A core human competency is the capacity to model outcomes. This predictive ability has contributed to our successful growth as a species and provided the stage from which we extrude our technologies. We observe our world, log our experiences, and use this information to envision & plan our future possibilities. In the rush into tomorrow we’ve deputized machines to assist in our scenario modeling as our plans grow ever greater in scope.
Today we have tremendous amounts of data available about any system we wish to model. Drive platters are bulging into the terabytes just to store all of the information gathered by sensors, services, and empowered humans. Whether we study business networks, financial models, or natural systems, our awareness of their complexity has grown exponentially. Things are far wider and more interconnected than we could have imagined even 20 years ago.
All systems are sets of nodes with properties & variables that govern their behavior, coupled together by relational rules governing their interaction. The more complex a system, the more unique nodes and the more interconnections between nodes. Given the human constraint of being able to hold only 6 or 7 unique objects in mind at any given time it’s clear that we’re overwhelmed by even the relatively simple tasks of understanding, for example, a mid-size business structure enough to predict its future, especially when you consider the business system itself as a single node embedded in a much larger global socio-economic system. Imagine the difficulties climate modelers face trying to document global circulatory systems…
One emerging strategy for modeling complex systems looks to software and the floating-point wonders enabled by Moore’s Law. Computers are phenomenally capable of managing the inconceivable amounts of operations necessary to begin modeling dynamic systems. Yet, until very recently one needed to book time on a supercomputer cluster to run weather models or robust behavioral analysis. Even today’s bleeding hardware strains under the weight of such complexity. Research institutions have pursued natural systems modeling for some time and the business world has been paying attention. SAP now offers modeling capabilities with its business intelligence ERP solutions, enabling executives to run scenarios and envision possible outcomes of strategic decisions. Oracle recently acquired Hyperion, adding “performance management” to their suite of BI tools. You can bet these technologies will work their way into government & geopolitical protocols, as well as social & personal behavioral engineering as we increasingly track & model our lives.
Effectively, this pattern emulates the deeper shift from individual enterprise to collective collaborations. You can only model a complex system with another sufficiently complex system. However, even the most interesting algorithms are encumbered by the impositions of their logic: they can only be as creative as they were written. A second emerging strategy for modeling complex systems looks to deputize humans as processing nodes, crowdsourcing future possibilities across infinitely creative sets of minds. The Institute for the Future has taken this approach with its Signtific Lab and the Superstruct platform, leveraging the principles of gameplay to engage massive participation in envisioning scenarios.
The Superstruct games have drawn in thousands of players offering their thoughts & dreams of the future. Players become processing nodes for the chosen subject (eg. “when augmented reality is everywhere”, or “when personal satellites are as easy to deploy as websites”) iterating across large sets of potential outcomes. From these inputs, patterns emerge showing trends with greater frequency & momentum among the collective. Perhaps even more interesting – and where the Superstruct method is more flexible than computational modeling – are the outliers that emerge from players. Many of the most compelling signals of the future are those that completely break from current patterns. Indeed, one of the most fundamental prevailing shifts in the global paradigm is that change is accelerating in ways we cannot even imagine.
These two approaches both consider complex systems & scenario modeling from architectures that themselves are complex, object-oriented systems. The programmatic approach brings heavy-weight numeric bit-crunching to dynamic data streams, while the Superstructing approach offers wide-reaching creativity and human sensing. Augmenting one approach with the other will mark the next phase of predictive analysis necessary to safely navigate civilization through the future. Envisioning these scenarios and building compelling narratives around them will inevitably draw them into becoming.
Our lives are more & more complex and our enterprises & collaborations are commonly reaching global scales. The need to effectively model & predict is a fundamental human trait, reinforced in the face of escalating complexity in a hyper-connected, Read-Write world.
Some rough notes from the weekend on the Northern California coast… I’m trying to get at the core of my general orientation towards the world. It’s coming into focus at the nexus of evolutionary biology & technology. Or…
How does evolutionary biology express through culture & technology?
Requirements of human biosurvivial & social identity (compare to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs):
Global comm networks are rapidly bringing the world closer and changing human cognition in ways we cannot yet fully see. What are the impacts and consequences of the emerging self-identification of the human species? How will we manage the human agency? Do we have a global strategy yet, or just a Balkanized polyculture of mostly-competing sub-identities? (Obv. the latter.) Compare to the Greek & Roman consciousness that embodied emotional states & psychological constructs in the mythic drama of deities & demigods. The western religious myth of Earth as resource and Earth as purgatory elevated us above the natural world. The planet is now urgently reminding us that we are within the natural world – a subset embedded in a much larger and ultimately self-interested system.
The assertion of the natural world compels us towards alignment with biomimetic solutions & protocols. Or towards oblivion as we are corrected by the planetary system. We cannot destroy the world before it limits our ability to do it damage. The compulsion towards environmental protection is a species-wide awareness rising from our very cells and fueled by our growing awareness of our impact on the planetary ecology. Adapt or perish.
Socio-economic & ecological adaptation is not on a uniform schedule. Diverse states & peoples have their own schedules to work out as they march up the pyramid of civilization. Does this demand caretakers & parent states? Globalization is a normalizing force, but inequities between self-appointed parents and emerging economies will grow, as will the ability of smaller networks to inflict their will on states, NGO’s, & global systems. This democratization of technological empowerment is yet another major current working through our species. We’re getting stronger yet the morality(?) & responsibility expected to wield this power is not uniform across cultures & peoples. Core biosurvival needs remain the primary driver, exposed to shifting climates and diminishing conventional energy sources. There will be (more) blood.
The race is whether the technologies of liberation & salvation will outpace the technologies of destruction & exploitation. Of course, the real technology underneath both is the human brain – a much more subtle & powerful tool, highly malleable but stubbornly resistant to overt change.
Here’s a selection of my tweets from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past week. These are the ones I think grab the juicy nuggets from the speaker’s presentations. [In temporal order with the earliest (ie Monday eve) listed first.]
Tim O’Reilly: “We have greatness but have wasted it on so much. ”
We have an unprecedented opportunity to build a digital commonwealth. #etech
Work on something that matters to you more than money. This is a robust strategy. #etech Niall Kennedy: Energy Star rating for web apps? Thinking of clouds & programming like tuning a car for better gas mileage. #etech
Cloud computing: no reasonable expectation of privacy when data is not in your hands. Not protected by 4th amendment. #etech Alex Steffen: Problems with water supply are based in part on our lack of beavers. #etech
Social media for human rights. http://hub.witness.org #etech Gavin Starks – Your Energy Identity & Why You Should Care. see http://amee.com #etech Maureen Mclugh – Consider that technology may be evolving in ways that are not particularly interested in us. #etech Becker, Muller: We have under-estimated the costs and over-estimated the value of our economy. #etech Becker, Muller: We assume economic trade must be the primary framing of value in our lives. Why? #etech
Design Patterns for PostConsumerism: Free; Repair Culture; Reputation Scaled; Loanership Society; Virtual Production. #etech NYT: emerging platforms, text reflow, multitouch, flexy displays, smart content, sms story updates, sensors, GPS localized content. #etech Jeremy Faludi: Buildings & transport have the largest impact on climate change. Biggest bang for the buck in re-design. #etech Jeremy Faludi – Biggest contributor to species extinction & habitat loss is encroachment & byproducts from agriculture. #etech Jeremy Faludi – Best strategies to vastly reduce overpopulation: access to birth control & family planning, empowerment of women. #etech Tom Raftery: Grid 1.0 can’t manage excess power from renewables. Solution: electric cars as distributed storage. #etech
Considering the impact of pluging AMEE (@agentGav) data in ERP systems for feedback to biz about supply chain impacts. BI meets NRG ID. Mike Mathieu: Data becoming more important than code. Civic data is plentiful and largely untapped. Make civic apps! #etech Mike Mathieu: Take 10 minutes today and pick your crisis. Figure out how to create software to help. #etech
What is #SantaCruz doing to make civic data available to service builders? We want to help SC be healthier & more productive. Mark Fraunfelder: “I haven’t heard of anybody having great success with automatic chicken doors.” #etech [re-emerging technology]
Realities of energy efficiency: 1gallon of gasoline = ~1000hrs of human labor. #etech Kevin Lynch: Adobe is saving over $1M annually just by managing energy. #etech
Designing backwards: Think about the destiny of the item before thinking about he initial use. (via Brian Dougherty) #etech
RealTimeCity: physical & digital space merges, people incorporate intelligent systems, cities react in accord w/needs of pub welfare. #etech
Oh my we’re being LIDAR’d while Zoe Keating plays live cello n loops. ZOMG!!! zoe keating & live lidar is blowing my mind at #etech 1.3M points per sec! Julian Bleeker cites David A. Kirby: “Diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage over true prototypes” #etech Julian Bleeker: Stories matter when designing the future, eg. Minority Report. #etech Julian Bleeker: “Think of Philip K. Dick as a System Administrator. #etech Rebecca MacKinnon: Which side are we helping, River Crabs or Grass Mud Horses? #etech Kati London: How can we use games to game The System and how can they be used to solve civic problems? #etech Nathan Wolfe: Trying to fight pandemics only at the viral human level ignores deep socioeconomic causes of animal-human transmission. #etech Nathan Wolfe, re: viral jump from animal to human populations: “What happens in central Africa doesn’t stay in central Africa.” Nathan Wolfe: need to work with % of population w/ hi freq of direct contact with animals for early detection of viral transmission. Nathan Wolfe: Vast majority of biosphere is microscopic, mostly bacterial & viral. Humans: very small piece of life on Earth. #etech
[This is a reply I left recently to a Global Futures question about the near-future of the web. It goes a little off-topic at the end but such is the risk of systems analysis. Everything's connected.]
Within 10-15 years mobile devices will constantly interact with the world around us, analyzing objects, faces, signage, locations, and anything else their sensors can engage. Camera viewfinders will identify visual sources using algorithms to match them up with cloud data repositories. Bluetooth and GPS will interact on sub-channels silently exchanging relationships with embedded sensors across devices and objects. A user’s mobile device will become their IP address hosting much of their profile information and mediating relationships across social nets, commercial transactions, security clearances, and the array of increasingly smart objects and devices.
Cloud access and screen presence will be nearly ubiquitous further blurring the line between desktop, laptop, server, mobile devices, and the objects in our world. It will all be screens interfacing between data, objects, and humans. Amidst the overwhelming data/content glut we will outsource mathematical chores to cloud agents dedicated to scraping data and filtering the bits that are pertinent to our personalized affinities and needs. These data streams will be highly dynamic and cloud agents will send them to rich media layers that will render the results in comprehensible and meaningful displays.
The human sensorium and its interaction with reality will be highly augmented through mobile devices that layer rich information over the world around us. The digital world will move heavily into the natural analog world as the boundaries between the two further erode. This will be readily apparent in the increasing amount of communication we will receive from appliances, vehicles, storefronts, other people, animals, and even plants all wired to the cloud. Meanwhile, cloud agents will sort through vast amounts of human behavioral information creating smart profiles and socioeconomic and environmental systems models with incredible complexity and increasing predictive ability. The cloud itself will be made more intelligible to agents by the standardization of semantic web protocols implemented into most new sites and services. Agents will concatenate to tie services together into meta-functions, just as human collectives will be much more common as we move into increasingly multicellular functional bodies.
The sense of self and our philosophical paradigms will be iterating and revising on an almost weekly basis as we spread out across the cloud and innumerable virtual spaces connected through instantaneous communication. Virtual worlds themselves will be increasingly common but will break out of the walled-garden models of the present, allowing comm channels and video streams to move freely between them and the social web. World of Warcraft will have live video feeds from in-world out to device displays. Mobile GPS will report a user’s real-world location as well as their virtual location, mashing both into Google Maps and the SketchUp-enabled virtual map of the planet.
All of this abstraction will press back on the world and create even greater value for real face-to-face interactions. Familial bonds will be more and more cherished and local communities will take greater and greater control of their lives away from unreliable global supply chains and profit-driven corporate bodies. Most families will engage in some form of gardening to supplement their food supply. The state itself will be hollowed out through over-extended conflicts and insurgencies coupled with ongoing failures to manage domestic civic instabilities. Power outages and water failures will be common in large cities. This will of course further invigorate alternative energy technologies and shift civic responsibilities to local communities. US manufacturing will have partially shifted towards alternative energy capture and storage but much of the real successes will be in small progressive towns rallying around local resources, small-scale fab, and pre-existing economic successes.
All in all, the future will be a rich collage. Totally new and much the same as it has been.
Now more than ever, screens are competing for our attention in daily life. The distinctions between desktop PC, laptop PC, mobile, etc… are being replaced by the simple abundance and omnipresence of digital screens conveying information and mediating interaction. As LCD newsfeeds, airport terminal displays, set-top video box menus, billboards, advertisements, multi-touch screens, and augmented mobile devices, data and content are everywhere. All of it requires a lightweight and dynamic graphic layer in which to render content. Dynamic render plugins like Flash and Silverlight are very well engineered to address the requirements of these displays but it should be understood that much of the technology represents a shift away from the 2D ad/interactive paradigm primarily addressed by the Flash runtime.
Mobile augmented reality solutions require heads-up-display, alpha-channel rendering of text and graphics. Dynamic data visualization requires strong integration with back-end databases as well as messaging protocols like JSON, SOAP, and SMS. To enable rendering large datastreams in plugin runtimes like Flash & Silverlight, companies should aggressively pursue runtime adoption across mobile devices and smart phones, while defining prototypes for active camera overlays. They should optimize rendering and expand into all rich-content displays (set-top, automotive, kiosks, smart objects, and embedded systems built on the Android/Linux platform). They should optimize for dynamic rendering of large data streams, like the Nasdaq AIR application. The runtimes should be increasingly exposed to SEO and analytics retrieval so that secondary services and agents can easily be built on user workflows and data collection. And they should not neglect the 3D gaming market, but should consider how it can play a role in immersive worlds as a dynamic data layer (eg billboard adverts that can be remotely updated).
Competitive landscape: Adobe Flash (dominant market share, full turn-key solution), Microsoft (Silverlight remains the strongest competitor to Flash though it continues to play catch-up with our tech), Java (JavaFX just released but has little traction and is too late to the party), W3C (HTML5 has perhaps the largest share of hearts but is also the slowest to move), Google (might be cutting around Flash & Silverlight by pushing its interests into HTML5, Mozilla, and through Android & Chrome).
Related: Augmented reality solutions will require semantic architecture and image recognition
algorithms (identification, recognition, relation).
Killer feature: Immersive gaming companies like Rockstar, Blizzard, ID, Epic, NCsoft, Valve et al should implement a way for game server admins to tap live in-scene camera feeds that can be bussed out to HTML. Liberty City should have public CCTV’s that viewers can watch from their browser or mobile client. Like a virtual Adam’s Block people could tune in to an alleyway or freeway underpass and let the action unfold in the streets below. World builders should enable first/third-person game cameras to send their viewport to Flash embeds.
Imagine tuning into a South Korean Quake deathmatch tournament as a spectator and being able to view the world through the game eyes of the champion or to switch across various fixed camera feeds in corridors, over walkways, and above central arenas to witness the gameplay from alternate angles. It might seem odd in sports-addled America and the UK but in Asia hundreds of millions are online and they love 3D gaming. The gameworld becomes a performance space. Second Life could finally entertain more than just the local cliques by broadcasting the actions of art collectives and protest groups out to the world.
It doesn’t take much effort to see how this multiplies the available media advertising real-estate considerably. Fixed camera views become hot advert property rented to savvy marketers who know they can reach both the local gamers and the viewing masses. Attention property goes meta. This is a two-way street as external feeds begin to pipe into the game worlds. The walls really start coming down when you can take a cellphone call in-game and then wave to the camera for your friends to see. They take a screenshot and then send it to the clan web site and the GTA Flickr feed that gets displayed on the side of a building in downtown Liberty City. Sponsored by Verizon of course.
Blizzard claims something like 10 million regular users of World of Warcraft. Their WoW wikia page is the largest collection of data on anything in the world. You think they might be interested in being able to view their clan members remotely and communicate with them at any time? Or tune into video feeds showing the night elves in Darnassus, or watch the pass at Chillwind’s Point? (Truth: I googled these.) And if Blizzard wins the fight to keep the gameworld free from advertising, marketers can accrete around the popular viewing channels and their Flash embeds.
These worlds are dark clouds, opaque from all but those that pay the playing fee. Yet there’s so much entertainment and interest and real human nature playing out in these worlds. People will watch. Agents will sift through the user data feeds streaming out along with the A/V feeds. And think of the up-sell as viewers convert to players. Someday I’m certain some of the reality tv channels on my mobile device will be looking into such immersive worlds and showing me where in my friends are and who they’re battling and what type of car they just jacked for a joyride through Liberty City. (I *really* want the GTA CCTV’s!)
This is kinda blowing my mind. Adam’s Block has gotten a ton of local and national (international?) press in the last week. Adam Jackson’s pair of webcams capturing the daily & nightly life of the San Francisco Tenderloin is becoming the latest booming media channel.
I just tuned in and now, in the middle of the intersection, framed in optimal view of the camera, is a white spray paint tag: WKT. A tagger has meta-tagged Adam’s Block. Whoever did it was painting the ground but is advertising to the web. There are far more people watching that intersection than the locals. With viewers come advertisers of all stripes. Everyone wants to be seen and heard. This totally up’s the ante of post-reality tv and redefines the very notion of space.
This is just the start. Expect more street art, performance theater, protests, and outright corporate advertising to invade the short stretch of Taylor St. The value of this dirty chunk of SF has just gone up exponentially. Adam’s Block is a hole in the wall between The Cloud and The Street, helping forge that new land where the two are indistinguishable.
Cars buzz along at remarkable speeds, occasionally screeching around the corner or stomping on their breaks to avoid oblivious pedestrians. An SUV parks on the curb and 5 men dressed in dark clothes emerge bobbling around in the manner of slightly drunken friends rolling from one event to another. A tall lanky man drags himself along the sidewalk with a staggered gait, half-limping in hazy diagonals across the concrete. People sit on the sidewalk while elders riding Rascal scooters roll past them. A lone bulky figure walks slowly then stops to wave across the road. A man jogs up to him and reaches for his hand with one arm, wrapping his other around him in a hug. They seem like old friends but then quickly part striding in opposite directions. Sirens echo off in the city canyons. Another grey figure stumbles along, pauses, turns and simply stares up into the sky for some interminable duration before turning around and stumbling back the way he came.
This is Adam’s Block. The little slice of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district surveilled by Adam Jackson and his two webcams. People spend hours just watching the street life, commenting below the cam views in a streaming chat window joking and speculating about the seedy and probably illegal nature of many of the transactions they witness. This is the new age of discovery masquerading as entertainment. A time where increasingly finite fragments of the human experience are being witnessed and shared shared across the species. This is humanity observing itself and peering into the every crack of life.
Adam’s Block is riding a wave of buzz after a number of high-profile TV news shows gave him national coverage. His page is registering an average visit time of 2.5 hours – an unheard of number for any web page. The simple web cam is out-competing the most zealous media outlets. Hollywood constructed the simulacrum in which dreams could be manufactured. Reality TV broke the paradigm by televising so-called real life. Such a compelling notion faltered when the scripts and directors meticulously crafting the narratives were exposed. Now, the YouTube generation is finding entertainment in the very homes and streets of the world around them. Human life, it seems, is immensely fascinating. We’re all stars in the New Reality TV.
As Hollywood flails with more and more recycled pap and the music industry guards its shareholders by never taking risks, preferring the safe profits squeezed from the next big media clone, the public hungers for authenticity and novelty. Content industries have become so conservative and profit-driven that real expression and entertainment is mostly squeezed out and marginalized. The inevitable response is the current democratization of media content that is completely redefining the broadcast industry. The viewers are taking over the network.
Life is vastly more diverse and compelling than 98% of what corporate media churns out for consumption. And this hints at the bull in the china shop of the Information Age: the best content is free content. Profit seems to erode authenticity and inevitably manages to calcify even the most creative minds. The experience of entertainment is shifting into the experience of life in all it’s detail, leaving business to hustle whatever it can from the narrowing interstices of observer & observed.
The Google paradigm is effectively partitioning content creation from many of the fiscal interests that feed on it. It’s only getting easier and easier for an individual to record, edit, publish, and share content. Adam’s Block runs on a host server, a couple of webcams, and some simple web programming. He can leave for the weekend and the feed continues to pump out quality slice-of-life entertainment while the community of viewers adds their own content and data. An incredibly simple setup is delivering one of the roughest parts of San Francisco to potentially millions of people across the globe. For ill or good, such remote voyeurism is the new media. The lo-fi street is now competing with big-budget properties of mainstream media.
Adam’s Block is only the beginning. YouTube and video is now the dominant bandwidth usage across the web. More and more free tools will arise on the mobile web platform to make it easy for anyone to share content. More cams will go online just to glimpse and capture the daily movements of humanity. The Shiba Inu puppy cam is hugely popular and viewers are hanging on every day to see the pups grow. Justin.tv is growing with hundreds of live video channels. Cameras and screens are spreading out to capture & mediate the world. CCTV channels will open and network, bringing public access to formerly-private cameras. Imagine Neighborhood Watch leveraging every open webcam in the area to reduce crime. Or local transport authorities deriving congestion patterns. Police & emergency services will increasingly use public cams to reinforce their existing information networks. Temporary wireless field cams will be deployed to capture & broadcast events, demonstrations, and invasions. Even now Qik turns a mobile phone into a live streaming video capture device. One user was recently expelled from China for streaming a Free Tibet protest to the world. The world of voyeurs is crowdsourcing the legions of self-made journalists, investigators, and sociologists. We are finding, witnessing, revealing, recording, & archiving everything that catches our eye because, really, beneath the creeping malaise of the daily grind, it’s all absolutely mind-bogglingly amazing.
Soon the video stream will separate and become transparent, revealing the rich array of data within. Video will be object-taggable and searchable. Video content will be scanned by image recognition algorithms and sent to cloud servers to identify known matches. Bots will watch streams and add their own semantic layers to the timeline, customized to serve whichever analyst or advertiser employs them. Yelp users will be revealed by their mobile GPS, identified on video by alpha channel text as they walk into the camera viewport. Increasingly network-aware vehicles and devices will communicate to cameras augmented with radio transmitters that read remote RFIDs. Clothing and accessories will be designed to communicate directly to the eyes and agents of the global panopticon, while street tech will evolve to render users invisible to the ever-present eyes of the world. And why limit to the real world? Video streams will soon provide web portals peering into virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto. Information, culture, and networks are all merging around the individual, helping us better navigate our world and communicate & collaborate with our allies, while abstracting our very selves out into distributed digital networks.
Still, people stream past the staggering beggar on the sidewalk who turns to find some human moment with a woman in a wheelchair parked at curb edge. Below the cam view, the chat window scrolls ceaselessly meandering between rude humor at the expense of the homeless and casual comments among emerging clicks of remote viewers who know more about the SF Tenderloin than they do about each other. The world is getting smaller and smaller but is it getting any friendlier? What will become of the simple grace of human touch and the ionized charge of air between hands and hearts face-to-face against the deepening hypermediation of life lived through inumerable screens? How is such tech helping people and communities? Given the option, would viewers click to donate money to help lift these people out of the brutal poverty of their lives? Or do screens make everyone into hollow actors always capering solely for our amusement?
“Like people,” Darpa notes …such a story-telling system would be able to “retrieve and reuse stories to construct an appropriate interpretation of events …because they convey the aspects of a situation that are most important in determining a decision.”
Darpa hopes to have this Experience-based Narrative Memory (EN-Mem) system make “complex situations… simple, understandable, and solvable.”
…Making sense of a complex situation is like understanding a story; one must construct, impose and extract an interpretation. This interpretation weaves a commonly understood narrative into the information in a way that captures the basic interactions of characters and the dynamics of their motivations while filling in details not explicitly mentioned in the input stream. It uses story lines with which we all have experience as analogies, and it simplifies the detail in order to communicate the crucial aspects of a situation. The story lines it uses are those the decision maker should be reminded of, because they are similar to the current situation based upon what the decision maker is trying to do.
The budget needed for an at-home surveillance system has just been slashed to a couple of Jeffersons. The eyeCam Micro Wireless camera, a plug-and-play with a wireless transmission range of 450 ft., is now down to $40, making it one of the most affordable spy video gadgets out there.
Click-through for sample video – spy cam attached to Dragonfly remote heli, ie personal neighborhood surveillance drone. Federal laws may apply.
…he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking.
He was then able to have a conversation with the other character using an attached microphone, said the researchers at Japan’s Keio University.
…”In the near future, they would be able to stroll through Second Life shopping malls with their brain waves… and click to make a purchase,” Ushiba said.
Nice to hear that Twitter is addressing their stability problems. My sense is they maybe didn’t expect to get so popular quite so fast. Still no word on their business model but it’s admirable that they’ve so far resisted the Google AdSense cancer…
Our direction going forward is to replace our existing system, component-by-component, with parts that are designed from the ground up to meet the requirements that have emerged as Twitter has grown. First and foremost amongst those requirements is stability. We’re planning for a gradual transition; our existing system will be maintained while new parts are built, and old parts swapped out for new as they’re completed. The alternative – scrapping everything for “the big rewrite” – is untenable, particularly given our small (but growing!) engineering and operations team.
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