So, those of us who have some experience in this area know better. Wait for the second release, when the battery is fixed, when the apps are mature, when the touchscreen is more reliable, when the headphone socket fits most headphones without you having to shave a bit of the base of the jack (anyone who had a 1st gen iPhone will know).

The little things, that Apple does so well are usually done in the second gen of a product launch. So the question begs? why buy the first gen product, why buy the new iPad?

The answer for me is “I won’t”, I will gladly forgo the teething pains of a virgin product. I have deliberated over it, but ultimately the need for a larger iPhone like pad, with no phone, camera or flash (adobe), is just not doing it. Prestige is not enough of a wager to swing me over to the new iPad for the first run.

I remember when watching the keynote, the little blue plugin bricks appearing over the screen (which Jobs failed to mention), made me think – ahhh there’s the compromise, there’s the sign that I will get a little let down. If only, if only she had flash.

There is a lesson here, a definite tactic to releasing a product that is 80% there. It captures the initial buzz and sells to the ardent fans, without the cost implications of holding on to an unreleased product. Then, continue to develop the product in the wild from the feedback of your supporters, the people who absolutely will be vocal about your product’s failings. Read the blogs, hear the complaints and then fix them. Essentially the first release of the iPad will be the last phase of Apple’s testing.

Hardware does not have a beta, just a huge product launch.

Try it: “13 coin flips, 12 heads”

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=13+coin+flips+12+heads

The web is about input and output, or should I really say, the computer is about input and output. After all the web is just a load of interconnected computers… so lets look at most important part of the computer, the input box.

Fundamentally, how we use and what we expect to come from the use of the input box, whether entering our credit card details, searching for postal addresses, looking for film times, alters the base function of the web. So why is WA so different and exciting? Well it fundamentally alters the base function of that input box. We are moved from asking what do you know about the data, to what can you understand from using the data.

Why does that matter? Well, if you ask Google how many coin flips will come up heads, you are at a loss unless someone has worked the specific problem out, worked the solution into a web page and then made the page accessible to the Internet. Then you have to hope that Google has crawled that page and indexed it correctly. That’s quite a lot of hoping to answer a relatively simple probability question (for maths geeks anyway). Along with the human intervention needed to answer your question, there is the added issue that the person might have got it wrong!

WA will look at what you have put into the input box (in this case “13 coin flips, 12 heads”) and do all the work for you, based on the data and methods it has available. Exciting eh!

Well, maybe not, its not a huge leap, as Google does do a lot of computing on the fly already, but it is a significant one. Up till now, we have been using computers as glorified librarians, from here on in we can use them as teachers, to tell us more about the world we live in than we already know.

“The detail IS the design”
Charles Eames

It’s quite funny to see the number of terms used to describe roles for people who are programming for the web; “interface architects” , “usability engineers” and now “UX designers”. To me it conveys a sense of confusion around principles of programming for the web, coupled with a need to real-world the roles by adding the terms “architect”, “engineer” or “designer” to an element of the program creation. The truth is that most people who venture into programming for the web do not fit into any of these disciplines entirely, or in some cases not at all.

To me, It’s a hangover from when sociopath programmers, who had a pretty poor eye for aesthetics,  dressed like mathematicians, were pushed aside by graphic designers in the push for a prettier Internet experience. Notice I said prettier, not nicer or better.

People who create web pages are programmers, not designers, or architects, or engineers or anything else for that matter. When they create content for the web, they are involved in creating a program, a program that someone else uses. They ‘have’ users.

Yes, many other, probably much more experienced programmers wrote say 99% of the code that delivers the web page to the users eyes, but the 1% of programming that is involved in creating the content is actually what the whole Internet is built upon.

When we bring other disciplines into the language, what do we gain? Nothing, but confusing analogies and abstractions. Programming is a big and mature enough discipline to handle all of the tasks it needs to perform without having to borrow from other disciplines. Actually, borrowing from those other disciplines only harms the output. Web pages are not buildings, they are not leaflets, they are not machines, they are programs, run on computers. Google’s homepage is a great example of program led design, that did not care for architecture, design or usability even. It was something that grew from the program they wrote to search the internet. It’s success has been phenomenal, but not because it was well designed, aesthetically pleasing or even well thought through (the design). It came about because the program needed an input. Simple.

It’s hard to program for success, even before you get into aesthetics. There are many factors, many environments, many pitfalls; layering complexity over complexity in programming can lead to large cumbersome systems, prone to failure. Visual design is a complexity, an often unnecessary one .

Adding design elements, new visual languages, pleasing layouts, mechanical functionality for the sake of it actually harms what we need from the web. What we need from the web is transparency, fluidity and most of all efficiency. Design just gets in the way.

Efficiency is not pretty, its functional. It’s pleasing. It delivers a result in a simple and concise way, again and again, on a large scale without failure or confusion – It works. I was reading some usability materials recently and it struck me that while focussing on usability can save you money, it actually can’t make you money. Quite a bold assertion, but usability only matters if you have a product that works.

A designer is creative, they create designs. They do so from a singular

subjective viewpoint, maybe with consideration, but it’s still a subjective consideration. Subjectivity is an opinion and opinions are easy to come by. This is the crux of the problem. Using the principles of design to solve what is essentially a programmatical problem causes two big issues; it creates a paradox for the user and unneccesary abstractions (and distractions) for the programmer.

Programmers do not have the same luxurious subjectivity as designers. The output for a programmer is binary; it either works, or it doesn’t. There are programming styles, of course and elements to designing a program, but largely these elements are part of a task to be completed.

La Meme

An algorithm will never understand you completely and every ‘product’ (if we are to believe our MBA textbooks) has a life cycle. At present it’s inconceivable that search will ever be usurped by any other medium as an entry point for the web. But while search is ultra efficient it sometimes lacks the personalisation and relevance of information passed from mouth to mouth.
Emerging services such as twitter, facebook, stumbleupon and digg provide much more personlised entry points into the web than search. Someone you respect sends and interesting link, someone else tells you about a breaking event, someone shares an idea with you.

Personalisation (something which search does not offer well) and group membership are really good at finding us things that we ‘might’ be interested in. This takes the web back to the television model of push publishing via channels, where we make one decision (which channel to watch) and relevant information is pushed at us. If the relevant information bores us, we just switch channel.

The notion of a channel on the Internet is ugly and cumbersome, it does not translate well. If we had to compare to the notion of a television channel, an internet channel is more of a wavelength that is bi-directional, more than that even, it’s now onmi directional and interferes with other channels. Television channels can’t interact with each other to spawn new channels for example, Internet channels can. The word channel, for me, is actually impotent in describing the interactive state the internet can bring.

I would say that we are heading towards meme culture, one where we access and are exposed to trains of thought via many access points, where we touch the information or the information touches us and we react or consume. Search plays a big part in this but is in no way the master of this realm.

A meme is a trend. The subversive web is a trend engine, where fads come and go, services are picked up and are dropped, daily topics are gobbled up and regurgitated and eventually filed in archive.org.

Search is a diverse activity and can resist to an extent the trending that goes on, but it’s not invincible. Search engines must have their eye on these new entry points as they begin to pick away at market share. The evolution of the web’s products or features in our lives rolls on regardless.

The hippies had a good idea, make love not war, have festivals, enjoy/live in harmony with nature. Admittedly long in the tooth and a bit derided, are these hippy ideals seeing a veiled resurgence, re-invented as post-consumerism? I know festival culture, boutique festivals such as ‘the big chill’ and ‘Beautiful Days’ nod towards that life ethic.

I have just listened to Kate Soper: http://is.gd/fI9O on alternative hedonism and she makes some very valid points about the next stage of our socio-economic evolution.

Maybe now a rethink of our addiction to consumerism is at hand, not a push towards “doing the right thing” which never satisfies the ego (vanity, pride, lust for power etc…) but a movement towards standards of enjoyment over standards of living.

Keeping up with the Jones’s (Jones’es? I really should know that one) could mean bragging about how much time you had off, or how much you enjoyed your latest party or dinner, how many friends you have (facebook, twitter…).

Unemployment en masse could have us all rethinking the value of things, which during the last epoch of progress, has been measured almost solely in currency, which affords financial “freedom”. So, the question begs – have we been buying back from capitalism what was always ours anyway, our freedom, and paying for it with our freedom?

Image from the documentary "Hyperland"

Thanks to @kidehen for this, this is wonderful wonderful BBC2 piece of history. Douglas Adams really was a genius.
Hyperland

Web 2.0 Joke

It’s true that all changes, or shifts in consciousness bring about fashion or trend, which for the masses to understand (or get a window into) have to, have a name.

But who versioned this internet as a movement? Who commissioned it? We never had music 2.0 or writing 2.0, of course we had musical periods “Rock and Roll”, “Classical”, and artistic ones “Cubism” etc… but those were terms created to pigeon-hole and describe parts of the movement, not the movement as a whole.

Versioning, is it just marketing candy? Shorthand for a shift in our understanding of the capabilities of the new connectedness? Or does it actually betray more about us as a species than we realise at first glance.

It’s interesting to see people already talking about web 3.0, as if there is a natural progression. But I was unaware of web 1.0 so how did we arrive at web 3.0 and where is web 2.4? or 1.9 for that matter. For a lot of people, it’s quite annoying to see terms bundled into the vernacular of business (and life) like “blue sky thinking” or “thinking out of the box” or now “Web 2.0″. To see perfectly reasonable concepts plastered over cracked walls which hold little understanding of the deeper concepts, makes those who do understand, baulk and twitch with annoyance and irritation.

But as with all great (or not so great) soundbytes/tags/sayings there is an element of truth behind them, or at least an element of revealing fiction.

“…an interpretation of a matter from a particular viewpoint..”

This was taken from a dictionary definition of the word ‘version’, which actually lets on more about the web versioning that is happening. Who’s viewpoint? who decides? who interprets? Some people used (and still use) the phrase “web 2.0″ without understanding who or what it represents. Sure, if quizzed many answers representative of change may  spring from the lips of the marketeers: “social networking”, “a network of networks” , “remix culture” etc… “How droll”, I hear “the geeks” cry. But if you were to really press, I mean really nail down what they mean when they say web x.x, they don’t actually single out a specific feature set in particular. It’s a clumped together phrase, embodying many other perfectly valid trends and some not so valid or fictitious maybe?

Who’s viewpoint then? It’s their/our viewpoint stupid! All of us internetters, together in a homogeneous lump of optimism and marketing drool. Well, at least all of us who subscribe to the understanding that “Web 2.0″ actually exists (which I personally don’t).

The scary version

The programmatical link is obvious, but are we already talking about generations, in an ordered sense, of something that is so young (in media terms), so packed full of potential and so chaotic? What happens when we get to Web 32.0? do we, like Rocky fall around the ring trying to reinvent old glory?

Many would argue that versioning itself is already outdated, practices such as scrum and agile development are opening doors to a less structured approach to creating things, where versions are in the eye of the beholder. Updates become releases and features become new products in themselves.

But what about the question: why? Why did we call it web 2.0? In a sense versioning gives you the impression that you are in control of its development, that there is a grand plan. Why do we seek overall control over this chaotic set of connected possibilities? The answer could be simple; give our fears a cutesy name, it gives us power over what is essentially a very scary and risky environment for the human. We are barely hairless apes (some less so than others) and sharing across tribes is not in our ‘human’ nature, unless we can see a benefit that overcomes our fear.

The handy illusion of control

The web is a spector, a ghost, a friendly helpful ghost, that turns the pages of the phonebook and opens up the encyclopedia to the correct page for us. But, aren’t we scared of ghosts?

As a massive fast growing, penetrative ether, has the power to stupefy, marvel and freak us out. The more it knows about us, the more we ‘could’ fear it, the more we would ‘need’ to censor and control it. I mean could you accept a friendly ghost in your house? You could if you gave it a friendly name maybe?

This point of fear and control, for me, is the point at which mankind can allow itself to break from tradition and relinquish fear as a driving principle for major change. But, versioning betrays our need to comfort ourselves by the use of cutesy terms and shiny phrases, i.e. naming the friendly ghost.

It serves only to stop us facing our fears head on. The fear of loss of privacy, betrayal of trust and most scary of all, the control of our thinking. The more we give to the web the more it can exploit us, now that is scary.

Is calling it “web 2.0″ about fear and control? or are we just naming our opportunity? or maybe both? I cannot be absolutely sure on either count, but that is my point in practice; we cannot be sure what chaotic creativity will spring from the technology as a whole and versioning in my view only limits the mental potential that we can offer each other, creating a tic or a loop for development to get stuck in. After all, as a medium, the web is so new that we are only just beginning to pluck the strings.

Brings me to the question, “how do you version the web?”. The answer, you don’t. No version, no time line, no plan. There is an effort under way to version the web of course, its happening in VC clinics, boardrooms, council chambers and politicians heads.

A mistake would be a ‘softly softly’ approach to this new discipline, there is a desperate need to face the challenges it brings head on with bravery and insight, in order to see real growth, not just lip service and javascript. We non-evangelists, armed with the understanding of how powerful and subversive the web can be, have a responsibility to open the door and go into the closet, to face the reality of what we have built without trying to tame it. Before we lose it completely to the evangelists who give us a “web 3.0″.

As I understand it, this is a dimple divergence from ask/find to ask/compute. Whats the difference? Well thinking on a very reductionist level, Google is a pretty dumb system – it follows some rules that are pre-determined by humans and then spits out a result based on those fixed rules (although they change over time manually, they are still fixed at the point of query). Wolfram takes a different approach, you set the rules at the point of query, or create the computation in real time, based on data that WA holds.

Take for example, if you wanted to know how much stock had fallen and risen over the last 2 years in the UK FTSE market. You could visit google finance, take a look at the graph and that would tell you. Simple, you say, so whats the advantage? Well there is none until, lets say you wanted to know how much farming stock in particular over a given area of the UK  had fallen and risen over that last 2 years, then that would rely on someone manually processing that, publishing a page, Google visiting that page and Google crawling that answer, storing it, giving it relevancy etc etc…. All that, when all you need is the answer to a data problem, not a relevancy one. WA however uses the ‘data’ available to compute the result, thus skipping every other step that Google (or search engines in general) might take.

An Answer Engine.

The benefit (which is what’s important here) is that we can create new data from old data, we can generate exponentially answers based on answers. In a world of jumbled data, human error, we can redistribute, recompute and ultimately collectively discover more than any single entity can in the same period.

Time

This is the critical factor (there are many other critical factors, but time the most important of the lot), as it’s saving the time taken to compute the same things, over and over again, making each of the trillions and trillions of data units the internet holds, n times more efficient.

As a basis for a knowledge system, it really is inspiring.

The instrumentation will be producing one gigabyte per second of information, which then has to be transferred instantly from its location in Switzerland to universities around the globe.

The capacity of this network is easily enough to make the largest ISP wobble, so the engineers and scientists are using a mixture of Teir 1 and Teir 2 fibre optic cable to handle the throughput.

This is not revolutionary in itself, but the way the data is handled using the middleware (globus), primarily its architecture and design means that huge amounts (gigabytes) of information will be delivered instantly with literally no delay. This could mean a revolution in the way that data is handled over the Internet and lead to a much richer convergence of mediums, visual media being the first obvious candidate.

If it takes a small black hole to get rid of the progress bar, then hey – it’ll be worth it.

The fisrt step (I am reliably informed) is to ensure that the content on the domain comes up to this standard:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en

Then I will submit a reconsideration request (in Google webmaster tools) and provide a begging letter to Google so that they can be happy that I am not going to spam their index. The begging letter must answer the following point precisely.

If you recently acquired this domain and think it may have violated the guidelines before you owned it, let us know that below. In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimizers, affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reconsidered.