Very cool stuff people. Mozilla’s Ubiquity and MS IE 8 Beta 2. Two different takes trying to solve very similar problems. I think I smell a very interesting trend.
The problem:
The Web as we use it today is only very loosely connected through hyperlinks or developer created mashups. Even though the business environment on the Web has shifted slightly toward openness, mashups are limited by technical issues like API’s and business relationships. User don’t care about either. They just want to add maps to email and tell their friends about it.
Ubiquity is all about empowering users to create their own mashups leveraging natural language. To use and visualize data and functionality provided by various sites as they see fit. Ubiquity has real potential to put an end to the limitations of walled gardens, and finally put the power in the hands of the people. It’s in super early Alpha release and there are definitely some challenges ahead, but I really dig it. Check out Aza Raskin’s blog and the Mozilla site for Ubiquity to find out more. My quick take, this is exactly the kind of thing that could make the Web exciting again. Only limitation is that it looks to be linked directly to Firefox. It would be even cooler if it could stay away from the browser wars altogether. Something like QuickSilver by Blacktree or Enso by Humanized. I also wonder how ubiquitous something leveraging “natural language” can be. I mean – which language? Note: if Aza reads this, I’d love to lend a UX hand with Ubiquity. Seriously.
IE 8 seems to be Microsoft’s attempt to solve the same problem through Accelerators and WebSlices. Accelerators are contextual services accessible via highlighting web page content and clicking the Accelerators icon. Developers can build Accelerators for their services and users can install them on IE 8. Webslices let users save sections of web pages for future access – not unlike Apple’s Widgets which should be no surprise. Microsoft’s solution is definitely further along than Ubiquity, but it still relies on developers to build the Accelerators and doesn’t rely on natural language parsing black magic.
On a side note: I’ve always thought it strange that MS causes complete software development nightmares for itself by trying to build operating systems that work on just about any hardware configuration users can splice together, but still can’t come to terms with relinguishing control of software development. Reminds me of Steve Ballmer’s famous freakout – “Developers, developers, developers, developers.” I’ve always considered good developers to be scarce resources. It’s gotta be tough to be a company that makes a ton of money selling developers the tools to build consumer products while still trying to sell consumer products yourself. I’d prefer to see a CEO running around a stage yelling, “people, people, people, people” or even “customers, customers, customers, customers” wouldn’t you?
Around the corner from my office they decided to construct a bike lane and “pedestrian plazas” down the center of Broadway between Times Square and Herald Square. They cut Broadway into two lanes, which happens to be an interesting choice for a city that claims to have major congestion problems. Note: I’m originally from Southern California, and compared to traffic on the 405 or 10 at rush hour, Manhattan traffic is laughable. One of my friends has a theory that they want to make Manhattan traffic and parking so bad that people will quit driving into the city all together. I don’t have a car anymore, so I don’t really care. I’ll leave the traffic management conspiracy theories to the folks who suffer the most. My problem with the recent “construction” is that it’s stupid and pathetic.
So I googled the construction to see if I could find any details online. I found the plans (PDF) and some early concepts at Streetsblog.org, which seem kinda nice. I mean there’s no question this area of Midtown could use some significant beautification and bike lanes are always kinda nice. My problem is with how they went about constructing the so called “pedestrian plazas”. Here’s what they did as far as I can tell.
Painted new lane lines down Broadway cutting the car lanes in half
Painted a bike lane down the eastern side
Poured tar or something similar (I don’t think they actually use tar anymore) all over the space between the car lanes and the new bike lane
Dumped sand all over the “tar”
Put potted plants and outdoor furniture on the sand covered tar
Called it a “pedestrian plaza”
I’m no expert in this stuff, but it seems kinda odd. There are no raised medians around the sand covered “plazas”, the sand doesn’t stick very well so it constantly needs to be manicured, lawn chairs and potted plants do not a plaza make, and it cannot be safe. Besides all that, who in the world wants to sit in the middle of the street while cars are zooming by with exhaust blowing in your face? This half-assed effort reminds me of the so called “park” at Herald Square across from Macy’s. They call it a park, but really it’s a gated off concrete median/lane divider. I mean come on people. If you’re gonna call something a plaza make it a plaza, and if you’re gonna call something a park make a park. No wonder everyone in Manhattan seems so miserable.
So, last Thursday evening I was walking in SoHo to meet with a couple friends. It had started raining a bit earlier in the day and caught most people off guard. I was lucky because I was able to grab up one of the few extra umbrellas at the office before I left. So here’s the scenario – Me w/ umbrella walking in SoHo relatively dry. I’m about half a block from my destination when I see a girl waiting to cross the street. She’s stuck in the rain w/out an umbrella and trying her best to keep dry by hiding under the crosswalk sign. I turn to see what she’s doing, she turns to look at me with a slightly embarrassed smile on her face… That’s where it ends.
I kept walking, and now I feel bad. Been thinking about it for a couple days, and basically I should have given her my umbrella. Not because she was pretty or because I would have liked to have met her, but simply because she needed it a hell of a lot more than I did. I honestly don’t even like carrying an umbrella. So my resolution is to put an extra umbrella in my messenger bag (one of the cheap $5 ones that they sell on the street) and next time it rains like that I’m going to give it to a stranger in need. I know I could use the karmic boost.
So after attempting to sign out of my bank’s web site, I received this wonderful default .Net exception error instead of the usual credit card cross-sell.
Nothing makes me feel secure in my bank or want to buy something more than a giant exception error. I especially like this one because it’s the default .Net error and includes instructions to the developers about how to replace it with something more useful to the user. Here’s a thought guys – REPLACE IT WITH SOMETHING MORE USEFUL TO THE USER.
One of the funniest blogs around (StuffWhitePeopleLike.com) actually raises a very interesting question about how folks move between online social networks and how that compares to how they move within their real world
Someone really really really needs to do some modeling that compares social network to real-world real estate markets. Take existing real estate models that show trends like suburbanization , “white flight”, immigration, and gentrification with data showing real estate price valuations and compare them to what happens on the interwebs. It might be an interesting way to predict who will be the next big social network or even a way to figure out what each network is really worth. I can see some potential trends already.
I just read this article from Voice of America about a press conference with the Dalai Lama. In the press conference the Dalai Lama “urged the world community to accept China into its ranks while staying firm on issues of human rights and democracy.” Concerning the issue of Tibetian independence, the article goes on to say that the Dalai Lama “only wants autonomy and religious freedom for that region.”
Doing some googling, I’ve found that the Dalai Lama has consistently focused his energy on the issue of religious freedom in Tibet via peaceful means. I like it. Being an “American” I have to admit that freedom can come after violence, but I don’t think it always has to be that way. I think the Dalai Lama has it right. He wants everyone to take the high road, to erase the artificial boundaries of politics, so that we can see people as people and treat them accordingly. According to an article in the Guardian back in April, he called creating hatred among the Chinese by disrupting the Olympic games “futile”. Probably because creating hatred is futile period.
This gets to some points I’ve made about how protesting the Olympics really pisses me off. The games are supposed to be about human triumph, not about politics. I guess that makes me sound like an idealist, but really… the Olympics are fun. I don’t care which country or sports you watch, there are great stories throughout the games. From Michael Phelps becoming the most decorated Olympian to the fact that there are countries so small that most people in the world have never heard of them competing without a real chance to win. The Olympics are one of the very very few venues where people from around the world can come together to celebrate being people. Anything that diminishes that is a shame, especially when the people doing it are the ones who supposedly believe it the most.
Interesting article from Ars Technica earlier today about a poorly thought out survey on What They Play. I will qualify the following post with a note that things like ESRB ratings and intentionally playing on paranoia to sell products really really irk me. So if you’re a fan of fear advertising and extortion we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Anyway, back to it.
Basically, the article points out that a survey asking parents what would most worry them when sending their child to a friend’s house to spend the night (with results like drink beer, smoke marijuana, play GTA, and watch pornography) is not scientific and is in fact misleading. Duh! Btw it seems folks who took the survey thought that weed and GTA were much more worrisome than beer and porn.
Look, What They Play is an advertisement driven, for-profit web site started in 2007 as the first product of What They Like by “entertainment and media industry veterans Ira Becker and John Davison.” The site’s stated mission is to offer “helpful resources within an unbiased, non-judgmental environment that provide parents with unparalleled insight and guidance about the various forms of popular entertainment that engage children.” All of this is from their About Page, I did truncate but did not edit the mission because I figured you could click on the link and see it for yourself.
The mission sounds great. Nothing like a unbiased, informed source to help adults gather enough information to make decisions about how to raise their children, right? I’m not a parent, so I’m no expert at the parenting thing, but at a glance it sounds potentially helpful. The problem is that the site is not unbiased or non-judgmental. Check out this article from the site about Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim entitled “AdultSwim.com Games: Get the Facts; Racism, religion, sex, violence, and suicide. All in your browser, for free.” If you read it, you’ll notice that it definitely doesn’t start off very “non-judgmental” with a quick jab referring to Adult Swim’s content as “immature” – interesting choice of words, especially when later referring to the site content as inappropriate for younger viewers and the games as featuring “violent or otherwise mature content.” Ugh. I can’t even express how angry that kind of blatant misrepresentation makes me.
Turns out What They Play is just another product trying to make money off of scaring well meaning but ignorant parents by feeding into paranoia about “evil video games” while showing them advertisements for “innocent games”.
Hey Parents – Video games do not cause violent behavior. Violent kids sometimes enjoy violent video games. That’s it. So maybe your kid is a psycho about to rampage through the halls of his junior high with a blowtorch, but I can assure if that’s true, you’ve got a lot more to worry about than which games he’s playing at a friend’s house.
Now, I’m going back to working on my next interweb startup idea – basically it’s about books. There isn’t anything more dangerous than the printed word. Books cause violence, sexual promiscuity, and are bad for children’s eyesight. After I get it off the ground, I’m going to start a book ratings organization where publishers can pay me a fee to receive a rating. I will then collude with retailers to block all non-rated books from being sold in stores. Say byebye Tom Sawyer and you better pay up King James, or else!
