Usable Interfaces

Whilst I entirely agree on Google’s position on Proposition 8 in California, the very act of Google coming out with a political opinion on an issue of this sort raises the question, again, of how comfortable we are with the power that Google has over our lives.

I don’t mean to sound overly dramatic, but for many users – at both ends of the technology sophistication spectrum – the internet is essentially Google. Soon, users will be able to use the company’s products to do virtually all digital lifestyle tasks: from running their mobile phones, to the entire act of surfing the web, managing their emails, images and address book, to how they access maps, many of the tools they use to work and so on. All of that whilst the company has the best technology to sift through and make use of all of the data on the web.

And god knows what they’ve got coming up next. They could they go into the enterprise with server products (a key part of their success so far has been knowledge about building their own bespoke servers and datacentre architectures; they already have the appliance product).

That would give Google almost everything –  if they’ve not got it already – and with virtually no oversight. Do we honestly think that if Google took a side on the presidential race in the states that it couldn’t sway the vote. What about if they came out for Proposition 8? Just because we happen to agree with their position, doesn’t mean we should ignore the incredible power they have manage to gain virtually overnight. And the risk of that power being misused.

What will happen now if pro-Proposition 8 websites start slipping out of Google? How can the company claimit is not influencing the results? What about if they were to ban Californians who’d expressed a preference for the amendment from their free services?

I’m not saying it’s going to happen, or that anyone at Google has even considered it. The important fact is that it could happen, and I have no idea what could happen next if it did.

The fact that Google is benevolent is not  a necessary truth. We could wake up tomorrow morning and find it had ‘gone bad’, as we saw with the shock reaction to clearly overreaching clauses in the Chrome EULA.

Page and Brin won’t live forever*. And they may not stay righteous so long either. So perhaps we should all be having another look at Alta Vista

* Unless they find a way to, which is not wholly unlikely.

More news from the department of ‘if Microsoft did it, they’d be strung up from a lamp post but if Apple does it, no one cares’ department.

It seems that you have to be so cool to be a member of the apple app creators’ club that you’re not allowed to even talk to the non-members about it.

Apple may be all nicey-nicey and ‘we love to share’ in their marketing, but it seems increasingly that their tyranical addiction to secrecy has gotten out of hand.

And it seems Apple is particularly keen to weild their control when potential revenue comes into play.

Perhaps no one really cared about the banning of stupid apps like ‘I am rich’ but the recent plight of the Podcaster application is as alarming as it is bizarre. The app, developed by Alex Sokirynsky, allowed users to download podcasts directly to iPhone or iPod Touch. It was banned by Apple for being ‘too similar’ to existing applications (meaning iTunes). The author then tried  to distribute it outside of the App store (using the beta testing channel), only to find his priveledges revoked, without explanation.

But the story gets more sinister still. In in fit of anger, Sokirynsky then wrote a blog post criticising Apple’s, decision and saying, amongst other things that he would port the app for Android.

And then, funnily enough the post was significantly softened, the next day. Do you know many bloggers who delete or substantially modify blog entries later? My experience is that people will follow up – maybe even apologize for overly energetic responses – but that it is very rare to remove post content.

The obvious explanation is that Apple, weilding the developer NDA (which currently even prohibits developers using public discussion forums and is now being prominently featured on app store rejection letters), asked Sokirynsky to remove the post. Who knows what really happened.

Now, how does that make you feel about the slightly vacant Gap-wearing characters of Apple marketing?

Stay quiet your ******, or we’re going to ex-communicate every last one of you.

I think it was Stephen Fry who pointed out the brilliant redundancy in the Martini advertising slogan ‘any time, any place, anywhere’, wondering out loud what possible difference there could be between the phrase ‘any place’ and ‘anywhere’. That, of course, had been entirely overlooked by the advertising copywriter in search of a more elegant catchline.

And so it should be.

In the same vein, I recently – and I can no longer remember how – stumbled across what I think will always be one of my favourite concepts, and certainly one of my favourite wikipedia entries which is RAS syndrome.

RAS syndrome (Redundant Acronym Syndrome syndrome) is what happens when one letter of an acronym ends up repeated after the acronym and people stop even noticing. Computing and technology are probably home to the most obscure and profligate acronym creators and so boast many of the best examples: ROM memory, BASIC code, LED light, LASER light, XP Programming, CPU unit, GPRS services, GPS System, DOS Operating System, CSS style sheets and so on. New banking terms appear to similarly befuddle: ATM machine, PIN number, ISA account, TESSA account and on and on.

As Wikipedia notes, the circularity can become quasi-obsessive, with RAS syndrome originally dubbed  ’PNS Sydrome’ or ‘PIN Number Syndome syndrome’ or ‘Personal Identificiation Number Number Sydnrome Syndrome’.

I guess what I love about this is the its self-referential nature. But it also reflects how different generations of users learn to suck these new concepts in at such massively accelerated pace. I remember, not so long ago, there being this tinge of slight displeasure when the OED dared admit new words to the dictionary because they had become common usage.

Well they weren’t always pretty: (new words recently), and – a propos of not very much (from that link):

1. Why do the Scottish need a new word for buttocks after all this time?
2. Don’t they appear to have missed a rather important definition of ‘blow back’?
3. Whatever I’m about to say, did we really need the word ‘Yogalates’ (a type of Pilates crossed with yoga)?  

Here I am somewhere else talking about Google Chrome.

It’s a funny industry, the web industry.

What started out for many of us as a job creating digital expressions has fast become the job of watching the world change how it communicates with itself and then coming up with ways in which we, or our clients, might fit into it all.

Buoyed up by all of this excitement, we sometimes end up with some pretty absurd ideas and discussions.

In a speakers’ evening I went to a while ago, someone asked when social shopping had first been invented (as if this phenomonen didn’t pre-date the internet), and just the other day I heard about the dramatic effect that ‘social networking’ was having on society (as if society itself had been invented by a somewhat snotty Harvard student).

On Friday, I was lucky enough to be at dConstruct 2008 in Brighton. The packed conference included some original takes on how to describe and design for a ‘social’ web. i particularly recommend Jeremy Keith’s mesmerizing walk from Isaac Asimov through determinism nd kevin bacon to the structure of all things and the future of all communications (which will apparently be podcast shortly – the speech not the future).

In his segment on Microformats, Tantek Celik unlocked a hugely interesting topic: looking at how a unified mark-up of social and identity data could be far more important than any single project like OpenID, allowing users to create identities (including lists of contacts) which could then be subscribed to from other sites. This approach reduces the burden (and inaccuracy) of maintaining multiple sets of information, eases the transition between networks etc. Combining this approach with platforms like OpenID could then produce single click registrations, or even single click logins across multiple domains.

I began to think about what this would mean for (for want of a better phrase) digital natives – the generation who were born after all this stuff became commonplace and see this level of technology as just normal.

Presumably the prize for sites now is it just registration but to be selected as the ‘single source of truth’ for these natives. If I were one, I’d use this blog (NB: note shiny new domain name). I guess others would use MySpace or Flickr.

Its interesting too that this syndication approach is the same as the approach architects of large scale data models are taking inside of orgnaisation. Perhaps, we are at last starting to close in on a global system of identity and social identity.

And that’s when I caught myself. Because, again I was attempting to think that all of this complexity could be reduced to its online ‘shaddow’. As if identity were a concept whose most important manifestation were online.

The changes in how we manage our online identities will no doubt be intense in the next few years but it remains a tiny proportion of the question about how we exist and exist online, and how we express ourselves in all of these new communities we have to explore.

So don’t let a computer try and capture your identity. Not just yet anyway.