On The Plethora Of Communication Media

I have been thinking, over the last couple of days, about various means of internet-enabled communication that are pervasive today. Mostly about why they exist and what value they add to our lives. I decided on a few criteria that i would judge them by:
  • Engagement: The extent to which a particular medium allows for community participation, allows for people to voice their views and is inclusive of the world. Social networks like Facebook are designed to be very engaging starting from their 'pokes' to their social games. On the other hand, blogs are more about commentary than equal participation.
  • Bandwidth: How much effort is it to voice your opinion. Twitter is the easiest - you don't have to think beyond 140 characters and you can do it by simply sending a text message. Creation of a wikipedia article, at the other end of the spectrum, is a lot more effort.
  • Signal To Noise Ratio: How easy is it to find the exact information that one is looking for. Wikis and blogs are great at this where as social networks are pretty abysmal.
  • Synchronicity: How 'real-time' is the mode of communication. Chatting is as close to real-time as we can get with all the people involved online at the same time.
  • Trust: Almost all communication media are a means of providing information. How trustworthy are these sources. Now, i separate trust from reliability. You can trust that a friend of facebook gives you a honest opinion of a product you are looking to buy, but you might not necessarily rely on his opinion. My scale of trust is based on a two factors: Is something provided by a group of experts and validated over time (like wikipedia / groups) or is it coming from close friends (like social networks); both of these are fairly trustworthy.
  • Serendipity: What is communication without a little fun. A lot of the joy in social networking is derived from chancing upon a video or photograph that you liked.
I rated the various media (on a scale of 1-5) and here they are. The bigger the size of the bar (each individual bar too), the better it is.

A few observations:
  • The standard deviation of email and groups is the least. They do a decent job at most things and are not the best way to communicate at any. It is also why they are still so prevalent - you can get by.
  • The highest standard deviation is for Twitter and chat. They are great a few things and completely terrible at a few others. If you have ever been part of a live chat with more than 5 people or if you have had to navigate through a river of ridiculous tweets, you know the pain.
  • As one can tell, there is still a lot of scope for improvement in the way we communicate and exchange information online (the highest score is only 2/3rd of the maximum possible).

I, then, decided to categorize the different types into 'old' and 'new'. I considered blogs, wikis, email, groups and chat as 'old media' and twitter, facebook and buzz as 'new media'. Here's what i found by taking averages (the larger the number, the better):

As you can tell, new social media solve some of the problems that traditional internet media had, but they introduce completely different problems; one of the reasons i am not too fond of them. Also, the cleave between what new media does well and what it completely fails at is quite large (the standard deviation, again).

The most desirable communication medium will be easy to use and provide a high level of interaction with low noise and high quality from sources i can trust. And it'll pleasantly surprise me occasionally. Will it be a combination of the existing media or will it be something completely different? Or maybe the different types of media will always exist and serve different purposes.

Footnote: was Google Wave trying take the leap and be the 'ideal' communication medium? Is that why it failed to take off? We might never know.

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The iDream

This isn't a post reviewing the iPad. Quite frankly, all i have seen are screenshots of the device. This isn't a post ridiculing the obnoxious name or lamenting the non-existence of multitasking, a camera or two, support of flash or your favorite proprietary protocol. It isn't about how pretty it is, the plethora of applications or the upcoming ebook store and its comparison to the Kindle. This isn't about its comparison with netbooks or other handheld computing devices. This isn't about the price and this isn't about how you cannot use it on an airplane (really. see 'environmental requirements').

This is about the iPad dream.

Imagine a computer where you don't have to navigate deep into a file structure hierarchy to find something you want. You don't have to worry about creating a folder (and a folder inside a folder) and then think about how to best name it so that you can find it again. You don't have to care about creating shortcuts just to reach somewhere faster. Hell, you don't even have to search for something you want to find on your own computer. Imagine a computer where you don't have to care about installing anti-virus software and firewalls, a computer where getting rid of something does not mean launching an uninstaller or going to 'Add or Remove Programs'. Imagine having just the one place to go to find exactly the software you were looking for instead of scouring the entire internet for it and then filling out a million forms just to try it. Imagine a computer for which software is built and hence, doesn't expect you to upgrade your hardware.

Imagine a computer where you are not scared of losing data because everything gets backed up without you having to think about it.  Imagine not having to bother about drives and partitions, formatting and defragmentation, mounting drives and choosing boot sequences, configuring IP settings and installing drivers. Imagine a computer without clutter, without an unintelligible registry and without having to assign virtual memory from your hard drive. Imagine not having to think about whether to single click, double click or right click at something, not having to learn the differences among hibernate, sleep, shutdown and lock and not having to remember to clear the recycle bin. 

Imagine a computer that does everything you want it to do and nothing that you don't. Imagine a computer that doesn't scare your mother. Imagine a computer that starts at the press of a button and just works.

Imagine a computer for the rest of us.

The iPad isn't just an overgrown iPhone (though, i see nothing wrong with that). It is a prototype for what computing will mean for the majority of the world in the coming years. The personal computer, though revolutionary, still placed computers in the hands of geeks and continues to be built for them. The iPad (and undoubtedly similar devices that come along) brings the power and joy of technology to the other 95%. In that regard, the idea of the iPad will create a bigger sociological impact in our world than anything else that we have seen.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's pretty.

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My Next Browser Is An App

A non-trivial proportion of my life is online. My means of communication, information gathering and learning is on the internet. And a non-trivial proportion of the time i spend online is increasingly with my mobile phone. I use my phone to catch up on everything online during my increasingly extending commute to and from work. And lately i have begun to notice that a non-trivial amount of time that i spend on the internet is done with almost no help from the browser. I rarely, if ever, in the last few weeks, have started the browser on my phone.

Pardon the abused phrase, but there is an application for anything you might want to do on the internet and more often than not, the application is better than the ubiquitous browser. A mail client helps me read and send email - with a better editor, offline capability and a faster response time than the browser does. With the plethora of twitter applications, i can't remember the last time i actually visited the twitter website, let alone use my browser. My feed reader lets me catch up on all the blogs and the latest news. And it lets me sync this on to my phone and allows me to catch up with them even if i have a flaky connection. More specifically, my phone has fantastic applications for social networking such as the Facebook app and for news such as the NY Times and Time Magazine ones. The Wikipedia app on my phone lets me favorite articles and lets me search them quickly because of its caching abilities. And this is just the beginning. You can browse photos in a jiffy with the Flickr photo application, watch full screen videos with the YouTube app and even listen to internet radio with, well, a dozen different apps. Don't even get me started on how much better the maps application on the phone is as compared to the one in the browser. Frankly, i think my browser is the most underused function on my phone.

Applications specialized for the content they render have an edge over the browser. They know the content they are supposed to render and can optimize. So, the YouTube app on the phone is so much better at finding and rendering videos than the browser is. Even on the desktop, applications such as Miro and Boxee are much better for watching videos than your browser is. Take a look below: The first image is NY Times on the browser and the second one is from an app dedicated to NY Times. News is so much easier to discern with the dedicated app.

 

Dedicated applications also have other advantages. The biggest ones are offline caching and ad-free content. Look at the below image of viewing a video on YouTube on my phone. (Of course, i can just tap to hide the controls)


No spammy comments, no ridiculous advertisements, no 'featured' videos. Plainly and simply the video i want. Of course, you could have advertisements in the applications, but you always have the option of paying for the app and getting an ad-free version; an option that doesn't exist on most websites today.

I think that the ubiquitous browser is ill-suited for the future, ironically because almost all the content is moving online now. Which is also why i am specially skeptical about netbooks and about the browser being the operating system of the future. I believe the future is personalized applications for specialized purposes. The future doesn't have room for a generalist that does a mediocre job at everything.

No browser was used in the creation of this blog post.

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Twitter And Me

I gave it an honest shot. I really did. I gave it my time, tried to understand it, attempted to see its positives and looked beyond its #fails. I was not judgmental and i did not base my opinion on its looks. It was immensely popular, yet not snobbish. It was the talk of the town, yet not materialistic. Everyone loved it, and it reciprocated in equal measure. But, something was amiss.

Twitter almost never gave me anything interesting. The noise to signal ratio was too high and it was too much trouble trying to find that diamond in the coal mine. The mine was too dark, there were not enough search lights and i didn't really know where to look. Maybe the gems were strewn all around me, but they were just too hard for me to find.

Twitter promised me conversations. It lied. I would reply to someone's tweet and they would only reply to that hours later. By then, i would have lost interest in continuing any conversation. I had painted pictures in my head about conversations like birds chirping in the morning; imagined music in the cacophony; thought about whispers late in the night. Twitter let me down - not only were conversations painful, discussions with groups of people greater than 2 was almost impossible. You picked me up only to crash me down, T.

Twitter was stingy. I could never say anything meaningful in the meagre 140 characters. I had to include a hyperlink to another place. I noticed that almost anyone who wanted to say anything remotely interesting also did the same. Was it a link sharing service? Don't we have them aplenty already? Because of it being niggardly, people misunderstood Twitter. They thought it was a social network, when it was a micro blogging platform. They thought it was a place to meet old friends, when it was actually a place to express oneself. It wasn't facebook, but nobody believed it. And as the world descended into sms-speak once again, it was time to alight.

Twitter was also too demanding. It wanted too much of my time and attention. The more people i followed, the harder it became to comprehend if anyone was real; much less what anyone was saying. Constantly fighting to keep up with all tweets, i found myself exhausted and disillusioned. I wanted my space. I wanted out.

In a different world, at a different time, maybe things might have worked out. Maybe, if Twitter allowed me to actually have conversations, if it allowed me to follow topics i was interested in and not just people i didn't know, if only people took 'followers' less seriously and did not make it an ego trip, if it did not sink into spewing spam and marketing gimmicks, maybe if following more than 20 people did not mean drinking from a fire hose, maybe, just maybe, if there was a purpose to all this.

Till then, Twitter, can we be just friends?

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Pandora For The Internet?

Before we get started, if you haven't already, read about the Music Genome Project. I'll wait. Wouldn't it be great if we have such a categorization and recommendation engine for information on the web? The music genome project categorizes music based on nearly 400 attributes. Surely, if we can do it for music, we can do it for text.

To narrow down the task a little, we could consider only blogs and leave out everything else. We can begin analyzing text on two basic attributes - form and function. By function, i refer to the content of the text, the subject that it tackles. And by form, i refer to the structure of the text, the emotion and the style of writing.

Function can be ascertained by diligent categorization based on the words used in the article. The overall content of the blog would help determine the general topic (blogs on technology or entertainment would generally write articles related to those areas). Parsing the text to look for specific terms and applying bayesian filters would provide a probability of the article belonging to a certain narrow topic (programming in python, iphone games or reviews of movies starring salma hayek). Another way of narrowing on the topic is to follow outgoing links and determining the general content of those webpages. The system would also group related topics in hierarchies.

Form is a little more difficult to categorize. We can divide form into two components: structure and sentiment. Structure consists of characteristics such as - the length of the article, the number of words in a sentence, the type of words or phrases used, the amount of dialogue, the density of the text, the use of language constructs like active vs passive voice, 1st person vs 3rd person and so on, the use of punctuation, the number of sentences in a paragraph, the rhythm of the text determined by the syllables - and then derive various metrics from these numbers. This would be one manner of categorization. Sentiment, on the other hand, is harder to determine. It is slightly easier in music (you can determine the rhythm, type of instruments used, the raaga, etc to home in on the sentiment), but it is much harder in english. It is very difficult to determine characteristics such as irony, sarcasm or humor by parsing text. Moreover, different cultures have different ways of expressing sentiments which renders any universal algorithm irrelevant. Having said that, some sentiments can be a trifle more easy to gauge - like anger, joy, sadness or want (by words, phrases, sentence lengths, punctuation used, etc).

How does all this help? It will help one wade through the garbage of the internet to find the little gems that we care about. If you liked an article, it would help you find other articles - perhaps on similar topics and with similar writing style - that you would be eager to read. It would also provide an opportunity to serendipitously discover great articles or pieces of information. Don't community powered recommendation engines already do this? Well, i would argue that they don't. Mostly, the articles submitted are what the original reader liked and not necessarily what you might enjoy (even if you are interested in the topic). Making a fully automated system can tailor content exactly as you would want it.

The system could sneak in a few surprises - like showing you an article with similar style on a completely unrelated topic to gauge your response and learn from it. It could also learn your reading patterns - what kind of articles you like reading in the morning vs reading at night, reading over the week vs reading over the weekend - and tune itself accordingly. It could show you articles based on your current mood. Over time, it would know what you want to read better than you do. As scary as that sounds, i think it's a beautiful thing.

I think it's time we stopped manually adding feeds to our feedreader. I think it's time we have an Internet Genome Project.

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Should Computers Be Free?

There has been a lot of talk about the $100 laptop and how it is going to change education. I believe that in the next 3-5 years, all laptops and computers will be free*.

Unless you have been living under a rock or are not in the technology field, you would have heard about the 'next big thing' - Cloud Computing. Simply put, it means that none of your data will be stored on your personal computer. Everything will be stored somewhere on someone else's server at someone's cost. All you would need is a web browser to access all this content. Before you get too paranoid and possessive about your content, remember that email works this way today. Almost all our photos are also online. Slowly, all our files, documents, music, movies - everything we own on our computers today will be stored on the 'cloud'. There are certain fears, but largely, this is a good thing.

One of the implications of storing data remotely is that you do not need a powerful operating system anymore - any simple version of linux will do, or in the future, a simple browser-based OS will also suffice. Too much disk space is obviously not required, since almost nothing will be stored on your computer (probably only temporary copies of files you are working on, but that doesn't matter). You don't need powerful hardware such as high amount of RAM or powerful microprocessors.

Let us speculate. Let's say the computer runs of a free operating system, has about 2GB of storage, about 512MB of RAM and a small processor. The cost of a GB of harddisk space today is about 10 cents, RAM costs about $10 per GB and Intel's atom processors cost about $20. So, the whole computer (including the screen, keyboard, ethernet card, etc) - when mass produced - will not cost more than $30. Another way to think about this - the configurations on modern mobile phones are more than sufficient to run this.

Now, imagine a scenario where an ISP like Bharati or BSNL decides to tie up with computer manufactures to mass produce these machines. Then, they give away these machines for free. They only charge people for the internet usage; internet usage which uses wifi or GPRS (the ISPs also control the mobile network) according to the available network. In essence, you pay for using the cloud and there is no upfront cost. This will follow models familiar today with mobile phones - prepaid or monthly payments.

With computers free, now they can be given away to all educational institutions in the world - and where there is no internet access, they will use the mobile networks. Governments can give these away, and subsidize the internet data costs to poor people, who can use it to network, get information on weather, buying / selling rates of commodities, gain knowledge of the latest techniques in agriculture and so much more. People in remote areas can have accounts and make bank transactions even if there are no branches for hundreds of miles. Since everyone has a computer, everything can be computerized - less paper, not only means you save the planet, but also means that everything (in theory, at least) gets done faster. You will friend your maid on facebook and your watchman will follow you on twitter.

The more exciting part, of making computer devices free, is that it can take turns we haven't even imagined today. Touch screen displays can be installed in public transport that can play videos from YouTube, children in rural areas can attend classes taught in modern schools 'live', devices installed at periodic intervals on streets can show maps with local data - restaurants, bus stops, movie theaters and more, school textbooks will be electronic devices that extract the latest data from open source collaborative reading material and all public phones will be free as they would make calls over IP. With an ubiquitous internet device, the opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship are endless.

Imagine a world where everyone - and i mean every single person - is connected and is online. The $0 computer will, truly, change the world.

* - you might still have to pay some shipping fee or tax, but i'll leave that out for now.

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Did These UI Designers Get Paid?

There are some user interfaces which get on my nerves. Well, actually, where i work, there are many user interfaces that irk me, but i'll leave those out for now. Allow my rant.


Welcome to Windows
Windows Vista "welcome"s you even if you have typed the wrong password! Verifying the password locally is the easiest and fastest thing to do (isn't it, after all, only a register comparison?) - why does it first display the welcome screen for a few seconds and then tell me that i am actually not welcome?

Facebook Login
The 'Remember Me' is before the email/password input fields. So, the user has to either manually check that with the mouse or shift+tab to get there, wading through 'Forgot your password?' along the way. Now, seriously?

Reload / New Tab
All browsers do this - reload / refresh is 'Ctrl+R' and new tab is 'Ctrl+T' (it is similar on the mac). One action refreshes the current content and the other takes you away from the current content. Unfortunately, both these opposite-end-of-the-spectrum actions are activated by keys right next to each other on the keyboard. If i had a penny for every time i refreshed the page when i wanted a new one...

Wolfram Alpha Input
I love the concept and vision of Wolfram Alpha, but i hate the fact that they have copied google for their query input , which can be exceedingly infuriating. Case in point:
   

IISc Website
This is on the homepage of India's premier institute of science and technology. Someone decided to use the entire palette of colors in that one box. (Aside: why is all that information under the 'Weather' tab?)
IISc


Kill Application
There has to be a Windows vs Mac feature on this list. To close an application on Windows, you have to press Alt+F4. On the Mac, it is Cmd+Q. Try it on your keyboard right now (with another window, of course) -> Alt+F4 vs Win+Q (roughly where the Cmd key is). Did you notice how you didn't have to contort your entire left hand to close a window?

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Why Is Wikipedia So Boring?

I grew up reading the Encyclopedia Britannica and later Microsoft Encarta. Britannica is a humongous set where every part of the page is filled with text, beautiful images and little sections with extra information / questions you have to think about. There are quotes, formulae with graphs and diagrams and colour coded pages for easy reference. It was a delight flipping through the pages and being marveled by the wonders of the world. Encarta, on the other hand, was a 2 CD set. Once you popped it in, the amazement never ceased. It was designed like a game, had awe-inspiring graphics and the whole fun was in the exploration. There were links connecting various topics letting you travel through the maze of time and space. It was also full of beautiful images, and, in addition, had videos and audio clips too. I would spend hours with it.

Today, we have Wikipedia. It, of course, contains more up-to-date information than any encyclopedia ever has. It is translated into many more languages and is, without doubt, one of mankind's greatest achievements. However, it does not inspire the same awe as the encyclopedias of yore did. It is mainly text - with abysmally low quality images at one corner and is littered with links (which, honestly, get in the way of a great reading experience).

This is a culmination of two factors, i think. Firstly, MediaWiki, the technology that powers Wikipedia, is quite restrictive on integration of rich media and its presentation, and secondly, Wikipedia is essential run by a clique which controls exactly how the content looks (Over 75% of the edits are done by 2% of the people*). This is not to portray them as being evil, they are only adhering to the design principles of the site that has failed to evolve with time. Like any other community based design, Wikipedia is trite and plain boring.

Imagine a site that has the breadth of content that Wikipedia does, and yet is gorgeous. Think of a site where the text is intermixed with rich images, informative videos from all across the internet, audio files and fascinating animations. Picture an interaction that draws you in, delights you with the experience and leaves you gasping for more. There will be slideshows with commentary on Da Vinci's greatest works, virtual objects that obey your command so that you can take a tour of the Taj Mahal or the Pyramids, maps that transport you across time to show the empire of Attila, and oceans that take you deep beneath, opening doors into worlds you never knew existed. Stories will come to life, characters will blossom and their lives will play out in front of us. And (for my personal satisfaction), there will be a companion "Hitchhiker's Guide" version.

Wouldn't you be eager to learn something new all the time, then?

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