email works best.
 

Timelines Are Pointless

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter show information in reverse chronology. The latest is on the top and as you scroll down, you are taken back in time. This is largely meaningless. Just because something happened recently doesn't make it more important or interesting than something that happened a little earlier. Further, it makes it harder to find something that is more interesting, buried as it is, beneath all the fluff.

Social websites are about people, interactions between people and stuff shared by people. Ideally, the websites should be designed around these and not around a timeline. I would love Facebook to look like so (the same concept could be applied to Twitter as well):

There would be separate sections called 'People' which would group everything that's happened (comments, photo uploads, videos, linked shared) by people, 'Conversations' which would point me to my friends commenting on each other's posts or writing on each other's walls (sorted by most active), 'Photos & Videos' where i could jump in and immediately see personal photos and videos (grouped by people) and 'Shared Stuff' which would show me links, YouTube videos and other shared items.

One could go one step further and add more intelligence to the system, by sorting all these lists by the people closest in my friends' list; the people i interact with the most. The screen could highlight groups which have had action since i last saw them or the ones that it thinks might interest me the most, based on what i have liked or viewed before.

Timelines add no value to social interaction and it is time the chronological stream of news dried up.

 

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.
 

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.
 

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.
 

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?