We Are Organized Chaos

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPad

As a self-described Steve Jobs hater, it’s going to sting a little to say this, but here goes:

Steve Jobs is right, and the haters are wrong. iPad is amazingly great and will be a tremendous hit. He is right to go with the iPhone OS and not OSX or some other multitasking capable OS. He is right to eliminate built-in expansion ports like SD, HDMI or USB. It doesn’t do Flash, which supports many of the Web’s most popular and heralded Rich Internet Applications – and that’s okay. It’s just a big iPod Touch. And that’s what it needs to be, for now.

Now let me try to explain how I came to this excruciating conclusion. First, I will start with a fictional story to put you in the right frame of mind. Imagine that after months of rumors and speculation, Apple came out and said, “Look, we have just developed the best video game of all time.” Enthusiasts drool and the Press pants with anticipation. Finally, MacWorld arrives and they dramatically unveil… Bejeweled. “But it doesn’t have 3D graphics OR multiplayer, this game sucks! It isn’t even as good as the original Wolfenstein. I’ve lost my faith in Steve Jobs,” the fan boys howl. “It isn’t really designed for an XBOX controller,” the pundits muse. And Steve Jobs smugly grins as over the coming years Bejeweled emerges as the standard bearer for the multibillion dollar casual gaming industry.

In order to appreciate why the iPad is going to be so successful, you’re going to have to relinquish your “Me First” attitude. Just because it doesn’t do what you want it to do, doesn’t make it a bad device. It just makes it inappropriate for you, personally. Most people don’t try to leverage the maximum power out of their laptops and netbooks – they use them as tools for accomplishing specific tasks. Under normal circumstances, there’s a correlation between general system power and complexity of usage. But more complexity doesn’t necessarily mean something is better; for most people, when complexity exceeds what is needed to perform the task at hand, it leads to an inferior user experience. Most people prefer managed experiences based on forcing functions to the open ended sandboxes that Tech Professionals like us demand. Instead of figuring out how a power-user would make best use of it, think of another type of user. Imagine a usage profile that focuses on personal email, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, online shopping, listening to a little music and casual gaming. The iPad excels in this scenario. And this scenario, while not pertinent to the fan boys and pixel pushers, represents a much larger swath of the population. For them, support for “Push” notifications is all the multitasking they want or need. For them, external ports are rarely used, if ever – who wants little holes getting gummed up with grime and food? For them, not doing Flash is no big deal (especially with HTML5 around the corner, although they are unconcerned with such nuances). For them, it’s just a big iPod Touch. And that’s what it needs to be.

So to all the techno-geeks that feel let down, don’t. This device isn’t for you and it never was. Stop worrying about it and get on with your lives.

RSS & Twitter – Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Ordinarily I’m a big fan of TechCrunch, but this article is so rife with hyperbole, melodrama and inaccuracies I just might hurl.

RSS is preferable to Twitter for many people and circumstances. And the number one issue is content availability. Although the author is so fixated on a narrow range of information that all his news sources are on Twitter, this is not the case for most of us. I checked, and about half of the 50 or so entries in my Google Reader re-post to Twitter. And that is because most people have interests that range from sports to shopping to humor, not just tech stuff. That’s part of the reason Yahoo Pipes is so popular – there is a ton of content out there that isn’t already parsed for Twitter. Sure, you can use various services to pipe RSS into Twitter, but the reverse scenario is more efficient.

When you get right down to it, are RSS and Twitter so different, really? After talking with my friends who tweet religiously, it occurred to me that RSS and Twitter have more in common than I initially realized. I mean, if you never replied to tweets, but used Twitter in a read-only fashion, would it not be just like RSS with a character limit? Some argue that the human and conversational nature of twitter is intrinsic to its effectiveness and success. Be that as it may, this is a “how individuals use it” issue as opposed to “how can it be used” issue.

Perhaps a more persuasive argument in support of Twitter’s superiority would be the idea of the “real time” web. And yet, I use RSS in a very real time fashion. I use Snackr to display a crawl across the bottom of my screen with the latest industry news, and I challenge Mr. Gillmor to show me a superior Twitter feed. Using the preferences “Don’t show items older than X” and “Display newest items from random feeds”, I literally have a “real time web” ticker – based on RSS instead of Twitter. Each news item is tagged with an age, such as “30 min ago”.

In many ways, Twitter’s success is attributable to the groundwork that was laid by RSS. But the two can coexist happily, as they fill different niches. There is little doubt that Twitter is here to stay, but it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

P.S. Neither RSS nor Twitter are “push” technologies. They both use a pulling mechanism to check for new information and pull it to a client.

World Wide Web 3.0

With the recent release of Wolfram Alpha, we’ve been hearing more and more about the Web 3.0. But what exactly does that mean? Well, that question is so disputed that Wikipedia recently deleted its web page on the subject, leading some to argue that it is a meaningless buzz word. There really is something at the core of it though.

Web 3.0 relates to the dominant future improvement over web 2.0 applications, which many (although not all) project to be computational semantics, and is widely understood to correspond loosely with the third (i.e. 3.0) decade of the web (2010-2019). Many definitions simply suggest that it will “enable machines to read WWW content as people do” but this phrase is not very meaningful. Machines cannot actually conceptualize as people do when they read, of course. Rather, it functions as a way to allow machines to process high-level concepts discussed in web-based content. So, let’s take a closer look at what computational semantics is and how it’s generally implemented.

Semantics deals with the meaning of language, as opposed to its syntactic structure. Put more simply, it’s meta-information describing the web content. Creating a scenario where this meta-information can be processed programmatically is approached in two primary ways – top down and bottom up. The bottom up approach relies on a set of extensions to the markup language that is used to generate web pages. Primarily, these are the Recourse Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The obvious challenge with this is that there is already a ton of content on the web that is not tagged, and the effort required to retrofit all of it would be tremendous. The top down approach entails developing sophisticated semi-autonomous applications called “agents” that parse ordinary web content that would be interesting to their owners. This also has its disadvantages, as it is rather difficult to engineer these agents to behave in an “intelligent” manner. Together, however, these two technologies converge in one place – a World Wide Web that people can interact with in a more natural and intuitive way.

So there you have it. Not everyone agrees that computational semantics will be the force behind web 3.0 – theories range from 3D interfaces to ubiquitous internet-ready appliances. But if Tim Berners-Lee (the original inventor of the WWW and a chief proponent of the Semantic Web) has his way, the web is going to get a lot smarter.

PlayOn Brings Media Convergence a Step Closer…But Just a Step

The perennial effort to marry the Internet to the TV has finally started to gain momentum in recent months, and no application exemplifies this better than PlayOn ($40, Windows Only). This Windows-based application is widely regarded as a front-runner in the race to use the PC to funnel Internet-based video content to the TV.

Historically, the major challenge from a user-experience perspective has been to overcome the “Last 10 Feet” problem: How do you get the video from the PC into the TV? Of course, directly connecting the video output of a computer into the TV, essentially using it as a big monitor, is a possibility. However, this option has not been widely adopted for a few reasons, most of which are centered on the issue of making the system accessible to the whole family. First, relatively few people outside of technology enthusiasts have a spare computer to put in the living room. Also, even for those that do, having a keyboard and mouse on the couch to control the system, even if they are wireless, is impractical. The extra cables and bulk tend to be an eyesore. Moreover, computer displays on TV’s (even HD) tend to be hard to use due to the need to read tiny computer-sized writing.

PlayOn addresses these issues by leveraging the Media Center capabilities of the increasingly ubiquitous console gaming systems – XBOX 360, PS3 and Wii. All of these systems can communicate with the PC with PlayOn installed wirelessly and provide a simple menu-based system for accessing content.

MediaMall’s offering certainly makes the overall process easier and more seamless than previous efforts – but it still falls short of seriously challenging its non-PC based alternatives. Consider a basic use case: a family that wants to watch a movie. First, the entire system needs to be installed and configured – this poses a daunting challenge for people who aren’t technically-oriented, and certainly more confusing than a competitive service, such as Pay Per View through DirecTV. Additionally, the overall user experience is not nearly as smooth. For instance, a typical process for watching a movie would require booting up the Playstation, a process that requires perhaps a minute of waiting – a long time in this age of instant gratification. Perhaps worst of all, seamless playback relies on a (typically) WIFI connection. Buffering problems or other technical glitches have plagued the system. For people comparing the experience with Pay Per View, the movie absolutely must play back without interruption in order to be in the same ballpark. The WIFI issue is pernicious, as the vast majority of people have 802.11b or g based WIFI, for which the problem is endemic.

However, the main draw of PlayOn is it’s ability to stream video content from Hulu, YouTube, CBS.com, and other content based sites. Say you missed the last few episodes of 24 and you really don’t want to sit in front of your 15-inch laptop screen to view them. That’s where PlayOn’s main niche fits in as it’s very easy to connect to Hulu through the software though as mentioned previously, you do need one of the major game consoles to run it.

Overall, for people who have a technical background and an appreciation for the hurdles a system like PlayOn must face, it is a fun and convenient way of watching content on the television. But in terms of seriously challenging the closed systems of DSS and Cable TV for the dominance they hold in at-home, on demand video delivery, Internet-based systems have a ways to go.

Is the Cloud around the corner?

Michael Arrington recently updated the tale of his nascent hardware project, dubbed the “CrunchPad”. In short, it’s a tablet that just runs a web browser with a touchpad interface over wifi. The current incarnation runs Ubuntu linux and supports Flash. He specifically calls out Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Hulu, Wikipedia, Google Docs and Gmail as supported web apps. He claims he can hit the $200 price point.

This could be a revolutionary product for the web development community. At $200, it aggressively competes in the netbook space, which was demonstrated to be deep during the holiday season. Although it doesn’t support a cellular connection, it also doesn’t come with a ~$700 plan cost hanging around its neck, and municipal wifi is only becoming more common. Rumors suggest that Apple thinks this sort of a device could be a serious product, based on word of a 9” iPod touch reportedly set for the end of the year.

If this device, or one substantially like it, were to hit store shelves by the ‘09 holiday season, it could instantly change the way the web is used. Specifically, hardware giants and media vendors alike have been striving for years to make the shift from web usage being “situational”, i.e. when you are sitting in front of your work computer to “ubiquitous”, i.e. anywhere and everywhere. The iPhone partially accomplishes this, and I feel that is why it has been so successful. Its killer app is Safari, not the App Store as so many have suggested. The CrunchPad could fill a similar niche that would be at least as large. For web developers, it would herald the much-discussed but slowly arriving cloud computing age.