Jean-Denis Greze's Blog

Make Things

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 07:42:09 -0500

Make Things

ClojureScript

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:26:09 -0500

Very exciting.

https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/

Wishing We All Weren't So Excited About Google+

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 07:41:00 -0500

I love G+; for the majority of my use cases, it is indeed > fb. However, it’s not clearly > > than fb and I wish we (myself included) were a little bit less excited about a product is essentially a better, hybrid copy of a 7-year-old social network (fb), a 5-year-old social network (twitter), and the conclusions from a more-than-one-year-old presentation (Paul Adams’ The Real Life Social Network).

All in all, it makes me feel extremely sad about the state of web innovation (do not get me started with photo-sharing apps).

A Narrative of What Twitter Was, Is, And Might Be

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 12:57:37 -0500

One of the most interesting things about Twitter is that, despite it being so minimalist and simple and seemingly single-purpose, it is so darn difficult to come up with concise and satisfying definition of what it is. Twitter is used to do so many things that no one interpretation is satisfying.

Over the last four years, the narrative about Twitter has reflected this difficulty, evolving continuously to reflect users’ changing usage and understanding of what can be accomplished with this medium. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to briefly summarize some of the most prevalent and salient perspectives on Twitter — and their evolution since the product’s introduction.

tl;dr

Publishing: Twitter was status updates only. Twitter was news. Twitter was your organization’s message.

Discovery and Self-Curation: Twitter was following your friends. Twitter was following organizations. Twitter was following people you found interesting.

Real-Time: Twitter was ad-hoc group communication. Twitter was protest. Twitter was back and forth live conversations.

Platform: Twitter was search. Twitter was trends. Twitter was empowering 3^rd-party applications.

Pulse: Twitter is the world’s heartbeat.

(Then emerged a dramatic and encompassing meaning: Twitter is our history.)

Status Updates, SXSW, and Iran

The first narrative about Twitter is that it was a way to share one’s status— indeed, this was a part of the founders’ blueprint (e.g., this sketch by Jack Dorsey). “In bed”, “Going to park”, “Coding”, “At Hamilton Deli”, “Can’t sleep”, “Out with Andy and Liz”, etc. Unsurprisingly, early media coverage of Twitter was often negative due to the uninteresting, self-centered, and trivial nature of shared information — why would I care what you are eating right now?

This taint remains with us today. Among the very private (“Why would I share my status with the world?”), the real-lifers (“If I want to know what my friends are up to, I’ll just hang out with them!”), and the semi-luddite (“Social networking [(whatever that is)] is a productivity black hole.”), Twitter lies beyond the periphery. They just don’t see the point. Twitter as status messages, even where it hints at a glimmer of usefulness, is far outweighed by the trivialness of the communication enabled.

This first impression of Twitter as dominated by the trivial started to change when some users moved from “about me” status updates to commentary and news. News was something the media could relate to and understand. For the technology press, SXSW 2007 was the tipping point. With the conference’s attendees grouping tweets using hashtags, Twitter became a way to report on interesting SXSW happenings in real-time — parties, great speakers, commentary, etc. Twitter became a digital mirror-image of the conference itself; micro-reporting was born. For the tech blogs, Twitter was not only the way to get at what was happening at the conference, it became the defining story of the techie SXSW.

It took longer for the non-tech media to understand and accept the usefulness of Twitter; that the communication it enabled could have real value and not simply be a medium for self-centered promotion. By 2009, Twitter users reporting on a number of events helped redefine Twitter away from its early status update-centric definition. Twitter was crucial to reporting about the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, the 2009-2010 Iranian presidential election, etc. Twitter as reporting was something the news media establishment had to recognize.

This narrative, however, was rooted in the publishing-function of Twitter — users acting as reporters of the trivial, the newsworthy, and everything in between. Thus, the perspective on Twitter that first reached the public at large, as reported on and defined by the likes of the New York Times and other preeminent news outlets, was focused on its publishing function and ignored its many other facets (curation, discovery, or history).

From Individuals to Communities to Organizations

At the same time that the media was grappling with what to make of Twitter (status messages or much more?), usage of Twitter was migrating from individual users to ad-hoc communities (attendees of conferences, protesters) and organizations (campaigns, governments, corporations). The Twitter stream did not simply provide news about the Iranian presidential election — more importantly, it allowed the protestors to organize in a decentralized and anonymous way (“Twitter Revolutions”).

Organizations and personalities started adopting Twitter as a lightweight medium through which to establish their brand and message, reach fans, or influence discourse in a way that is more free-flowing and accessible than press releases or blog posts or the press. Indeed, Twitter democratized the rather static modes of communications between organizations and the public at large. For organizations, it provided a much easier way to reach their audience; and for the public, it allowed them to question and respond to — as individuals or ad hoc groups — the large organizations which just a few years earlier would not have paid any attention to them.

Customized Curation and Discovery

Although the publishing narrative is the most easily understood use of Twitter, its follow-based distribution and curation facets are at least as important. It is a shame that this curation narrative has gotten much less attention (although it is well-recognized in the technology community, where Twitter’s follow semantics are understood as a more concise and accessible version of RSS).

Consider someone who does not use Twitter for publishing — 140 character updates are not her preferred way of communicating, for whatever reason. However, she follows other users on Twitter. She does this because it gives her access to those users’ expertise. Twitter is her customized window into the topics she cares about, curated by the individuals and organizations she finds to be intelligent/funny/controversial/etc. In this narrative, Twitter provides a custom curated view of the world’s information, updated in real time.

This kind of follow-based curation fits very well with a view of the world where fewer people are producers of interesting information than are consumers of it. Even assuming an even balance between production and consumption of information, it is clear that the curation aspect of Twitter is at least as important as the publishing aspect. Indeed, they are two sides of the same coin.

Moreover, Twitter is not only curation, but also discovery. And the discovery is not limited to links contained within tweets: via retweeting, Twitter allows for discovery of people, permitting users to incrementally improve the quality of their stream by refining its sources. For example, as I see more and more retweets of a user that I am not following, I decide to start following that person who then introduces me to new topics — incremental discovery.

Furthermore, discovery on Twitter goes well beyond the organic incremental kind provided by shared links and retweets: Twitter’s own search functionality, trending topics and hashtags, location information, meta data and lists are all aimed at helping users find relevant content.

This curation and discovery narrative is what has made Twitter successful, because while there aren’t hundreds of millions of worthwhile publishers, there are hundreds of millions of readers and consumers (and soon billions); Twitter’s success was and is predicated on these readers finding the publishers, topics, and tweets that interest them. Whenever I ask someone why they don’t use Twitter and they respond that they don’t have anything interesting to share, or don’t care about their friends’ daily activities, etc. I realize how the preeminence of the publishing narrative is a real disservice — publishing is not the added value to the majority of users. Publishing and following one’s friends’ tweets is a use-case, but it pales in comparative importance and usefulness to following the interesting, the famous, the specialized, the in-the-know, the niches, etc. — consumption, curation and discovery.

Twitter Minors: Conversations and Access Everywhere

A more recent narrative is that tweeting is often an invitation to start a conversation. Twitter is not simply a one-way broadcast; users can and do communicate back and forth in real-time using the @ reply. Thus, over a 10 minute window, you’ll find small groups of people using @ between one another at such a fast pace that Twitter will act like IM. This idea has gained momentum over the past 12 to 18 months with the increased focus on real-time web services and the recognition that Twitter was the first mainstream provider.

What’s interesting about this kind of behavior is that communication can seamlessly move in and out of such a pattern. I.e., an organization can tweet something, the audience can react, then the organization can enter into separate conversations with its audience, and after a few minutes every participant can go back to a more asynchronous way of behaving. Twitter is unique in providing a way to smoothly and continuously move from unidirectional (broadcast, like a blog post or press release) to bi- or multi-directional communication (responding to one’s audience). And these modes of communication can alternate seamlessly between asynchronous and synchronous; welcome to the real-time Internet.

Another secondary characteristic of Twitter is its endorsement of access anywhere. This means the Twitter stream isn’t limited to what people are thinking while in front of a computer, or what articles / links / images / videos they are finding online. You can relate things you are experiencing out in the real world through text, images, videos shared from mobile devices. Twitter was one of the first Internet services to endorse the idea that the Internet should not be limited to our homes and offices, but should be available everywhere. Although today other web or Internet services that can be accessed from a cellular phone share this, what makes Twitter different is the extent to which such behavior is part of the service’s DNA. In the pre-Internet-phone and pre-geolocation world, Twitter worked because it just required any old regular cellular phone with text messaging. Thus, from its very beginnings, Twitter has encouraged the breakdown of the boundary between the virtual and real worlds.

Platform

So far, I have limited myself to narratives that come out of the core Twitter, as offered by Twitter, the company. But a critical dimension of Twitter is that it is a platform open to 3^rd-party developers. The openness to developers is a large part of why what “we think it to be” is what Twitter becomes, as these third party developers offer a testing ground for innovation.

There is a clear tension here between third-party developers and Twitter, especially if Twitter follows a strategy of taking the best of the third-party world and moving it in-house, as opposed to letting 3rd party companies thrive or acquiring them (e.g., lists or clients for mobile devices). As much as we want to think of Twitter as a public good — a utility providing an Internet-scale publish/subscribe platform — it is very much a profit-seeking enterprise. Moving forward, it will be interesting to see if this profit-seeking will limit Twitter’s growth and the kind of resources 3rd parties are willing to dedicate toward innovation on Twitter-as-a-platform.

Pulse

So far, I have aimed this discussion at those narratives that affect the individual user – what can Twitter do for you and what can you do with Twitter – but the most fascinating facet of Twitter is what it says about all of us taken together. Although, as discussed above, status updates are often dull when looked at individually, a different pictures emerges when many users’ uninteresting status updates are looked at together. I.e., what isn’t very interesting at the micro level (“I am tired”, “I am eating sesame chicken at Ollie’s”, etc.) may be fascinating at the macro level (the aggregated tastes, likes, dislikes, interests, and concerns of every Twitter user).

Twitter is a live real-time pulse or heartbeat of the world. It’s a little bit like a stock market for small pieces of information or a dispatch system that everyone checks into. What can we do with such information? One need look no further than how financial firms use twitter: sentiment from Twitter as a leading indicator used to predict stock prices. What else? Product trends, political sentiment, fast-food eating tendencies, etc. Finding what is important in this sea of trivial information is one of the most interesting avenues for startups and research in the Twitter ecosystem.

The Pulse Is Our History

Because tweets are informational atoms that live forever, this pulse is persistent and allows us to look back in time.

Let’s compare this facet of Twitter to the Web generally. The Web’s contents are generally transient. You can’t go back in time and see what the web looked like 4 days ago, 4 months ago, or 4 years ago (despite the best attempts of the Library of Congress and archiving efforts everywhere). The truth is that there is just too much information and that a lot of this information changes too quickly for us to be able save old version of everything.

Moreover, even where some information is archived, it is often poorly indexed by time. Say you want to see the price of all items of Amazon on January 28th 2005, sure the information is somewhere (Amazon servers, receipts from people who bought the items on those dates, etc.), but it’s either not public, or very difficult to get in a structured way. You won’t be able to find my old websites on the web. Versioning is simply not part of the web’s DNA.

Twitter, however, is a time series (along with a geolocation series, and other meta-data series). Tweets can’t change (beyond deletion). There are no “edits to tweets” to keep track of. A tweet just is, it’s an atom, with a message, set at one point in time, with a location, and other meta data, and that’s it; it never changes.

So Twitter history is a forever-record of people’s small likes, dislikes, interests, and a macro record of our history. Twitter is fundamentally changing the way the human timeline is recorded; for all future it will provide us with the ability to go back in time to see how people felt about just about anything. With better NLP, big data analysis, etc., this will revolutionize our ability to understand humanity’s direction.

Twitter is our history.

Defining Twitter Is Not That Interesting Either

Defining Twitter: a world-scale publish-subscribe message bus.

That’s not very interesting. One can see the possibilities, but the definition itself is bland. That’s why we need many alternative narratives of Twitter, ones that go beyond its being just a platform for publishing.

Twitter is like the telephone in that describing the medium isn’t nearly as interesting as thinking about what to do with the medium. With the telephone, the initial narrative is simple: it allows you to speak to someone who is far away. Eventually, the narrative broadens and gives us telemarketing, the red telephone, phone-sex, and cellular networks. We are still only in the very early stages of the Twitter platform. How innovative are we willing to get and where will this innovation take us?

Synchronous Communication, User Awareness, and the Real-Time Web

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:15:00 -0600

This piece looks at how user awareness and synchronous communication have been lagging on the web, and why this might change in 2011+.

Background

A major trend in UX design over the past decade has been to move away from page-load based interaction toward real-time interfaces — from web pages to web apps and the read/write web, if you will. Although real-time interfaces initially appeared in Outlook Web Access in 2000 and first reached the wider public with Gmail in 2004 (pioneering Ajax), they are still far from dominant today. This relatively slow speed of adoption is due to a wide range of factors such as browser incompatibilities (and the need for clean degradation), programming complexity (relative to page-load based websites), security, scalability (increased requests to web servers and other back-end components), usability (bookmarking, broken browser histories) and business concerns (incompatibility with traditional analytics and ad platforms). By 2010, with many of these hurdles having been overcome, a number of large-scale apps made the switch toward dynamic, responsive, real-time interfaces — two prominent examples being the new Twitter and Google Instant Search.

This move toward real-time at the interface level obviously goes hand-in-hand with the evolution of the real-time web more broadly — the idea that the sending and receiving of information should happen immediately without needing to poll publishers periodically. Thus, today, users not only expect their web apps to be faster and more responsive, they expect that publishing, discovery/search, and consumption happen in real-time.

User Awareness and Synchronous Communication

Interestingly, neither user awareness nor synchronous communication are prevalent characteristics of this real-time web movement, despite their being critical parts of interactions in the real world.

User awareness refers to one user knowing what other users are currently doing in a web app — it is the web equivalent of seeing who else is in a room with you. For example, while surfing a product page on Amazon, one could imagine being told that three other users are currently looking at the product, as well as one Amazon representative in case you has any questions. Synchronous communication means that all people communicating need to be available at the same time for successful communication to occur. A phone call is synchronous, emails are asynchronous, and text messages and IM are somewhere in between.

These two concepts characterize only very few web applications, for example:

- Justin.tv: best experienced if you are online at the same time as a host so that you can communicate with him/her, as well as other viewers, during the broadcast.

- the isolated use of Twitter for chatting: a real-time medium that traditionally focuses on asynchronous (and often one-way) communication being used for synchronous, two-way conversations, e.g., DHH v. Dave McClure; Arrington v. Dave Winer.

- Google Wave: one of the highlights of the keynote is seeing a bunch of people intuitively editing a document at the same time.

- Chatroulette

Despite their lack of adoption on the web, user awareness and synchronous communication are prevalent characteristics of non-web Internet application. One need look no further than IRC, IM, online video games (MMORPGs especially) and video game communities (XBox Live). Straddling the web boundary, the 2010 browser startup, Rockmelt, adds, through extra-web mechanisms, user awareness, chat, and real-time sharing to the entire web-experience .

Coming to a Web App Near You in 2011

I’ll posit that this lacuna of user aware apps with real-time communication will start to be filled in 2011, and that the time and technology are ripe for a mainstream app with these characteristics. Why?

- 3D in the browser will lead to avatar-based web apps which by definition include user awareness and, often, synchronous chatting.

- Individuals who use location apps are familiarizing themselves with the idea of broadcasting where they are “now” in the real world via the “check in”. It is only a matter of time until this idea switches to the Internet: broadcast to your friends which page you are on now so that they can join you and experience the content at the same time.

- As increasingly complex games move to the web because of HTML5 and canvas, gamers will ask for the user awareness and synchronous communication they have taken for granted.

- Experiencing something live with a friend or with a crowd is almost always » sharing and enjoying the same thing at different points in time; it’s the way we are wired. Time for the web to catch up.

Five Side Project Ideas

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:13:00 -0600

Here are five side projects to which I am thinking of dedicating my non-work time. The first four are programming projects and, of those, only two have the semblance of a business model (I’ll let you decide which ones). The fifth one is more of a multimedia undertaking.

I have a few more ideas in mind, which I’ll be writing about over the next month. I don’t anticipate picking my first side project for 2011 until early February (see Goals for 2011).

Let me know what you think of these. I don’t have any predefined criteria beyond choosing a project that I am excited about that that is fun, educational, and useful.

Good Looking Goal Tracking

Although there are a number of goal tracking tools and webapps out there, none of them seem particularly fun or social to me. Many seem more like non-fancy, yet somehow overly-complicated, “to do” managers (e.g., Lifetick).

I am thinking there is space for a free goal tracking app that focuses on (i) charts and other visual goodies to visualize progress, (ii) game elements to incentivize continued use, and (iii) a light social element whereby friends can cheer you on, you can compare your progress to other people, and you can share aforementioned visual goodies with others via Twitter, Facebook, and other usual suspects.

Specializing on only one goal family (getting ready for a marathon, going to the gym every week, losing weight, etc.) and focusing on one great progress visualization, one game element, and one social element (e.g., share the goal with friends and then compare progress), I think there’s an easy-to-build and niche-ready MVP from which to iterate.

Zoom-Based UIs for…

I have been infatuated with zoom-based and spatial UIs for a while (take a look at the Aurora concept video at 2:06). Spaces and Expose for the Mac are good examples, as is Tab Candy for Firefox (now called Panorama).

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to build webapps with zooming as an interface element because… well, uh, ya… html/css don’t lend themselves to zooming all that easily. Now, you can get around this by playing with the webapp’s container in the OS, which is how a number of extensions such as the above mentioned Tab Candy do it, but then you’re mired in multi-platform development which is no way to build a mainstream product.

Today, with html5 and the <canvas> tag, however, zooming becomes a lot easier. I am thinking the time has come for me write a zoom-based interface to an existing website. I think the obvious choice here is search result visualization: run a search, see result pages visually-grouped together by category, use the mouse to zoom-into any group to see further results for that category (perhaps grouped by sub-categories) or some such. Other applications might be visualization one’s browser history, one’s delicious bookmarks (well, pinboard.in now that delicious is donzo), or the live Twitter stream.

With Google Custom Search and Yahoo BOSS, building this should simply be a matter of rewriting search-result visualization — this is a pure UX/UI project.

Three.js Multi-User Social Network

Three.js is an awesome lightweight javascript 3D library, built by Mr. Doob, a pretty well-known actionscript and html5 designer and coder. Basically, it allows you to do 3D in the browser (with or without WebGL) without needing any plug-ins.

I am thinking of building a social network where users’ profiles are represented as a house/room in a 3D environment with multi-user support and elementary avatars. Think web-based MMO Minecraft without the crafting or fun but with 3D graphics that scream 1992. Like this, but more simple, and with people. I know, hawt!

Vertical And Social Search for Developers

Vertical search has been very successful in fields such as travel, restaurant/business reviews, and law. I am thinking that programming/development is ripe for a vertical search engine, especially given the increasing and unfortunate prominence of content farms when doing Google searches on programming topics.

The plan is to pick an ultra-niche (e.g., Python web development with Django, or javascript/node.js or clojure/incanter) and build a search engine that provides results from (i) APIs and docs for the language, (ii) popular modules and packages, (iii) blogs about the language, (iv) Stack Overflow, and (v) github projects in the language. The approach would be pure whitelist, supplemented by results from Google.

In addition to this traditional search (library) aspect, by focusing on an ultra-niche, I’d like to also provide social search (village) a la aardvark. Because I’d be dealing with programmers from the same community, just about everyone using the engine is an appropriate target for questions. The search interface could include a live IM/Q&A mechanism. Really I am thinking of something at the intersection of search and community. Shades of Sociabl live interaction, I know.

There is a pretty good history of small verticals working, plus I feel like there are standard business models that lend themselves to websites for programmers (e.g., job postings like on 37signals for designers or Stack Overflow for programmers). The difficulty here is coming up with an MVP that’s truly M.

A History of Video Games

A few months ago, my friend Greg sent me a video lecture reviewing technology innovation and change over the past 25 years. It’s a pretty great speech highlighting both how far we have come in terms of innovation and how little we’ve actually evolved in terms of the ideas behind this innovation. As Greg put it, “it’s a good illustration of [the basic point] that sustainable innovation often comes from really old ideas being revisited with modern infrastructure.”

I have always been fascinated by video games — not just playing them, but also looking at how they continually evolve and dazzle us while still dealing with the same currencies fun, addiction and social interaction. I’d like to create a multimedia series that explores how tried-and-true ways to have fun have been visited and revisited through the many generations of video and computer games, 1970s to today. This would probably be a year-long project of blog posts, videos, and interviews with game developers.

Think of it also as a great excuse to whip out ye ol’ PS3, N64, and Commodore 64D (Great Giana Sisters, here I come).