PC in a new domain

Posted on 02 Aug 2012 by Allister

Political correctness: it has pervaded modern life to an extreme.

In New Zealand, any swimming pool must have a fence around it with fairly serious dimensions and locking mechanisms – all because a handful of people weren’t watching the kids in their care. Smacking a child is against the law, too, as a ‘protection’ against the ravages of child abuse. Those same children can’t fail at school either, where everyone succeeds and it is an offence to even touch a student. It’s a mad state of affairs which doesn’t look like turning around any time soon.

Still, in today’s modern society, that wonderful, free (as in speech) internet must be the last bastion of speaking one’s mind, right? Well, yes and no. Certainly lawmakers are having a hard time catching up with what online publishing means. Publishing a slanderous allegation in the online edition of a major publication will certainly attract the attention of the authorities, but what about a mildly offensive tweet? Yes, even those are starting to gain attention.

But what I would like to draw attention to right now is something altogether more pervasive and worrying. I’m talking about all those places many of us hang out every day. Twitter, sure, but also blog/article comments, forums, Facebook and more. Those everyday places where people hold what used to be water cooler conversations but with generally much wider audiences. There are mini soapboxes that people stand on every day, including me.

It has been my observation in the last couple of years that any form of opposing view or criticism or even observation – no matter how well reasoned – is taken as a personal attack and often met with vitriol. If I might draw upon an analogy: a student stands on a low wall with a megaphone and demands something be done about exorbitant student fees. I, standing nearby, yell out “your fly’s down mate” and am met with cries of “Hater!” and basically painted as a capitalist oppressor. That sounds extreme but honestly, it has the right levels based on what I’ve experienced recently.

I’m as opinionated as they get, but I learned years ago that I’m often just wrong. Sometimes spectacularly. The thing is, I stand up for my views but I am also more than happy to have those views changed by means of a spirited debate. I fear, however, that I am in a minority with that trait. It used to be people just wouldn’t respond to anything I said. More recently I get varying levels of pure disdain or even hate coming back at me.

Sometimes I wonder if I should just shut up. Say nothing. Let it slide. Fuck that! It’s not who I am.

I see society devolving day in and day out. PC laws, coddled kids, over-sensitivity to pretty much any group you can attach a label to, and I don’t like the way it’s going. So I am saying my piece. If we all say nothing, it just gets worse.

If I see a flaw in your thinking – I will say so.

If I think you’re just wrong – I will say so.

If I think you’re not being clear – I will say so.

If I think you’ve missed a key point – I will say so.

If you use bad grammar or spelling to the point I have trouble understanding – I will say so.

If you don’t like it, then defend your position. There’s every chance I’m wrong and I’m prepared to accept that if you can convince me, or just agree to disagree if it turns out our beliefs are not aligned.

But as soon as you respond while failing to defend your argument/position then I will consider you the idiot. But I won’t hate you for it.

When people hate and despise those with opposing views – that’s where wars and oppression come from. If we end up in the much feared ‘nanny state’ with our liberties curtailed to an extreme, I will stand proud and say I am not accountable for this.

Now go on. I dare you. The comments are open… have at it!

Best versus biggest

Posted on 13 Mar 2011 by Allister

OK, here’s the deal. The topic of this post is completely unimportant. It’s way less important than middle east revolutions or Pacific natural disasters. It doesn’t, cosmically speaking, matter at all. And yet, regardless of all the more important stuff, this topic gets beaten to death every week.

Facebook. Good or bad? Sainted or evil? Dead or alive?

Let us first divide the (digitally aware) population in two. Those who use social networks and those who don’t. Those who don’t will have their reasons, almost always ill-founded, but cannot help answer my questions. If you don’t use a product, how can you judge it? You can’t. The other group, social network users, will choose one or more networks to participate in. It seems the overwhelming majority of them choose to participate in Facebook. Why?

A big part of the answer lies in my last statement. If you want to connect with most of your friends easily then clearly you have to go where most of your friends are. That’s certainly the reason I participate on Facebook. It is also a very similar reason to why, about 12 years ago, I bought my first PC and a copy of the Windows operating system. Not my first computer, my first PC. Almost everybody else was buying the same and, at the time, I felt it inevitable that I should go in that direction also. A little over 4 years ago I reversed that decision. I bought a Mac. I did that because I was convinced there was a better alternative to what I had been using.

Back in the days of the VHS versus BetaMax battle, VHS won and everyone who had a VCR soon ended up with VHS. It made no sense to own a BetaMax when the infrastructure (tape manufacture and distribution) was clearly going to favour a single format. Two competing formats for a single goal was an inefficient model. Cassette tape versus vinyl was a little different because there were clear differences in portability versus quality. An audiophile would choose vinyl every time. Then Sony came along with the Walkman. No way was vinyl ever going to go that portable, so the two formats co-existed for their respective markets. When CD arrived in the 80s, it promised high quality and portability and ultimately won over both preceding formats. Once again, the infrastructure to produce the physical goods went the way of the masses for efficiency’s sake and vinyl and cassette tape quickly faded.

Around the time CDs were taking over the music industry, personal computers were hitting their stride. No longer game-playing curios, they began to show promise in other areas and we saw the beginnings of the ubiquity we now know. One “format” became dominant – the “PC”. More specifically, the IBM PC-compatible. While many people talk of the “PC versus Mac” battle, in fact the battle occurs on a different level. The Mac and PC are merely infrastructure – much like the VHS and BetaMax players, the turntables and decks. The media in use was now software. Just like you couldn’t stick an LP in a cassette deck or CD player, neither could you put software written for Mac on a PC.

Making my jump from PC to Mac was not a simple one. Actually, that’s not true. Convincing myself to make the jump was the difficult part. The actual transition was quite easy. I did have to consider the software angle but fortunately I had previously made that problem a lot easier for myself due to a little thing we like to call the Internet. I had already begun using GMail for my everyday email and had progressed my web sites to using online tools instead of relying on specific software on the PC. I had moved much of my computing onto the infrastructure of the internet. Most of the rest of my computer use at the time was simple and task-based. Converting a FLAC audio file to MP3 is not difficult to achieve on any personal computer and once it’s done, it’s done.

Now let’s fast forward to today. What is the infrastructure that social networks rely on? The Internet, of course. So looking back at our history, we see that infrastructure was the primary reason that any format or platform became dominant. Seeing as all social networks make use of the same infrastructure there is no significant technical or mechanical barrier to change. You only need to look at the fortunes of Alta Vista – the internet’s premier search engine until Google came along – to see that massive swings can occur for very simple reasons and in relatively short timeframes. Google was better and was not hog-tied by the need to overcome any delivery infrastructure problems.

In my recent experience, more and more people are choosing to forsake the world of the PC (i.e. Windows) for the lure of Mac (i.e. OS X). With very, very few exceptions, none are looking back. Whether you like it or not, OS X is a better experience for most people. If you’re a super geek with a penchant for changing everything, making it bend to your will, then go download a Linux distro or two and leave us regular folk to discuss this politely. I’ve used computers for about 30 years now, professionally for over 20 of those years. I’ve made many personal studies of “stuff that works” and “stuff that doesn’t” – usually by accident and mostly by using them. I can honestly say that in my objective view of today’s personal computing landscape you don’t have to, and shouldn’t, suffer the myriad dramas that the Windows operating system offers. I haven’t yet experienced Windows 7, but all previous versions are more trouble than they’re worth when there are simpler, better alternatives to be had. For most people.

But that’s not the (long delayed) point of this post. The point is this. There is every chance that you only use Facebook because everyone else does. Many of you are using Windows for the same reason. In both cases, it’s not the only and certainly not the best platform. Most people I know on Facebook complain about it at one time or another – some frequently. Well, you have the power in your hands. No corporation or cost stands in your way of jumping ship. If Facebook sucks, you have only yourself to blame for sticking around.

Twitter is not a replacement for Facebook, it’s something different. But it may be all you need or want. Don’t disparage what you haven’t tried. (Merely signing up is not enough.) Disapora, on the other hand is a replacement for Facebook. It’s early days yet, but this largely functional product runs rings around Facebook for simplicity and does the key things most people join Facebook for – communicating with their friends. Let’s call it “social networking.”

Does Diaspora have games, quizzes, pokes and likes? No. Does it have complex and ever changing privacy controls? No! Does it make it hard to control who sees what? No!! It’s a very simple platform that does social networking the way you probably thought Facebook would. The product came about precisely because of all the drama Facebook has caused. The primary reason I am using and supporting Diaspora is because I want to see Facebook have a decent competitor. I believe this will be it. Once it hits its stride, all that stands in the way of success is social inertia. Well, that and they’d better not start making the same mistakes Facebook did.

And that brings me to a final, related point. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain about the government.” The premise of the statement is reasonable only if vote casting is done from a position of knowledge. Of all parties. Indeed, how can you claim a representative stands best for your views if you do not know the views of his opponents? By the same token, I don’t think it is fair to complain about Facebook if you haven’t made an honest attempt to look at alternatives. And much as a large section of the voting public pay little attention to detail, instead mopping up campaign slogans and propaganda, so, too, do many of the social networkers assume Facebook is the “cat’s whiskers” simply because that’s where everyone is. I don’t even have to tell you it’s not. Most of you are complaining already.

And this is where I come in. Think of me as your independent candidate. I’ll stick to the issues and all votes will be conscience votes. But rest assured, I will be out there campaigning. If I see discourse on the nature of Facebook, please expect me to make my point. If I take it too far, then tell me to pull my head in. I don’t mean to offend, I just mean to educate so you can make the best choice for you. Yes, I continue to suffer Facebook for your benefit. You bet I will complain.

Look both ways before you cross the road

Posted on 06 Sep 2010 by Allister

It’s interesting how product brands become generic terms for all similar products. In New Zealand, for many years, a vacuum cleaner was a “Hoover”. Sticky tape is “Sellotape” to me and always will be.

And so it has happened that “iPod” is perhaps not used to directly refer to another brand of music player, but certainly to the product concept as a whole. Today’s story on Stuff, titled “Pedestrian death rise blamed on iPods“, certainly continues the trend, but that’s only the beginning of where this article misses the mark.

If we are to take the headline literally, then the blame for the rise in numbers has been attributed to music players. Yet the opening paragraph reads

Death by iPod is being blamed as a contributing factor to the 25 per cent rise in the number of pedestrian fatalities in the Australian state of New South Wales.

Note the words “contributing factor”, which describe a concept utterly absent from the headline. But even then, the basic conjecture of the article is stretching credulity

The issue has been highlighted in Sydney by the death of a 46-year-old Glebe woman reportedly wearing headphones when she was knocked down and killed by an ambulance on Saturday night.

There is speculation she might not have heard the ambulance siren when crossing Parramatta Road at Mallett Street at Camperdown.

Agreed. You can technically only speculate whether the woman heard the siren as she is no longer alive to ask. I think it’s fairly safe to assume, however, that she didn’t hear it and still walk in front if of it. So one might assume, at this point, that her failure to hear the siren was a major contributing factor to her death. What I’d like to know is why did she have a blindfold on? Or was it one of those cool 3D-projector glasses things?

When I was taught how to cross the road, the basic instructions were “Look right. Look left. Look right again.” In New Zealand, we drive on the left, so if you’re in a country where you drive on the right, just reverse the directions and you should be good. In more recent years, I’ve seen a different phrase “Stop. Look. Listen.” It seems clear to me that this woman followed neither set of instructions because, surely, an ambulance traveling at speed with flashing lights on its roof must be pretty hard not to see!

If you are now thinking it is quite incredible that someone would walk out into a roadway without first looking for traffic, then you’re probably not a pedestrian in New Zealand. Certainly not Wellington. My home town. The thing is, I see people walking out onto roads without looking very often. Every. Single. Day. Most of them do not have earphones or earbuds on or in their ears. Many are alone. Some are with friends. All of them are idiots.

I don’t know if the average attention level of NSW pedestrians is any higher than in Wellington, but I’d wager it’s probably quite low if the increase in deaths has been 25%. I was once told a figure of how many people get hit (though not necessarily killed) by vehicles in Wellington each year. I think it was something like 437. More than one a day!

The issue then takes a final, harrowing turn into this

‘The government is quite happy to legislate that people can lose two demerit points for having music up too loud in their cars, but is apparently unconcerned that listening devices now appear to have become lethal pieces of entertainment,” he said. ”They should legislate appropriate penalties for people acting so carelessly towards their own welfare and that of others.

”Manufacturers … should be made to [warn] consumers of the risks they run.”

If you’re happy with your government having to legislate to protect you from yourself, then you have nothing to worry about – “Nanny State” is probably a term that gives you warm fuzzies. For myself, I’d take a different stance and suggest that we simply scare people into taking notice. I have a feeling some Japanese game show producers could come up with something applicable.

So, when you first saw the title of this post, I bet you thought I’d be making some witty play on words. Nope. It’s a request. Please do as it says! I’ve seen more near misses than I really want to and I sure as hell do not want to see a direct hit. It would really ruin my day.

Life, the universe and everything

Posted on 04 Aug 2010 by Allister

With full and undying gratitude to Douglas Adams for the title of this post, I am beginning to write because of what has and hasn’t been happening in my life lately. And also because I feel like it must be time to write something here.

What hasn’t been happening is web site maintenance, podcasting and various other personal projects. What has been happening is that life has been continuing despite me being tired and, on occasion, a little poorly. I suspect the poorlyness, if there is such a word, is brought on in significant measure by the tiredness. The tiredness, in turn, is brought on by not sleeping enough. Yeah, that’s kind of obvious, that last part, huh?

I have an addiction that robs me of sleep. Call me Johnny 5 if you want, but I need more info. I have an insatiable thirst for information on a variety of subjects. Technology in various guises – the web, gadgets, cool software – is probably chief among the topics but I can also include aviation and photography pretty high on the list. I used to spend hours on my Mac in the evening, diving around all sorts of corners of the internet to satisfy these needs, and then realise that it really was ‘bed time’ before 11pm. Then came the iPod Touch, iPhone and recently, the iPad.

I still often make it to bed well before 11pm, but out comes the iPad and it continues. It is on my portable device that I watch all my video podcasts. I’ll sometimes listen to audio ones and play a game at the same time. Then there is Twitter, Facebook, my RSS feeds and email to check. Again. It’s often midnight by the time I finally make myself put down the device and turn the light out – leaving a scant 6-7 hours for sleep. Only, I don’t fall asleep quickly.

A plus side of all this consumption – at least on the subject of technology – is that I’m known amongst family, friends and colleagues as a fairly knowledgeable guy and I can – and often do – help people with their problems, even if it is only to make a few general suggestions. I’ve often thought how these people view me as this “über-geek” who knows so much when, in reality, I could let them in on my secrets (mostly my RSS feeds) and they could learn it all themselves. Except, of course, I have been doing this for a long time now.

There is one thing that technology has brought me that can cut through this swathe of information overload. Music. Every so often I feel the need to cut the information pipes and just flood my head with music. Not just any music. Great music. And it all comes from the internet. No, not like that. It’s all legal, I assure you. You see I have this belief that any piece of music is like a key. A good, old fashioned key has grooves and ridges, bumps and dips – just like the music. And much as the key fits a specific lock to make a smooth action, so I believe each of our minds is like a lock. We have our own, unique tumblers inside and the music engages them. Unlike the key and lock analogy, the music need not fit exactly to have some effect. But oh, when it does fit exactly, much enjoyment is to be had.

I have had personal experiences with music that have changed my mood. A gloomy walk to the office in the morning – an office I didn’t really want to go to at the time – was brightened significantly when I switched off the podcast, chose my podsafe music playlist and hit shuffle. I remember the song clearly. Magic Carpet by New Leaf.

And so I found myself today, feeling quite under the weather, on top of tired, hitting that shuffle icon on that same playlist as I dove into some fairly decent coding at work. I enjoy coding as it is, but zoning out to the likes of Black Lab, The Razorbax, Amphibians, Little Invisibles and Ariaphonics made the remainder of the day fly by and I forgot all about the tired limbs and uneasy head that had me almost turn for home on the way in this morning. Go ahead – follow those links and take a listen for yourself. Let the music flow and see which ones fit your lock.

Well hopefully there is some connected thought above. It’s 22:11 and I am now heading to bed. You know what happens next…

Have I got news for you?

Posted on 03 Mar 2010 by Allister

It is an ever more frequent event that I screw up my face in confusion, anger or even disgust when viewing the nightly 6pm television news. The cause of consternation is the seemingly endless stream of misinformation – or disinformation – fed to an eager public by ill-informed or ignorant ‘journalists’.

I use the term ‘journalist’ in its most broad sense of a paid employee of a news organisation. Actually, I use the term ‘news’ in a very broad sense too. Any organisation which seeks to inform us through traditional media channels and, in most cases, brands itself as ‘news’ will generally get away with it. But for how long?

Anyone who has a professional skill or an entrenched hobby can most often easily pick holes in a story on their specialist subject. My professional skills are in IT and my hobbies also encompass IT, and aviation. With the increasing number of stories about IT hitting our eyes and ears in this modern digital age, it is becoming almost too easy to pick holes. But it is from aviation that I can draw the most telling examples.

In January 2008, a British Airways Boeing 777 crash landed at London’s Heathrow airport. Inevitably, information about the cause of the crash was sketchy in the first few days and the media can be forgiven for latching on to whatever ‘facts’ were being thrown about at the time. There is no excuse, however, for an absolute gem of misreporting perpetrated by then-European reporter for 3News, Rachael Smalley.

As she stood beside one of Heathrow’s main runways, describing the delays caused to airborne aircraft by the accident, she uttered the words “if you look up to the top of the flight path, you can see planes are literally queueing up to land”. In the background we could see three sets of landing lights. Anyone who has ever stood beside the runway at Heathrow might have noted the smog/cloud was reasonably thick that day as it is common to be able to see FOUR sets of landing lights. Of course, the real congestion would have been in the various holding ‘stacks’ around the greater London area and perhaps even further afield too.

Some months later, 3News anchor Alistair Wilkinson read an update to this story in which he said that the aircraft’s engines had ‘shut down’ in flight. This is simply wrong. By this stage, the accident reports clearly stated that the engines failed to respond to a command for increased thrust. They were still running!

Both of these examples show the lack of basic fact checking. In the first case, you may be tempted to forgive them because they were trying to get a story out quickly. The latter case carries no such excuse. Either the writer of the story played fast and loose with the facts, or they got the information from somewhere other than an official source. The official crash report was available on the internet. In fact, 3News’ published version of the story on their web site actually contained the correct description!

What is missing, I believe, from modern news organisations is the use of ‘subject matter experts’ (SMEs). A quick call to, perhaps, the Royal Aeronautical Society might have alleviated some of the blatant mistruths. Better still would be to have persons on staff who are familiar with common areas of coverage. We are subjected to network-employed political commentators and sports commentators on a regular basis and 3News also have a qualified medical reporter.

Moving back to IT now, it is a constant irritation I suffer that people believe what they hear on TV. My own family, and indeed many smart people I know speak with derision about topics they clearly have no real knowledge of. The most prevalent example is Twitter. The popular micro-blogging service keeps making headlines, whether it be used by predators or celebrities or ‘real people’ in the midst of wars or major events. The popular misconception of Twitter is that it consists of a lot of people telling you what they’re eating for lunch and other such mindless, boring minutiae and that this overwhelming tide of dross hides any real information.

Well, that’s true if you let it happen. An online forum community I participate in recently rounded on Twitter and Facebook, decrying all this ‘lunch’ rubbish and how it couldn’t possibly be of any value. I felt compelled to point out to them that should they all join Twitter and follow each other, they would immediately disprove their own theory because none of them would dare to post any dross! Several members said they had ‘signed up’, hadn’t posted anything and didn’t yet see the value. That’s like standing on the sidelines of a sports match and complaining that the players are useless. Get on the field and show them how it is done!

I spend a lot of time these days challenging people on their views about such things, but I need to step back and realise they’re just being sold a line by the media. Instead, I should be educating them about the failings of the media. I’d try to educate the media, but it is hard to make yourself heard in that court.

Social networks need castes

Posted on 19 Jan 2010 by Allister

On Facebook I have “friends”. On Twitter, I “follow” people and am “followed”. These are examples of classless societies.

But they don’t mirror the real world.

As much as many cultures have tried to eliminate social castes, classes, if you will, at a societal level, the fact is that within the realm of people you know and communicate with on a regular basis, a caste system is firmly in place and not likely to disappear any time soon.

Your best friend. A close friend. A friend. An acquaintance. Your immediate family. Your extended family. People you work with every day. People you meet often in your work. People you know at work. People you went to school with. People you know from your club. People you talk to on public transport. People you’ve met online. There are a myriad different relationships that bind you to the people you ‘know’.

Take Facebook as an example. Would you ‘friend’ your best friend? Of course. You most likely share a lot of social discourse in person and through other media like the telephone, email, instant messaging etc. What about that person you know at work, but who you never see outside of work? You talk often, but usually about work. Maybe politics or the weather. Would you ‘friend’ them? Maybe. What about that person you went to school with who you bump into on the street occasionally and say hello to, but otherwise don’t see? Probably not.

Facebook gives you only two choices: 1) You are my ‘friend’. 2) I don’t want to be associated with you.

Moving on to Twitter, I currently follow 53 people/organisations. I read every single tweet from those people. That’s why I follow them – because I am interested in what they have to say. Others will follow anyone they come across and cannot possibly hope to see even a small fraction of their tweets. Why do they follow like this? I assume because they are happy to be associated with these people.

This is why I think both of these social networks need to introduce castes. On Facebook, I want to ‘friend’ people I will actually interact with on a frequent basis. At the same time, I have no issues showing my association with others who I will generally not communicate with. On Twitter, I am happy once again to associate with a much larger number of people than I will actually read the tweets from.

Granted, Twitter does offer lists now which can allow me to operate in this fashion. But it doesn’t make it clear to those being ‘followed’ (but not really) that my desired relationship is different. Or perhaps more importantly the other way around – that I am really following you because I find you interesting and not just because I follow everyone I ever come across.

What do you think?

Bad SA

Posted on 01 Dec 2009 by Allister

Pilots and aviation buffs will likely know the term I have used in the title. In full, it is “bad situational awareness” and it means a pilot has an incomplete or inaccurate appreciation of their place in the sky, both in absolute terms – position, altitude and attitude – and in relative terms – proximity to hazards such as other aircraft, terrain and different classifications of airspace. Bad SA is a safety issue. It can cause things to go wrong or can cause the pilot to react inappropriately to unexpected events.

But I’m not talking about flying. I’m talking about being out in public. For the most part a far more benign environment, but potentially as deadly. Every day I see people crossing roads in ways that entirely fail to take into account their own mortality. Really there is only one rule for crossing a road. Don’t get hit. Sure there are rules, lights, road markings. But these are merely an aid to not getting hit. I’ve made a personal study of ‘how not to get hit’. For many years now I have had the basic model sorted, but I continue to refine it by observing others’ ‘how not to not get hit’ behaviours. For instance, don’t sneak to the traffic island in the centre of the road and then forget about the traffic that is now behind you.

But an experience at lunch time today gave me a very interesting insight into the way people – ordinary people – get their SA. Or don’t.

I was lined up in my favourite Subway shop. The cash register is near the door and the line stretches along the counter and then doubles back along the other side of the long, thin shop toward the door again. I was about half way along this tail when I noticed something of a minor commotion behind me. It was a man and a dog. It took me a few moments to realise what was happening. The dog, a large German Sherpherd, had a handle. The man was hanging on to the handle and a leash. Clearly the man was poor of sight. As is my habit, I had left a gap in front of me while I was adjacent to the staircase that leads to the sit-down eating area. The dog clearly saw this gap and decided it was the end of the line and pushed in in front of me. I didn’t mind at all. Now let’s turn our attention to the woman who had been in front of me.

Prior to the entrance of the man and his dog, she had been queued up standing quite close behind another customer. As I arrived in the line she was scanning the menu boards high on the wall behind the counter – facing away from the stairway. I left my customary gap so that other customers could freely get to and from the staircase. Having just cleared the Coke fridge, for some reason she stepped back into the stair landing area effectively blocking the gap I had left, just as two people descended the stairs and had to push past her. I believe she was aware of them on some level, but she did not break her gaze on the menus nor move either foot more than a couple of inches. I moved further back to facilitate their exit.

When the man and the dog entered, she spun around and seemed to take a great interest in the scene. She began to move in ways that made it clear to me she was intent on making life easier for the man and his dog. After she had given her order, she even approached the man, gently hooked his arm and guided him to the counter whilst explaining he could now give his order. Further along the counter the dog started taking an interest in the cookie shelf. I’m not sure what the fuss was about, as it is completely sealed from the customer’s side, but again, she was observant and helpful.

And so to my point. This woman proved she was compassionate and able to assess and deal with the situation very well. She saw someone who was at a disadvantage and went out of her way to help that person. However, if you’re just Joe or Jane Public, then she really doesn’t give a fuck about you. She saw the dog in the shop. She missed the elephant in the room.

Going back to mortality for a moment, I would like to suggest that it’s the elephant that will kill you when you cross the road. Personally, I’m always looking for elephants, though I rarely meet them face to face.

Google Wave – ahead of its time?

Posted on 05 Oct 2009 by Allister

Google Wave has once again hit the headlines as the beta service (no, really, this one is) opens up to 100,000 more users. I toyed with the idea of trying to secure an invite, but soon gave that away as I realised how many other things I have waiting in the wings for some attention. And that’s a key point and why I believe Wave is ahead of its time.

In a nutshell, Wave is a mix of email, instant messaging, collaboration and sharing. Imagine a mash-up of your favourite IM with Flickr, Facebook and your favourite email client. But it’s more than that. Google are opening up Wave so that clever developers the world over can implement things even Google doesn’t dare to imagine. Just look at what happened to the iPhone when Apple made a proper developer’s kit available. They’re now pushing the angle “there’s an app for everything” because there pretty well is now. Sure there’s a lot of rubbish, but some unexpected gems have surfaced too. So I expect it will be with Wave. In time.

As I see it there is one big hurdle confronting Wave. The oft-mentioned ‘mainstream acceptance’ of such a technology. And let’s get this straight – this is a new technology. It might be a combination of all of those things I mentioned above, but it does not draw on any of them to get the job done. It is a closed system. You rush off and get your Wave invite and… and… and there’s no-one to communicate with.

Email is a mature and accepted standard. Whether you use GMail, Outlook (shudder), Apple Mail or Pine, you can exchange emails with anyone else who has an email account. There are no real barriers to entry and there is much choice of software to accomplish the task. Instant messaging was next and after many years still remains fragmented. I personally have accounts on ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Skype and GoogleTalk. But as all these networks are doing essentially the same thing, single client applications have evolved (such as Trillian or Adium) which nearly seamlessly meld your separate networks of friends. I have friends I keep in touch with on all of these networks except AOL. If I want to contact one of them, I just look at my single ‘buddy list’, double-click, and start typing.

Wave is a completely new technology. At least initially, and I suspect for a considerable time, you will either be on Wave or you won’t. There will be no middle ground, no partial access. Similarly your friends will either be on or off. The closest analogy I can think of for this is the likes of Facebook versus Bebo versus <insert name here>. Each of those networks has its following which seems to have built along demographic lines. But those networks are mature. Each has won a large demographic with a hard and long fought battle.

To put this in perspective, Facebook is approaching six years of age and yet my own circle of friends on the service is still relatively small. I only started using it in the last year or so and some of my friends joined after I did. It is a slow process.

I’ve rambled on a bit about this point of mainstream adoption. Now I must return to my original statement. If you remember, above I said I don’t have enough time. In what may at first appear to be a contradictory statement, I believe the real-time nature of Google Wave will slow it’s adoption because people don’t have enough time in their day.

I was reading a BBC News dot.life article about Wave and reading through the comments. Many of the comments are predictable and echo some of what I have said above. But one jumped out at me. It says, in part:

Anyone who does business with people remotely will surely agree that the a voice conversation is by far the most effective means for efficient communication, and even more so when followed up by email (or collaborative documents) confirming the salient points and next steps/action points.

I agree with the commenter with one qualification – that this applies with respect to a single conversation. I would be extremely happy in my job if the working day did not contain overlapping conversations. It does, and it sucks. This is where I use real-time and what I call ‘right-time’ communications. Specifically, this is why I use instant messaging every day, and use it a lot.

A phone call addresses only one task. True it could address more than one, but only one at a time. It is an inherently linear process. Even on a conference call, everyone is talking about the same thing at any one time. You also have to take careful notes. The nature of email (and this is really only by convention) is that of a phone call, but it loses the real-time nature of the phone. Instant messaging is the happy medium. It can be used for real-time conversation, and it can be used in parallel by holding multiple conversations simultaneously. Even more usefully, if another party is distracted or detained by another task, the conversation just ‘hangs’ until their return, be it 2 minutes, 15 minutes or even a few hours later. That’s what I call ‘right-time’ communications.

How many times have you called someone and it hasn’t been a great time for them? Or how many times have you gone to call someone and then thought, oh, they might be busy, so not called? A phone call interrupts the recipient. An email goes too far the other way (unless the recipient is one of those people who hang on their inbox’s every arrival) and (by convention) delays the conversation, perhaps unnecessarily. Instant messaging (at least when configured correctly) attracts the attention of the recipient so they may respond when it is convenient. Often, the recipient will see the communication is a simple question with a simple answer and dispatch the query quickly. They may respond with a polite “I’m busy can I get back to you in half an hour?” in which case everyone knows where they stand and can get on with what needs doing.

A couple of use cases may illustrate my point – then I’ll get back to Google Wave.

I was feeling unwell and was at home in bed. But there was something I had been supposed to be doing so I needed to hand it off to someone else and provide them with sufficient information to perform the task. My affliction was a cold and I really didn’t feel like actually talking to anyone. Out came the laptop. I decided to glance at my emails and noticed another couple of burning issues which I knew would fester if I didn’t get someone to pay attention to them. I popped open my instant messaging client (provided by the company for internal use) and began two conversations to colleagues at my office. I was able to describe the tasks to the recipients, send links to important information and answer any questions. While I was doing this, someone else popped up online from an overseas office and asked me a question. I tried to respond but didn’t have all the information I needed. So up popped another message window where I sought the missing information from another colleague. Pretty soon the opportune question aspect became out of my league so I invited the two parties I was speaking with into a conversation together, introduced them to one another and left them to it. All this time I was continuing my handoff of tasks. In the midst of this I had been talking, simultaneously, to 2 people in Wellington, 1 in Auckland, 1 in Vancouver, Canada and 1 in Brighton, England. I logged off after about an hour with more accomplished than I had intended. None of that would have happened, or certainly not within an hour, using any other medium.

The second use case is far simpler. My team was supporting users in all the above-listed cities. For those overseas, an international phone call was something avoided if possible due to costs. One Canadian user had lots of questions and wasn’t afraid to ask them (something I applaud). His preferred choice was using instant messaging. One day he coyly asked if I minded him asking the questions over IM instead of the ‘proper’ channel of email. I explained my policy to him. If it’s just a question, fire away. But I reserve the right to fob you off to email if I’m particularly busy, or even to ignore you completely if it gets insane around here. If you want me to actually do something, then use email so we have an audit trail. He quickly understood and he got a lot of questions answered for minimal effort on either of our parts. It was as efficient as sitting next to each other.

So what the hell have I been rambling about and what does it have to with slow Google Wave adoption?

Simple. It’s this. The two use cases above happened over 6 years ago. Whilst I have changed jobs twice since then, the landscape has barely changed in terms of IM adoption within the enterprise. Which is to say a lot of people don’t see the value in it and don’t use it. Ironically they see it as an interruptive tool, even though many will still use the telephone. Most rely on email, however. And that is why my inbox looks like the trash dump it is. Instant messaging is a great technology with massive benefits but a lot of people still don’t ‘get it’.

So, if people – in the IT industry, no less – are not yet ready to adopt plain old instant messaging, what hope does Wave have? That’s a business view, but there’s a similar story to be told in the real world too. Of my immediate family (parents, siblings, spouse and children) I am the only one to regularly use instant messaging despite every single one of them having their own computer. Some will end up using email almost in real time whilst simultaneously not seeing the point of IM. It’s an uphill battle.

If we are to really analyse the tech landscape for mainstream use, I think it is only safe to say that email is ‘almost there’ in terms of adoption by the masses. Everything else is up-and-coming.