A cliche we hear a lot is “content is king“. I’ve heard it in speeches from Rupert Murdoch to Eric Schmidt, and it just seems to be an accepted fact. It was said a lot in the late 1990′s to fuel part of the dotcom boom. And in the last year or so, this meme seems to have taken an upward trend again.
But is content king? If you look at the most successful brands and companies, I don’t think so.
Posted in Web
Reading has had a long history, no doubt. But here’s why I think it’s future may be shorter than its past. The stages of reading:
Reading = interpreting drawings
Writing in symbols or pictures to communicate messages started some 70,000 years ago they reckon, with the first proven examples about 7,000BC. An example of such writing from the “Tartaria Tablets“, dating from 5300 BC:
So at that stage reading was about cartoons, pretty much…
Reading = interpreting symbols
Symbols (otherwise called glyphs) that stand for something abstract – like letters, then emerged around 3000BC. The “Vinca Symbols” are one of the first steps towards what we know today as an alphabet:
Phonetic writing (where characters represent sounds, which in turn represent names for things) then evolved from tablets (oh yes, the iPad of its day) to books to newspapers to magazines. Through rock to papyrus to paper, from printing press to colour laser.
Reading = text + image + video
But letters aren’t enough. Reading today means getting informtion from a screen full of text, images and video. Ebooks aside (more about that in my next post), that’s what the current generation means reading.
NEAR FUTURE: Reading = interacting
Even today’s state-of-the art reading (the internet) is lean-forward and stare, with the occasional click (or finger swipe) to navigate around content. We like to think of it as interactive, but really its static. It may be targeted or personalized, but usually barely so.
For the first step towards truly interactive content, and the next phase of writing and reading, take a look at the Microsoft Courier demo below. Apart from making Apple’s iHype (iPad) seem like a brick, it feels to me that this is the dawn of Personal.
(http://www.viddler.com/simple_on_site/dec196af) This will change reading forever.
Reading = dead?
Let’s not forget reading is just a way of getting information into our brains.
The problems with text (specifically our Roman alphabet) are:
Text, images, audio and video wil merge – into something new. Something more efficient. “Reading” will be what slow-minded people of the past did.
Communication will happen in its most efficient possible way (which has always be the case) – likely directly into our brains in a format perfectly suited to our neurons.
Reading, as we know it, will be dead. Even the written word may fall by the wayside.
Posted in Psychology, Web
There’s a whole lot of talk about “real time” just now – from Google’s realtime search, to games, processing power, and medicine. And yet it strikes me that “realtime” (or is it real-time or real time?) is overused, and often meaningless.
Wikipedia defines realtime as “when things respond to events as they occur“. Well, I respond to events as they occur to me, but sometimes hours or days late… Dictionary.com defines it as “of or pertaining to applications in which the computer must respond as rapidly as required by the user or necessitated by the process being controlled.” Hm. Well – if the user required a response only the next day, would that still be realtime? Selecting “shutdown” on my PC shuts the PC down in about 5 minutes, which when I’ve walked away from the PC is as rapidly as required, but is hardly realtime.
It seems like the realtime I thought I knew is actually some concept which spans almost any sort of delay. My definition would be something much closer to “simultaneous” or “directly after”. In other words, within a short enough time-period that an average observer would say that the result/response happened right after the cause.
So if I click a mouse button to select something on screen, I expect that something to respond immediately.
And what is immediate? Well, as an example in tests of human reaction time (often by catching a falling ruler between finger tips), the average human reaction time tends to be in the range of 0.2 seconds, or 200 milliseconds. So it might be fair to say that anything that happens within that time period would be pretty immediate, or without perceptible delay.
So given that definition of realtime, what is ACTUALLY realtime?
- Twitter is mainly not as most updates are actually read out-of-sync
- SMS and email are mosty not, for the same reason
- Communicating by talking IS generally realtime
- Google’s search is barely realtime, if at all – it’s just very recent
- The feedback we get from machines can be realtime – from clicking on things, to turning the steering wheel, to turning on a light….
Actually, thinking through the options – there’s not much in life that is actually realtime…
Posted in Science, Technology, Web
It’s pretty easy to get caught up in being a wired-social-media-twitter-myfacespace-er and forget that actually, most people aren’t that wired. By which I mean, most people on this 3rd rock from the sun aren’t participating in the heady-Web 2.0 life, and even those we might assume are, are not. I meet a lot of people who would normally be included in the statistic of “internet users” who, unsurprisingly, are still largely untouched by the latest developments. Some basic info-graphics (if you can call them that) to illustrate:
So, 5bn people aren’t internet users, versus 1.7bn who are (numbers courtesy of World Internet Stats). A significant majority of the world’s current population who wouldn’t know a tweet from a poke, let alone who are actively using the internet for any purpose whatsoever.
Next, let’s assume that really wired internet users are members of one of a couple of key sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Sure, we could add MySpace, Orkut and so on into the mix, but it’s fairly obvious that the crossover between the different sites is going to be heavy – i.e. most Twitter users will have a facebook account, listen to spotify, whatever whatever. Another high-tech infographic for your enlightenment:
(The twitter number I’ve derived from various sources, the other figures are from the sites’ own published stats)
Finally, here are a couple of other indicative statistics to keep in mind:
Obviously I’m not saying any of this to try and claim the “internet” is dead or broken or flawed. The fact facebook has 300m accounts is hugely impressive, and a feat not achieved by any business before that quickly. In fact, I’m saying the opposite: I’m underlining the huge potential still wrapped up in its growth, despite few people in our worlds talking about that growth, and despite the temptation to assume that everyone is equally tech savvy.
I’m fully aware that those with businesses exposed to BRIC countries know all this – and are building their businesses based on this potential growth. But I’m also confronted daily with a significant section of the web-culture in the UK/US (including me) who can take a fully-wired society for granted.
Back in 1995 when I started my first company (a web agency) I thought then that maybe I was too late…! Fact is, we’re still all very early to the game.
Posted in Web
Who cares???
I wrote a while ago about the Palm Pre (now available in the UK) unifying messaging. It makes sense – all your messages to me are as one.
The thing is, I don’t care how your message arrives. If I’m at my work PC, sure a Skype message is handy, it’s right there. In a meeting? Email is pretty good. On a train with just my Blackberry – well, any mobile message works. But really, whether to message me in LinkedIn, Twitter, email - it doesn’t matter, it just makes your and my life harder working out which one to use. We’re supposed to be in a new bright era of unparalleled communications - but, it’s actually a mess.
Twitter? Handy when I have Tweetdeck open. And crazy when I get alerted to new messages by email (talk about duplication). Can I be bothered to install twitter clients on my Blackberry so I have yet another format of message to read? Is a tweet any more useful than a Skype IM? Do I remember whether you told me about some new great thing via MSN rather than email? No, no and no!
Sure, there are different ways you might want to message – just to me, just to our group of friends/interest group, or to the world including me. But that doesn’t need 10 different platforms, 10 different interfaces, 10 apps on my iPhone (disclaimer: I don’t have an iPhone, this guy outlines the reasons why pretty well). It just needs a simple setting connected to the message: like a “purpose” or “audience” label.
We’re running a real risk of losing out on the benefits of realtime communication by getting caught up in new brands that merely provide a way of sending messages (I’m looking at you, Twitter), rather than ways of getting that message to me in the most appropriate, useful, immediate way.
It’s a little bit like providing gas to my house in pipes that are colourful, light up, have cute names, and make their journey via London’s top landmarks. I don’t care – I just want the gas that comes out of the end, and feeds my boiler and oven. Even more than that, I just want the heating it enables, and the food that comes out of the oven. So, even if the gas itself is replaced by some new energy source, I’d be just as happy.
It’s the message that counts, not the medium.
Posted in Technology, Usability, Web
My thoughts about targeting, psychology and data - all things that drive my company, Cognitive Match.
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