly paw the text, images, and links placed into articles and posts, and then it chooses what to display based on a proprietary algorithm inside the guts of the app, not based on the publisher’s RSS specification. 

Flipboard, Twitter, and other dense, complex social tools create a messier world, one that has superlinear scale. The tradeoff between complete ‘openness’ (or individual control of information and its experience) and superlinear social density is one I am willing to make. And so are all the users of these tools, or should I say, residents of these cities?

4 January 2011 8 Permalink

Are You Ready For Social Software?

[Originally published in Darwin, January 2005. I am reprinting because of a request from a reader that led me to search for this piece. Thank goodness someone reprinted in its entirety, because Darwin content has been offline for several years.]

Years ago, a logic professor beat it into my bony head that Sherlock Holmes had it all wrong when he consistently claimed to use deduction in solving his cases. It turns out he (or better, Arthur Conan Doyle) was using induction, which is, according to Webster’s, “the act or process of reasoning from a part to a whole, from particulars to generals, or from the individual to the universal.” In working from a paltry collection of clues to a full understanding of the actions and motives of the butler and his victim, Holmes/Doyle was, basically, developing a picture of the universe surrounding the crime from a few hints.

The same sort of confusion — the difference between induction and deduction — seems to be at work in the rapidly escalating debate about “social software:” its meaning, relevance and purpose.

What is Social Software?

People naturally tend to use software as a means to advance personal interests and to interact socially. As a result, the most broadminded consider the “cc:” line on e-mail the starting point of social software; others restrict the term a bit more. In fact, you may be tempted to ask, “what isn’t social software?”

I believe the phrase social software should be more helpful, and can distinguish software built around one or more of these premises:

Support for conversational interaction between individuals or groups — including real time and “slow time” conversation, like instant messaging and collaborative teamwork spaces, respectively. This is also supported by the interplay always going on in blogs, where one blogger riffs on something another has said, and a third jumps in with more commentary, and the next thing you know, 40 others chime in, and someone suggests creating a groupblog to pursue the theme, whatever it may be. A big freewheeling discussion, with snippets of the interaction spread all over the place.

Support for social feedback — which allows a group to rate the contributions of others, perhaps implicitly, leading to the creation of digital reputation. Digital reputation — also known as karma (from the Slashdot web community model) or whuffie (from Corey Doctorow’s science fiction novel, Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom) — will turn out to be an area of great importance. Consider the lengths that eBay sellers go to to maintain a good reputation.

Support for social networks — to explicitly create and manage a digital expression of people’s personal relationships, and to help them build new relationships. These usually involve some sort of “six degrees of separation” system. One example is the Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) proposed standard, an XML-based approach to define your interests, phone number, e-mail, and the degree and kind of relationships you have with others, including creating explicit links to their FOAF specifications (which, of course, refer to others’ FOAF definitions, and so on).

The heady interest in Web-based services like Ryze, Friendster, LinkedIn and others, which are explicitly social (or business) networking systems, is being driven by a growing awareness of the fluidity and flexibility of networking through the Internet.

Adina Levin, author of BookBlog, recently suggested that social software could be defined as “tools that depend more on social convention than on software features to facilitate interaction and collaboration.” But I think this stops short of what is going on: Social software allows us to create new social groupings and then new sorts of social conventions arise.

Kenneth Boulding, the economist, humanist and social scientist, once wrote: “We make our tools, and then they shape us.” That is what social software is doing. It is changing the way that we socialize.

So What’s The Big Deal?

On the other hand, social software has aroused the ire of some well-known cyber-culture vultures, such as blogger Dave Winer (the founder of RadioLand, a blog technology company), who recently opined:

Social Software? I’ve been in the software biz for 2.5 decades, so I’ve seen this kind of hype over and over. Take something that exists, give it a fancy new name, and then blast at reporters and analysts about it. Every time around the loop it works less well. In the ’80s, it worked very well. In the early 21st century, there aren’t enough analysts with credibility to make such a pig fly.

P2P was the last gasp. I remember getting breathless invitations to keynotes where this or that luminary was going to finally tell us what it is. In the end it wasn’t the technology that made a difference, but ironically, the people. Apparently the promoters of Social Software were listening.

It’s wrong. We don’t need this. Weblogs are about punching through the hype machine of idiot analysts and reporters who go for their BS. Social Software has existed for years. What’s the big news? A few people are looking for a pole to fly their flag on. Pfui!

I disagree with Dave (which isn’t unusual), as do others who think the term has legs (or wings). David Weinberger (Darwinmag.com’s Swift Kick columnist) has weighed in saying,

First, I consider social software actually to be emergent social software. That narrows the field to software that enables groups to form and organize themselves…. Second, it doesn’t much matter to me whether the software is new or old. I’m excited about the fact that that type of software is now being recognized (i.e., “hyped”) as important.

Social Software: Bottom-up

Social software is likely to come to mean the opposite of what groupware and other project- or organization-oriented collaboration tools were intended to be. Social software is based on supporting the desire of individuals to affiliate, their desire to be pulled into groups to achieve their personal goals. Contrast that with the groupware approach to things where people are placed into groups defined organizationally or functionally.

One good metaphor is worth a thousand words, so I suggest the following: Social software works bottom-up.

People sign up in the system (for example, by downloading an IM client and registering an ID there) and then they affiliate through personal choice and actions (I add you to my buddy list, and you decide to remove me from yours).

Traditional software approaches the relationship of people to groups from a top-down fashion. In the corporate setting, its hard to imagine a person existing without being specifically assigned membership to top-down groups: your team, your division, the budget committee and so on.

Over time, more sophisticated social software will exploit second and third order information from such affiliations — friends of friends; digital reputation based on level of interaction, rating schemes and the like. And this new software will support David Weinberger’s notion of enabling groups to form and self-organize rather than have structure or organization imposed.

Blogging is a good example of this dynamic, and perhaps is the primary irritant pushing us today to grope our way towards new terms and tools. The group interactions around blogging arise in many ways: authors post thoughts, others comment and still others add their opinions. Likewise, social software starts with individuals: People start with their own interests, biases and connections, and these become reflected in social relationships, from which a network of groups emerge from the interchange. And the blog developers add more features to blogs to support this group interaction.

A contemporary example is the blog concept of Trackback — a means to automatically post at your blog any comments made on other blogs regarding something you have written.

Traditional groupware puts the group, the organization or the project first, and individuals second. As a member of a Lotus Notes group, for example, you are provided specific access to specific sorts of information based on the administrator’s settings. It’s all about control. It’s deductive: enforcing the general conditions upon each specific individual. The individual is fractured into a number of unintegrated group personas. The fact that you are involved in other groups, that you have had a long history with others in the groups, etc., is secondary to the fixed purpose of the group, whatever that is.

Social software reflects the “juice” that arises from people’s personal interactions. It’s not about control, it’s about co-evolution: people in personal contact, interacting towards their own ends, influencing each other. But there isn’t a single clearly defined project, per se. It’s a sprawling, tentacled world, where social dealings are inductive, going from the individual, to a group, to many groups and, finally, to the universe. Or at least the itty-bitty universe of all people using the Internet.

Why Now?

There are hundreds of millions of people connected through the Internet, using all manner of media — real time/transient, slow time/persistent and the various hybrids — to form groups. Online business or personal network systems like Ryze, Friendster, Meetup and LinkedIn are exploding in use, often adding tens of thousands of new users every week, because they provide the key elements of social software: conversational interaction, social feedback leading to digital reputation and explicit representation of “equaintance,” as blogger Gary Turner styles digital relationships.

The answer to nearly all “why now?” questions is technology and money, and that is true here. The availability of low-cost, high bandwidth tools like blogs or systems like Ryze, when coupled with the critical mass of millions of self-motivated, gregarious and eager users of the Internet, means social software is certain to make it onto “the next big thing” list.

Investment groups are eager to find a successful business model in social software, and I am certain that there are many to be discovered in each of the three key areas that define social software.

Despite the wet blankets and the naysayers, we are witnessing the appearance of a new crop of inductive, bottom-up social software that lets individuals network in what may appear to be crude approximations of meatworld social systems, but which actually are a better way to form groups and work them.

Perhaps just as interesting as the way that social software is transforming group interaction, across different time zones or in the same room. Social software is destined to have a huge impact on how businesses get at their markets. So the essential elements of social software will be incorporated into more conventional software solutions, changing the way collaboration and communication is managed within and across businesses, and ultimately transforming how companies sell and interact with customers.

15 December 2010 47 Permalink

Blog 2.0 —- More Conversation Required

Apparently my planned revamp for /Message is part of a greater trend that I was unaware of:

[from Hugh MacLeod’s twits]

Thinking about gapingvoid 2.0. gapingvoid 1.0 HAS GOT to die…

And Dave Winer’s response:

[from Winer’s twits]

@gapingvoid, funny I’m thinking the same thing! (About Scripting News.)

Of course Winer has been threatening blogicide for some time, so who knows what he means by “die”…

I mean a drastic reworking of the site. I have a new logo, but nothing else yet. Here’s the logo in a sticker I put together for the new Moo sticker product:

19 July 2007 Permalink

Russell Beattie on The Last Page

So Russell is hanging it up. This, too, is a natural part of life: people come, people go.

I seldom read Russell in the past year, and never really warmed to him. Not that that has anything to do with his turning off the light. The reasons to stop are as ideosyncratic and imponderable as the reasons to start. There are probably millions who quit every year. Maybe these guys, like Dave Winer, can’t really adapt to this new brave new blogosphere, “that has such people in it.”

Somehow I think there should be a website dedicated to those who have quit, though: a sort of memorial. We could put virtual wreaths on virtual graves, since it is a kind of death: the end of blogging. We could even have a virtual ceremony.

23 April 2006 Permalink

Conference perfection

Euan Semple is a guy I first met in the flesh when he and I and a bunch of other people self-organized a small conference called the Symposium for Social Tools a few years ago in London. It was a ball, and we pulled it together in a couple of weeks. Some open space stuff, some presentations: all fun.

He has a few words to say about the the unconference meme:

[from The Obvious?: A word or two on conferences]

I was also very aware of the unconferencing meme going around at the moment but to be honest I am getting pretty tired of a small group of people who have attended mind-bloggling numbers of conferences, along with pretty much the same group of geeks, over the past four years in the US getting bored with themselves and declaring conferences dead. I know from experience that there are still a lot of people for whom “real” conferences continue to have value - especially for people who are new to a subject and not one of the chosen few.

And anyway - people like Chris Corrigan, Jon Husband and Johnnie Moore have been applying open space principles to group working for years very effectively. Getting a bunch of people to self-organise round things they feel passionate about wasn’t invented by Dave Winer.

I personally am not tired of conferences. I am just tired of tired conferences. Particularly the ones with the same group of twenty talking heads saying the same twenty things.

But I never get tired of Euan, perhaps because I don’t get to hear him enough.

[pointer from Jeneane Sessum]

21 April 2006 Permalink

Is it Head On or AIMSpace?

There have been a number of recent posts about AOL’s plans to launch a new social networking app, like Jason Calacanis’ recent piece where he simply — and enigmatically — reprints a Dave Winer one-liner — “I just heard a rumor that AOL is going to challenge MySpace, “head on,” to be announced in approximately two weeks.” — and then comments, “I know nothing. :-)”.

AIMspace is the internal project name, and it’s not clear if Winer is suggesting that the name of the product will be “Head On”.

But I know from discussions with folks like Tina Sharkey that AOL is planning to roll out a lot of stuff over the next few months, and that the buddylist is very much the center of their social universe. No surprise, considering what an asset AIM is.

I am having lunch with some AOL folks today, so maybe they will tell me something substantive, although I bet they won’t let me publish a word.

20 April 2006 Permalink