These are my brief (and very rough) notes from 5 minutes ago summarizing some guidelines I feel are critical for application & service development:
The cloud is everywhere.
Applications grab eyes.
Mobile/desktop/cloud - Don’t draw partitions.
Seek integrations across platforms.
Scale services by UI. Eg editing photos on a mobile is not appropriate but capturing images and uploading them to a workspace is.
Build communities.
Provide ubiquitous workspaces.
Communicate, Collaborate, Create, Share
As with much of the digital world, corporate transparency is greater now than it ever has been. Witness yesterday’s Adobe Analyst Meeting - a closed door, invite-only industry event at which analysts of all stripes were treated to Adobe’s financial strategy for the year to come. Within those exclusive walls, many industry agents were typing away on laptops and mobiles but they weren’t just live-blogging or recording notes for a report or article to be edited by their gatekeepers and published later. They were also broadcasting SMS messages to the masses in real-time through Twitter, micro-blogging their instantaneous thoughts, reactions, and sub-channel conversations to thousands of vicarious third-parties.
These raw feeds are perhaps a much more accurate representation of such events - or at least constitute a valuable nuance to the conversation - but their true merit is in their subversive tunneling to freedom through the garden walls, broadcast to the masses. I was annoyed that I couldn’t attend my own company’s briefing but then I got a lot of the meat from trolling the analyst tweets. This raises numerous issues. Should the company defend the tower and let me get the info second-hand through the emotional filters and bullshit detectors of the invitees? Or is it in their interest to include me and the rest of the public so they can at least have a better bet at controlling the message? Is there value in creating such walled gardens in the first place if anyone can breech your security with a simple 140 character message? Is it cost-effective? Do companies impose checkpoints to remove potentially threatening mobile devices? Can you trust people to stick to the talking points or do you allow that the genie is out of the bottle and the natural process of selection will actually help your company do a better job? Transparency and democratized digital broadcast is crowdsourced quality control. It’s a natural feedback mechanism for regulating the evolution of ideas.
These days, if an exclusionary body refuses to share beyond the in-crowd, at least one of those insiders will probably share it with the world. Information is free and the closed companies see their brand suffer as they try in vain to crush the dissenters on a global and very public stage. Their insular reporting hierarchies inevitably ensure that the same ideas and strategies eventually become recycled again and again, and that the truth is filtered through the instinct of self-preservation. Secrecy is like evolution in a vacuum or asexual reproduction. There is little pressure for real change beyond the cold, hard truth of the quarterly earnings report.
Is it even possible to keep secrets anymore? Do you remember all the conspiracy theories you read about in college? Have you noticed that most of them have now been recorded as historical fact? Have you considered that within 10 years the majority of elected officials will have public digital paper trails stretching across the fabled Information Superhighway? And there will be bands of saavy developers eager to crunch the data from those paper trails and render them in pretty visualizations that really show just exactly how honorable/charitable/pious/two-faced/depraved your future senator really is.
Even the analysts are known, willingly opting in to the public timeline of Twitter. All of their names are published at Sage Circle for anyone to see and follow. In fact, in order to really productively use many of the new open social tools & services, the user is highly incentivised to opt-in to their own public transparency. Everyone who wants to speak with power enough to reach the masses (or at least a few handfuls of them) must embrace the open platform. And if you’re professional, you need to use your real name. Therein lies the rub: to be competitive businesses need to have their product managers, their evangelists, their analysts, idea makers and trend-setters all dialed in to the social web. Communication and sharing and an openness to take feedback from your users is becoming crucial for the corporate body to humanize and interact with the eyes of the world. Effective product development must include the people buying your product, otherwise you end up designing for imagined ghosts. Hence, the increasing migration of analysts and audiences to Twitter. Then as a company you end up with your intelligence agents working for you but writing to their audience. And you have an empowered audience that’s publicly-yet-privately back-channeling their loathing of your corporate shill right in front of them, like the now legendary and immediately ground-breaking SXSW smackdown of Tara Hunt.
Like journalists, analysts are no longer totally bound by an allegiance to their lords nor to the companies they scrutinize. They become like moonlighting Ronin. They broadcast to the world from a niche stardom and semi-famous personhood that carefully (or not-so-carefully) balances the party line and the ratings of the viewers. In the face of even limited fame and empowerment, how does company loyalty measure up to increased outsourcing and diminishing employee perks? All life, it seems, will bend towards the viewership, simultaneously revealed and true, yet inevitably influenced and state-shifted by 5 or 6 billion eyes and the inescapable quantal fact of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty. In a totally measured and watched world, is Truth just a state of observation, a sufficiently-probable collapsing of the waveform undergoing the formality of actually occuring, to paraphrase McKenna quoting Whitehead. The soul becomes visible as the mind manifests to all eyes.
Information - Truth, whether it exists fundamentally or is just a state of mind - indeed wants to be free and this fundamental law works through the human species and the technologies we extrude. We are still animals and our tools must help us adapt and thrive. This is more clear now than ever as our actions leave deeper and deeper footprints across the digital terrain we walk. We are being recorded and we are recording, capturing more and more facets of our human experiment written onto spinning platters like prayer wheels in the virtual breeze. The New Journalism will find even the most exclusive events, the narrowest niches, the darkest secrets and the most banal subcultures and capture them, radiating out to the digital world into the very Akashic Record of Our Times. Life is the new media, rich in all it’s texture, drama, subterfuge, and transcendence. As the military struggles with soldier bloggers, embedded third-party reporters, wired insurgencies, and the ever-present satt feeds waving down from far up above with just a passing glint of sunlight, the injustices and atrocities wrought by man & machine are cataloged equally alongside silly cat pictures, personal bios, frat videos, copyright violations, knowledge wiki’s, satellite imagery, and reams & reams of pornography. All acts are caught and surveyed by the one unblinking eye, like Sauron or the Illuminati or the gaze of God.
The world is getting much smaller and simultaneously incredibly huge and diverse. Global instability will be balanced by local resilience, and hierarchical corruption will struggle against networked transparency. CCTV’s will merge with YouTube & reality TV and life will reveal itself on a scale never before known. The cloud is breaking out of the browser and out of our servers spreading to mobile devices and HUD overlays, objects & artifacts. Reality will be radically augmented, participatory, and unbounded. We will fragment and unite, solve et coagula. And tweeting as we go, televising & recording the revolution for all to witness.
I’m heartened to find the Metaverse Roadmap, sponsored by the Accelerating Studies Foundation. While I’ve been moaning about the shortcomings of immersive 3D technologies, they’ve been defining the template for progress. Much of their thoughts align with my own, painting an exciting future of convergence across modalities, devices, and workflows.
The emergence of a robust Metaverse will shape the development of many technological realms that presently appear non-Internet-related. In manufacturing, 3D environments offer ideal design spaces for rapid-prototyping and customized and decentralized production. In logistics and transportation, spatially-aware tags and real-time world modeling will bring new efficiencies, insights, and markets. In artificial intelligence, virtual worlds offer low-risk, transparent platforms for the development and testing of autonomous machine behaviors, many of which may be also used in the physical world. These are just a sampling of coming developments based on early stage Metaverse technologies.
In sum, for the best view of the changes ahead, we suggest thinking of the Metaverse not as virtual space but as the junction or nexus of our physical and virtual worlds.
Hyperpolitics: American Style
It is as though we have all been shoved into the same room, a post-modern Panopticon, where everyone watches everyone else, can speak with everyone else, can work with everyone else. We can send out a call to “find the others,” for any cause, and watch in wonder as millions raise their hands. Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule.
…These newly disproportionate returns on the investment in altruism now trump the ‘virtue of selfishness.’
…Sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing.
A photo snapped on my mobile becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible. No wonder she’s nervous: in my simple, honest and entirely human act of sharing, it becomes immediately apparent that any pretensions to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power have already collapsed into shell-shocked impotence.
More keen & critical insight from Mark Pesce about the unprecedented transformations in human culture rising from the mobile webs & meshnets spreading across the globe. Hierarchy is falling to the network.
Twitter has gotten a lot of mixed attention lately, both as a rising phenomenon but also for failing to fix its capacity issues as quickly as people seem to expect. The issue at hand, as expressed by Twitter Dev, is that the platform was not originally written as a messaging system. Indeed, it was built on a content management model.
Recall that Twitter was originally about posting what you are doing at the moment. As such, it was essentially constructed as a public microblog that happened to include mobile support. But very quickly the Twitter user community realized the power of broadcasting and co-opted this feature to grow a very large social netwoork. Twitter became an extension of sms and all of the new API clients that started popping up.
Now with almost 2 million users, many of whom are tweeting multiple times a day, the content management system is maxxing out. Imagine if 2 million people were posting 160-char messages to Blogger daily… Frankly, it’s amazing that Twitter is doing as well as it is. So now the Twitter dev team is rebuilding every component from scratch to explicitly construct a robust global messaging system.
What’s really interesting is that the Twitter community has effectively turned Twitter into something it wasn’t intended to be. The desire to rapidly communicate with affiliates across the globe is so strong, and the power of broadcast is so compelling in the web2.0 era, that the very DNA of Twitter is being forced to mutate to support this demand. The spark of “what am I doing right now?” set flame to social media and the connection of communities. We want to know what’s going on with all the people we’re interested in. We want to know them professionally, philosophically, and personally. And we want to speak our mind and emotions and will to them.
I’m constantly taken by the casual intimacy of Twitter friends - people I’ve never met yet I know that they had a rough interview, or their cats are hungry, or they are giving a lecture tomorrow, or just saw a crazy person dancing on Wall St., or that they think Indiana Jones represents the Marxian class struggle. Normally you only get this spread of data about someone if you’re close friends and physically near them on a regular basis.
We want to socialize and share and we have an instinctual feeling, waking up from the haze of 50 years of corporate push-media, that life itself in all it’s minutia is far more entertaining than anything Fox or NBC can throw at us. Or at least, it’s just as entertaining and engaging and, at it’s core, so much more real. The simulacrum cannot mess with us, ala Real World where we were sold scripted caricatures in the guise of “reality”. Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Blogger, etc… These are the new reality media platforms and we’re all the new empowered content creators, scripted or real. Culture is going digital and the once-static web archive is waking up as a dynamic organism managing and sharing the very whims of it’s creators.
Through this process we’re getting to know each other and ourselves and our world very quickly as knowledge is distributed globally and minds are linked across worlds with zero lag. Culture is iterating faster than ever and we’re only at the very beginning of what is clearly becoming a huge revolution for all of humanity, whether or not each person is immediately touched by the wires. Life is virtualizing and the abstracted mental content of our world is increasingly archived and shared and commented upon and iterated on itself from all across the world. The power and reach of our minds is expanding out through our devices and the exocortical software agents we now have managing so many of our subroutines. We are cyber even without the implants and wetware. The individual is wiring into groups, like cells aggregating into functional bodies, towards greater communicative and iterative power.
The human species is beginning to truly know itself and grok it’s identity and function. As our eyes open up to perceive more and more of our world, we gaze at our creations and atrocities and the spark of soul sits in judgment, our conscience asserting itself. The democratization of media and the transparency of behavior is fundamentally altering the power balance away from the dominant elite towards the will of the people. In a very strange and sweet way, Twitter is part of this process of sharing and reinforcing the similarities between us all.
Wednesday May 28th 2008, 12:44 pm
Filed under: mobile nets
Mark Pesce discusses the power of Twitter, the empowerment of democratized media, and shifting power dynamics signified by Josh Marshall’s army. Video from 2008 Next Wave Festival, Mercat Hotel, Melbourne, on 25 May 2008:
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.
Mark Pesce has written a truly insightful piece of analysis over on his blog, The Human Network. In a moment of synchronicty, I found his article just after ranting about these same concepts: the democratization of content and broadcast and the tools of creation; the power of mobile communication and networked affinity groups; the decline of content monopolies with the rise of The Makers; the exponentially increasing visibility into the lives and events of our world; the empowerment of the individual and communities through social networks; the parabolic rise in clock-speed of iterative knowledge; the counterbalance of economic globalization with the rising cost and dissipating supply of industrial energy; and the relentless and unstoppable transparency of life.
All of this sharing of media means that the media titans – the corporations which produce and broadcast most of the television we watch – have lost control over their own content. Anything broadcast anywhere, even just once, becomes available everywhere, almost instantaneously. While that’s a revolutionary development, it’s merely the tip of the iceberg. The audience now has the ability to share anything they like – whether produced by a media behemoth, or made by themselves. YouTube has allowed individuals (some talented, some less so) reach audiences numbering in hundreds of millions. The attention of the audience, increasingly focused on what the audience makes for itself, has been draining ratings away from broadcasters, a drain which accelerates every time someone posts something funny, or poignant, or instructive to YouTube.
…Our connectivity has grown into “hyperconnectivity”, and a single individual, with the right message, at the right time, can reach millions, almost instantaneously.
This simple, sudden, subtle change in culture has changed everything.
…Nothing is hidden anymore, no secret safe. We each possess a ‘nuclear option’ – the capability to go wide, instantaneously, bringing the hyperconnected attention of the Human Network to a single point.
In games, immersive worlds, forums, social networks, and in blogs we inhabit multiple selves. In most cases, theses virtual spaces are walled islands with little relation between them. Increasingly it’s becoming apparent that continuity is necessary to resolve these fractured selves and to open up the channels of communication between the diversity of online containers. This can be seen in the new wave of web 2.0 aggregators like FriendFeed and Plaxo that aim to collate our myriad profiles, friends and content streams into a single portal. Now, Technology Review reports that several companies are working to enable avatars to move between virtual worlds.
More and more, such affordances will move into virtual spaces. 2D content streams and communication pipelines will feed into and across immersive worlds. A WoW player should be able to call up a HUD console in the game and locate their friends across all of the virtual worlds they’re currently in. They should then be able to communicate with them through IM or VoIP and subsequently transport to join them in another world. GTA4 has announced a feature to allow users to call each other in-world using the game cell phone. Shouldn’t this extend across game worlds and out into real-world mobiles? API’s could evolve to mine user communications (Twitter in WoW?) and chart locations on world maps. In the age of digital society, findability is key.
The vast amounts of personal profiling we’re building up around ourselves in MySpace, Facebook, blogs, and other forums should be accessible through our avatars and from all places we inhabit, virtually and in reality. It should be present in our devices and our profiles. As avatars, it should follow us like a digital skin (secured and opt-in, of course) layered in transaction-appropriate trust profiles that fly-out on mouseover. My avatars should contain more information than just polygons and scripted motions. Social transactions are information exchanges. My LinkedIn profile should be accesible to anyone in 2D and 3D if I so desire.
The realness of immersive worlds should leverage the fundamental reality of our digital profiles and interests. If these platforms are going to become truly compelling, they must work to integrate the API’s, content streams, and communication channels of the web2.0 revolution. We’re in the midst of a completely unprecedented historical shift as all of our cultural and intellectual content is going digital, made manifest in searchable, findable, and persistent datalogs. The profiles we create around our virtual selves are growing larger and larger, and they are being recorded and left open for many eyes to see. Imagine the political candidates running 10 or 15 years from now. So much of their lives will be a matter of public record easily searchable and graphed out to show affiliations, donations, histories and contradictions. So much of who they are will live online like a shadow. SO much of who we all are.
Virtual worlds are poised to engage directly in this shift and draw culture and identity into their domain. Instead of closed platforms, worlds like Second Life must open up and grow to become contiguous spaces whose character arises from the types of people that choose to gather there by affiliation, interest, and intention. MMORPG’s like WoW will continue to offer highly crafted narratives, specialized social groups and hierarchies, and bleeding edge rendering tech but will acknowledge the tremendous personal content within each player distributed across their digital and analog lives.
Of course, if virtual platforms become more open, their business models will inevitably shift towards advertising. Space is space, whether 2D, 3D, or 4D, and eyes are eyes especially when they gather in great enough concentration. As in the real world, the exchange of goods and services will always be of great value in any domain, so the shift towards continuity will be a shift towards reality. Virtual worlds have the unique proposition of creating fantasy within the world of life. So the shift towards reality in the context of a realized fantasy brings both closer together. It is part of the alchemical formula of bringing spirit into matter. It is the power of gods to create in an unlimited universe. It is the movement of the ghost in the machine as our real selves grow more and more to include virtual, digital, non-local aspects of identity and presence. Who am I but the sum of my transactions with the world? These words I’m writing and posting on the global billboard become preserved bits of my self. Your interactions with them extend my identity into the virtual world. All my words are facets of my expanding digital identity. My self-reflection extends from my body, my deeds, my actions towards others around me, to include the ideas and statements I leave online, the avatars I inhabit, and the webs of disembodied people I associate with. In 100 years I may roll up in bits under some social anthropologist’s data-mining PhD nudging their graphs this way or that with my Tweets and posts.
Aggregation of social data serves a very practical role of making it easier for us to manage an increasingly vast amount of data, but it also serves a larger role of helping us defragment our sense of self as it fractures out across so many new digital domains rising and falling daily. If we’re to walk like new gods through worlds both real and virtual, shouldn’t we do so with as much wholeness as possible? In a world that’s made it so challenging to have a fully integrated psyche it’s really imperative that we lay down a strong foundation of holism and continuity as we move into the unfettered vastness of the digital noosphere. As strong cohesive selves we can better wear the masks of avatars and wield the power of virtual gods.
Sensoring
Biometrics
Transactions
Lifestreaming
Recommendation
Image Recognition
Augmented Reality
Mobile Connected Games
Location-based Social Media
Retail Proximity Media Consumption
In a move that further realizes the place-ness of popular immersive worlds, players of Grand Theft Auto 4 will be able to use their cell phone to mark songs they hear in the game world, then recieve info and a link to buy the song on Amazon. I like this feature since it acknowledges the increasing continuity across real life and game worlds but I think the implementation falls short of being really compelling. The game should automatically provide heads-up info on the song and artist, and I should be able to make a purchase in-game that saves a file to my console, to my mobile, and/or puts it in my Amazon or iTunes shopping cart for later download. And what about having an in-game music player I can fill with songs?
If you hear a song you like as you’re tooling around the streets, you can “mark” it by calling ZIT-555-0100 on your cell phone, and soon receive a text message with the song and artist names. If you also happen to be a member of the Rockstar Games Social Club, Rockstar’s community site for GTA IV and all future titles, you’ll receive an email with a link to download the song from Amazon for less than a buck.
Though I assume they mean you use your real-world cell phone it’s not totally clear. Shouldn’t my game character have a cell phone that can place calls/sms to other gamers in-world, across games to other worlds, and out to real-world lines?
QR Code is a a UPC-like image code very popular in Japanese cities. Codes are in magazines, on fliers, on storefronts, and on products. When a person takes a picture of the QR Code with their cellphone the code is parsed for an url embed which launches the mobile web browser that takes the user to a website. Now, QR Codes will be tested in San Francisco in the first US pilot program.
“More than 500 restaurants, shops and businesses reviewed by Citysearch are placing printed bar codes in their windows. People who have special software from Scanbuy Inc. loaded on their cell phones can simply take a picture of the code and their phone’s Internet browser will immediately take them to the restaurant’s corresponding Citysearch page.”
This is an interesting step towards smart objects where things begin to have their own websites. I suspect this is just a step along the way towards using an embedded RFID-type chip that will transmit stored information to mobiles while users pass by the tags. I can imagine a time when all consumables and media contain an alter-profile of data and cloud-aware links and can communicate these to each-other, to users/consumers, and to supply-chains…
To briefly elaborate on an earlier post about Second Life… And specifically, ways in which I believe a modern 3d immersive world can leverage the new wave of cloud tech and create a truly compelling experience:
I want downtown billboards streaming Twitter feeds, rich dataviz, global network traffic, weather patterns, Flickr streams, and cycling media channels. I want to Dj from Traktor directly into a virtual club. I want interactive music and video remix tools that include the world as a substrate. I want to endow my avatar with metadata callouts, grouped in trust profiles, that display my affinities, affiliations, tag cloud, LinkedIn profile, sms number, twitter id, and credit accounts as appropriate to those I meet. I want to be free to re-purpose 3D assets from 3DSM, Maya, and Sketchup into my worldspace. I want a beautiful living homeworld that gathers the populace and inspires users and developers to create their own content elsewhere on distributed servers. I want to join friends on a virtual hilltop and watch the clouds drift past, watch the sun set, and the moons rise. I want to get lost in emergent behaviors, intelligent agents, and the beauty of physical dynamics. I want to easily find friends across multiple servers, across social nets, and out into mobile, gsm, and phone networks. I want an open-standard, opt-in, cloakable virtual ID that can be searched for and found across all dominant gaming and immersive networked worldspaces - and then when I find my friend I want to be able to join them wherever they are. I want peer-to-peer drop-boxes and back-channels that can address files to dominant industry and open-source applications, then back to in-world interfaces. I want an in-world, heads-up fly-out phone/sms/notepad/web-browser overlay that’s data synched to my mobile phone. I want to stumble into sinuous plotlines that sweep me away to distant parts of the virtual world. And yes, I want an SDK that allows EA to stick the Tony Hawk trick and physics model into a nice binary that can be purchased and installed into my client so I can skate around the place. And yes, I will try to grind your avatar if you have any linear edges sticking out.
I’m totally dreaming, I know. But dreams are what the future is built upon.
Penned as 12 future apps for your iPhone, this ReadWriteWeb list could be a general wish-list roadmap for the near-future of mobile computing. Here are the top-level items. Click through to read the details.
1. Reality Tagging
2. People Tagging
3. Reality Recognition
4. Physical Social Networks
5. Personalized Travel Guides
6. Digital and Physical Treasure Hunt
7. Distributed Mobile Games
8. Credit Card and Biometrics as Software
9. Paperless Receipts & Digital Business Cards
10. Medical records as Software
11. Physical Browsing & Digital Shopping
12. Location/time-based deals
QR Code is a a UPC-like image code very popular in Japanese cities. Codes are in magazines, on fliers, on storefronts, and on products. When a person takes a picture of the QR Code with their cellphone the code is parsed for an url embed which launches the mobile web browser that takes the user to a website. Now,