Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

People have asked me if I know of any conceivable practical use for Twitter. This “microblogging” platform lets you publish 140-character updates to a group of friends and the internet at large.

Like you, I’ve probably made fun of the entire idea of microblogging as completely unrelated to anything but what the blogger is eating at the moment. And at first, it was like that: people tweeted (that’s Twitter-speak for “publish”) odes to cheeseburgers, curry and pizza.

However, like all technologies, microblogging has matured. It’s no longer for humans. Instead, it’s a way to automate up-to-the-minute news with a quick description and url.

If you look at any fairly active Twitter stream now, you’ll see that’s the case. I love metaphors, so here’s my metaphor for Twitter as it’s going to be in its second stage: a teletype machine.

There’s a convergence between Digg, Twitter and Facebook that allowes the publishing of “updates” that in their second stage are of a functional nature.

First stage was people chattering away like teenagers in illicit notes passed around math class; second stage is the industrial version. It will function in two ways:

a) Promotion of items found on the internet
b) Real-time updates of alerts, deals, offers, etc

If you look on the top right of this page, you’ll see icons for RSS and Twitter. If you haven’t seen it, this kind of option is stealthily invading sites that offer real-time information across the net; it means their Twitter updates, or “tweets,” or produced by their web software any time new information is posted.

RSS and Twitter are convergences upon the same idea: finding a way to centralize all of our information. Gone is the mid-1990s blather about the portal site. The new portal is the browser, probably a mobile one, and people are looking for a way to get a dashboard or control panel for information from all of the people, businesses and organizations with which they’ve involved.

It’s likely that at this point, over half of Twitter’s users are on mobile devices like phones or PDAs. I’m hearing Facebook has experienced the same thing, so that people meeting in bars simply exchange Facebook profiles instead of scribbled phone numbers. Then they can update each other, letting opportunities for contact form passively.

It’s like a teletype machine in an old-school news office: every thirty seconds or so, it prints out a one-liner of the news. It’s how different offices across the world stay in touch, not a diary.

The office is now a more flexible definition however. Individuals are like small firms; many are also small firms that contract labor. Here’s a vision of how these mobile tweeting technologies are going to fit into our lives:

A young woman steps up to the counter at an auto dealership. Her car needs an oil change; the person behind the counter informs her that there will be a 24-minute wait. She smiles, thanks him (ideally), and sits down on a nearby couch — and whips out her phone.

She then proceeds to conduct all of the business of her life outside of her job: ordering goods on the internet, staying in touch with friends, even paying her phone bill. Even more, when she’s done with that, she’ll try to stay on top of what others she knows are doing, usually through their blogs/tweets and so on.

In the late 1990s, web designers anticipated a day when smart automated “agents” would know a user’s preferences and seek out advantageous contracts and purchases for them across the net. Until we trust our artificial intelligence machines more, we’re going to be doing it the old fashioned way: reading the teletype and checking off items we’re interested in, even if we do it on a cell phone/PDA hybrid like a Blackberry or iPhone.

Like most technologies, Twitter has grown up — and we’re going to see tools that address this perceived need grow further. Now that we’ve linked the world and everyone has something to say, the real challenge is quickly filtering wheat from chaff, much like your grandfather may have done reading over the teletype in his office.

You’ve probably heard people saying that history repeats itself. This saying is troubling because events repeat in different forms, so you can’t look for similar appearances. You can however look for similar functions in the information ecosystem.

I’ve now lived through several cycles of the “this newfangled stuff is worthless” and, in my experience, that reaction occurs because when technologies first appear, people have no idea how to apply them. And if there’s anything that excites me about technology, it’s applying it. Making it address real world needs and functions.

Take for example, Twitter. The service allows you to post “tweets,” or 140-character one-line updates, to your online friends. The old joke was that most tweets were from people in restaurants. “Now at In-N-Out. The cheeseburger with bacon is a better option. Someone swiped my fries.”

That was the early adopters trying to find a reason to hold on to this neat new service. It’s more of a service than a new technology, but we still treat it as a new technology because interface design is what shapes technologies into products, and each product must be adopted just like any new tech.

First, people found out that while prices for texting a group of people on your cell phone are low in Europe, they’re high in the USA, so Americans — many of whom carry smart phones or PDAs — favor Twitter. But that was just an intermediate step to the real use of Twitter.

Remember how I said history repeats itself? That means we can use past patterns as metaphors to describe current ones. Kind of how we might describe an automobile as a chariot or a big military defeat as a Waterloo.

Here’s my metaphor for Twitter as it’s going to be in its second stage: a teletype machine.

In the old days, newspaper offices, government buildings and large corporations all had teletype machines. These enabled them to get updates from all over the world before they had been processed through the newspapers and radio.

Of course, these were terse updates — under 140 characters or less in most cases — because the teletype was a group-directed extension of an earlier technology, the telegram. Mechanically, it was barely different at all; however, since it allowed news to be broadcast instead of directed at one person, it changed society. The pace of the teletype defined how fast insiders were moving on the news, and the rest of society adapted to keep up.

Back to Twitter: it’s the modern teletype. From what I can see, most of the content on Twitter is generated by automated scripts. Your blog can automatically update others using Twitter. If you have a content management system, a bulletin board, mailing list or news service, the same is true.

Like a teletype, the Twitter page spits out these updates as they occur, so if you “follow” the Twitter accounts of all concerns in your life, you’ll be very well-informed and up to the minute, thanks to these automated postings.

Here’s one I’m using — the CDC’s H1N1 “Swine Flu” page. This box from the upper-right corner of that page gives you numerous options for staying informed without coming back to the page — which, given the amount of information the average person must manage, is an unlikely outcome.

It’s likely that at this point, over half of Twitter’s users are on mobile devices like phones or PDAs, and they tune in to see what the world around them is doing. They also catch these updates while they’re out being good consumers and buying products, which makes Twitter a good medium for making a pitch.

People are using Twitter for their businesses to offer real-time news, and updates like coupons or deal offers to draw in customers. They know that the savvy Twitter user isn’t posting restaurant updates — they’re subscribing to the best news feed you can get outside of a press nexus.

History repeats itself in other ways as well. I could point out how downloading MP3s has become like the new radio, or how the internet itself has become the new television, but you know these things already. Now just add Twitter to the heap.

As someone who always thought the web was one of the coolest technological amalgamations we as a species have produced, I have been wary for years of a collision between worlds. The virtual world has its own rules; the economic world has its own rules, too, but they’re closer to being part of nature.

In other words, we can represent nature by economics, but probably not by virtual world ideas. The virtual world is too cleanly cut off from the physical world, and too clearly tied up with what users think and want to believe. Because everything in this world is virtual, there’s no scarcity to force one solution to be better than another.

Now, at fifteen plus years into this little experiment, we’re seeing the worlds collide — and the physical world model is winning. Despite all the panic over the supposed demise of newspapers, the business models of old media are steadily gaining ground each business cycle.

• Advertising. In the past, I’ve written about how the people clicking are not the consumers advertisers desire. For many years, web advertising has been a free-for-all, with most ads being complete spam unrelated to what a user is seeing. The ads that do work seem to be the ones that pick up on what a person is seeking and offer a solution, but I don’t have data for that yet. What we do have is the news that users of Microsoft’s search engine Bing are more likely to click on ads. Bing and Google are two opposite strategies: Google cultivates its audience from the virtual world, where Bing gathers its audience from the “real world” more readily reached with TV and magazine advertising. Google is the new strategy of giving away expensive software services (like search) so that people buy ads; the Microsoft strategy is to use ads to get people to use services so that they can then sell them other software services.
• The virtual world model of free software is in trouble. At a time when Linux use is rising, but not as much as people thinking, other free/open source (FOSS) software makers are finding they’re facing competition — from corporations using the open source model of distribution even if not open-sourcing. Microsoft has released some code under an open source license; Google is distributing its browser, Chrome, as if it were open source software. This adds up to a problem for open source software, since most open source software packages are basically clones of existing software. Do you want Microsoft Office, or the free clone alternative, Open Office? Do you want a commercial UNIX or the free version, Linux? The main competition with open source software is piracy. If I can get Open Office for free, and Microsoft Office for free by pirating it, does the piracy being illegal affect me so much I wouldn’t rather have the better product? Look for more software houses to look the other way as piracy occurs, because having a larger installed user base is probably more important than getting people to pay large sums for software. Here we see the old model of hiring the best designers and coders and making top quality software coming out ahead.
• Net capping. The problem with the net is that people get attracted to the $50 monthly cost for broadband, and assume everything else is free. Music should be free. Software should be free. All web sites should be free, and newspapers should not charge for their online versions. Companies are finding that all this free doesn’t add up to profit, and that without profit, quality of services declines — but people are happy with Wikipedia, Google, free software, and pirating anything else. I have frequently suggested, in conversation, that newspapers make the first three paragraphs of any article available to the general public, but the full thing available to search engines, and then use either (a) micropayments or (b) membership in a monthly “information fee” group, with the percentage of a user’s clicks on each site determining how much of the payment goes to that site. People balk at $300 software, but they also balk at $20 software. The costs of running a computer are too high because the computer is now an everyday appliance like a refrigerator. People want to spend maybe $100 a month on it; $50 will go to broadband, where does the other $50? I suggest that operating system vendors open their own version of an “App Store” and sell third-party apps, possibly under a layaway-cum-subscription free that sells software cheaply, but as a bonus, gets these users registered. Software prices are going to fall except for businesses who license the stuff so they can get support; the industry will face this sooner or later, but either way, the future belongs to those who can make many bills/obligations become a single, one-stop source for software. This, again, is the old model; instead of a multiplicity of sources through which we must wade, trusting our wits, there’s a single answer — like a SEARS in the 1970s — which converts the computer from something we work on to an appliance we do work with.

As this year closes, watch for these market forces to converge. The age of the computer as calculating machine died in 1982; the age of the computer as an isolated device died in 1995; now, the idea of the virtual world as separate from physical world business models and natural world metaphors is about to die.

While they keep our eyes busy by wiggling their fingers around a “cloud computing” strategy, the Google guys are up to something else: they want to seize the real killer app, which is the freeware browser/email combination.

Most people don’t like to look at it this way, but the major uses people have for the internet all date back to 1980s uses:

• News — from reading Prodigy and AOL to massive aggregators like Digg and Slashdot.
• Address book — what do most people really use social networking for? Connecting to real life friends so if that Yahoo! email address expires, they can still reach them.
• Documentation — Google is like a giant library if you know where to look. Who keeps track of the links? Del.icio.us, or maybe your browser.

People aren’t going to go with cloud computing, which has only one real value: if paired with virtual machines, it gives companies the ability to dynamically scale their web presence. If your hits suddenly quintuple, and you’re running a virtual machine that’s distributed over a cluster, you can increase its resources and you’ll handle the load — a big advantage over having one machine, one website.

But do you really want to edit your documents on a web page? Especially after you’ve shelled out for a high-powered machine, this is unlikely. What’s more likely is that you’ll get a combination offsite backup and application installation solution, kind of like Iron Mountain or Mozy.com crossed with Apple’s app store. (I mention this in an earlier post as something Microsoft should do.)

All of these indicators, however, come back to one idea: that the browser is here to stay. To their credit, the Microsoft guys figured this out, but their browser team was not agile enough — probably thanks to layers of middle management — to make a competitive product on all fronts, and those weaknesses were brilliantly exploited by hackers and ploddingly exploited by Mozilla.org.

Now Firefox has a huge chunk of browser market share, with probably more to come with the excellent 3.5, which may be the fastest, most stable and most well-designed interface yet. Did I mention that 85% or more of the Mozilla’s teams funding came from Google? That is kind of interesting, since Google has since released their own browser, Chrome.

It’s part of a two-stage strategy. The first was to weaken Microsoft through an indirect attack, using Mozilla which is open source and freeware and non-profit and so “good” to most people, and the second stage is now coming true: make Chrome work best with the Google applications they’re hoping to convince us to use.

As you can see above, they’ve started that move already. Google apps work best with Google chrome. But you’re not being forced to use it. It will be your choice, whether you want these added and optional features or not.

Much as Google’s strategy is to use a search engine to sell advertising, their strategy here is to get you to use their apps so they get better tracking data. The big weakness of search is that most searchers are not the consumers advertisers want; the solution is to get people using applications and site features and so getting a chance to offer them customized advertising, and offering coupons and the like to those who are the ideal customers.

The integrated installer has been a dream of mine for ages:

PC-BSD exclusively features the Push Button Installer (PBI), a push-button software installation wizard with a wide range of applications. The latest version of the Push Button Installer improves PBI self-containment to increase reliability.

The Add / Remove Programs tool and the Update Manager have been consolidated into “Software & Updates.”

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Why separate between system updates and software? Or installed packages?

If Microsoft is listening, they’ll see a great opportunity here: a one-stop software shop. Imagine if you could search windows software and freeware and install it with a single click, straight from Microsoft.

If other UNIX-like operating systems are listening, they’ll see that for all their advances (Debian) in managing ports, users still want more: a single interface to manage every bit of code they have.