Technology has been working its way into the minds of almost everyone it seems these days. As a developer, it’s particularly encouraging to see many of the technologies I work with and develop for rising to the top. In particular, I am a new convert to blogging (formerly known as Content Management where I did lots of work) and Social Networking (formerly known as Instant Messaging, Blogging, Contact Management, etc.). The core acknowledgement is that technology is providing a new level of enablement from the “Geeks to the Greeks” to quote the old college saying.

Macromedia has coined the phrase “Occassionally Connected” in relation to the push for “Rich Internet Applications” — applications that leverage dynamic, flexible user interfaces, network-aware, service-oriented architectures, and connected “consumers”. Ironically, Macromedia has released a new “platform” of sorts called Macromedia Central. According to their site:

Macromedia Central gives people the ability to interact with distributed information in a more meaningful and relevant way. By managing your personal information outside the browser Central enables a more responsive, immediate, and convenient way to interact with the sources you need on a daily basis. Central is a personal interface that can be downloaded and customized based on the information that matters to you. Regardless of whether you are online or off, Central allows you to access, filter, and interpret content and share data across applications in meaningful ways.

Central provides Macromedia Flash developers with a pre-built infrastructure for creating, distributing and selling applications. Developers can use their existing skills and the ability of Central to store and share data locally to build a new class of responsive Rich Internet Applications. The consistent Central deployment environment, support for payment processing, and ready availability on any computer empower individual developers to distribute applications directly to end users.

Source: Macromedia Central Product Page

Interestingly enough, here in is the hidden promise: “Build It and They Will Come”. Macromedia has released version 1.0 of its platform under the guise of a “Developer” release. With this moniker, MM has been able to excuse itself of the majority of the marketing responsibility embedded in this promise as it gears up developers. This is a Catch-22, of course, so one can’t blame MM entirely. Without applications, there will be nothing to attract consumers to Central and without consumers, developers won’t have a desire to develop. Fortunately, developers are easily hyped and have in many ways taken the bait and jumped on the bandwagon.

So what’s the problem? Well, the major concern is illustrated by a post from a Flash Developer today titled “Earning $120000 with a Macromedia Central app?… more? (wtf???)”. For the most part, actionScriptHero (asH) does a quick profit analysis on the development of an AIM add-on application that could be marketed to AIM users utilizing Central’s unique integration API. asH and I have had a little back and forth on the matter, but I think he does prove that there is a good potential for this market. Of course, this may be based on three potentially overlooked forces`:

• Build the Community, Not the Members — although the Macromedia Central application will undoubtedly reach a large audience to say the least, Macromedia Central, as it currently is implemented, markets the Central Community more so than the Central Developer. This sounds incredibly close to the design of, say, Google. The hub generates the majority of the traffic for itself, stakes a claim by selling eyeballs or platform-specific “service charges”, and in exchange introduces consumers to Developer X’s content (or application).
• User Behavior Is Difficult To Change — it seems that many people think consumers think in terms of “applications”. Macromedia’s design of the system seems centered on the notion that users have an inherent need to “find” applications. But are we that easily shaped? If I wasn’t a developer, would I really be nearly as concerned about the applications I run? I’m not sure. Most end users I know are need driven, not function driven. I need a way to send Instant Messages, I ask my friends, they tell me get AIM. I need to write documents, I ask my friends, Microsoft Word is the leader. As opposed to “I need to be able to track message history” so I search for Instant Messengers with this function and find Trillian. And don’t forget what Danah said about “Configuring the User”.
• Virii Are Hard To Create — as Seth Godin has identified, and as I have written about previously, the world is now full of marketing messages, value propositions, and hollow promises. Standing out in a crowd requires nothing short of a Purple Cow, a remarkable concept executed at unseen levels from start to finish. Developer zeal can often lead to myopic views of many situations simply because of their closeness to the content and its execution. As the wealth of applications grows, how exactly does one create anything more than a simple listing if not through marketing?

So I guess that’s one context of the “Casually Connected” and its implications on two audiences, developers and consumers. Interestingly enough, Anil Dash recently commented (“While We Weren’t Looking” ) on another context for “Casually Connected” — public awareness of Internet technology, specifically blogging. As Anil notes:

I’ve been arguing for a long time that, for all the hype, weblogs have barely made an impact with regular people in any appreciable way. Most people have still never heard of them and don’t know what the word “blog” means. But watching TV last night made me think that perhaps we’re finally making some progress.

[…]

The word blog was only barely mentioned once in the intro for the show, and only as part of the introduction to Sullivan, but the presence of the medium was undeniable on the show.

[…]

I suppose none of this is news, we’ve never yet had a time in the weblog realm when the medium has been getting less popular, but it seems worth noting that, while we weren’t looking, we started to cross over to that other 95% of people that have never heard of blogs. I can’t help but be excited to find out how they participate and what they think of our medium.

Source: Anil Dash

The crux of this discussion was that the overall awareness of blogging has grown and spread to an ever-increasing audience. Currently, it appears to be gaining more and more momentum and lacks only a few “official” endorsements before moving to the next level of acceptance by the Early Majority.

However, I was most enlightened by the series of comments that flew out after Anil’s post. They fell into two major categories: Markedly Against vs. Sorta Supporting.

In the Markedly Against category, this quote seems representative:

In all honesty, I don’t think blogs will grow in popularity much more than they already are. Look at us, blog users. We’re all “technical types.” To put it another way, we’re geeks, nerds, dorks, etc. Before we had our blogs we ran dial-in modem bulletin board systems (BBS’s) years back.

As opposed to this:

There’s no doubt that bloggign started out as a techie playground, but the biggest growth I can see is in the literary world where every frustrated writer gets instant publication and gratification. If they’re anyway good they might even find that signing up for Adsense will buy then a whisky at the end of the month. The polical and social commentator also has a public. Like everything else, time will filter out the dross, and those with a loyal public will survive. There’s always space for someone who captures the zeitgeist

Clearly, there’s some other forms of “management” required in the process, .. be it process or reputation to ensure that things don’t go awry too soon and collapse the entire effort. Either way, this context has show “Casually Connected” as seen from the eyes of three audiences: The Users (bloggers, content creators, etc.), The Officials (press, media, public opinion), and Anti-Users.

Indeed we’re growing to be a “Casually Connected” community. I’m not sure anyone is aware of how many moving parts and divergent opinions that really requires wrangling.

Digital Photography is definitely an up and coming industry. There are more and more cameras available every day and the increasing role of digital photography in both business and personal lives is undeniable. I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner, however, the metaphor of memory to film is starting to translate from concept to product marketing and packaging.

SanDisk is slated to release a new line of digital memory products that will be sold in much the way the traditional Kodak, Fuji, etc. films were marketed.. and at a surprisingly similar price point. As CNET’s News.com reports:

The Sunnyvale, Calif., memory card marker on Wednesday unveiled the Shoot and Store memory card, which it says will sell at stores such as supermarkets and drug stores for prices starting at about $15.

To date, many consumers buying new digital cameras have opted for single, higher capacity memory cards. But by offering inexpensive memory cards at the stores consumers frequent and where they might already shop for film or process pictures, SanDisk hopes it can inspire them to take large numbers of photos—-using Shoot and Store cards. Then, as the product’s name suggests, the company would like to see people using the cards as digital negatives of sorts, to permanently store images instead of downloading them to a PC.

The company agues that more readily available, less expensive memory cards could also lead to more people using digital cameras.

Source: News.com

I would tend to agree that digital photography will be more commonplace. I am not sure the role that exchangeable memory will play in that world as compared to more pervasive devices and open standards for inter-device memory usage.

Continuing with my review of the recent NY Times article covering TeleFlip. Towards the end of the article, Howard Rheingold is interviewed to provide an alternative perspective on the benefits of a service like Teleflip’s. As the article states:

But Howard Rheingold, whose book “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution” (Perseus Publishing, 2002) examines how people are using wireless technologies, discounts that explanation. “In America, from the beginning, cellular voice calls were cheaper than they were in the rest of the world,” he said. “If we’d had the same pricing structure they had in Europe, where text was cheaper than voice, we would have been using text on our cellphones too.”

Mr. Rheingold said that systems like Teleflip represent the first wave of a significant cultural shift. “Taking the kind of communications that the Internet provides, untethering it from desktop and putting it in your pocket creates something more than just the Internet on a telephone,” he said. “It changes where the Internet is, and who uses the Internet. The cellphone is now the poor person’s Internet terminal.”

Source: NY Times

Indeed, a cultural shift is underway. While I would wholly agree that the cellular phone has become the next-generation Internet terminal, quickly surpassing the handheld/PDA’s potential to rule that position through ubiquity and convergence, I have to wonder if the Teleflip service is truly the first case where the Internet was “untethered” from the computer.

A simple look through history shows a wide range of products and services that have served as gateways to the Internet. I would clarify that this “untethering” need be nothing more than an unconnected or occasionally connected device or application that provided links or directions to a specific URI. In this regard, all of the following ideas served the cause:

• Business Cards
• Advertisements
• Newspaper Ads
• Loyalty Cards
• Cue Cat

These devices were important because they brought mindshare to the Internet at times when it was not the point of focus. Although Teleflip does connect one medium (cellular) to another medium (e-mail), the net effect is the same. An end-user with knowledge of a URI has always had to resort to a Internet-enabled device (which Teleflip is not) to make that connection.

Not to mention, if I wanted to be historically correct, I would point that one of my companies own inventions predates the Teleflip service by a significant amount of time while providing a far more extensive repository (on par with the Web as a whole vs. a single node of the web). In October of last year, we released the OnlineCameo Card, an anonymous, portable identification system designed to assist singles in establishing connections with real-world suitors. The device, a simple plastic key-tag, provided what we called “Reverse Internet Dating” by which people meet in the real-world and complete connections online. Despite this knowledge, I would still not refer to even the Cameo Card as the first “Portable Internet Device” simply because I believe that the items listed above easily predate both Teleflip and OnlineCameo.

Additionally, if we are really changing where the Internet “is” then that prize would most likely be in the hands of Satellite, Wi-Fi, and Broadband Cable (mostly in that order). Each of those technologies took the Internet as far as the ends of the Earth, to the lounge of the airport, to the coffee shop on the corner, all the way right into our bedrooms and living rooms. In fact, I think it’s only fair to think of systems that widen the reach of the Internet as “Portable Internet Devices” whereas the other technologies, from paper to plastic to pixel that simply re-direct or bookmark are most like advertisements of the depth and benefit afforded us by the Internet and its little brother, the World Wide Web.

Marketing has changed the way that people understand how technology works. A sort of weird science where by it’s better to sell the big number than explain why the smaller is good enough or better.

Consider the case of the Mars Explorer and the pictures taken.

Anil Dash writes about the “Obsolescence of Happenstance” recently in his blog. Anil points out that our new-fangled communications tools have shifted our points of contact away from the abstract (company, family) to the concrete (employee, individual) and efficiently wiped out a great deal of the random encounters that were found in not-so-recent times. As he notes:

Once, there was fairly frequent interaction with people who weren’t your intended target of conversation. Speaking to a receptionist before getting to a business contact comes to mind, and its certainly an example that’s not going away any time soon, but the more casual conversations are the ones that intrigue me. Your friend’s younger sister who always ran to answer the phone first, the roommate of a person whom you spoke to frequently, your parents screening your phone calls when you were grounded; Those unexpected encounters with people often yielded extraordinary results.

Source: Anil Dash

There are a lot of great comments at the end of the entry and it’s definitely worth chcking out. For the most part, most people are quick to point out, and Anil concedes, that our new forms of communication often make up for, though do not necessarily replace, those random occurrences.

Based on just my last entry, it’s clear that the ability for online tools to generate new links within our social network is not only present but powerful. I’ll try to post up some quotes from some of my reading that relate to the power of “weak ties” in the next few days.

There’s no doubt about it. The Internet has totally infiltrated our lives and it would take a huge blast to get it out of our DNA now.

John Dowdell mentions the results of a new study on adult internet usage. To quote the source:

The Media Audit reports today that the percentage of adults who spend at least an hour a day on the Internet is significantly greater than the percentage of adults who spend an hour a day with the print edition of a daily newspaper (in 85 U.S. metro markets). In other words, among adults, there are more “heavy users” (and no, we don’t mean in need of dieting) of the Internet than of newspapers. Media Audit figures cite growth of heavy online users from 24.6 percent of the adult population in 2002 to 26.2 percent in 2003; for newspapers, heavy users were 19.8 percent in 2002 and dropped to 19.6 percent in 2003. Heavy users of TV were 20.4 percent in 2002 and 20.6 percent in 2003.

Source: Poynter Online

Next thing you know, people will expect it to actually improve their lives!

When I initially heard that Apple was making a mini iPod I was most curious as to why they would bother to do this. Apple is the clear leader at this moment in the portable digital music arena. It seemed that the only thing a smaller, sleaker, cheaper product could really offer would be competition for its bigger brother. So why bother?

The rumors predicted that the device would be priced near $100 dollars and that it would offer a significantly smaller amount of memory, possibly using a flash memory device to power the new device. Steve Job naturally said there were no plans to release a smaller version of the iPod and that they were not working on any type of Flash memory device.

So MacWorld has come and gone, and naturally, that liar :) came out with a miniPod. Of course, it seems that it’s probably one of the least impressive releases in my opinion. I know I am not alone. Alex Salkever has written a quick writeup about just how unspectacular it is. Here he states:

Macheads witnessed a Cube moment the other day at MacWorld San Francisco when Jobs trotted out the new iPod mini as a highlight of his much anticipated keynote speech.

…

Even Jobs’s Jedi-esque powers of reality dispersion can’t alter the unfavorable math behind Apple’s new offering. Here are the hard numbers. The new miniPod will cost $249. That’s about $100 more than the rumor sites had posited. It will offer 4 gigabytes of capacity on its hard drive. By comparison, the entry-level iPod now costs $299 and has 15 gigabytes of disk space. The miniPod’s cost per gigabyte is $62.50. In the entry-level iPod, it’s about $20.

So Apple is asking customers to pay three times as much per gigabyte. I have one word for that. Ouch.

Source: Business Week

So what’s the reasoning for this post? Well I’m always taken aback somewhat by the sheer fanatacism that Apple diehards have for their hardware. Despite the many rumblings and grumblings related to this somewhat disappointing new device, or even the addition of charges previously trumpeted as free it seems that the Apple fans still end up buying this stuff.

I certainly don’t mean to pass judgement, but I’m very curious what makes people so religious about things. Is it marketing? Is it charm and charisma? Who knows.

This is a few days old, but I think still newsworthy. Since the gaming industry is left to regulate itself using a very broad ratings system, the content of these games unfortunately does not directly correlate to the grading on the box. Often enough, the game makers turn to good old-fashioned violence to win the hearts and minds of our teens. Heck, in that regard, I’m not sure it’s possible for them to design in “too much” carnage.

So it seems the makers of good old GTA (Grand Theft Auto for those not in the know) — Rockstar Games — decided to rely on some pretty racy comments to drive the game’s objective.

Just came across this article about a law suit filed against Rockstar Games Inc, makers of Grand Theft Auto. Here’s what the suit is about:

Haitian civil rights groups filed the lawsuit because the game instructs players to “kill the Haitians” and awards points for each kill.

…

The lawsuit takes on heavyweights in the video game industry, including Rockstar Games, its parent company Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., Sony Computer Entertainment, the Microsoft Corp., and retailers Target, Wal-Mart and Best Buy.

Source: CNN

I’m especially interested in this as it clearly is a form of the beloved Social Virus I’ll discuss shortly. For so long, there has been the ongoing debate of whether exposure to “fake” violence, as served by Hollywood and the Entertainment industries, really encourages youths to behave and harbor more violent tendencies. Nature vs. nurture, just not the biological kind.

So if something is a persistently evidenced fact in an area, not that I am agreeing or disagreeing with the statements in the game AND we’re able to make our own decisions regardless of those ideas put before us (I mean how many people REALLY are paying attention to the content instead of just beating each other up and shooting one another), how damaging is this in reality?

I came across this article and was thinking how much it sounded like the old game Risk. The soldiers are even colored blue (good) and red (evil).

This is all very hazy and seems to remind me of the old Terminator movies at the same time. These new military vehicles are like armored humans and able to not only serve tactically but also to flag and field data that is harvested to a central server. Quite interesting indeed:

“At the core of it is a soldier that imagines what must be done, thinks through how to get it done, then gets it done. The technology is just an enabler,” said Col. James Hickey, the 1st Brigade’s commander.

The civilian specialists concede this enabler doesn’t come cheap, but they are reluctant to talk about the technology’s price tag.

“How much does the equipment cost? This is equipment that will save soldiers’ lives,” Jones said.

“If a soldier is attacked, other units can find him with this equipment. It is worth it that soldier have the best equipment [they] can have.”

Source: CNN

Guess the main question now is, who’s handling your joystick?”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3320515.stm