Postcyberpunk

Message management

2011-08-22T19:26:00.000-07:00

Think of an interface like an SMS application. It has a list of the last contacts you contacted, ordered by last message first. The list is a person, the time and a small preview of what was last said. I use this to track how long ago I contacted someone.

If I see someone way down the list that I want to be more in touch with, I "bubble" them up by pinging them, even if only to say "hi".

It occurs to me that this method could also work for email and IM to better keep track of my inbox. I typically erase the conversations from my SMS log to avoid costly lookups —an indicator of a too-helpful, inefficient UI implementation.

Eventually, it was very handy to leave logs for interactions that were waiting for a response from me. This same sorting is interesting to me: I want to look at my email, SMS, IM, tweets, social status updates (and any other) in a descending list of recency and a preview in case the ball is on my side.

Memories, dreams.

2009-05-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

For a movie to make it into the big screen, it is first either lived or imagined by an author.

This author writes it down or otherwise shares this story; it is a correspondent following news, it is a kid recording on youTube, it is an old man writing his memories.

Let's say the story is good enough to convince someone to print copies of it and distribute them massively. Money can be made, says the editor.

Money can be made, says the producer. Thus a movie is born. A lot of creative work goes into it, to make it beautiful: music, photography, storyboard, scenario, makeup, lighting, wardrobe...

Years later, it is a classic.

What if everyone could record every minute of everything they perceive? What if there were a few very renowned editors ("mashers") who can quickly put together a story in a very dramatic way?

Time would be compressed by those factors: life to memory and memory to book and movie take 60 years to live to 3 years to write to a few months to publish and make bestseller, movie, t-shirts, shenanigans...

Say a hundred years.

Now take a future generation, capable of compressing and editing their own memories at such a fast pace that you can see live cams, memes, blogs, tweets, posts, quivers, commits, hits... from a couple of weeks to instantly.

History is the medium for ideas. As we increasingly connect, great ideas move even faster, so change is even more noticeable.

But then you get slow. Kids know more and are faster than you ever dreamed.

It's a race to the top. To see which old man remembers everything.

One ID per person

2008-07-31T22:29:00.001-07:00

I have problems trying to figure out why do we still live in 1999 sometimes.

Here's the thing: Why would we want an email address (or several!), a home number, a cell phone number, all sorts of virtual numbers, several IM ids... If I want to talk to someone, I punch the id on my phone and get the person's phone or voicemail/email or sms transcriber. If I want to write something, I'll use my phone to txt or my IM, even if it's to several people. Whoever is on the other side either gets it on the phone or IM or even email.

You can see a bit of this smart redirection already with GrandCentral and some hunting with AIM. The AIM setup is very interesting: you register your mobile so when you're offline, your IMs get forwarded as SMS to your phone (MSN also does it), but you can also directly SMS people from IM and they can reply to your IM almost seamlessly. Almost, because they don't know who the message is from.

Email and IM are already well associated in gmail: If you're offline, your IMs get sent to your inbox. It's pretty neat, actually. Both email and IM are almost equivalent, only that the immediacy changes. It actually overlaps.

The argument for choosing the medium is still a valid one: obviously you don't want everything you could get on email on your sms... although people do get their email on their phones. It's also a matter of intent: IMs are somewhat expected to be responded sooner and are more casual, whereas emails tend toward the opposite.

An interesting thing happens between phone and email/sms: you can either transcribe messages or you can get them as audio attachments which play inline. Again, the reception method is up to the receiver.

Ok, what happens with your land line? That's just a group alias. Nuff said.

Now the question again, do we really need all three: email, IM and phone number? Can I dial your email? I certainly should be able to! If only we didn't live on 1999...*

*note to the people from the future of 2020: It is currently mid-2008 and I'm being sarcastic. Apologies if this screws up your AI indexing.

Bookmarking

2008-02-12T16:40:00.000-08:00

Bookmarks are used for two things: you want to often go back to them (e.g. your bank website) or you found it interesting (you want to read it later or share it).

The second case is well covered by social bookmarking: sites like del.icio.us which allow you to even post a feed. Cool. While I'd like to see my bookmarked results ranked in relevance on my search results, that's a subject for another discussion.

For the first case, if you want to quickly go somewhere, I recommend Google Bookmarks with the GMarks extension for Firefox.

If you're familiar with Google Desktop or Quicksilver (and their ilk), you probably love having a hotkey and typing a few letters of what you're thinking about. It takes substantially less time than navigating fly-out menus or directories. GMarks allows you to do the same thing for your Google Bookmarks, which as an added bonus are linked to Google Notebook.

While GMarks' interface is less than perfect, it gets the job well done: hit Ctrl-D and your usual "add bookmark" dialog shows up, with an extra tab for Google Bookmarks. You can even save your bookmark to both places at once. While that's neat, the killer feature is that you hit a hotkey and a dialog appears, which autocompletes your strokes to search in your bookmarks by title, tag or note fragment.

I foresee a future where you type in a box and you get what you want. Everywhere. Everything. Always.

Firefox tips and tricks

2007-10-26T13:53:00.001-07:00

Today I was recalling reading about running Firefox from removable media, so I looked for the article. I was hoping I could have Firefox always loaded in RAM and have it jump at will.

Well, I didn't manage to find out how to do that, but I did stumble across a cool page about Firefox Tips & Tricks.

Go “First-person shooter” with the Eclipse debugger

2007-10-22T09:50:00.001-07:00

Every bit counts. Every fraction of a second that you manage to get out of your daily activities.

Today I found a post with an excellent example for ingenious interfacing with the bits and bytes: Go “First-person shooter” with the Eclipse debugger

What I like the most about this, is that now I have an excuse for buying a fancy piece of hardware.

As a warning, however, elsewhere I was reading a post on WIRED about time-managing your time-management activities. [apparently the post is not up on the website yet. go fetch a meatware version instead]

Human-Computer Interaction

2007-10-16T11:06:00.001-07:00

Whenever I'm not at my computer, I'm constantly thinking about all these things I'd like to blog about. More often than not, this happens at the expense of completely missing what the person in front of me is telling me.

The thing is, whenever I'm at the keyboard, I either don't feel like writing anymore, or I just don't think about it.

This problem is an example of something larger: the lack of a proper medium to express ourselves. We're currently stuck having to have a computer (or web-enabled device) if we want to be online, for example. Obviously. But as technology evolves and the internet becomes more pervasive, people migrate towards taking care of their meatware activities online instead: shopping, socializing, etc.

Technologies need to evolve to accommodate this shift, at least if anyone wants to really profit from it; and whoever does it best will make the most.

In this context, user centric design means keeping in mind how users conduct their lives in meatware, then try to at least disrupt minimally. Ideally, the service complements and becomes a natural extension.

Based on this point of view, it becomes an interesting exercise to analyze successful and unsuccessful applications, keeping in mind that a viral effect is more influential on the perceived success. This success, however, is different as it is based on the monetary perspective, not whether or not it is a useful service at all.

It's not difficult to extrapolate a bit and imagine a future (with robot servants and flying cars) where web-enabled devices become more part of us as hardware size keeps shrinking. My wishful thinking includes living in a world of permanently-connected minds with shared memories. Anyone who is familiar with Ghost in the Shell will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Postcyberpunk

2007-10-12T17:01:00.000-07:00

Postcyberpunk describes a subgenre of science fiction which some critics suggest has evolved from classic cyberpunk. Like its predecessor, postcyberpunk focuses on technological developments in near-future societies, typically examining the social effects of an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, genetic engineering, modification of the human body, and the continued impact of perpetual technological change. Unlike "classic" cyberpunk, however, the works in this category feature characters who act to improve social conditions or at least protect the status quo from further decay.

wikipedia/Postcyberpunk