Media for Future Generations

Saturday morning. Watching some short films and trailers on Vuze with my kids. After watching the trailer for BatMan: The Dark Knight:

Henry (Aged 6): Dad, I want to watch that one!
Dad: Well we need to go and watch that at the movies son.
Henry: Why can’t we just print one off?’

I’ll leave you to make your own predictions on how future generations will value and interact with media.

Enterprise 2.0 Now On

I’m at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Sydney. This is my live blog:

Tangler 2 Go (Updated “Nokia at Mobile World Congress”)

Tangler is working on some delicious features so that users can put live discussions where they want them to be. There’s an API coming up (read-only to begin with write in the pipes) and embed is now here. In any Tangler topic, select ‘Share’ in the top right and paste the code into your site, blog or social networking application.

Nokia’s doing it… check out the discussion below for real live blogging of Nokia’s season launch at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

• Main event page
• Tangler - Unconference - More Topics
  
• Symbian World coverage

Evan Williams & the Universal Law of Simplicity

When designing software, the temptation is to add features. If the users aren’t loving our app as much as we need them to, it must be because we need to add that extra feature. That’ll get them! Rarely does this have the impact we desire, but the cycle continues and we add more and more features in the hope that, one day, we hit the sweet spot.We forget the universal law of simplicity.

One of the founders of Twitter, Evan Williams, presenting the powerful idea that less is more at LeWeb3 (LeWeb channel is here). Twitter itself was built around the constraint that the primary communication platform was SMS and that the web was just another interface. Twitter is dead simple to grasp. Tell everyone what you are doing in less than 140 characters of text. People can follow you and you can follow them. Following means you see what they are saying. There’s no video. No audio. No categories. No complex privacy settings. I don’t need to read the help pages because I can look at the home page and get it almost immediately.

There are a couple of powerful dynamics behind this that I want to talk about.

People not Features

Technology is a means to an end and not and end in itself. Users don’t put photos on the web because of the cool new embed feature, or the API that allows them to upload from their mobile phone. They simply and purely want to share their photos with other people. Great technology serves a simple need that people have. Twitter is an inspiration. It asks “What are you doing?” and we answer. In your app, what is the user trying to do?

Creativity: How it Works

Complexity is the enemy of creativity. In a former life I was a theatre director. I ran a course on improvisation at the West Australian Academy or Performing Arts. I began this course with a simple exercise in which I asked the group to form a circle (we do that a lot in theatre) and for a volunteer to step into the circle to do anything they liked. They had a infinite palette of possibility and the result was paralysis. Their eyes filled with fear as they free-falled through their minds trying to think of something interesting to do. Introducing constraints quickly changed the dynamic: “You are very heavy” or “This ball is precious” or “It’s dark”.  Constraints caused wonderful, creative moments to happen.  It’s a lot like “Tell me what you are doing in less than 140 characters”
Seesmic is bringing the universal law of simplicity to video which can be the most paralysing of all web experiences. I find that if I can film anything I like, wherever I like with my camera and then edit it in Adobe Premiere using After Effects to add titles, before uploading to YouTube I usually give up. It’s too much and I lose the most important thing: Something to say. With Seesmic, I press the big red button and do something. Awesome. I can’t wait to see some of the moments that come out of the Seesmic community.

Check out Evan’s presentation for some more great examples of how constraints can make great software.

Oh, and if you want to add me on Twitter, here I am.

Open Social & Facebook are Just Widgets

The Facebook Developer Platform and Google Open social are really just widgets with a social layer. Chris tells me they are even called ‘OpenWidgets’ by some.

Facebook Developers, especially early adopters, were able to get millions of active users very quickly because they could immediately be put themselves into a community of millions of people with some powerful, viral defaults. The value to the developer is the access (albeit limited) to the users.

Google’s Open Social is useless in this context. It is the same as Facebook… but with no users. So why would you?

Facebook allowing others to clone its model extends the existing value by making ‘widgets’ already developed for Facebook available to their users. Now developers can reach even more users. Its like World of Warcraft increasing the level ceiling from 60 to 70 because it provides fuel to keep the engine running. Developers who already have a few million users are incentivised to keep innovating to reach even more. Everyone wins.

But, even so, Facebook and Open Social are promotional tools… widgets by another name. Its a way of getting your app in front of the users of the container social site but you stil can’t inter-connect.

What if you want to make a social application that is more than a wall, a horoscope, a slideshow, a quiz? What if I want to make a TV that knows what my friends recommend? Or an email client that already knows my relationships and how to reach them? [Snip big list]

I’m proud to be working on the dataportability.org initiative because its leading the way to deliver what Google and Facebook should be doing to create a truly open social web powered by open standards.

My Contribution to Spouse 2.0 Day

Ashley and Chris over at Faraday Media have created a new day they are calling Spouse 2.0 and today is the day.

Here’s my contribution to the worthy cause of staying married whilst being a start-up junkie.

I realised the other week that my biggest failing as a spouse was not paying enough attention to the small stuff. Hey, I am busy changing the world so how am I going to notice that the floor needs vacuuming

I just don’t see it. I am on conference calls, writing spec and blog posts, designing user interfaces, speaking with India about outsourcing, etc. The goals are big, the ambition is high. Its about creating a perfect world for my family…

The problem is, it’s insulting. Its leaving all the shit jobs to my spouse without noticing. I am actually quite happy to do house work, but just don’t notice.

So here’s what I did. I decided that the best way was to treat it like a startup and have a weekly meeting to agree on the goals and tasks for the week and literally schedule them in. I created a template which every week, without fail, we sit down and complete. Things we cover:

• Weekly events: Make sure we each know what the others are doing so no double booking, birthdays are remembered, baby-sitters arranged, etc
• Career issues: What’s going on Enough money coming in, etc
• Tasks: Who is going to do what house work and when.

Here is the template we use.

Morle Inc Tasks.pdf

Let me know if you find this useful.

Technorati Tags: Spouse 2.0

The Perfect Ad?

I dunno if Facebook have always done this, but feeding sponsored messages into the News Feed has to be the perfect ad. In my News Feed, I read everything and click on almost everything.

Deep Scoble…. Deep

@Scobleizer:

“With all the lifestreaming going on I’m wondering if anyone is actually going to create any content anymore. Instead we’ll just copy it.”

This is the kind of tweet I like. You could write a whole book on the thought behind it. There’s a whole cultural shift in one sentence!

The KAOS Dream

KAOS Theatre, the company I founded in the UK in 1991 is staging a rather dirty production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They are vlogging the rehearsal process on their website.

It fills me with nostalgia and happiness to watch.

Instructions Impossible to Follow

This sign is displayed all over Indian airports. I spent the whole flight back to Australia reflecting upon actions I could take to follow it… nope, couldn’t think of one.

My research upon returning home uncovered the revelation that ISO 14001-2204 is not, in fact, a standard for clear signage in public places as you might guess, but a standard for protecting the environment.