Why is HTML Suddenly Interesting?

Web developers couldn't stop talking about HTML and its evolution during the 1990s. New features were usually tempting, though not always workable, and the Browser Wars meant that vendors competed by providing and copying features. The HTML standardization process had its twists and turns, moving from the IETF to the W3C, developing standards that reflected immediate needs and tried to channel developer energy in more productive directions.

Then, suddenly, HTML was incredibly boring. The dot-com bust was part of that, but a more fundamental change doomed the conversation: Microsoft dominated the space. Whether because of the dominance of Windows, the technical quality of key innovations like Dynamic HTML, or the disappearance of Netscape into AOL, the stark reality was that Internet Explorer ruled the browser world. Outsiders asking Microsoft for improvements to Internet Explorer invariably heard that Microsoft would be willing to upgrade IE "when our customers ask for it" - which was an almost polite version of no.

As a result, the last decade, even for those of us who turned to Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Chrome, or other browsers, has been one long exercise in making the most out of tools that took their last major steps in the late 1990s. There was enough in HTML 4.01, Cascading Style Sheets 2, JavaScript, XML, HTTP, and XMLHttpRequest to keep us busy, especially as users acquired higher-speed connections and faster computers. There was also constant frustration with browser limitations, driving the development of more flexible plugin approaches like Flash and Silverlight, though none of them succeeded in replacing the traditional Web, however dull it might have become.

Today, though, the HTML conversation is reborn. Standards development around HTML seems to actually have a chance of influencing user experience in the browser, and Microsoft itself is participating in the HTML 5 conversation despite still holding roughly two-thirds of the browser market. While Microsoft's market share is only slowly eroding, developer mindshare seems to have shifted decisively to the band of WHATWG upstarts, Microsoft's competitors.

The reason for this, I think, is that HTML 5 clearly has a bright future in a place that Microsoft can't presently block: mobile web browsers. When I ask people about the future of computing, the word I keep hearing in their answers is "mobile". Even if it's small now, it has a much greater effect on how people evaluate what's coming.

Microsoft has a mobile presence, certainly, but it's hard to argue that it has anywhere near the visibility of the iPhone, or even the Android. Mobile web browsing has kept Opera going for years, but the iPhone and Android give Apple and Google much more visibility for their HTML 5 work, and Apple's decision to keep Flash off the iPhone in particular gave developers further cause to rethink their dependencies. (The WebKit browser engine these share will also be integrated with Blackberry soon, and is also on the Palm Pre.)

In the mad rush to build mobile applications, HTML 5's competition isn't even desktop web browsers, but other mobile development toolkits. As my co-worker Keith Fahlgren put it recently:

Speaking from personal experience, I've had a lot more fun writing an HTML5 application based on CSS3, the database API, and jQuery that runs out of the box on all of the hot mobile platforms than I ever would have had writing some silly Objective C app for a locked down App Store (or Java for an open one).

This creates a whole new world for the "where should HTML go?" conversation. Web developers certainly have pent-up demand for new features, but previous conversations about revising HTML always foundered on the "but will Internet Explorer support it?" question. Today, when that question feels less important, the ice is finally breaking. (Microsoft is even participating in HTML 5, though it's not yet clear how committed they are to implementation.)

It will doubtless be years before developers can safely deploy fully-featured HTML 5 sites without concern for older browsers, but for the first time it is plausible that changes to HTML will find wide adoption, and hope is rising. That hope, of course, brings its own risks. I can't say the HTML 5 process has done credit to either the W3C or the WHATWG - it feels to me like an ugly scramble - and there are plenty of specific decisions that deserve careful questioning. That the broken process is actually important to people, however, is a huge sign in itself that HTML is relevant once again.

After years of quiet, it's worth paying attention again!

What Does Government 2.0 Mean To You?

As many of you know, I've built a new conference, Gov 2.0 Summit, around the idea of the government as platform: how can government design programs to be generative, to use Zittrain's phrase? How do we get beyond the idea that participation means "public input" (shaking the vending machine to get more or better services out of it), and over to the idea that it means government building frameworks that enable people to build new services of their own?

I've been talking a lot about this topic recently, so there are plenty of places to to see and hear what I think. (Here are links to my Forbes column on Gov 2.0, an interview with Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, my interview with Mark Amtower on Federal News Radio, and my Radar talk at this year's OSCON. (Gov 2.0 remarks start about 9:45 in, with my idea of what Gov 2.0 is really about starting at around 16 minutes.)) And in a few weeks, you can hear the latest thinking from some key people in the world of policy and technology at Gov 2.0 Summit.

But I'd like to reach beyond the voices of the people on stage at that event, and include your voices. So I'm throwing out an invitation in the form of a question: what does Gov 2.0 mean to you? The question is intentionally open to interpretation in a variety of ways, so go to town!

I'd like to hear from you through short video clips; just tag them with #whatisgov2 and post them to your favorite video service by September 2. Details about the video invitation are here. I'll take some of the best of these videos to Gov 2.0 Summit in two weeks, and make them part of the conversation there.

Ignite Show: Jeff Veen on Great Designers

Good designers copy. Great designers steal.

In this week's Ignite Show Jeff Veen, well-known for his design work on Google Analytics, Wikirank and Typekit, lays out a strong argument for why iPhone imitators are the cargo cults of the digital era. The people building touchscreen knock-offs don't understand what makes the iPhone great. So instead of creating an end-to-end service they attempt to imitate it's flashiest features - kind of like Pacific Islanders who built "planes" out of bamboo.

Wikipedia provides further context for the use of the term cargo cults in this way.

From time to time, the term "cargo cult" is invoked as an English language idiom to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance. The error of logic made by the islanders consisted of mistaking a necessary condition (i.e., building airstrips, control towers, etc.) for cargo to come flying in, for a sufficient condition for cargo to come flying in, thereby reversing the causation. On a lower level, they repeated the same error by e.g. mistaking the necessary condition (i.e. build something that looks like a control tower) for building a control tower, for a sufficient condition for building a control tower.

The inception of cargo cults often is defined as being based on a flawed model of causation, being the confusion between the logical concepts of necessary condition and sufficient condition when aiming to obtain a certain result. Based on this definition, the term "cargo cult" also is used in business and science to refer to a particular type of fallacy whereby ill-considered effort and ceremony take place but go unrewarded due to flawed models of causation as described above. For example, Maoism has been referred to as "cargo cult Marxism"[citation needed], and New Zealand's optimistic adoption of liberal economic policies in the 1980s as "cargo cult capitalism".[citation needed]

This episode of the Ignite Show was filmed at Ignite SF. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

You can see more episodes of the Ignite Show on our site or subscribe in iTunes.

Four short links: 26 August 2009

Food, NoSQL, Brain Power, Social Data

1. Better BBQ Through Chemistry -- food is the perfect ground for geek training: there are measurements, there's science, it's easy to know whether you've succeeded, and you can eat all but the worst of your failures. (via BoingBoing)
2. NoSQL (East) -- conference on East Coast for relationless databases.
3. Human Brain Processing Speed -- clocked at 60bits/second, according to this MIT Technology Review article. Their approach eventually led to Hick's Law, one of the few laws of experimental psychology. It states that the time it takes to make a choice is linearly related to the entropy of the possible alternatives. The results from various reaction-time experiments seem to show that this is the case. Although one byproduct of this approach is that the results are intimately linked to the type of experiment used to measure the reaction time. And that makes each study peculiarly vulnerable to the idiosyncrasies of the experimental approach. Today, Fermi Moscoso del Prado Martín from the Université de Provence in France proposes a new way to study reaction times by analyzing the entropy of their distribution, rather in the manner of thermodynamics. (via Hacker News)
4. Truly Social Data -- Data will only be truly social when you can work with it in the kinds of ways we work with information in the real, non-computational, world. In the real world we don’t ask for permission to have an opinion on something, to add to the ball of information surrounding a concept. Our needs don’t have to be anticipated by programmers. We can share information as we please. For example, nobody owns the concept of Barcelona. If I want to essentially “tag” Barcelona as being hot, or noisy, or beautiful, I just do it. I can keep my opinion private, I can share it with certain others, I can hold conflicting opinions, I can organize things in multiple ways at the same time and give things many names.

Burning Man Gets an API (and a Whole Lot More)

An API! SMS! Foursquare! An iPhone app! They are all coming to Burning Man this year. Will the festival be the same?

The annual tech-art festival in the Nevada desert, starts on Sunday. Normally the attendees leave their phones and laptop behind, but this year that may not be the case. As I ride from Seattle to Black Rock City, NV I am getting SMS from friends on the playa. In anticipation of wifi and possible data connections Foursquare has rolled out Black Rock City as a city (@sfslim is already the Mayor of The Man). If AT&T;'s service doesn't work then attendees may be able to take advantage of OpenBTS's local SMS project. Most of the attendees aren't there, but the tech is already making its presence known.

Burning Man is dismissed as a party by many people (attendees and non-attendees alike), but for many it is a unique opportunity to try out new software. Geohackers in particular find it to be a great playground. Black Rock City is a full city complete with a fire department, stores (where you can buy coffee, tea or ice bags), a Main drag and 40,000+ residents. However, since it is only around for a week each year (and is always in a new location) there is not time (or profit) for commercial companies to map it. The process falls to the community and they take advantage of the opportunity (and sites like Flickr use the resulting commercial-grade data).

This year the Burning Man organization is assisting with the launch of an API. With the API you get access to descriptions and locations of the Streets, Art, Camps and Events. When combined with a map this is everything you need for a local city guide. And that is exactly what the iPhone app does (it's not available in the app store; if you want it head to the Burning Man Earth Camp next to Media Mecca -- be nice). It maps all of those entities, will geolocate you and let you mark favorites (see the screenshot from my iPhone). You can learn more about the API project here. Burning Man still has its Virtual Playa project online.

There is also a move to take advantage of Flickr's machine tags. For example if you take a picture of Area 47 (with the online directory entry: https://earth.burningman.com/brc/2009/themecamp/2234/) then use burningman:camp=2234. The photo will appear on that locations page. We will see how many photos end up using these machine tags. I suspect that V2 of the iPhone app will add a camera that can apply those tags automatically and that we'll see more uptake then.

Burning Earth team member, Tom Longson, sent me the following.

Burning Man's theme this year is evolution which is fitting as Burning Man Earth launches an online directory, API, and a beta iPhone App. The group of artists, geo-wankers, and software developers are rapidly deploying systems, both off and on the Black Rock Desert playa to help participants find each other, schedule events, find theme camps, and artwork. It is a digital project aimed at providing better maps, and an online space to describe the community and art.

The open source webapp, named "Earth", builds upon Open Street Map, GeoDjango, and Pinax to create an easy to use, mapping interface for the event. Coupled with Jeffrey Johnson's prior work with aerial photography, and Andrew Johnstone's virtual playa 3D modeling, the platform is rapidly evolving to become an important part of the organization of the event.

Burning Man's API now opens the door for developers and artists alike to remix and reuse data about the event. For example, you could plot all the events in the next hour, build an Arduino belt that vibrated in the direction of the closest piece of artwork, or a web service for rating theme camps.

In addition, Mikel Maron is championing machine-tags to allow the project to couple Earth's database with other websites, such as Flickr. By integrating machine tags, people can say on Flickr what art installation their photo is of, and Earth will automatically pull up that photo. Likewise, Flickr will provide a link to the page describing the artwork itself.

Beyonds enabling mashups, the APIs are the foundation for the new beta iPhone app, which serves as both a directory and enhanced GPS designed for Burning Man. A small number of participants will get to try out the app, which will be in full production next year.

While it may sound like fun and games, the harsh conditions of the Black Rock Desert make the system a perfect testbed for mapping temporary places, people, and things. In this same way, these tools may just be the next best thing for helping disaster hit regions react and respond. Burning Man Earth is more than just an attempt at radical self-expression, self-reliance, and community building. It may just be a tool for tomorrow.

This is Burning Man at its best. Letting people create something just for the festival and its attendees. The question becomes how will the larger Burning Man community, expecting a cellphone free vacation, react to intrusions from the real-world?

BTW, If you are on the playa you may be able to find me at my group art project Steve the Robot H.E.A.i.D.

World Wide Lexicon Toolbar changes the reading experience for the other 99% of web pages

Brian McConnell's latest coding effort, World Wide Lexicon Toolbar, meets my criterion for a piece of critical infrastructure: after two days with it I can't get along without it, and I plan to avoid any browser that doesn't have it installed.

Brian is a highly adaptive programmer. With roots in the telecom industry and several start-ups on his resume, he also wrote Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations for O'Reilly. The World Wide Lexicon project he's been working on for the past several years is again something totally different.

Install the add-on (currently experimental) in Firefox 3.5 or higher and visit a page in some language other than your default. Before your eyes, headings and text change into your native language. You can get similar effects by submitting the page to a popular translator such as Google (which is one of the tools used behind the scenes by the WWL toolbar), but the instantaneous effect of the toolbar makes you feel closer to the people whose sites you visit around the world.

There are several languages that I know well enough to get the gist of a page, but where I miss some of the details and get frustrated by gaps in my vocabulary. Therefore, I set the WWL toolbar to "Bilingual view," so each block element of the original text is shown together with its translation. The bilingual view is considerably less attractive, because it swells the size of each block element, but I can tell already that it will improve my language skills quickly.

WWL is designed for volunteer translations. If it becomes more popular, people will submit translations that are much more accurate than the machine-generated ones the WWL must fall back on currently.

What's the process behind this new dimension to web browsing? McConnell let me in on some of the magic.

Volunteer translations

McConnell invented WWL several years ago with the core notion of encouraging people to translate web pages they thought should get a wider audience. When he first told me about the idea, I was skeptical that he would get many volunteers. But then I heard of other volunteer translation efforts. For instance, there's a whole subculture of people who write subtitles for popular Hollywood films. This runs afoul of copyright law, of course (and so do the copies of movies they're attached to, probably) but they show the lengths to which crowdsourcing has progressed in the translation area.

FLOSS Manuals, a project I do volunteer work for, also finds dozens of people willing to translate its open source documentation.

McConnell's first set of tools were designed to facilitate on-the-fly translations. Web designers could enhance their web sites by downloading from the WWL site some JavaScript that made each text element on the page editable. (I blogged about this in December 2007.) The paste-in displayed a little pencil icon, signaling to viewers that they could do instant translations. All they would have to do was click on an element, and a text box would pop up where they could enter their translation. The web site would then register the translation with the central WWL site.

World Wide Lexicon API

The WWL API covers the entire life cycle of a translation: registering a translation, rating translations for quality, searching for a translation of a particular page into a particular language, and retrieving a translation. Queries can specify a minimum rating.

Toolbar

The latest achievement of the WWL project is the toolbar officially released yesterday. It determines the user's native language through settings in the browser. When each page is visited, the toolbar uses the domain name and various tests on the text to make a guess about its language.

The toolbar then issues an API query to see whether any human translations exist. If so, it displays the translations with a light yellow or green background.

If no one has made a human translation (which is usually the case so far) the toolbar resorts to well-known machine translation services. It can make use of Google Translate, Apertium, and Moses, each of which offers an API, and will also query Babelfish when its API is ready. Machine translations are displayed with a light blue or grey background.

The progressive translation used by the toolbar is also interesting. It starts with the first 10 or 20 elements, then translates heading tags (<H1>, etc.), then the larger texts, and ultimately every element on a page. (I displayed one page that embedded a Google ad, and the translator recognized and translated that text too.) McConnell is working on making the various translations run in parallel. Because translation changes the sizes of elements, the toolbar makes various accommodations to display the page as attractively as it can.

In short, WWL is a cool combination of mash-ups, existing services, crowdsourcing, and Ajax. I'm sure that in a year's time I'll think back to its appearance today and be shocked at how primitive it was. But it will remain a transformative tool for me.

Where 2.0 2010 CFP is Now Open

The CFP for the sixth annual Where 2.0 is now open. The three-day conference about location, mapping and geodata will be held from 3/30 to 4/1 in San Jose, CA. This year our focus will be on location-enabled platforms, mobile apps, user-generated geodata, sensors, and augmented reality. Here is more about the conference below,

Mobile: The iPhone, Android, and Symbian mobile OS’s are continually advancing the state of the art. By creating a wide-spread platform that allows for third-party development and geolocation they are bringing along the whole industry. The phone is going to become the primary I/O device for geodata in the near future. What new applications are you building for it? How are the social aapps effecting society and our notions of privacy?
Realtime Mapping: Mobile phones are being used to generate maps and other geodata. Sensors across the world are capturing more data every second. Reality mining systems are being used to release this data to users in realtime. Who is making the most of this deluge? How can they handle these new data sets?
Temporal Information: Realtime data requires the element of time to be added. This is uncharted design territory. How should time come to the Web?
Rich Analysis: Web mapping is moving past just allowing the display of data (aka red-dot fever). There are now many tools online that help people analyze data and could, in time, challenge traditional GIS systems. How is the Web different? Will end-users take up richer tools?
Geolocated Web: Every updated browser can now geolocate it’s user. Websites are now going to start using this information. What should they do with the information? What new services can be created?
Mobile Advertising vs. Services: Will people pay for their mobile apps directly or through ads? Which makes for a better product, a better user experience and a more stable revenue stream?
Augmented Reality: The combination of a camera, a GPS and a compass on a mobile phone is going to let us layer information on top of the world. What do you want to see? How will you edit the layers?
3D: Photosynth-like apps are becoming more commonplace. Google’s 3D Warehouse is filled with models. It’s safe to say that 3D is here. But do we need it? What are its limits?
Open Data: Governments are treasure troves of data. Increasingly they are releasing it online for free. How does open data effect the web? How can this data be widely available and yet maintain its creators? How is this critical information being put to use?
Crisis Mapping: The tools of neogeography are being used to spread the word of humanitarian and natural disasters. What are some of the best (and worst) examples?
Open-Source: The backbone of any independant mapping site is open source software. What are the newest tools that can be used to handle the location-enabled web?
Workshops
Where 2.0 will have a full day of workshops where participants can dig deep into a range of issues and leave the conference armed with new tools and skills. Workshops are one hour and fifteen minutes in length and will be held on Tuesday, March 30, 2010. Topics we’d like to explore include, but are not exclusive to:
Geo Support in Web Application Frameworks: As people design their own mapping applications, there has been a need for built-in geo support. We’re looking for workshops that teach about Mapstraction, Modest Maps, Open Layers, GeoDjango, GeoRuby, MapCruncher, and other tools.
GeoStack: As locations apps are brought in-house, companies need their own geostack. What are the best tools?
Mapping APIs: The location space would not have gotten as far as it has today without all of the innovation in the mapping API space. How can you test the limits of these free resources?
GeoTargeting: Knowing users’ locations has never been more important. Identifying it accurately can be difficult and expensive. What are the best methods?
Privacy Implications: As you are collecting user data, keeping track of your users, or collecting geodata, are you aware of the relevant laws? What would you teach others?
GeoBrowsers: Google Earth and NASA WorldWind are both amazing geobrowsers. How can you get the most out of them?
Data Management: Geo applications work with massive amounts of data. What are the tools, tips, and tricks that can be used to manage it?
Protocols and Formats: GeoRSS, GML, KML, EXIF, Microformats, Geo OpenSearch. Which formats are on the way in and which ones are on the way out? These are just some of the technologies and transformations we’ve noticed and represent just the starting point for the program. While we’d like you to tap into the theme as your inspiration in writing your proposal, feel free to wander. What are you working on that will change the world, or at least the world you’re in? What project is bringing you pleasure, or teasing your brain? Surprise and delight us; shake us out of our assumptions. We’re angling for shorter talks with longer breaks so you’ll have more time for one-on-one interactions.

IN adition to plenary talks and workshops we will also have opportunities for startups to launch, Ignitte talks and opportunities to experiment with RFIDs. The CFP closes 10/13/09. Submit a talk now.

Four Short Links: 25 August 2009

Reverse Search, PDF Stripping, Flash Visualization, Failure

1. Tineye -- reverse search engine; you upload an image and they find you similar images so you know where else it's used. Check out their cool searches.
2. PDF Pirate -- upload a PDF and this web site will give it back to you minus the restrictions on copying/printing/etc.
3. Flare -- an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. BSD-licensed, modelled on Prefuse. When there's a visualisation library for every platform, will we start to get people who know how to make them?
4. The Importance of Failure (Marco Tabini) -- This is a point that I don't often hear made when people talk about failure; the moral behind a failure-related story is usually about preventing it, or dealing with the aftermath, but not about the fact that sometimes things go bad despite your best efforts, and all the careful risk management and contingency planning won't keep you from going down in flames. This is important, because it forces every person to establish a risk threshold that they are willing to accept in every one of their life efforts.

Who's Winning the Smartphone Wars?

The short answer - Microsoft and Nokia are slipping, RIM and Apple are gaining. It's too early to tell with Google. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

Last week, UK-based analyst firm Canalys, released its findings on smartphone market share based on Q2 2009 unit shipments (see "Smart phones defy slowdown"). Before sharing Canalys' findings, there are two important points to understand:

• How market share is defined is based on the numnber of units shipped during a particular period of time, not the number of active users of a specific smartphone platform, which is the installed base. These are commonly misunderstood terms. To determine the share that any particular smartphone platform has of worldwide active smartphone users would require aggregation of data from all of the mobile network operators. Good luck with that.
• The results of these reports are not reflective of how well a company is actually doing in terms of profit (see "A Visualized Look At The Estimated Revenues Of The Top Cell Phone Manufacturers" as an example).

Canalys covers a number of topics in their latest smartphone research, but the one topic are I want to focus on is "Global smart phone market by OS". Which companies are shipping the largest number of plastic phones into the world is less interesting to most of us than which mobile operating systems are winning. Dell vs. HP is not as compelling as Microsoft vs. Apple, in the personal computer market. LG, Fujitsu, and Samsung, three successful handset manufacturers, generally are not fully part of the smartphone conversation as they have historically licensed smartphone operating systems from companies such as Microsoft (this trend is changing to include more diverse licensing partners and increased in-house OS development).

Symbian (Nokia) accounts for half of the smartphones shipped in Q2 2009, followed by RIM, Apple, and Microsoft. Compared to the same quarter in 2008, Symbian and Microsoft are losing smartphone market share, and RIM and Apple are gaining significantly. Apple's growth percentage over the prior year is artifically inflated due to contraints in availability of the original iPhone just prior to the release of the iPhone 3G in Q3 2008. Minus that event, it would have been closer to RIM's annual growth percentage.

Even though Nokia has a 50% smartphone market share right now with Symbian, I think they are the most vulnerable of all the major players covered by Canalys. Symbian is a mobile operating system struggling to be modern with a developer ecosystem that seems to be far more fractured and unmotivated when compared to the excitement I see regularly from Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry developers. Microsoft's Windows CE and its variants have been in the market since 1996, and on smartphones for nearly a decade, yet has not been able to effectively remain competitive recently. And while Android has shipped on just over a million smartphones during the quarter, that's still impressive considering the small number of devices that it's currently available on, especially due to the number of pre-announced devices that wil be coming over the next few quarters.

Surprisingly absent in this data are other Linux-based mobile operating systems, which must fall into the ambiguous "Others" category, along with mobile operating systems, such as Palm Pre. The fragmentation of the various Linux mobile operating system efforts, including handset manufacturer specific implementations, is doing more harm than good right now in terms of market share growth.

Touch Traveler: London, Paris and only an iPod Touch

Recently, I spent two weeks vacationing in London and Paris with only an iPod Touch for communications and connectivity.

As I wanted to honor the fact that the trip was to celebrate my 10th wedding anniversary, my wife/I didn't bring either a mobile phone or a PC/Mac.

Mind you, I am not suggesting that this was a wise thing to do, but it's what I did, and this post captures the good, bad and ugly of the experience.

First off, the revelation (for me) was how much the Google Mobile Maps App on iPod Touch completely changes the equation when traveling. Touch-based control with a virtual keyboard is the perfect UI for zooming in and out of geo-locales, and Mobile Maps offers a workflow whose predictability and logical structure both de-mystifies and anchors foreign travel.

Moreover, Maps allows you to visually navigate in Real-Time (very different from the experience on my Blackberry), all the while push-pinning favorite destinations, and determining routes in just a few clicks. It is the consummate reality augmentation application for travel, a sort of "magic compass."

Case in point, is a context traversal function whereby you search for and find a destination. Right clicking on the pin reveals listing info, and left clicking takes you into Street View, revealing a 360-degree panoramic view of the target destination.

Street View provided a form of error-correction since you could visually confirm that a given destination was indeed the right destination, an extra bit of piece of mind when visiting a new area.

Candidly, I wish that Maps was even more autonomous about capturing my real-time travels and indexing them, as then I would never need to re-trace my steps, not to mention the entertainment value of being able to replay the day's travels at a later time.

Similarly, if you could somehow overlay your interaction data with that of locals, professionals (e.g., Fodors) and other travelers, you could create a very potent social fabric that is data rich, and can be filtered on parameters such as user-generated, professionally mastered, crowd-sourced and/or curated.

To frame this one, let me give you a specific example from my trip. I was walking through St-Germain in Paris when I had a flashback to the last time I was there (eight years before).

Back then, I had eaten at this incredible sandwich place nearby St-Germain. The restaurant made their own breads, had good sandwich combinations, and was an earnest, warm place. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember its name or specific location.

I remembered, however, that the sandwich place became a retail chain in New York. (It's good, but nowhere near as good as the original shop.)

While I couldn't remember the name, I did remember them having a branch near Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, so I opened the Yelp app on my iPod Touch, and typed in "sandwiches" near the geo of Rockefeller Center, and up came Cosi. (Note: Yelp had limited data for London and none for Paris).

Next, I fired up the Maps App, typed in "Cosi," and a pin dropped on the map.

I clicked on the pin, and it confirmed that I had been staying less than two blocks from this place for the past week! I then left-clicked, and saw a picture that took me back eight years.

Lunch? It was everything that I remembered.

Meanwhile, another App that we used throughout the trip was Facebook. My wife and I were sharing one iPod Touch, and Facebook really delivered in terms of being very easy/seamless to log into and out of our respective accounts, not to mention providing (relatively) full access to Facebook's services.

In fact, it was through Facebook that I loosely tracked the vacation that my brother and his family were currently taking in Israel, Jordan, and Greece.

I had some short exchanges with my niece, and there was a reference to a London overlap, but it didn't seem like the times meshed.

Days later, my wife and I are walking from the Kensington Park area where we were staying to Harrods in Knightsbridge.

45 minutes later, we are ogling over the sweets and pastry section of Harrods (if you have never been there, it is a spectacle; they have everything). Suddenly, a voice chimes out, "I didn't think they let your type in here." I turn around, and it's my brother and his youngest son.

It turns out that he had tried to call me the night before to let me know that he had changed his itinerary, and that they were going to be in London while we were there. But, I brought no phone so I never got that message.

Similarly, he had emailed me, but it turned out that he sent it to an address that is not received on my iPod Touch, so I never got that message.

Finally, he had gotten the wrong hotel information from my parents (we booked our room just days before we left), and so he couldn't leave us a message at our hotel either.

Yet, just hours after landing in London, here we were face to face at Harrods in London.

Kismet, to be sure, but I am left wondering whether technology helped (the Facebook exchange with my niece), hindered (wrong emails, unanswered phone calls), or was simply a neutral observer in this outcome.

Keeping it real, one paradox presented by relying on the iPod Touch as the sole connectivity device was that connectivity was, by definition, intermittent since the iPod Touch depends upon ready access to Wi-Fi for connectivity, a sketchy bet for mobile travelers.

In London, this meant that 99% of the time, I had decent Wi-Fi connectivity at my hotel but no connectivity when mobile. This was key as we walked a ton, and took the Underground a lot (it is a great service).

Not having reliable connectivity in mobile contexts crippled some of the utility of Google Mobile Maps since it essentially removed the Real-Time goodness of the app. Moreover, it crimped the ability to search for nearby restaurants when on the move.

By contrast, in Paris we were able to grab onto "gray" connectivity within 5-10 minutes of trying to do so. This, at the very least, gave us a sense of intermittent connectivity being reliable.

Gray connectivity was captured two ways. One was via a discovery of Wi-Fi connections within the Settings tab, and jumping from one connection to the next until we found live access. Primitive, but fungible.

The second was that we discovered a service provider that offered different tiers of Wi-Fi access on-demand, including a "20 Minutes Free" option, which was like getting a lucky board game roll.

Armed with some sense of being able to queue up requests, messages, grab map views and the like, geo navigation became tactile, a virtual, but distinct, overlay to our physical navigation.

The ability to visually follow block-by-block, and see the storefront of a business blocks or miles away was very powerful.

At times, it felt like Mobile Maps was a divining rod pulling us to our destination.

What was almost magical was how Maps seemed designed to watch proactively in the background for a live connection so it could autonomously update location data when connectivity was intermittent.

I was more than once surprised to discover that Maps had used a sliver of momentary connectivity, and updated location with no prodding from me.

That said, it seems that Apple could make MobileMe even more essential for iPod Touch owners by bundling into it a Boingo-like Wi-Fi Universal Pass so at least queue-level store and forward services can autonomously be negotiated for the mobility-oriented user.

A couple of final notes: One is that my wife realized tremendous utility in using the Notes App to capture daily food & water intake and other related health data. This was a simple, powerful, and recurring workflow for her.

Two is that during the trip I finished my first Kindle book on the iPod Touch, 'Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando.'

I absolutely loved the fact that when I found myself with a five-minute slug of time (waiting in lobby, bathroom, at coffee), I could read a chunk of pages and click out as easily as I had clicked in (since the Kindle App automatically bookmarks where you left off).

It, like the iPod Touch itself, was a perfect travel companion.

Related Posts:

1. "Right Here Now" services: weaving a real-time web around status


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3. iPhones, App Stores and Ecosystems

Four Short Links: 24 August 2009

Distributed Version Control Systems, Ideas Tracking, OO Survey Results, New Barcodes

1. Making Sense of Revision Control Systems (ACM Queue) -- good introduction to the subject from Bryan O'Sullivan, author of Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (aka Distributed Revision Control with Mercurial) that covers Subversion, Mercurial, and git. Under the distributed view of revision control, every commit is potentially a branch of its own. If Bob and Alice start from the exact same view of history, and each one makes a commit, they have already created a tiny anonymous fork in the history of the project. Neither will know about this until one pulls the other's changes in, at which point they will have to merge with them. These tiny branches and merges are so frequent with Mercurial and Git that users of these tools look at branching and merging in a very different way from Subversion users. The parallel and branchy nature of a project's development is clearly visible in its history, making it obvious who made which changes when, and exactly which other changes theirs were based upon.
2. Ideas Are Awesome -- Ideas Are Awesome is a web culture aggregator tracking emerging marketing, design, and technology memes. We are currently tracking: simplify, empower, give, inspire, connect, adapt. (via cheeky_geeky on Twitter)
3. OO Concepts Survey Result -- There were 3785 people who completed the survey. These charts show the proportion who gave the different possible responses for each question. If you're an OO programmer, use this to determine how aberrant your practices are (hint: most people are neither zealous nor consistent).
4. Bokode -- a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. Current optical tags, such as barcodes, must be read within a short range and the codes occupy valuable physical space on products. We present a new low-cost optical design so that the tags can be shrunk to 3mm visible diameter, and unmodified ordinary cameras several meters away can be set up to decode the identity plus the relative distance and angle. The design exploits the bokeh effect of ordinary cameras lenses, which maps rays exiting from an out of focus scene point into a disk like blur on the camera sensor. (via waxy)

Four short links: 21 August 2009

Moody Twitter, Future Geohistory, News Sucks, Whyless in Wonderland

1. TwitterMood -- using Twitter as a giant mood sensor for the world (see also temporal correlations, via kellan on delicious).
2. What Will Remain of Us -- The sea that brought trade to Dunwich was not entirely benevolent. The town was losing ground as early as 1086 when the Domesday Book, a survey of all holdings in England, was published; between 1066 and 1086 more than half of Dunwich’s taxable farmland had washed away. Major storms in 1287, 1328, 1347, and 1740 swallowed up more land. By 1844, only 237 people lived in Dunwich. Today, less than half as many reside there in a handful of ruins on dry land. (via blackbeltjones on Delicious)
3. The Three Key Parts of Stories You Don't Usually Get -- In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news sites. Take a look at that WaPo page again. Currently, a link sits on the far right side of the page, a third of the way down, labeled “What you need to know.” Click on that link, and you’re taken here: a linkless, five-paragraph blog post from May. This basically captures our approach to providing the necessary background to follow the news.
4. Eulogy to _why -- a pseudonymous Ruby character, _why the Lucky Stiff, recently vanished from the net: all his sites and accounts were deleted. It's possible this is because someone tried to identify him, it's possible that his accounts were hacked. Either way, this is a touching tribute to him from John Resig. I for one would like to see more appreciation while the people are still around. Today, tell two good people that you enjoy what they do. You know you can.

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