Hm; This whole "arrogance" thing going around deserves response.
Let's say we're in a bus on a cold, rainy day. People are shuttering the windows up.
An ignorant person says, "You catch the cold because you're in the cold. That's why it's called a cold. It's common sense."
A scientist says, "No! Open the windows! Colds are ''viruses.'' You only catch them from getting infected by the virus. When it's cold, people close the windows and huddle together indoors. They breath the same air as one another, and infect each other with the virus. So, open the windows, and wear a sweater! You're going to make us all sick!"
"You're just an arrogant scientist, think you know everything!"
You're saying that scientists are wrongly casting people as incapable of thinking, because they know some things.
But it seems to me that you (and your community) are wrongly casting scientists as arrogant (a personality trait.)
When in fact what is being said can also be explained as: These people know things that others don't, and they see how they are harming themselves and each other out of their ignorance. And it's not a pretty sight.
What is the difference in appearance, between someone who is watching people harm themselves (and trying to teach them otherwise,) and someone who is arrogant?
Is it reasonable to suspect that someone might get frustrated, watching uninformed people insist on beating themselves up by their ignorance?
Your post seems frustrated. Might I venture to say that it even appears to be arrogant? Pretentious, even?
Sure, Microsoft does good. But you can't punch someone in the head, then hand them $10, and say: "Hey! Why are you looking at me so strange? I gave you $10; I did good."
I don't know that it's so much that we want to talk to computers, as much as it is that we want to talk with people, through computers. That is, sending people textual messages through the audio interface. Text is much less obtrusive, scannable, etc., etc.,. Sending SMS by voice will be very useful.
That said, we'll still want to talk with computers. You're thinking of a desktop computer, where you've got a keyboard in front of you. In those cases, yeah: Go with the keyboard.
The thing is, there are a zillion places where we want to use computers, where we can't, because we're tethered by the keyboard.
For instance, if you're one of the guys working at an auto repair factory, and you've got a visor that you use to see your schematics, fishing around for the keyboard when you've got your hands on the wrench is a real problem. Much better to just say: "Pull up the engine specs for (car model here.)" It frees up your manipulators.
Face it: We're fighting a battle, and we see signs of winning! What's not to be excited about?
Don't be shocked that we're happy and cheering!:) This isn't the place people go to for well reasoned arguments. They exist; They're just not here. This is where we cheer, talk, and give off-the-cuff strategy, ideas, encouragement.
I don't know of any good effort that succeeds without room for clapping & celebration over small victories.
One day, we'll be automatically generating 3D textured models by just waving our mobiles around the objects. Already in Japan, they're OCR'ing text off printed pages with their mobiles.
There are plenty of things to do with computation in mobiles...
I think MySQL reasons that it relies on the goodwill of the general FL/OSS public. Non-experts might not notice if MySQL worked to keep mum, but influentials would notice the absence.
Even humans, who have evolved in a fully concurrent environment, are much more productive when they're NOT interrupted.
Oh, for sure.
Just: Some times, the explicit activity that we're trying to be productive at is holding a conversation.
It's not the end of live communication.
I have read Accelerando. Nothing in it detracts from this concept, that people have live communications with one another. In the post-human future, the definition of "live communication with full attention" changes and gets more complicated, but the basic principle is still there, and it surely doesn't defy the idea that people, present day, find value in live communication with each other.
If it's annoying that your boss plays primate games with you by commanding your attention, and doesn't simply email you, that's one thing. But to completely deny the utility of live conversation for the next few decades, is quite another.
The people that I program with, we get together every once in a while. We do it to discuss things interactively. Getting clarification where it is needed, and telling people "wait, you're going too long on this thing, I already get it," is an enormous time saver. The easiest way to do it is to meet in person. We can't quite do that, so we meet in IRC. But it is painful in IRC. If I'm looking at a web page, I have to say, "I'm looking at X web page, will you look at it to?" "Okay." "Now, do you see the part where it says Foo?" "No,..." "Down by the bottom..."
In Second Life, people can see your head turn, and get a good concept of what you're looking at. In IRC, there is no equivalent. A superior environment will make this possible and fluid and transparent. It has the possibility of being better than, more transparent than, material interaction. I think it can be that way within 15 years.
The reason why we can communicate more ideas per unit time in a live communication setting, is because we make errors when we simulate another person's mind in our head. We think that they didn't understand X, and spend more time on explaining it, when a shorter explanation would have been done fine. And we think that they would understand Y, and spend a brief moment refering to it, when in fact they don't know the basis of Y, and need some more elaboration on it. There are other reasons as well; I don't know how much energy I need to work into preparing the message for you, I think this should be enough. If I'm wrong, you'll need to send a message to me requesting clarifications, and I'll need to type to you a response.
I strongly believe that, if we were talking live, in person, this whole exchange between us would take less than 15 minutes; We would very quickly unconsciously communicate (through facial expression, gesture, and posture) "I don't need this" when we already get a point. When we need elaboration on something, we just ask. Sincerely, I tell you- this conversation would have been much more efficient, had it been a live exchange.
Let's suppose that, as I was typing this, you happened to arrive to the Slashdot. It might say at the top of the page, "You have 1 message in progress!" That would mean that I am responding to you. Let's suppose now that you had a moment, and went in to see me writing this. You see me typing away.
"Ah, Lion, I already know this stuff," you think to yourself.
While I'm writing, I see you enter the area: A small icon blinks on at the side of the page. You're here!
"Oh, hey, how you doing? What do you think?"
"Well, I already understand this idea; What I meant to say is--..."
And what would have been a very lengthy back-and-forth is cut down to a very short conversation.
Surely, there is efficiency in live communication, no?
(my apologies for making the previous post too long)
The point to them being "web applications" is not that this allows them to be integrated, but that it allows them to be used by all participants without them having to download, install, and configure software.
OK, yes. But, I think if you're making a really big and complex environment, it can be easier to just say, "Screw it," and make your own client system. I mean: MMORPGs aren't written on top of the web, Second Life isn't written on top of the web; I don't see why we should expect a super-online-collaboration-environment to be written on top of the web, either.
The closest thing to a solution I have ever seen is to restrict chat to one channel.
Exactly. This is exactly why I believe that it is so important to have a super-integrated-single-medium, rather than trying to cobble together the super-environment out of lots and lots of pieces of medium implemented on different websites.
This is exactly the reason why.
But putting all those things into one single AJAX web-app is going to be too much; It's going to be too complicated for even a large team (such as Google!) to write. For at least the next 10 years, it'll just be too hard to manufacture. To put all the code into one single AJAX environment. Just pragmatically- you're not going to be able to pull it off.
That's why I believe so strongly that we're going to see super-mediums develop in special clients. Yes, it's going to suck that they aren't as cross-platform as the web browser. But, it'll happen anyways. Because it's going to be cheaper to do it this way, and people really want to do this. People ''love'' bandwidth. (Not the bit kind; I mean the human-communication kind.)
As for the rest, I don't need to read it. Greg Egan, Cory Docterow, Charley Stross, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, these people have done a much better job of presenting that argument... and I'm way ahead of you there.
This is where I get confused. What argument do you mean? I've read all of those guys. Do you mean trans-humanism in general? Or do you mean the mechanics of some particular user interface issue that I'm missing?
(I want to note- Cory Doctorow liked Second Life. He thought it was a good idea, he thought it was cool. He didn't say, "Nah, this is dumb. It should be an AJAX app.")
What I'm talking about is a Second Life that's more focused towards developers.
I wrote two pages about my dreams for it, and why we would want such a thing:
If you're way ahead of me, I want to hear about it. If my vision is behind the times, I want to know the up-to-date version.
If you're going to argue thought that the web isn't going to be "live," if you're arguing that those "live web" ideas are dumb, then (A) I'm going to disagree with you, (B) I'm going to ask you where those authors made the argument that the web won't be live. Because I've read them, and I think that they would all agree with my vision. Not the particulars, mind you- I'm sure I'm wrong on details. But I think the general idea of how things will go? I think it's right on. Much more so than what most people imagine of the future web ("faster web pages! better graphics!"), at the very least. But maybe I am wrong. Maybe I just didn't read something, in which case: I'd like to see it. Those authors are very persuasive to me, and if they say and argue something, I think it will make more sense to me.
Okay; I think I've got a clearer understanding of how to say what I mean to say.
Let's differentiate between building a program on a platform (such as the web,) and integrating programs with protocols.
Wiki builds a program on a platform. That platform is "the web."
By "the web," I take it here to mean the sum of: HTTP, HTML, Javascript, and web browsers. Soon this will include SVG as well.
Many programs run on the platform of the web. So wiki is a program, building on a platform. There are other programs running on the platform of the web. For instance, there is Kuro5hin. There are community bulletin boards / forums. There are blogs. There is the wikipedia.
Not all of our programs that are Internet technologies run on the web. For instance: IRC, Skype, Jabber, Second Life, MMORPG's. It's important to note that many of these are very successful, even though they don't run on the web platform.
(The platform behind all the platforms, of course, is TCP/IP. Just to get clear on language.)
Now, there's this other class of thing, which is integrations between programs. This happens by way of some sort of protocol.
The most successful and well known example today is RSS. It is so successful, it is almost part of the platform. That is, first it was some wire that was drawn up by hand between programs. Then lots of people started building it into their software. If this continues, (and it will,) it will effectively be part of the platform. No longer just "HTTP+Javascript+DHTML+SVG+whatever," it will have a "+RSS" in there as well. "HTTP+Javascript+DHTML+SVG+RSS+whatever."
This is an integration between programs that grew and grew and grew until it became part of the base platform between them all.
The platform makes integrations between programs possible. The capabilities and expectations of the platform determine the integrations possible (and normal) between programs. For example, the hyperlink is common to just about everything building on the web platform. The hyperlink is near-universally respected. With RSS gaining more and more ground, it too is becoming near-universally provided & respected.
Now, after the success of RSS, many people thought, "A-hah! We know how to extend the Internet platform! We can do it from the edge of the network!" That is, they thought (and I was one of them) that the growth of the Internet would accelerate, because they'd be able to implement infrastructure from the edge of the network, and as people saw how cool it was, it would gravitate to the center, be built into new tools, etc., etc.,.
The only problem is, it didn't happen. Despite valient efforts, it became clear that people were not interested in integrating new foreign ideas into their program. "FOAF? What's that? Why do I care? Why should I bother?" There are many great ideas people have had, that would do great things, if they were implemented. But there's something about the situation, such that people simply don't do it. Even sympathetic people who would like to, somehow don't get around to doing it. I don't fully understand it yet, but there's something about the way things are set up, such that this approach is not working.
But it's clear that there's a place where new infrastructure / integration ideas is working -- that's in new platforms. In new programs featuring fully integrated environments.
It does not matter if it's built on top of the web platform, or not! Second Life does great, even though it's working off-web. The same can be said for Skype, and the same can be said even for IRC, should the complaint be that the other two obviously can't be done on today's web. Going the other way, Kuro5hin is it's own, integrated platform, with very few connections with the outside environment (except those afforded by the web platform, such as hyperlinking,) even though it's on the web.
I don't have the time to give you the full response you deserve; I'm at work in a crunch time right know.
I just wanted to tell you, very briefly:
Which is why I can't understand why you're referring to a shared whiteboard application that happens to be written using DHTML and Java and maybe SVG as a "side system".
No; Those aren't side-systems-- those are core infrastructure. (SVG will be, shortly, when Firefox 1.5 releases, and when the next IE comes out.)
I just recently wrote up (in the bus) and posted (here at work) to CW: Platforms First, which may explain my perspective better.
By a "side system," I don't mean "something running on a platform I don't approve of." Rather, I mean a system that is attached to some other system, that hasn't hit mainstream use within that system. So, for example, my Local Names system, or any other infrastructure projects that people are doing, that hasn't quite made mainstream use.
RSS began as a side-system, and is now entering mainstream use, becoming part of the system.
As for how will the avatar system work: I think that when you don't feel like talking with others, but you don't mind people seeing you, you'll have it configured that way. Whatever most people are comfortable with, we'll see. I suspect that initially, most people will want privacy. But with time, people will loosen up, and permit un-interrupted visibility, except for a white list (or something like that) culled from people you talk with a lot.
When you're looking at a page, you would see little icons on the side representing other people who are looking at the document at the same time as you, and there will be something that you can click on to see the social life of the page. That is, something where you can see the most recent visitors, where they departed to, which links they clicked. If there are several people online at the time, looking at the page at the very moment, you may see their icons too.
Then you can zoom in on one of the people. You could see where their multiple selves are, what the other pages they're looking at are. You could see where they've been, as well. You could see their group affinities. If they are engaged in a live conversation, you would see a snippet of that conversation. Perhaps you could see their desktop as well. It would be a sort of "snapshot profile" of a person. And then you could drop a note for them to see later, in their periphery.
Right now, messages are all "in your face." But I think we'll have a "periphery." Messages will show up briefly in the periphery, if they're from trusted people. (A web of trust system behind it.)
You don't have to "juggle" your avatars, any more than you have to juggle web pages. Your icon just automatically shows up in other people's browsers. You could opt not to be visible. You could opt to be visible to just people in your cliques.
Well, this is the vision, at least. I think in the next 5 years, someone will implement a primitive version of this. That will inspire a family of things like this. Then 5 years after that, someone will implement a much better version, and that may be the one that lots of people use. 5 years after that, there will be a public & free version.
Or, maybe, as you note- it won't happen. We never know, really. But I think this is something we should look for and work towards.
I think it's clear that we can't implement this on top of web+AJAX. Or if we can, it would take 35 years to do so.
The shared editor and the shared drawing board and the special shared web browsing window are the problem. None of those exist. Where you need one, you bring it up in a web browser, copy the link, and *that* link is all you have to give someone to show them what you're looking at and (if what you're looking at is a collaborative tool) let them collaborate.
Right, but I'm saying-- those programs won't communicate between one another. You're not going to copy and paste a drawing into another window. And I'm saying people who haven't been following the discussion won't have clicked on the link, and will be confused when they get back. They'll have to backtrack through logs (if they have them, assuming 2 hops haven't been made) and they'll have to manually reconstruct the environment. And I'm saying that it distracts from the conversation. It's distracting enough to change mediums psychologically; Forcing people to talk URL to one another is even more so on top of that.
These sorts of things, +high quality 3D (like people will expect!), are not coming in the tools coming down the pipe.
Implementing this as some kind of Javascript-based tool, and you'll get somewhere, without creating another application that I have to use to interact with these "special" people.
I'm saying: I don't think all these side-systems are going to work. They're not going to integrate. Somebody or some group in the next 10 years is going to make some system that does integrate all these systems into one cohesive whole, and it's going to work great, and everyone's going to want to build on it.
We already have some of these systems, let me list them:
Web browsers.
IRC
The familiar notion of the desktop.
These are all platforms. They all did something that the existing platforms didn't cover well enough. Theoretically, IRC could happen entirely over the web. Theoretically. Only some people actually do it that way, though. Freenode runs entirely over an IRC server, and most people run IRC clients to use it.
The web is not the end of all things, whatever the REST people would have you believe. There will be new platforms. Special platforms, even, just like the web was originally. Remember having to download web browsers?
This is why we're not communicating. I keep saying "this is how you can do something to make what you want happen", and you keep hearing "we don't have to make anything new". While you're the one who;s sitting there refusing to try and actually do something rather than fantasising about this super cyberspace of the future.
Stop right there. I've been working for more than a year in my free time on Local Names. It's been through three specifications for the namespace description now. (Unfortunately, I can't show it to you right now, my server OS died halfway through an update. I'm switching it to FreeBSD 5.4 right now; Next up is to install the Apache port, and restore the 20 wiki I was running on there before, and then the Local Names pages.)
What is it? It's a general format for establishing short-name to URL bindings, and for linking namespaces to other namespaces, and defaulting between them. Think of services that bind friendly names to IOR's, except that they bind to URLs. Think of how in wiki, short names are made for long URLs, and you can connect with namespaces on other wiki. Very abstract, I know, and you can forget all about it.
Because I'm basically just saying: I do work on stuff, and I don't appreciate your saying that I don't. I've released software, and other people have built on it. Not many. The work isn't really all that impressive. But you know what? I'm working on stuff. And even though it's not the most impressive thing in the world, I don't appreciate being treated as someone who just talks about stuff, and doesn't do work. Because I do.
I strive to make software that people will want to use, that will help us all do cool things together. Just because I don't always succeed, doesn't mean that I'm not striving, and doesn't mean that I will succeed one day.
The things I talked about were not just "cyber-fantasy." We're going to see those things happen. If not just those things, we're going to see things like those things happen. The details are probably wrong, but we'll get something like it. That's the sort of stuff we should be thinking about. There's a tendency amongst people to think that the future will be just like it is now, just "faster." But it's not. It's going to be qualitatively different than it is now. And we need to stretch our imaginations out into those different worlds, to envision those different things. It's actually important. Frankly, I don't see a whole lot of people doing it. Douglass Engelbart envisions Liquid Information. There are the HeadMap people. There are people envisioning stuff, because it's the necessary predecessor to implementing the vision.
You already know this, you've seen it play out. I don't need to lecture you on this.
You know, this conversation is really dumb. It's some kind of warped idea pissing match, and I'm not interested in participating anymore.
I think the idea of holding back a text until it's done is interesting and good. I've seen it before. I'm not convinced that I wouldn't like to see text as it's being written, or at least to have the option to see it as it's written.
I'll tell you why.
One day, I was writing a post for the communitywiki.A friend of mine sent me a Skype message; He was just curious about what I was up to, what I was thinking about, how I was doing. I texted back to him: "Well, actually, I'm working on a post you might be interest in." We agreed to open up a gobby session, and I copied and pasted my text into it. I continued writing my post, him looking over my shoulder.
I wrote something poorly, and he asked a question about it: "What do you mean by xyz?" He and I talked a bit in Skype IM, and then I realized the text was unclear. We talked about how to fix it, and then put the fix in place.
While I worked on the text below, I noticed that every now and then, he'd fix a spelling error he'd noticed. He'd also point an arrow and say, "What is this?" or "I don't think I agree here..." Things like that.
It was a good interaction. The classical problem with writing is that you can't get your audiences response to the writing in real time. This problem is now solved. It is rare in the material world that we are physically present with people who will be reading it at the same time. In the online world, this is actually easier to do; Place in the world doesn't matter so much.
There were some problems with the interaction though: It took entirely too long to negotiate gobby to make this a regular thing.
In most of our IRC meetings, we'd like to keep some schematic notes, and a record of the meeting. This requires that we negotiate a transfer to using a whiteboarding app (such as the Coccinella on the Jabber networks,) or to using gobby. There are problems such as so-and-so doesn't have Foo installed, or Bar installed, or whatever. And then there's the time it takes to get a group of people on the same page. Then there's the problem that the people who aren't around when we negotiate a transfer are "abandoned" - when we're talking in gobby, the folk in #onebigsoup on IRC don't see our words.
This is a problem because most of the time, the way we manage to get together and talk together is that 2 people happen to be around and make a conversation, and then later the other members notice that there is activity on the channel, and then tune in to see if they are interested. (I have a general strategy for improving with this kind of conversational tinderwood, I call it "OverHear." If you should happen to think it's a stupid idea, please don't let me know.)
Anyways- when we go into gobby, the "conversational tinderwood" is gone. The other members of the forum would be interested in what was going on, but they simply don't know about it, because they didn't happen to be there when the conversation was happening.
Now, it is of course possible to establish bridges, connectors, link-ups between forums. But in my experience they tend to be "hacky," made available pretty late; For some reason, the bridges just don't seem to work very well. This feeds into my newly revived "platformist" approach (rather than "side-system" approach) to the development of communication systems. The ability to generically extend a given system is always a good thing, but there are things that a given platform is just genuinely not good at. It reaches a fundamental limit, a breaking point. And I think that the world wide web as a platform is sort of reaching that platau point. I can forsee that the webapps on the world wide web are going to continue to grow in capabilities and strenghts. But I think th
It'll do more than that. It'll have to give you a *hold button* for the people around you. And they won't even know they're on hold. Because we're using technology to make something BETTER THAN reality, not just duping it.
Being able to read what people speak isn't duplicating reality.
Not yet, at least; Not until augmented reality.
I prefer my anime subbed, not dubbed, thanks.
Yep-- because you like to (A) read the text, and (B) hear the original artist's voice.
Oh, wait-- I forgot-- you're that deaf guy who turns the music and voices off when you watch anime!
We're going to be using speech in the future to talk, and we're going to read it off the screen.
I'll grant that the engine may wait for a person to finish a sentance before writing it out.
In sims where hearing a persons voice is a part of the fantasy (you do watch movies, right? You don't entirely read books, no?) we'll synth a voice. When it's important to us to actually hear another person's voice, we may use live voice, or a synth voice.
No: I disagree with you that they just add "who's on" features "just because they can." They do it because people like to know who else is around, and people like being with other people, and people like interacting with other people. People actually do use the IM systems built into community websites. In a lot of communities, people are interested in the people there, and they'd be tickled pink if they could actually transparently communicate in real-time. Not all would do it all the time, but many people would do it some of the time. If you are one of the few who doesn't like to talk real-time, ever, you can just opt out.
Yeah-yeah-yeah, I know the audioblogging manifesto. I teach it to people myself. But people have a real desire to hear voice, too. I think you're over-compensating.
Sorry for jumping on you like that; I'm just a little angry at having been so thoroughly misunderstood.
AHEM:
There are times in the universe when people want to interact live.
As it is, live interaction over the Internet sucks.
There is no good general-purpose interactive platform right now.
Croquet, Second Life-- these are neat places to make things and meet people, but you can't perform a business meeting there, you can't work on code together there, etc., etc.,.
Now, there is a loooonng continuum between "completely live interaction and expectations," and "a web where people send messages in bottles to one another over vast distances in time." That continuum is very long, and it's not at all clear where people will draw lines. Most likely, I believe, software will develop to cover and mediate the whole range of expressions.
Right now, due to the technology, it's almost entirely in the "sending messages in a bottle."
Now, if you believe people are inattentive and have some sort of mindset that says people need to concentrate, meditate, reflect more, not talk live, live slow, etc., etc., - whatever's going on in your personal life or that you observe going on in the social world, fine, fine, fine. I'm not going to bother arguing or talking with you about it right now.
If you're a software developer looking at the world of "what does technology enable, and not enable," then you're who I'm talking with. And surely you will agree: There's no good basically free technology for working live on code with others, having meetings over a share whiteboard, meeting other people who happen to be in the same space with you, etc., etc.,.
As evidence of demand for this stuff, I point you to all the bulletin board systems that tell you who else is online right now. As evidence for the demand for FOAF type stuff, I point you to the explosion of activity there, and I point you to Slashdot's own friend/foe system. If you want to see Wikipedia of the future, I point you to #wikipedia.
People want and need live interaction. We have not been giving it to them.
Technologists have been thinking AJAX is the way to enable this stuff, and making side systems to the web.
I used to be a strong proponent of the approach as well, but just recently I'm having second thoughts. Second Life can be humbling, and when I look ahead into the future, I realize just how archaic our web experience is right now, and how unsustainable the technical platform is. If you're not a web developer, I don't know how useful my post is for you. It's clearly not communicating to people, since they have (wrongly) imagined I think we're all going to be spending all day waiting for people to finish their blog entries.
Now again: If you're in the "slow down" "stop making technology" crowd, we can't have a conversation. If you're in the "computers = distraction = evil / info-overload worries" crowd, then let me say that the problem isn't the amount of communication that's the problem, (we have a deficit in successful communications, actually,) the problem is that the management of communications and the mediation of spaces is the problem.
In material life, we have all these mechanisms for communicating and realizing what kinds of loads people have and are carrying. We can just look at a person, and infer all this information, and make judgements, totally unconsciously. Without all the paralanguage, we can't do much.
Communicating paralanguage is an increase in communication. Just because it's not words, doesn't mean it's not communication. Back again to "the problem is organizing communications, not the amount of communication." That's where we get wikipedia and social bookmarking and all these things. Again, it's organizing communication,
1. There must have been hundreds of collaborative tools that did things like this over the past 25 years, and the edit/save/checking method has proven infinitely superior. Even when people are standing in the same room with a whiteboard, you get *one person* doing a bunch of work on it, then talking about it, then stepping back to let someone else do it. I won't say there' are NO people who can pay attention to more than one thing at once, but it's rare.
Actualy, that's not true. We do shared meeting notes collection in gobby and IRC, and we ain't ''never'' going back.
So "Erm" yourself.
2. If you wanted to do this, you could do it right now with Javascript.
Un-hunh. Except, only one person's done it so far. You have to actually write software. It's not enough to say, "It can be done."
And besides, you're missing one of the main points of my post: All this stuff has to work together. And nobody's done that yet. "All this stuff" = "all these features."
You're in IRC, and you want to have a shared whiteboarding session? Oh, now we have to spend 5 minutes starting up programs, negotiating a channel, telling how to download if someone doesn't have it, etc., etc.,.
I don't give a damn it's already been done. I've already seen it. I've even written one myself. Who cares.
So go "Erm" yourself.
One of the big advantages of the near-but-not-quite real-time nature of computer communication is that it defers interruptions. You don't need to know when to interrupt someone, because you can't interrupt someone... you can *queue* a request for their attention, and they don't have to feel rushed, and you don't have to pay the computer attention waiting for them to be ready.
I'm already quite aware of that.
I'm talking about for live participation, live interaction. People (A) want and (B) need it. And right now, it's just not up to spec.
When we're doing live interaction, it sucks hard-core. You're constantly manipulating technology.
You're imagining (assuming, really,) that I think people want to be, must be, constantly distracted. What you're missing is that I think people should be able to turn on/off privacy, to be able to defer interaction, to be able to say "this is what I'm doing right now, don't bug me if it's not important." There will be a mixture of human and mechanical systems to ensure people aren't derailed from their path.
What suxors right now is that you can't do real-time visibility stuff when you want it. You just can't. The technology is just simply not there.
Well, we're changing that. Because we're tired of traveling hundreds of miles for a conference.
And besides, we're tired of the sedentariness of the web. It's like that halo-sim-movie thing, where the guys are talking about what a party is like in real life, vs. a party on the web. "Uh... neat party... there's like... nobody here." The web is just text, text, text, deferred text. WEll, it's not going to be like that anymore.
If you want to be one of the voyeurs, be my guest. But I think you'll want to interact with the people who are interested in the same things you're interested in. Just a bet.
I think Flock's going to fail, but I also think that extending Firefox is not able to scale to the kinds of things people will want from the Internet/Web. It'll be able to do it a little, but not as an integrated package. There's going to have to be a new platform at some point.
Perhaps it's not worded plainly enough: Interaction on the "web" will be live, sort of like being in a MUD or VR or MMORPG.
Now, if you don't want to be on the web that way, fine. But I'm betting you will.
Nobody goes to a disco wearing an invisibility suit, and nobody wants to go to a disco in an invisibility suit.
Now, the particulars of my post are for people who know the technologies I'm talking about, and understand the development hurdles. If that's not you, fine.
For you, just understand: There's going to be a live web in the future, and you're going to see what people are doing, in real time, whether that's writing, browsing, talking, whatever. Real-time.
No, actually, I know about Croquet. And I've run Squeak.
My memory tells me though, you can't work on source-code in real-time with others on Croquet, though. They don't have a gobby, they don't have a real-time voice system. They don't have all these things that people need.
It's a great system though, and it's great inspiration for the kinds of things we will do in the future.
BTW, the present existance of a thing doesn't mean we've entered a "new world" yet. I'll call it the "new world" when most everybody I know, and hoards I don't, are involved in that environment. The world wide web is a "new world" in this respect, compared to the past.
Earnestly, I don't understand the biting criticism to my post. I think it's just applied misanthropy. i.e.: "Oh God, bloggers are the sux0rs." What they don't realize is that they themselves are bloggers, whether they do it online, or whether they do it offline by just posting updates to their friends. In which case it's worse than general mis-anthropy, it's just general self-hatred. Not a good thing.
I think you (and others) have the wrong idea about why people are going to do this, and how they are going to use it.
People are going to use this to collaborate on texts together.
Popular wikipedia pages will be perpetually live. In place of "saves," there will be "checkpoints" in the live stream. People will talk over pages in voice, and then collaborate on the actual text, in real-time.
That will extend to blogs as well.
If you go in a room, you know whether to interrupt or not, based on being able to see what the person is doing. You can't do that on the web right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm; This whole "arrogance" thing going around deserves response.
Let's say we're in a bus on a cold, rainy day. People are shuttering the windows up.
An ignorant person says, "You catch the cold because you're in the cold. That's why it's called a cold. It's common sense."
A scientist says, "No! Open the windows! Colds are ''viruses.'' You only catch them from getting infected by the virus. When it's cold, people close the windows and huddle together indoors. They breath the same air as one another, and infect each other with the virus. So, open the windows, and wear a sweater! You're going to make us all sick!"
"You're just an arrogant scientist, think you know everything!"
You're saying that scientists are wrongly casting people as incapable of thinking, because they know some things.
But it seems to me that you (and your community) are wrongly casting scientists as arrogant (a personality trait.)
When in fact what is being said can also be explained as: These people know things that others don't, and they see how they are harming themselves and each other out of their ignorance. And it's not a pretty sight.
What is the difference in appearance, between someone who is watching people harm themselves (and trying to teach them otherwise,) and someone who is arrogant?
Is it reasonable to suspect that someone might get frustrated, watching uninformed people insist on beating themselves up by their ignorance?
Your post seems frustrated. Might I venture to say that it even appears to be arrogant? Pretentious, even?
no, No, NO!
:)
No punching people in the head!
But if you give money, and you act repententant, you can be restored to community grace.
Sure, Microsoft does good. But you can't punch someone in the head, then hand them $10, and say: "Hey! Why are you looking at me so strange? I gave you $10; I did good."
1,443?
1,443 is less than 2048 (= 2**11th)
11 Moores = 22 years: x1 human brain.
22 Moores = 44 years: x2048 human brains.
33 Moores = 66 years: x4194304 human brains.
44 Moores = 88 years: x8589934592 human brains.
I don't know that it's so much that we want to talk to computers, as much as it is that we want to talk with people, through computers. That is, sending people textual messages through the audio interface. Text is much less obtrusive, scannable, etc., etc.,. Sending SMS by voice will be very useful.
That said, we'll still want to talk with computers. You're thinking of a desktop computer, where you've got a keyboard in front of you. In those cases, yeah: Go with the keyboard.
The thing is, there are a zillion places where we want to use computers, where we can't, because we're tethered by the keyboard.
For instance, if you're one of the guys working at an auto repair factory, and you've got a visor that you use to see your schematics, fishing around for the keyboard when you've got your hands on the wrench is a real problem. Much better to just say: "Pull up the engine specs for (car model here.)" It frees up your manipulators.
ROCK ON, PORTLAND!
Face it: We're fighting a battle, and we see signs of winning! What's not to be excited about?
Don't be shocked that we're happy and cheering!
I don't know of any good effort that succeeds without room for clapping & celebration over small victories.
One day, we'll be automatically generating 3D textured models by just waving our mobiles around the objects. Already in Japan, they're OCR'ing text off printed pages with their mobiles.
There are plenty of things to do with computation in mobiles...
I think MySQL reasons that it relies on the goodwill of the general FL/OSS public. Non-experts might not notice if MySQL worked to keep mum, but influentials would notice the absence.
Well, I think we've exchanged enough ideas.
I don't yet agree with many things you've said, but there's enough to chew on, and as I think through these ideas, my thoughts may change.
Thank you for your time and thoughts.
Even humans, who have evolved in a fully concurrent environment, are much more productive when they're NOT interrupted.
Oh, for sure.
Just: Some times, the explicit activity that we're trying to be productive at is holding a conversation.
It's not the end of live communication.
I have read Accelerando. Nothing in it detracts from this concept, that people have live communications with one another. In the post-human future, the definition of "live communication with full attention" changes and gets more complicated, but the basic principle is still there, and it surely doesn't defy the idea that people, present day, find value in live communication with each other.
If it's annoying that your boss plays primate games with you by commanding your attention, and doesn't simply email you, that's one thing. But to completely deny the utility of live conversation for the next few decades, is quite another.
The people that I program with, we get together every once in a while. We do it to discuss things interactively. Getting clarification where it is needed, and telling people "wait, you're going too long on this thing, I already get it," is an enormous time saver. The easiest way to do it is to meet in person. We can't quite do that, so we meet in IRC. But it is painful in IRC. If I'm looking at a web page, I have to say, "I'm looking at X web page, will you look at it to?" "Okay." "Now, do you see the part where it says Foo?" "No,..." "Down by the bottom..."
In Second Life, people can see your head turn, and get a good concept of what you're looking at. In IRC, there is no equivalent. A superior environment will make this possible and fluid and transparent. It has the possibility of being better than, more transparent than, material interaction. I think it can be that way within 15 years.
The reason why we can communicate more ideas per unit time in a live communication setting, is because we make errors when we simulate another person's mind in our head. We think that they didn't understand X, and spend more time on explaining it, when a shorter explanation would have been done fine. And we think that they would understand Y, and spend a brief moment refering to it, when in fact they don't know the basis of Y, and need some more elaboration on it. There are other reasons as well; I don't know how much energy I need to work into preparing the message for you, I think this should be enough. If I'm wrong, you'll need to send a message to me requesting clarifications, and I'll need to type to you a response.
I strongly believe that, if we were talking live, in person, this whole exchange between us would take less than 15 minutes; We would very quickly unconsciously communicate (through facial expression, gesture, and posture) "I don't need this" when we already get a point. When we need elaboration on something, we just ask. Sincerely, I tell you- this conversation would have been much more efficient, had it been a live exchange.
Let's suppose that, as I was typing this, you happened to arrive to the Slashdot. It might say at the top of the page, "You have 1 message in progress!" That would mean that I am responding to you. Let's suppose now that you had a moment, and went in to see me writing this. You see me typing away.
"Ah, Lion, I already know this stuff," you think to yourself.
While I'm writing, I see you enter the area: A small icon blinks on at the side of the page. You're here!
"Oh, hey, how you doing? What do you think?"
"Well, I already understand this idea; What I meant to say is--..."
And what would have been a very lengthy back-and-forth is cut down to a very short conversation.
Surely, there is efficiency in live communication, no?
The point to them being "web applications" is not that this allows them to be integrated, but that it allows them to be used by all participants without them having to download, install, and configure software.
OK, yes. But, I think if you're making a really big and complex environment, it can be easier to just say, "Screw it," and make your own client system. I mean: MMORPGs aren't written on top of the web, Second Life isn't written on top of the web; I don't see why we should expect a super-online-collaboration-environment to be written on top of the web, either.
The closest thing to a solution I have ever seen is to restrict chat to one channel.
Exactly. This is exactly why I believe that it is so important to have a super-integrated-single-medium, rather than trying to cobble together the super-environment out of lots and lots of pieces of medium implemented on different websites.
This is exactly the reason why.
But putting all those things into one single AJAX web-app is going to be too much; It's going to be too complicated for even a large team (such as Google!) to write. For at least the next 10 years, it'll just be too hard to manufacture. To put all the code into one single AJAX environment. Just pragmatically- you're not going to be able to pull it off.
That's why I believe so strongly that we're going to see super-mediums develop in special clients. Yes, it's going to suck that they aren't as cross-platform as the web browser. But, it'll happen anyways. Because it's going to be cheaper to do it this way, and people really want to do this. People ''love'' bandwidth. (Not the bit kind; I mean the human-communication kind.)
As for the rest, I don't need to read it. Greg Egan, Cory Docterow, Charley Stross, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, these people have done a much better job of presenting that argument... and I'm way ahead of you there.
This is where I get confused. What argument do you mean? I've read all of those guys. Do you mean trans-humanism in general? Or do you mean the mechanics of some particular user interface issue that I'm missing?
(I want to note- Cory Doctorow liked Second Life. He thought it was a good idea, he thought it was cool. He didn't say, "Nah, this is dumb. It should be an AJAX app.")
What I'm talking about is a Second Life that's more focused towards developers.
I wrote two pages about my dreams for it, and why we would want such a thing:
If you're way ahead of me, I want to hear about it. If my vision is behind the times, I want to know the up-to-date version.
If you're going to argue thought that the web isn't going to be "live," if you're arguing that those "live web" ideas are dumb, then (A) I'm going to disagree with you, (B) I'm going to ask you where those authors made the argument that the web won't be live. Because I've read them, and I think that they would all agree with my vision. Not the particulars, mind you- I'm sure I'm wrong on details. But I think the general idea of how things will go? I think it's right on. Much more so than what most people imagine of the future web ("faster web pages! better graphics!"), at the very least. But maybe I am wrong. Maybe I just didn't read something, in which case: I'd like to see it. Those authors are very persuasive to me, and if they say and argue something, I think it will make more sense to me.
Okay; I think I've got a clearer understanding of how to say what I mean to say.
Let's differentiate between building a program on a platform (such as the web,) and integrating programs with protocols.
Wiki builds a program on a platform. That platform is "the web."
By "the web," I take it here to mean the sum of: HTTP, HTML, Javascript, and web browsers. Soon this will include SVG as well.
Many programs run on the platform of the web. So wiki is a program, building on a platform. There are other programs running on the platform of the web. For instance, there is Kuro5hin. There are community bulletin boards / forums. There are blogs. There is the wikipedia.
Not all of our programs that are Internet technologies run on the web. For instance: IRC, Skype, Jabber, Second Life, MMORPG's. It's important to note that many of these are very successful, even though they don't run on the web platform.
(The platform behind all the platforms, of course, is TCP/IP. Just to get clear on language.)
Now, there's this other class of thing, which is integrations between programs. This happens by way of some sort of protocol.
The most successful and well known example today is RSS. It is so successful, it is almost part of the platform. That is, first it was some wire that was drawn up by hand between programs. Then lots of people started building it into their software. If this continues, (and it will,) it will effectively be part of the platform. No longer just "HTTP+Javascript+DHTML+SVG+whatever," it will have a "+RSS" in there as well. "HTTP+Javascript+DHTML+SVG+RSS+whatever."
This is an integration between programs that grew and grew and grew until it became part of the base platform between them all.
The platform makes integrations between programs possible. The capabilities and expectations of the platform determine the integrations possible (and normal) between programs. For example, the hyperlink is common to just about everything building on the web platform. The hyperlink is near-universally respected. With RSS gaining more and more ground, it too is becoming near-universally provided & respected.
Now, after the success of RSS, many people thought, "A-hah! We know how to extend the Internet platform! We can do it from the edge of the network!" That is, they thought (and I was one of them) that the growth of the Internet would accelerate, because they'd be able to implement infrastructure from the edge of the network, and as people saw how cool it was, it would gravitate to the center, be built into new tools, etc., etc.,.
The only problem is, it didn't happen. Despite valient efforts, it became clear that people were not interested in integrating new foreign ideas into their program. "FOAF? What's that? Why do I care? Why should I bother?" There are many great ideas people have had, that would do great things, if they were implemented. But there's something about the situation, such that people simply don't do it. Even sympathetic people who would like to, somehow don't get around to doing it. I don't fully understand it yet, but there's something about the way things are set up, such that this approach is not working.
But it's clear that there's a place where new infrastructure / integration ideas is working -- that's in new platforms. In new programs featuring fully integrated environments.
It does not matter if it's built on top of the web platform, or not! Second Life does great, even though it's working off-web. The same can be said for Skype, and the same can be said even for IRC, should the complaint be that the other two obviously can't be done on today's web. Going the other way, Kuro5hin is it's own, integrated platform, with very few connections with the outside environment (except those afforded by the web platform, such as hyperlinking,) even though it's on the web.
It seems to me the things that y
I don't have the time to give you the full response you deserve; I'm at work in a crunch time right know.
I just wanted to tell you, very briefly:
Which is why I can't understand why you're referring to a shared whiteboard application that happens to be written using DHTML and Java and maybe SVG as a "side system".
No; Those aren't side-systems-- those are core infrastructure. (SVG will be, shortly, when Firefox 1.5 releases, and when the next IE comes out.)
I just recently wrote up (in the bus) and posted (here at work) to CW: Platforms First, which may explain my perspective better.
By a "side system," I don't mean "something running on a platform I don't approve of." Rather, I mean a system that is attached to some other system, that hasn't hit mainstream use within that system. So, for example, my Local Names system, or any other infrastructure projects that people are doing, that hasn't quite made mainstream use.
RSS began as a side-system, and is now entering mainstream use, becoming part of the system.
As for how will the avatar system work: I think that when you don't feel like talking with others, but you don't mind people seeing you, you'll have it configured that way. Whatever most people are comfortable with, we'll see. I suspect that initially, most people will want privacy. But with time, people will loosen up, and permit un-interrupted visibility, except for a white list (or something like that) culled from people you talk with a lot.
When you're looking at a page, you would see little icons on the side representing other people who are looking at the document at the same time as you, and there will be something that you can click on to see the social life of the page. That is, something where you can see the most recent visitors, where they departed to, which links they clicked. If there are several people online at the time, looking at the page at the very moment, you may see their icons too.
Then you can zoom in on one of the people. You could see where their multiple selves are, what the other pages they're looking at are. You could see where they've been, as well. You could see their group affinities. If they are engaged in a live conversation, you would see a snippet of that conversation. Perhaps you could see their desktop as well. It would be a sort of "snapshot profile" of a person. And then you could drop a note for them to see later, in their periphery.
Right now, messages are all "in your face." But I think we'll have a "periphery." Messages will show up briefly in the periphery, if they're from trusted people. (A web of trust system behind it.)
You don't have to "juggle" your avatars, any more than you have to juggle web pages. Your icon just automatically shows up in other people's browsers. You could opt not to be visible. You could opt to be visible to just people in your cliques.
Well, this is the vision, at least. I think in the next 5 years, someone will implement a primitive version of this. That will inspire a family of things like this. Then 5 years after that, someone will implement a much better version, and that may be the one that lots of people use. 5 years after that, there will be a public & free version.
Or, maybe, as you note- it won't happen. We never know, really. But I think this is something we should look for and work towards.
I think it's clear that we can't implement this on top of web+AJAX. Or if we can, it would take 35 years to do so.
The shared editor and the shared drawing board and the special shared web browsing window are the problem. None of those exist. Where you need one, you bring it up in a web browser, copy the link, and *that* link is all you have to give someone to show them what you're looking at and (if what you're looking at is a collaborative tool) let them collaborate.
Right, but I'm saying-- those programs won't communicate between one another. You're not going to copy and paste a drawing into another window. And I'm saying people who haven't been following the discussion won't have clicked on the link, and will be confused when they get back. They'll have to backtrack through logs (if they have them, assuming 2 hops haven't been made) and they'll have to manually reconstruct the environment. And I'm saying that it distracts from the conversation. It's distracting enough to change mediums psychologically; Forcing people to talk URL to one another is even more so on top of that.
These sorts of things, +high quality 3D (like people will expect!), are not coming in the tools coming down the pipe.
I'm saying: I don't think all these side-systems are going to work. They're not going to integrate. Somebody or some group in the next 10 years is going to make some system that does integrate all these systems into one cohesive whole, and it's going to work great, and everyone's going to want to build on it.
We already have some of these systems, let me list them:
These are all platforms. They all did something that the existing platforms didn't cover well enough. Theoretically, IRC could happen entirely over the web. Theoretically. Only some people actually do it that way, though. Freenode runs entirely over an IRC server, and most people run IRC clients to use it.
The web is not the end of all things, whatever the REST people would have you believe. There will be new platforms. Special platforms, even, just like the web was originally. Remember having to download web browsers?
This is why we're not communicating. I keep saying "this is how you can do something to make what you want happen", and you keep hearing "we don't have to make anything new". While you're the one who;s sitting there refusing to try and actually do something rather than fantasising about this super cyberspace of the future.
Stop right there. I've been working for more than a year in my free time on Local Names. It's been through three specifications for the namespace description now. (Unfortunately, I can't show it to you right now, my server OS died halfway through an update. I'm switching it to FreeBSD 5.4 right now; Next up is to install the Apache port, and restore the 20 wiki I was running on there before, and then the Local Names pages.)
What is it? It's a general format for establishing short-name to URL bindings, and for linking namespaces to other namespaces, and defaulting between them. Think of services that bind friendly names to IOR's, except that they bind to URLs. Think of how in wiki, short names are made for long URLs, and you can connect with namespaces on other wiki. Very abstract, I know, and you can forget all about it.
Because I'm basically just saying: I do work on stuff, and I don't appreciate your saying that I don't. I've released software, and other people have built on it. Not many. The work isn't really all that impressive. But you know what? I'm working on stuff. And even though it's not the most impressive thing in the world, I don't appreciate being treated as someone who just talks about stuff, and doesn't do work. Because I do.
I strive to make software that people will want to use, that will help us all do cool things together. Just because I don't always succeed, doesn't mean that I'm not striving, and doesn't mean that I will succeed one day.
The things I talked about were not just "cyber-fantasy." We're going to see those things happen. If not just those things, we're going to see things like those things happen. The details are probably wrong, but we'll get something like it. That's the sort of stuff we should be thinking about. There's a tendency amongst people to think that the future will be just like it is now, just "faster." But it's not. It's going to be qualitatively different than it is now. And we need to stretch our imaginations out into those different worlds, to envision those different things. It's actually important. Frankly, I don't see a whole lot of people doing it. Douglass Engelbart envisions Liquid Information. There are the HeadMap people. There are people envisioning stuff, because it's the necessary predecessor to implementing the vision.
You already know this, you've seen it play out. I don't need to lecture you on this.
But I don't think they're going to chang
You know, this conversation is really dumb. It's some kind of warped idea pissing match, and I'm not interested in participating anymore.
I think the idea of holding back a text until it's done is interesting and good. I've seen it before. I'm not convinced that I wouldn't like to see text as it's being written, or at least to have the option to see it as it's written.
I'll tell you why.
One day, I was writing a post for the communitywiki. A friend of mine sent me a Skype message; He was just curious about what I was up to, what I was thinking about, how I was doing. I texted back to him: "Well, actually, I'm working on a post you might be interest in." We agreed to open up a gobby session, and I copied and pasted my text into it. I continued writing my post, him looking over my shoulder.
I wrote something poorly, and he asked a question about it: "What do you mean by xyz?" He and I talked a bit in Skype IM, and then I realized the text was unclear. We talked about how to fix it, and then put the fix in place.
While I worked on the text below, I noticed that every now and then, he'd fix a spelling error he'd noticed. He'd also point an arrow and say, "What is this?" or "I don't think I agree here..." Things like that.
It was a good interaction. The classical problem with writing is that you can't get your audiences response to the writing in real time. This problem is now solved. It is rare in the material world that we are physically present with people who will be reading it at the same time. In the online world, this is actually easier to do; Place in the world doesn't matter so much.
There were some problems with the interaction though: It took entirely too long to negotiate gobby to make this a regular thing.
In most of our IRC meetings, we'd like to keep some schematic notes, and a record of the meeting. This requires that we negotiate a transfer to using a whiteboarding app (such as the Coccinella on the Jabber networks,) or to using gobby. There are problems such as so-and-so doesn't have Foo installed, or Bar installed, or whatever. And then there's the time it takes to get a group of people on the same page. Then there's the problem that the people who aren't around when we negotiate a transfer are "abandoned" - when we're talking in gobby, the folk in #onebigsoup on IRC don't see our words.
This is a problem because most of the time, the way we manage to get together and talk together is that 2 people happen to be around and make a conversation, and then later the other members notice that there is activity on the channel, and then tune in to see if they are interested. (I have a general strategy for improving with this kind of conversational tinderwood, I call it "OverHear." If you should happen to think it's a stupid idea, please don't let me know.)
Anyways- when we go into gobby, the "conversational tinderwood" is gone. The other members of the forum would be interested in what was going on, but they simply don't know about it, because they didn't happen to be there when the conversation was happening.
Now, it is of course possible to establish bridges, connectors, link-ups between forums. But in my experience they tend to be "hacky," made available pretty late; For some reason, the bridges just don't seem to work very well. This feeds into my newly revived "platformist" approach (rather than "side-system" approach) to the development of communication systems. The ability to generically extend a given system is always a good thing, but there are things that a given platform is just genuinely not good at. It reaches a fundamental limit, a breaking point. And I think that the world wide web as a platform is sort of reaching that platau point. I can forsee that the webapps on the world wide web are going to continue to grow in capabilities and strenghts. But I think th
It'll do more than that. It'll have to give you a *hold button* for the people around you. And they won't even know they're on hold. Because we're using technology to make something BETTER THAN reality, not just duping it.
Being able to read what people speak isn't duplicating reality.
Not yet, at least; Not until augmented reality.
I prefer my anime subbed, not dubbed, thanks.
Yep-- because you like to (A) read the text, and (B) hear the original artist's voice.
Oh, wait-- I forgot-- you're that deaf guy who turns the music and voices off when you watch anime!
We're going to be using speech in the future to talk, and we're going to read it off the screen.
I'll grant that the engine may wait for a person to finish a sentance before writing it out.
In sims where hearing a persons voice is a part of the fantasy (you do watch movies, right? You don't entirely read books, no?) we'll synth a voice. When it's important to us to actually hear another person's voice, we may use live voice, or a synth voice.
No: I disagree with you that they just add "who's on" features "just because they can." They do it because people like to know who else is around, and people like being with other people, and people like interacting with other people. People actually do use the IM systems built into community websites. In a lot of communities, people are interested in the people there, and they'd be tickled pink if they could actually transparently communicate in real-time. Not all would do it all the time, but many people would do it some of the time. If you are one of the few who doesn't like to talk real-time, ever, you can just opt out.
Yeah-yeah-yeah, I know the audioblogging manifesto. I teach it to people myself. But people have a real desire to hear voice, too. I think you're over-compensating.
Sorry for jumping on you like that; I'm just a little angry at having been so thoroughly misunderstood.
AHEM:
There are times in the universe when people want to interact live.
As it is, live interaction over the Internet sucks.
There is no good general-purpose interactive platform right now.
Croquet, Second Life-- these are neat places to make things and meet people, but you can't perform a business meeting there, you can't work on code together there, etc., etc.,.
Now, there is a loooonng continuum between "completely live interaction and expectations," and "a web where people send messages in bottles to one another over vast distances in time." That continuum is very long, and it's not at all clear where people will draw lines. Most likely, I believe, software will develop to cover and mediate the whole range of expressions.
Right now, due to the technology, it's almost entirely in the "sending messages in a bottle."
Now, if you believe people are inattentive and have some sort of mindset that says people need to concentrate, meditate, reflect more, not talk live, live slow, etc., etc., - whatever's going on in your personal life or that you observe going on in the social world, fine, fine, fine. I'm not going to bother arguing or talking with you about it right now.
If you're a software developer looking at the world of "what does technology enable, and not enable," then you're who I'm talking with. And surely you will agree: There's no good basically free technology for working live on code with others, having meetings over a share whiteboard, meeting other people who happen to be in the same space with you, etc., etc.,.
As evidence of demand for this stuff, I point you to all the bulletin board systems that tell you who else is online right now. As evidence for the demand for FOAF type stuff, I point you to the explosion of activity there, and I point you to Slashdot's own friend/foe system. If you want to see Wikipedia of the future, I point you to #wikipedia.
People want and need live interaction. We have not been giving it to them.
Technologists have been thinking AJAX is the way to enable this stuff, and making side systems to the web.
I used to be a strong proponent of the approach as well, but just recently I'm having second thoughts. Second Life can be humbling, and when I look ahead into the future, I realize just how archaic our web experience is right now, and how unsustainable the technical platform is. If you're not a web developer, I don't know how useful my post is for you. It's clearly not communicating to people, since they have (wrongly) imagined I think we're all going to be spending all day waiting for people to finish their blog entries.
Now again: If you're in the "slow down" "stop making technology" crowd, we can't have a conversation. If you're in the "computers = distraction = evil / info-overload worries" crowd, then let me say that the problem isn't the amount of communication that's the problem, (we have a deficit in successful communications, actually,) the problem is that the management of communications and the mediation of spaces is the problem.
In material life, we have all these mechanisms for communicating and realizing what kinds of loads people have and are carrying. We can just look at a person, and infer all this information, and make judgements, totally unconsciously. Without all the paralanguage, we can't do much.
Communicating paralanguage is an increase in communication. Just because it's not words, doesn't mean it's not communication. Back again to "the problem is organizing communications, not the amount of communication." That's where we get wikipedia and social bookmarking and all these things. Again, it's organizing communication,
1. There must have been hundreds of collaborative tools that did things like this over the past 25 years, and the edit/save/checking method has proven infinitely superior. Even when people are standing in the same room with a whiteboard, you get *one person* doing a bunch of work on it, then talking about it, then stepping back to let someone else do it. I won't say there' are NO people who can pay attention to more than one thing at once, but it's rare.
Actualy, that's not true. We do shared meeting notes collection in gobby and IRC, and we ain't ''never'' going back.
So "Erm" yourself.
2. If you wanted to do this, you could do it right now with Javascript.
Un-hunh. Except, only one person's done it so far. You have to actually write software. It's not enough to say, "It can be done."
And besides, you're missing one of the main points of my post: All this stuff has to work together. And nobody's done that yet. "All this stuff" = "all these features."
You're in IRC, and you want to have a shared whiteboarding session? Oh, now we have to spend 5 minutes starting up programs, negotiating a channel, telling how to download if someone doesn't have it, etc., etc.,.
I don't give a damn it's already been done. I've already seen it. I've even written one myself. Who cares.
So go "Erm" yourself.
One of the big advantages of the near-but-not-quite real-time nature of computer communication is that it defers interruptions. You don't need to know when to interrupt someone, because you can't interrupt someone... you can *queue* a request for their attention, and they don't have to feel rushed, and you don't have to pay the computer attention waiting for them to be ready.
I'm already quite aware of that.
I'm talking about for live participation, live interaction. People (A) want and (B) need it. And right now, it's just not up to spec.
When we're doing live interaction, it sucks hard-core. You're constantly manipulating technology.
You're imagining (assuming, really,) that I think people want to be, must be, constantly distracted. What you're missing is that I think people should be able to turn on/off privacy, to be able to defer interaction, to be able to say "this is what I'm doing right now, don't bug me if it's not important." There will be a mixture of human and mechanical systems to ensure people aren't derailed from their path.
What suxors right now is that you can't do real-time visibility stuff when you want it. You just can't. The technology is just simply not there.
Well, we're changing that. Because we're tired of traveling hundreds of miles for a conference.
And besides, we're tired of the sedentariness of the web. It's like that halo-sim-movie thing, where the guys are talking about what a party is like in real life, vs. a party on the web. "Uh... neat party... there's like... nobody here." The web is just text, text, text, deferred text. WEll, it's not going to be like that anymore.
If you want to be one of the voyeurs, be my guest. But I think you'll want to interact with the people who are interested in the same things you're interested in. Just a bet.
I think Flock's going to fail, but I also think that extending Firefox is not able to scale to the kinds of things people will want from the Internet/Web. It'll be able to do it a little, but not as an integrated package. There's going to have to be a new platform at some point.
What's wrong with the post?
Perhaps it's not worded plainly enough: Interaction on the "web" will be live, sort of like being in a MUD or VR or MMORPG.
Now, if you don't want to be on the web that way, fine. But I'm betting you will.
Nobody goes to a disco wearing an invisibility suit, and nobody wants to go to a disco in an invisibility suit.
Now, the particulars of my post are for people who know the technologies I'm talking about, and understand the development hurdles. If that's not you, fine.
For you, just understand: There's going to be a live web in the future, and you're going to see what people are doing, in real time, whether that's writing, browsing, talking, whatever. Real-time.
No, actually, I know about Croquet. And I've run Squeak.
My memory tells me though, you can't work on source-code in real-time with others on Croquet, though. They don't have a gobby, they don't have a real-time voice system. They don't have all these things that people need.
It's a great system though, and it's great inspiration for the kinds of things we will do in the future.
BTW, the present existance of a thing doesn't mean we've entered a "new world" yet. I'll call it the "new world" when most everybody I know, and hoards I don't, are involved in that environment. The world wide web is a "new world" in this respect, compared to the past.
Earnestly, I don't understand the biting criticism to my post. I think it's just applied misanthropy. i.e.: "Oh God, bloggers are the sux0rs." What they don't realize is that they themselves are bloggers, whether they do it online, or whether they do it offline by just posting updates to their friends. In which case it's worse than general mis-anthropy, it's just general self-hatred. Not a good thing.
I think you (and others) have the wrong idea about why people are going to do this, and how they are going to use it.
People are going to use this to collaborate on texts together.
Popular wikipedia pages will be perpetually live. In place of "saves," there will be "checkpoints" in the live stream. People will talk over pages in voice, and then collaborate on the actual text, in real-time.
That will extend to blogs as well.
If you go in a room, you know whether to interrupt or not, based on being able to see what the person is doing. You can't do that on the web right now.
Um, except I'm not selling you anything?
And: I'm a Free Software developer?
Do you have any questions? What kinds of insights are you looking for?
What kinds of things are you interested in doing online? Perhaps I can help you.