The King is Dead, Long Live the King

I've been resisting the temptation to write about Android. But after reading some of the blogs about Android netbooks, I can't keep quiet.

Aside from being a Really Cool Idea, I don't have a lot to say about netbooks themselves. I've got an Android phone (thanks, Google), and I like it, and it would be nice to see the operating system move from the cell phone world onto other hardware. Netbooks are a logical step. But what's the next step after netbooks? How long will it be before we see "big" computers--full sized laptops and desktops, developer machines for serious coding, video and audio production, even servers--run on Android?

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Clarke and the Continuous Location Update

I love the idea of Fire Eagle, Yahoo's under-supported location-brokering service. However until recently I found myself unable to use it. I had no mobile service that I could consistently rely on to update Fire Eagle.

Enter Clarke. Clarke (named after Arthur C. Clarke) is a small tool that runs in the background on my Mac. It updates my location on FireEagle every 5 minutes. It triangulates me via Skyhook (the same location-service that is used on the iPhone). Like all FireEagle apps Clarke used OAuth to gain access to my account (developer Tom Taylor used oauthconsumer). Tom has released the Clarke code on Github.

If you don't have a Mac or don't wish to run Clarke for some other reason these Fire Eagle updater might do the trick for you. Fire Eagle Updater Add-on for Firefox has a very descriptive name. This Firefox extension was developed by Yahoo! and requires the Geode extension. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a similar updater for Windows.

The reason I bring up Clarke is not that you can update FireEagle; there are plenty of apps (79 in the gallery) that work with the service. Instead, it's interesting because of its continuous background updates. I don't have to think about it and can leave it running all the time, which means it gets forgotten.

When I setup a continuous location-updater I have to think about the actions of my future self. How can I guard against him? What if there are places or times that I do not want revealed (shopping for a birthday present, my home, etc.)? I take care of this by usually only sharing my neighborhood (it's useful for both locals and non-locals without getting too specific). However, in the future I'd like time-based rules (share specific places after 5PM), white lists (always share bars or when I am in San Francisco) and black-lists (never share my home). Services like Clarke and Fire Eagle and Latitude will need to add these safeguards before they get wide spread adoption.

John Viega Talks About Beautiful Security

John Viega is the co-editor of Beautiful Security, the latest in O'Reilly's "Beautiful" series. He recently talked to me a bit about what makes security beautiful, and what demands modern security problems place on end users and administrators.

James Turner: With Beautiful Code and Beautiful Data, you can think about code or data that's elegant or has a simplicity to it. When you think about security, you tend to think about diligence and slogging and going through logs and not things you would associate with being beautiful. How do you make security beautiful?

John Viega: The idea behind Beautiful Security was that -- you're right, security is not beautiful in the same way that code is. It's often a lot of grunt work, and it's just very challenging to build a good system, not necessarily fun. Although, there are a lot of people who do enjoy it. The idea behind Beautiful Security is more that it's beautiful when you can actually provide somebody an experience that's both secure and easy to use.

James Turner: To some extent, isn't that, in most organizations, diametrically opposed in that the more secure things get, the more you start hearing, "Oh, we can't do that because we can't open that port up or whatever"? And, in my experience, the more of one you get, the less of the other you get.

John Viega: It's usually the case that as you add more security, the usability goes away or as you add more usability, the security goes away. But it doesn't have to be that way. With a well designed system, often you can make it both easy to use and more secure at the same time. And there are certainly examples of that in Beautiful Security, the book. Things like password systems, for instance. If you do them very well, you can make something that's more easy to use and more secure than a traditional password system.

James Turner: When you think about security, there's different layers depending on your level of savviness and the needs you have. If we could just take a couple of minutes to address the various levels. Let's start at the lowest level. For Joe Blow, home user with cable or a fiber or a DSL line, has it gotten to the point where they have no way of realistically knowing if they're secure or not?

John Viega: For the home user, I think the security industry does a disservice about making things seem a lot worse than they really are. The security industry sells fear, uncertainty and doubt. Pretty recently, it was revealed that Symantec had been giving gross overestimations of the number of people infected by Conficker, I think. The average home user, as long as they are not doing anything dangerous that leaves them prone to social engineering or out in a very hostile environment like potentially a conference, they're usually okay. So on your home network, you're behind a NATing firewall usually. So there's really little threat from the outside world, except what the user browses to. And then there are tools like Site Advisor that can help make the browsing experience a lot more safe as well.

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Four short links: 10 June 2009

App Wall, Negroponte Switch, Data Exploration, Inadequate Innovation

1. Apple's Cool Matrix-Style App Wall (TechCrunch) -- a huge collection of icons for many of the apps available in the App Store, arranged by color. Apparently, when someone purchased one, that app’s icon would pulsate. An App Store version of Google's search globe. Information visualization makes activities meaningful, beautiful, and useful, but not necessarily all at the same time. (via dubdotdash on Twitter)
2. The New Negroponte Switch -- "Designing things that think they are services, and services that think they are things". Matt Jones presentation gushing with great ideas for the "Web Meets World" change. I love the evolving printed map they made for the British Council at Salone di Mobile. A five course meal with port and insulin shots for thought.
3. Odesi -- web-based data exploration, extraction, and analysis tool. (via scilib on Twitter)
4. The Failed Promise of Innovation (Business Week) -- I have a post building up inside me about how irritatingly of the mark this article is. Until that post erupts, however, you'll have to just read it yourself and form your own view of its flaws. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted? And if that's true, is there any reason to expect the next decade to be any better?

Twitter is Not a Conversational Platform

Perhaps the most common reason given for joining the microsharing site Twitter is "participating in the conversation" or some version of that. I myself am guilty of using this explanation. But is Twitter truly a conversational platform? Here I argue that the underlying mechanics of Twitter more closely resemble the knowledge co-creation seen in wikis than the dynamics seen with conversational tools like instant messaging and interactions within online social networks.

Wikis are causally thought of as platforms for "collaborative" document creation. But on Wikipedia, while many people share knowledge to co-create pages, the process is not formally collaborative in the sense that contributors are not cooperating with each other ways that form group identity (to paraphrase Clay Shirky from his book Here Comes Everybody). To the contrary, passionate experts write the majority of text, and a long tail of other contributors offer relatively few, small edits. Many users contribute nothing. Through this process, Wikipedia pages often become valuable repositories of knowledge.

Brian Solis recently posited the dichotomy of whether Twitter is a conversational or broadcast platform. New data bears on this. According to a Harvard Business School study, about 10% of Twitter users contribute roughly 90% of its content. Anecdotally, these 10% are subject-matter experts, passionates, mavens, and thought leaders who break news, write strong opinions, and tell jokes. Like on Wikipedia, most users merely read this information, and a modest number of people in the long tail use the information in the form of re-tweets, comments, corrections, and alternative opinions or links.

So while an individual user may use Twitter primarily as a conversational tool or a broadcast medium, in its totality, Twitter operates a lot like a wiki: as a knowledge-sharing, co-creation platform that produces content and allows its consumption. Conversation is perhaps the most simple and obvious form of collaboration, but would anyone claim that Wikipedia is a conversational platform? Despite the presence of information sharing, co-creation of an end product, and even discussion pages, Wikipedians on the whole aren't having conversations.

According to this argument, Twitter is no more a conversational platform than Wikipedia is. But is it a social networking platform? New HBS data showing that men have 15% more followers than women and being twice as likely to follow another man than a woman also bear on this to some extent. Authors Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski state: "On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women."

As in the case of the conversational platform, it seems that Twitter is also no more a social network than Wikipedia is. Wikis have user accounts and discussion pages, and it is possible for relationships to form. Twitter has user handles and direct messaging, and relationships can form. But social relationships on Wikipedia and Twitter are not a prerequisite for satisfaction and success (inasmuch as that can be defined). For instance, the popular and useful account @BreakingNews has hundreds of thousands of followers but participants in effectively zero engagement. There are many Twitter users who contribute large amounts of useful information and engage in relatively little conversation. And it is not common for people to describe Wikipedia as a social network.

Andrew McAfee notes that two useful Twitter traits are its asynchronous and asymmetric nature. These two traits are also critical to Wikipedia, but importantly much less so within popular social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace. Thus, entities that are clearly social networking platforms can be but are not necessarily knowledge co-creation platforms, and entities that are clearly asynchronous knowledge co-creation platforms can be but are not necessarily social networks.

If microsharing tools resemble wikis more than conversational tools and social networks, this has huge implications for how people and organizations approach use of this emerging technology. Solis suggests, I think rightly, that "sometimes it's effective to...maintain a presence simply by reading, listening, and sharing relevant and timely information without having to directly respond to each and every tweet." The strategy of being a "lethally generous" member of a community would seem to be more worthwhile in this context, contrasted with the individual-level customer service approach of (for example) @ComcastCares.

This framework for thinking about microsharing platforms as knowledge co-creation enablers also puts Nielsen's recent data on Twitter's "user retention and loyalty" in a new light. When the average user is a consumer of the content produced by subject-matter experts and passionate mavens, how much does it matter if the majority of use is infrequent spectating (particularly when the information is archived for asynchronous retrieval)? As Shirky recently noted in his talk at the IAC/ACT Management of Change Conference that I attended in Norfolk, VA, such an imbalance of contribution is not a condition of failure for the platform or its users.

Finally, if microsharing is equated with knowledge co-creation, rules for attribution becomes an important consideration. But while the wiki attribution process has generally been worked out, attribution on Twitter is like the wild west - there are no rules; only conventions that are commonly accepted in some circles but not others. In addition, it is relatively easy to cheat the system, hard to catch someone doing it, and difficult to determine what the consequences are of such behavior. This problem will be a lasting one, requiring careful consideration by not only the user community, but also Twitter itself.

Twitter Approval Matrix

There is a lot of interest in figuring out how to most effectively use Twitter. The Twitter Book is a great start to put some of the of the puzzle pieces together. The book got me thinking about some of the people and tags that are popular. I was amazed at how Ashton Kutcher, @aplusk, surpassed 2 million followers relatively quickly. My curiosity led me to scraping his tweet archive and producing a Wordle of his tweets. I found very little substantive content as compared to Kathy Sierra (@kathysierra) or Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly). Don't get me wrong, Ashton does tweet, but it's about boring stuff, IMO. But boring to me could be exciting to one of his followers.

This got me thinking further about tastes. We all have different tastes. I like to make sense of the world around me by collecting as much information as I can, analyzing it (in my head and in programs), and then visualizing it. So, that led me to the matrix idea. Why not plot Twitter activity, trends, users, tags on a matrix? For years, I've been reading the New York Magazine and always scanned its Approval Matrix. They describe their Twitter version as, "Our deliberately oversimplified guide to whose tweets are worth following." I thought I'd do the same, but with more than just who but also what is worth following. I decided to throw in some analysis and a user contributed component: you. The "you" part is for the future. That is, I would like you to contribute coordinates for where you think items should land on a future grid similar to the one below.

This matrix shows four quadrants used to describe tastes found on Twitter, or related sites such as hashtag.org, tweestats.com, etc. The Y-axis is partly analytical and shows popularity (mostly through scraped numbers) or perceived popularity (in the future nominated by you). The other part of the grid is more curated and subjective. The X-axis has been plotted based on my personal opinion. You may agree or disagree with my placements and that's all good to me. After all, it is about taste. The matrix and plots do not represent a thorough analytical treatment, but rather a view of the trends that could be found in data sources allowing me to plot with some sense of relevance.

For this post, I've limited the data and activity to the month of May. I will make this a monthly post if I get enough feedback/help. So, here's how you can nominate topics or people for the matrix:

• You can tag any of your tweets, RTs using #approvalmatrix and I'll find it.
• Tweet to @mikehatora
• DM mikehatora
• Send email to mikeh {at} oreilly {dot} com

If you want to suggest where the tweet or subject belongs on the matrix, do this:

• Notice the numbers on the grid, 1-10, in North/South and East/West directions.
• Notice the quadrant tags NE, SE,NW,SW, on the outer corners of each quadrant.

Here are a couple of examples that could end up on future ApprovalMatrix postings:

• @mikehatora #wwdc, NE 5,9 Interesting new stuff from Apple, but seems to have NOT leapfrogged ahead again this year. The plot is hot [N], because lots of hastags have #wwdc and the comment shows it is interesting [E] but not at the 8-10 scale of smart but rather a 5-right, 9-up on the plot]. You could say a topic like this is hotter than it is smart/interesting/useful.
• Starting new job on Monday, thanks to Twitter posting. #ApprovalMatrix This will be picked up in a scrape and added to the jobs/careers bucket. It'll likely will be a NE 5,8 aggregated with the other job data and comments.
• #approvalmatrix NE 7,8 RT @timoreilly Three-part series on how Google does search quality evaluation, starts here: https://bit.ly/QIgwX Here the tweeter is Re-Tweeting someone (timoreilly) and indicating that it is an important item in the Hot and Smart quadrant (NE). I'd look to see how many RTs have happened after the initial tweet.
• DM mikehatora SE 7,8 #hr Indicates the hashtag #hr, which is Human Resources, is not trending up, and is boring according to the sender.

Feel free to nominate people, tags, related news, etc. I can't guarantee your nomination will make it into next month's post, but it just might. This is a chance for you to put things on our Radar while letting us know what your tastes are.

I hope you enjoy this and see it as a potentially useful tool to monitor trends that your fellow readers are tracking.

Four short links: 9 June 2009

Biological Radio, Laggy Smart Grids, API Moneys, and Pubsub Server

1. Drawing Inspiration From Nature To Build A Better Radio -- based on the design of the cochlear, this MIT-built RF chip is faster than others out there, and consumes 1/100th the power. Biomimicry and UWB radio are on our radar.
2. Why the Smart Grid Won’t Have the Innovations of the Internet Any Time Soon -- While it’s significant that utilities are starting to build out smart grid infrastructure, utilities are largely opting for networks that provide connections that are far from real time, and this could stifle the desired innovation. [...] smart meter data that is pushed to Google’s PowerMeter energy tool has to make its way back to the utility before it can be sent to Google. That means that even for Google’s energy tool, there can be both a significant delay before information reaches consumers, and significant gaps in energy data details. These delays and gaps can undercut the premise of how smart meter technologies will empower consumers to make decisions about their energy use based on real-time costs. Smart grids (houses and devices able to take use of instantaneous pricing changes) have the potential to help us with our energy obesity problem, but the architecture must be right.
3. API Value Creation, Not Monetization -- On the side of the unexpected but interesting outcomes, Kevin said they have seen a flurry of internally developed business applications. In the past many valuable, internal-facing projects were turned down because the programs had to meet strict top line to bottom line ratios. With the availability to data and services, many teams within the company now have access to things they didn’t in the past, and project costs have been minimized. Throughout the company, consumers of the API have been able to launch successful projects that have created additional revenue and have reduced the overall development costs for new projects. Some solid numbers and names to help convince businesses to offer APIs, though the battle is still much harder than it should be.
4. Watercoolr -- a pubsub server for your apps. A channel is a list of URLs to be notified whenever a message is posted to that channel. Clever little piece of infrastructure for web apps, embodying the Unix philosophy of small tools that each do one thing very well. (via straup on Delicious)

What the iPhone 3GS and 3.0 OS Means for Geo Devs

Yesterday's announcements around the iPhone 3GS and new 3.0 OS were significant to consumers and developers. Here are some of the changes that will make geo devs happy.

Google Maps Views (Mapkit) - Developers can now take advantage of Google Maps within their apps. This means that you no longer have to building your own mapping system for your native apps. Companies like Platial and Pelago who made huge resource investments in building their own maps early on that did will now have to decide if they should continue the maintenance or go with Google.

Dynamic Map Markers - Map markers in mapping apps can now be changed based on realtime data on the server. This is used in the featured ZipCar app (screenshot) to show which cars are available to use at a certain time.

Safari - The new Safari will be faster, allow for offline content and provide access to location APIs. This is huge. It means that a web application can find a user's location. Google showed a version of Latitude using this at Google I/O. The faster browser also means that developers can have richer apps with less performance fears. Finally, the ability to have offline access will allow content to be cahced. Unfortunately, there is no word if Safari will have access to the Compass (I doubt it) and it still does not have access to the Camera (a key component to many geo apps).

In-Application Purchases - iPhone 3.0 should also bring the ability to purchase content/items from within an application. Developers will be able to sell geo data and upgrade app services with this feature.

Here are some iPhone 3GS goodies that are available due to the new hardware and are only available on the iPhone 3GS.

Camera - The new camera is 3MP and has video capabilities. Awesome, but more importantly for geo developers it has an auto-focus macro-mode. This will allow users to take pictures of small Barcodes and QR Codes. The previous iPhone camera had issues reading them. These physical marks (QR Codes especially) are often used to convey digital information like an URL or email address.

Compass - The digital compass provides orientation to the phone. With orientation apps that layer virtual information (AKA Augmented Reality) over the camera view become possible. This is a great boon to the iPhone. Hopefully we'll see some great designs come forward. No word on whether or not Safari will have access to the compass.

Peer-to-Peer (GameKit) - This API lets two apps talk to each other over BlueTooth. It is designed for gamers, but if the API is open then it will be used by geohackers to do proximity checks (who is nearby me) and for geocontent sharing.

Accessories API - Apple has released the ability for third-party hardware to interact with the iPhone. This is going to be a huge boon to hardware hackers everywhere. The iPhone can take in and transmit sensor and location data for them. Nike won't have to go through this API; support for Nike+ is built-in giving all hardware hackers something to dream about.

Graphics - The new phone will have improved performance and increased 3D support. You mostly hear news about how this will affect games, but awesome 3D geo apps like Google Earth and UpNext will also get the 3D benefits.

Even with all these goodies, there are some obvious carrots that are out of reach for developers. Some of them are:

Find My iPhone - If you have MobileMe iPhone 3.0 users can find their phones, send a message to their phone and perform a data wipe on their iPhone. This is a service; not an API. It will probably get Apple a lot of MobileMe accounts. Apple did not provide any way for apps to passively get a user's location, however they obviously have the ability to get that info.

Tomtom Turn-By-Turn Navigation - Apple forbid third-party developers from developing turn-by-turn navigation, obviously waiting for a big partner to take on the task. Tomtom won the honor.

There were of course some disappointments:

Push Notifications - Apps cannot send data to the server unless they are open. That means that location data cannot be sent to the cloud in the background. This is a big disappointment for those of us who want Latitude, Fire Eagle, Loopt, Whrrl, BrightKite to be able to track our every move. Maybe it will come in a future release.

I've discussed my disappointment about the lack of background location support before. Read Apple's Big Location Chance, Or When Is The iPhone Going To Use That GPS? for an expanded read on why Apple should do this.

Thanks to Raven for your help on this post and Ryan Block for the gdgt photos from WWDC.

Scripting Comes to Android

Google is bringing scripts to Android. The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) will make development accessible and easy for devs who don't want to build a full-fledge application. As Google provides these details:

Scripts can be run interactively in a terminal, started as a long running service, or started via Locale. Python, Lua and BeanShell are currently supported, and we're planning to add Ruby and JavaScript support, as well.

These scripts can:

Handle intents
Start activities
Make phone calls
Send text messages
Scan bar codes
Poll location and sensor data
Use text-to-speech (TTS)
And more

The ASE will greatly increase the customizability of Android phones. This is one of the more interesting developments I have seen for mobile apps. I hope that the Market supports trading scripts. The ASE is not in the Market yet, but you can download it from its project page.

Via Hacker News

Vanessa Fox's Search Developer Summit - 6/12 in SF

Vanessa Fox, search expert at large, is running a Search Developer Summit this Friday in SF. As she describes it:

A site’s technical architecture is crucial for its success in search engines. If you are an entrepreneur building an online business, a web developer who is looking to add valuable skills to your resume, or a CTO or engineering manager who wants to build SEO best practices into the development process, don’t miss this opportunity for in-depth technical insight that you can put into action now.
• Optimizing URLs, information architecture and your site’s navigation
• Effectively using Flash, Silverlight, AJAX and Video
• Diagnosing root cause of existing issues
• Case studies from real websites about what works
Hear directly from the search engine representatives and developers who have been in the trenches about what works, what to avoid, and how to build a kick-ass web application that is loved by both users and search engines.

The cost is only $50. However, if you register with RADAR25 you'll get 25% off (you'll have to pay on-site). I also have two free passes. Tell me your favorite thing about the new Bing Search Engine by Tuesday afternoon. The two most insightful comments will get the passes.

Ignite! comes to San Jose June 22nd - Submit your talks now!

Ignite! is coming to San Jose on Monday June 22, 2009 at 8:00 pm, attached to the Velocity Conference. Admission is free, open to all, and there will be a cash bar.

The deadline for talks is May 11th, so submit your talks now!

As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of five minutes. We'll be looking for fun geek topics like hacks, how-to's, and insights. (Talks don't have to be Velocity-related!) If you're not sure what an Ignite talk looks like check out the Ignite Show.

You can RSVP for the event on Upcoming or Facebook.

When do your beliefs become knowledge?

I've been reading a lot of philosophy lately -- Kierkegaard and Dawkins, Lewis, Hume, Calvin and Augustine, you name it -- for a class I'm taking, as well as for my own enjoyment. One of the interesting things about philosophy is that it's a discipline that takes the understanding of understanding seriously. As a teacher, that's fascinating to me; has education -- specifically, the way we in 2009 are trying to educate -- really examined what knowledge is? Have educational systems considered what the wealth of literature says about knowledge, and responded to it responsibly?

[A few important insertions: I'm not supposing that to respond to philosophical ideas about knowledge, education needs to change. I am suggesting, though, that a responsible response entails understanding the arguments, and either adhering to them, or forming a sound counter-argument to explain abandoning them.]

Two theses in particular caught my attention. First, Thomas Reid makes this astounding statement (cited from Thomas Reid's Inquiry and Essays (1975), p. 275):

Another first principle is--That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious.

What does this say? It says that our natural senses don't tend to fail us. Now, I know, many of you are freaking out over this quote, especially in light of particle physics or molecular biology. And we can argue that over a good cup of coffee. But I will suggest that Reid is right in the macro-world.

I see a piano falling, I rightly assume several things:

1. It is indeed falling, and I am not instead rushing up toward it.

2. That piano is dangerous to be under, given that it's falling.

There are plenty of other observations, but you get the idea.

So why does this matter? Well, how much do we allow the learner's senses (and by senses, I don't mean "ears listening to 90 minutes of lecture") engage in a typical learning environment? How much do we allow the natural faculties to assert themselves, create knowledge, and then refine and provide context for the knowledge already gained?

I think it's an important question. I think Dan Meyer is a master at this (check out his blog for some amazing examples of using pictures to stimulate learning). How are you doing this? What effect on education would an increased (as in, significantly more than you're currently doing) amount of sensory learning create?

Let me know what you think. Oh, and as for my other philosophical quote that I think is important? More on that later this week...

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