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Internet Identities

2011-02-17T00:00:00-08:00

For many of my early ‘Internet’ years I used various pseudonyms/handles to interact with the online world. In some circles, this was the accepted behaviour of most users; in others, aggressively acted against. The reasons for the latter always puzzled me.

It seems identity is a concept many associate with government-issued paperwork. That someone would choose not to use their legal name is often perceived as an indication of mischief, and potential harm, so people get suspicious. So much so that otherwise civil conversation is discounted simply because the names of the participants seem made-up. This behaviour of exclusion seems much more prevalent in the ‘free’ world, where the expectation is that a Government prioritizes the citizens’ interest and encourages democratic speech, so dissidents don’t have to fear for their lives if they use their actual names.

Accountability is another card that’s often played, as Salon.com’s Kent Pitman observes (emphasis added):

And that brings me to the claim that life would somehow be better if people blogged under their real name—if there were no pseudonyms. The underlying claim, not always expressed explicitly, is that eliminating pseudonyms would make people more polite and/or more accountable. I disagree that it would, even if it did, I don’t think the cost is worth the value.

First, there is the question of whether you need to know who a speaker is in order to evaluate truth.

I would think this is an issue of common sense, an aspect of critical thinking that I’d like to see permeate all online conversations and communities. The things being said are more important than the people saying them. It is not a name that gives context and disclosure of one’s agenda, but the persona they have developed, online and elsewhere. The name becomes a brand, and nothing prevents one from building the brand around a pseudonym.

The disclosure of one’s real name can easily hurt the conversation. Ethnicity, race and gender are only but the easiest to infer, and can bring to light participants’ biases and preconceived notions, or — worse yet for the discussion — assumptions about an agenda where one may not exist. A pseudonym lets one express ideas without any of these burdens.

On the flip side, everyone from spammers and scammers to corporate entities and government agencies engage in illusory personas, as most recently highlighted by the HBGary leak. ‘Persona management’ is an industry that revolves around creating consent in ‘public voices’ where none may exist.

Anecdotally, ‘geek’ communities accept pseudonyms without pause, and I often find it’s indicative of the critical thinking aspect I mentioned. More ‘traditional’ (old-world) outfits seem to cling to the concept of identity-being-a-real-name, enforcing it on their users quite aggressively.

I hope more people will realize that branding and trust have little to do with one’s legal name, and more to do with how they have engaged the world around them, how they express their ideas or demonstrate their abilities.

The Irrelevancy of the File System

2011-02-10T00:00:00-08:00

In speaking about the simplification of computing, I touched briefly on the matter of the file system, and how Apple has been making it increasingly less relevant on their mobile platform. I’d like to expand on this topic some more.

Alex King:

Apple’s iOS devices are treating files like historical artifacts that users should be protected from while popularity surges for Dropbox’s file sync service.

Files are the historical artifacts of a dying metaphor: the office cabinet. When computing was nascent, rooting metaphors in the physical world made the barrier to entry significantly lower for office workers, who were the primary audience after computers left the research labs, and before mass home adoption was even remotely considered. It made practical sense to model the New after the Old, so we ended up with virtual files and the folders that contain them.

Four decades later, it’s high-time for a change.

The file system’s biggest problems are clutter and the difficulty of retrieving information. Clutter happens because of applications and the operating system, and the completely unnecessary ‘feature’ of being able to navigate to those locations. On that topic, André Pang comments:

I think the fundamental problem is that Windows Explorer, Finder, Nautilus and all the other file managers in the world are designed, by definition, to browse the filesystem. However, what we really want is an abstraction level for users that hides the filesystem from them, and only shows them relevant material, organised in a way that’s sensible for them.

I completely agree: users only care about their data. The other files and folders either confuse or annoy, and sometimes find their way into the great big void of the Trash can / Recycle Bin, only to subsequently reappear after the required software or operating system reinstall. I would say it’s almost insulting to show users things they aren’t meant to understand, yet the vast majority of the file system is just that. Out of over 1.5 million files that I can currently see on my computer, I care for about 100,000, and that’s including plenty of source code. Average users care for about however many files you can count on their desktop. But on my iPad? I care about every single thing.

Information retrieval is a different problem, one not resolved entirely by search. The Google model applies very well when one is trying to find new information, but it breaks down (sometimes in hilarious ways) when it comes to retrieval. People just keep things on their virtual desktop until it, too, becomes as inscrutable as the rest of the file system.

To help users in both of these situations, Apple has added a layer of abstraction in iOS, as Rob Foster points out:

Apple is doing something rather daring with their new iPhone OS. They are essentially omitting features that people once took for granted in a typical computer. And one of the biggest things they’ve omitted is the visual file system. Instead, in the iPhone OS, the concept of the file is essentially gone. It’s been replaced by “apps and their stuff.”

I hope a lot (more) of this goes back to the Mac.

The Everything Buckets

There have been a series of articles from the very smart Alex Payne and Shawn Blank chiming in on the issue of Everything Buckets. In brief, applications like Yojimbo and Evernote are popular because they allow people to store all their documents in one place. But isn’t that what the file system itself is supposed to provide? After all, the whole metaphor revolves around hierarchical organization of information via folders and files… But it doesn’t work anymore. User data is piled on their virtual desktops, or tucked away into some kind of personal information organizer/manager. These everything buckets really are nothing more than an additional level of abstraction, as Pang suggests. A way to hide the irrelevant bits of the file system, and keep only the stuff that’s meaningful in view. Arriving at this juncture is a pretty clear indication that the traditional file system representation is dated, and must die.

Apple knows this, because they’ve ignored the Finder for a long time. Instead of trying to find new ways to let users navigate the file system, they removed it for those things that matter the most. As Sachin Agarwal points out:

When you launch iTunes, you see your music. When you launch iPhoto, you see your photos. When you launch Mail, you see your email. Where is it all stored? Who cares. Apple stores these files on your Mac in a folder or “package” that isn’t meant to be examined or manipulated.

As for Alex King’s observations, I believe (backed by no data but my own experience) that Dropbox is used very much like an everything bucket. A way to synchronize documents and photos and music, rather than files, at least insofar as users are concerned. And that’s why Dropbox is increasingly mainstream. I don’t think we can ever move away from using simple hierarchies for organizing our stuff, and semantic file systems are still a ways off, but removing all the clutter would be a good first step in making the whole experience of managing information better for users. It’s not that we can’t used the file system as a document store, is that there are all these other, unimportant things getting in our way.

The Simplification of Computing

2011-01-11T00:00:00-08:00

The launch of Apple’s Mac App Store is a great opportunity to revisit an issue previously brought to light by the launch of the iPad: The simplification of general-purpose computing. It’s true that computers have been used for a few decades now, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find many users who have not been, at some point or another, thoroughly frustrated by the things. Computers have never quite managed to shed their academic pedigree.

While computers have become mainstream, their usage has remained largely enjoyment-free. Many still see them exclusively as tools for work, a love-hate relationship made possible by the episodes of anger and the outbursts of rage that pepper typical usage. Blue Screens of Death, viruses, phishing scams, and crashing hard-drives taking away days or months of work in a second. And while many know, intimately, what the antidote for each of these ailments is, they shouldn’t need to in order to use the damn computers. Yet such measures have become prerequisite for modern computing.

And that’s no fun.

Simplification

I wouldn’t dare reduce Cory Doctorow’s argument against buying an iPad as reactionary, but the piece has many hallmarks typical of snobbish geeks. Doctorow sees Apple determined to ‘infantilize’ hardware and software by taking away users’ ability to tinker, in exchange for making computing more accessible to (stereotypical) technophobic mothers. And while the stereotype may be stupid, the goal isn’t. I don’t see the drive to make computing simpler as a negative sum game, where all we get are dumber devices and spoon-fed content via ‘iApps’.

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

I don’t believe this. Kids that end up hackers don’t have much care for authority, in any shape they encounter it. The parent that tells the child to stop taking apart all the toys is rarely met with acceptance; if anything, the child learns to be more careful and secretive about her exploits. But she doesn’t give up just because there are some hardships along the way. Doctorow reminds of the original Apple ][+ which came with schematics for the circuit boards as if this was the reason for why people were tinkering with the machine. They were not. Rather more like icing than the cake itself.

Alex Payne raised similar concerns regarding device openness in his initial reaction to the iPad, though not as effervescently as Doctorow. He called this the Tinkerer’s Sunset, bemoaning future generations that will not be raised with any sort of hacker mentality because the devices don’t encourage it. Which to me seems counter to what a hacker really is (from The Jargon File):

A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

Without quibbling over definitions, I strongly believe that the truest of hacker mindsets is brought to light by the harshest of conditions. If openness as prescribed by Doctorow or the Free Software Foundation is the only desired outcome, then indeed Apple’s particular flavour of simplified computing is ‘evil’, defective by design.

Snobbism

Why fight against this simplification? I think it’s because many geeks can be complete snobs when it comes to technology and gadgets. Spending most of one’s time understanding the innards of a system has the odd side-effect of making an individual believe everyone else should dedicate a commensurate amount of time. But this doesn’t scale considering how many people’s jobs have nothing to do with computers. Requiring my mother to learn about compiling software so that she can handle her work-related emails is asinine. Regular people don’t care about codecs, licenses, platform squabbles or various file system idiosyncrasies; they care about photos, music, friends and work.

Rafe Colburn talks about a third kind of freedom that Apple’s ecosystem provides, the freedom to install and use software without worrying about it breaking your system. And this is the crux of the matter. For once, people feel like they are in control of their devices because they can install whatever they want, without requiring some complicated mental flowchart to help navigate the decisions: Where’s this app from? Would my (tech-savvy) child let me install it? Can it steal my employer’s documents or crack their network if I install it on my work device?.

Hackers and power users see this as a bad tradeoff, but I would imagine that for many users, this tradeoff is completely worth it. Ask any of the people who pay Geek Squad hundreds of dollars to disinfect their PCs whether they’d give up some of the freedom to do what they like to their PC in exchange for never having to deal with those sorts of problems again.

Hackers and power users see this as a bad tradeoff because the benefits don’t apply to them. They wouldn’t be as vocal if Apple had decided to let everyone buy the components and the IKEA-style assembly manual and put together their iPads at home, because hackers and power users could do it. But the iPad wouldn’t sell as well as it had, wouldn’t attract as many people as it had, and wouldn’t be good for the general use case. Geeks are a niche in every market, and while I don’t think any company should shun them voluntarily (as Apple sometimes does) they aren’t the core demographic either.

The Old World

The truth is that computing is changing in a big way, for the first time in decades. I would put the previous such shift around the time the Graphical User Interface was introduced, and just like then, the goal now is to commodify computers and turn them into appliances. And this move is bound to upset a few from the Old World, because change is always a big deal. But the worst part of it, I fear, is that there are those who enjoy feeling special because they ‘get’ computers, and want to deny others the privilege. Narrow-minded and selfish, there are those who feel that in order to use a computer, one should obtain a permit after a long and painful trial of fire, just as they did.

It may sound like an exaggeration, and I hope that’s true.

New Directions

Shawn Blanc writes:

Apple is simplifying and refining OS X with primarily one user group in mind: the decidedly non-nerdy.

The Mac App Store is the current epitome of where Apple wants to take OS X and the Mac user experience. This is the first of some significant steps towards the next evolution of Apple’s desktop software.

Let’s get back to the Mac App Store, even though this article wasn’t about that (nor was it about the iPad). The decidedly non-nerdy don’t want to become nerdy. They’re not the kinds of people that take apart their toaster to overclock it so they can char their toast .3 of a second faster. No, they’re the people who do Other Work, and I assure you their work is pretty damn important. They don’t have time to learn somebody else’s job as well. And there is no need they should.

Apple is trying to make computing easier by simplifying the installation process, abstracting away the file system, and encouraging a certain kind of workflow. Their approach is far from perfect, and even if it improves it will never make everyone happy. But its success will be measured in a few years, when users will become so accustomed to this level of simplicity that anything less will not do.

That’s an exciting direction to be heading.

(Thanks to Joanna Schilling for providing feedback on a draft of this essay.)

My Notes Workflow

2011-01-10T00:00:00-08:00

I have been a long-time user and supporter of Simplenote for iOS, a straightforward note taking utility that provides cloud syncing and, via Notational Velocity, the ability to sync and use those notes on a Mac. Simplenote came at a time Dropbox did not have an API, and the built-in Notes.app for iOS was lacking in a number of important ways.

The Simplenote-NV workflow suffices if those are the only two applications you want accessing your notes, but it failed for me in some ways that have a lot more to do with how I use the notes than anything the apps themselves may be lacking.

I set up Notational to save my (synced) notes to Dropbox, both for backup and to allow me to access them anywhere. When Dropbox opened their API to developers, the number of text apps that provided integration with the service increased significantly, so I was also able to link my Dropbox/Notes folder to these other apps. But any edits made in one place wouldn’t show up in the other until my Mac had a chance to sync the two, which was a form of friction in need of elimination. I know Simplenote added Dropbox integration for paid accounts, but with that I realized that I no longer needed Simplenote for being a frictionless cloud sync note app; I needed a great text editor for text files in my Dropbox — both short form (notes) and longer pieces (blog posts).

For now I settled on PlainText for general-purpose writing and note-taking, and Textastic for code and Markdown (incidentally, I find Textastic to be the best Markdown editor that I have tried, even though it is not specifically geared to that task.) They both work great with Dropbox and fit my workflow much better, and they both allow navigation of one’s entire Dropbox, if set up as such. (I also use iA Writer for some kinds of longer text, though it syncs with a different folder in my Dropbox.)

In closing, I should point out that Simplenote has been a great companion for a long time (from before the app was free) and it fits many other workflows perfectly. But, in seeking a good balance, I’ve come to realize Dropbox-based sync is both superior and sufficient for me, and maybe it is for you as well.