I care about… – Page 19

Browsers, the future thereof

When I first realized the web as a medium — like artists found clay — I was someone who built websites. I grew up an artist, dabbling with pastels, sculpture, painting; I took lessons in all the classics. Back when I started out on the web, well, I threw my paint against the wall, watched it dry differently; tried watercolor and salt; mixed in color pencil. I created on someone else’s canvas, beholden to the whims of the Internet Explorers and Netscapes.

It wasn’t until I grew frustrated trying to create a publishing and composition tool for regular folks in CivicSpace that I realized that it wasn’t that the brushes or paint that I was using that were flawed — but that the canvas itself could be streched so much further. And so when the opportunity arose to go work on and set the direction of Flock, I jumped at the chance. The thought that I could take a number of the ideas on content creation that I’d been trying to implement in regular webpages into the browser itself was too irresistible to pass up.

And that’s how it started for me — working first on the side of web content developers — and then on the side of the actual rendering context and application. I doubt that I was qualified to work on either, but that’s besides the point, since that’s where I found myself (and artists worth their weight are hardly what I would call experts).

So now, a few months out after leaving Flock, a few heady announcements about microformats, a new Firefox Beta to toy with, a number of webkit-based apps to ponder over and an emerging identity standard coming to the fore, I’m starting to see the future materialize in front of me. From where I sit though, there is a lack of clarity as to what it’s all about, what’s really going on and what’s missing in between to glue it all together and — perhaps most importantly — a sense for what we can learn by focusing on the negative space of our current situation.

I’ve been reading about Doug Engelbart lately and the stuff he was doing in the 60s with his Augment system. He’s now collaborating with my buddy Brad Neuberg on a system he calls “Hyperscope”. I can’t help but see disjoint parallels between his ideas and what’s emerging today. Simply put, there is no grand theory or unifying concept that will bring it all together, just as there’s no single design for a tree — in fact, it takes many to make a forest, and we’re only now beginning to see the emergence of the forest in spite of the individual trees that seem oh-so-important.

And we don’t even have the benefit of LSD. Man, how are we to escape what we already know to imagine what’s possible? Oh well.

Anyway, lemme get down to brass tacks, coz I can tell you’re getting bored already. I almost am, striking out at some kind of point out of this rambling.

When I was at Web 2.0™ (I think) I mentioned to Jason Fried — as I’ve done to others since — my desire to have a webwide conversation about what the future of web browsers should look like. This was the work that I thought I’d started at Flock, but the reality is that they’re a business and not an academic institution and need to pay their employees (a harsh reality that I’m now realizing owning my own company and having a payroll). I left because of this — and maybe for other personal reasons — but primarily because my vision for the future wasn’t exactly compatible with where they needed to go in the short term. Hey, bills, remember?

Anyway, let me put it out there: I don’t get where Firefox is going. I don’t think it’s going anywhere actually. I think it’s strong, it’s stable, it’s a great platform. But it’s not innovative. It’s not Quicksilver. It was a response to IE and now IE7 will come out, co-opt everything that makes Firefox great or interesting and we’ll run through another coupla years of stagnation. Blah.

There is a solution though — you’d be surprised maybe, but you can find it in Safari and I’m dead serious about this. The number of webkit-based apps being released is growing by the week. Pyro, Gcal, Webmail, Hiker (thanks Josh!). There was talk about the future of the merged Internet-desktop as, quite clearly, this is where we’re going — but the choice of user agent is sadly coming down to facility over featureset or robustness. Why isn’t this happening with XUL Runner or Firefox (you figure it out)?

At Flock, this is where I saw things going. I didn’t see Flock as a monolithic package of integrated apps like Netscape or Office — bundled up with unmaintainable software sprawl… but with a solid underlying platform that these secondary apps could be built upon (yeah, Lucene, yeah, Microformats, yeah IM, yeah video and audio and all the rest). Speaking RSS, microformats, Atom and other syndicated content natively, you’d be able to universally star anything for later sharing… you’d be able to upload anything… be able to have any AJAX’d experience offline with a super-cache that could handle the sporadic network connectivity that most of the world puts up with (or that we put up with when we travel). And hell, with OpenID, we’ve even got a way to sync it all up together. Toss in a platform that is built on and around people people people and you’ve got something to really take us forward into the next evolution of Things As We Know Them™.

I wanted Firefox to be my Chariot, Flock to be my Sun.

Such as it is with Open Source, trying to inspire end-user interface innovation is often a losing battle.

(As an aside in parentheses, I think this is biological; I met Tara’s 2-year-old niece this weekend and she mimicked everything we did; thus it’s developmental and inherent — yet the problem remains: how do we bring the majority of user interface innovation to the open source space?)

So anyway — Safari; webkit apps… the future.

For the benefit of everyone involved, whether Mozilla, Flock, Microsoft, Opera, and so on implements any of this stuff… there needs to be some major advancements made in browser technology, both for normal humans and for web… um… painters. This stuff, seriously, is still way too opaque, and way too obscure for most humans for whom “delicious” still means “tastes good”. I want to have that web-wide conversation about the future of the web but somehow, my instincts tell me that the venue to have that conversation isn’t going to be on the web… it’s going to be in barber shops and gas stations and restaurants and the places where normal people really hang out.

If we’re ever going to bear witness to the promise of Doug Engelbart’s achievable vision, it has to be this way. And, to paraphrase walkway wisdom: nothing worth doing is easy. And so I challenge you — those who give a shit — look at what’s out there — and more importantly — what’s not out there — and begin to think seriously on what comes next… on what’s missing… on where this medium needs to be stretched in order to make the most of what’s possible.

Ben Franklin, the original open saucey badass

J. Matthew Buchanan discovered an interesting anecdote about Mr Franklin: that he had very little use for exclusive patents! Check out this passage from Franklin’s autobiography (grafted from Matthew’s post):

In order of time, I should have mentioned before, that having, in 1742, invented an open stove for the better warming of rooms, and at the same time saving fuel, as the fresh air admitted was warmed in entering, I made a present of the model to Mr. Robert Grace, one of my early friends, who, having an iron-furnace, found the casting of the plates for these stoves a profitable thing, as they were growing in demand. To promote that demand, I wrote and published a pamphlet, entitled “An Account of the new-invented Pennsylvania Fireplaces; wherein their Construction and Manner of Operation is particularly explained; their Advantages above every other Method of warming Rooms demonstrated; and all Objections that have been raised against the Use of them answered and obviated,” etc. This pamphlet had a good effect. Gov’r. Thomas was so pleas’d with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin’d it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.” (emphasis added)

As Matt sumarizes: I bet if Ben were around today, he’d be an open source programmer, inventing all sorts of new software and sharing them with everyone.

Picoformats: microformats for mobile

Andrew Turner pinged me about a project I started up as an offshoot to my work with Mozes called Picoformats. He wrote that a picoformat is a standard-means for defining markup in small, probably mobile, devices.

That’s not exactly the original idea, but it actually makes a lot of sense and, the more that Tara and I use our Blackberries, the more we see a need for standard micro-interfaces. Sure it’s great that you can download my hcard into your address book from your regular web browser, but the same seems not to hold true on mobile devices.

Anyway, that’s an issue that needs to be addressed in mobile browsers, and Opera‘s well on their way working on such problems.

Andrew’s post did highlight both the need for me to get the word out about this project and also explain it a little more clearly since Microformats could actually address the formating of data for mobile devices (especially when we start pairing up microformatted content with relevant media-specific CSS).

The goal of the Picoformats project is to use an open process that reflects existing behavior and come up with standards for an SMS-based dialect for interacting with mobile services.

Dodgeball already has a pretty good SMS/email dialect. In fact, I use it all the time. What I want is service interoperability, so that when I send a message to (okay, I’ll reveal my bias) Mozes, I can use the same syntax to compose the command or message. For example, if I send a message formed like this: “! heading to the movies at 10pm”, it shouldn’t matter if I’m on Dodgeball, Facebook Mobile, MySpace Mobile, or FactoryCity Mobile — each service that supports Picoformats should send out the blast message to my friends, just as I’d expect it to. But already there’s divergence — with Mozes using “@” for blast messages and Dodgeball using “!”. This is the kind of thing that will make it extremely hard for people to move between services or, worse yet, use a multitude of services.

You can probably begin to see how this is similar to life before Adium or Trillian. Personally, I like not having to run 5 different instant messenger apps. I like having them all in one and being able to IM my friends regardless of the service they’re on from one interface. I’d like to be able to do the same with the mobile services I use. And that’s why this Picoformats idea is important — it’s syntactic interoperability.

OpenOffice initiative to follow SFX’s footsteps

Apparently someone named Ben Horst has taken up the failed SpreadOpenOffice initiative in order to buy out the back page in New York free daily Metro, following in the footsteps of Spread Firefox’s campaign which lead to a two-page ad in the New York Times last year (which I designed).

Ben’s goal of raising $5,000 is a bit more modest than the $100,000 we set out to collect in 10 days (raising nearly $250,000 by the end) — and the audience of the Metro is noteably smaller and less geographically diverse than the TImes, but the effort is nonetheless to be commended.

I have my own issues with OpenOffice as a product, but I do wholeheartedly support Ben’s efforts to galvanize the community around a specific action. He’s currently 75% of the way through raising funds and there’s already been a good deal of pick-up on Digg and Slashdot so I imagine he’ll meet his goal before his self-imposed deadline.

It’s interesting to see this effort emerge organically — especially after the initial thrust to create a SpreadOpenOffice project fashioned after Spread Firefox died on the vine owing to internal struggles over branding control. A similar project SpreadKDE made it out of the gate, but it’s unclear whether it ever took off.

So why did it work for Mozilla? And will it work for others? Not sure, but it’ll interesting to see whether Ben’s micro-donation effort pays off.

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If I were smaht and I worked at Microsoft, I might consider the freebie that Apple’s put out in Bootcamp as an opportunity to really stake my claim on the future. Think about it — the most proprietary hardware in the world can now run Windows. Boy I’d take that software — the Windows OS that is — and give it away for free.

Think about it — the browser market’s price was set at zero many years ago, leading to Microsoft’s monopoly. If you give your product away (as Google does) can it be considered a monopoly? Furthermore, the value of an OS, ignoring the cost of development, is rapidly diminshing as more apps migrate to the web.

So why not do something totally whack and just give it away, interupting the whole OSX onslaught? I mean, I’m not much good with math or economics, but could it really hurt at this point?

Slap my PowerBitch up

I’ve been a fan of VirtueDesktops for awhile but had only used hotkey shortcuts to switch screens.

Apparently I was thinking way too Interface 1.0 because now you can literally “slap” your PowerBook to switch desktops. It uses the anti-drop Sudden Motion Sensor to detect … what else? … sudden motion and relays that information to SlapBook.

Download it now and start expressing your frustration… productively!

What’s next for Firefox advocacy?

I can’t help but notice that not much has happened with Spread Firefox since I left, even though my good friend Jamey continues to feed me mockups and possible redesigns of the site (note: the photo at right isn’t Jamey’s work but an early redesign attempt between me and Josh Jarmin).

And though the Firefox Flicks Campaign was a considerable success, it didn’t seem to arouse the same kind of passionate support that the New York Times ad campaign did in its time (though it did drive a considerable amount of traffic). It seemed isolated and somewhat self-congratulatory… preaching to an audience that was already aware of and promoting the open source browser, rather than those who wouldn’t be able to separate the “Internet” from “MySpace” from “the blue E”.

And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a criticism so much as something I’ve been stewing on for some time, trying to figure out, y’know, what comes next?

When I was at Flock (and I continue to champion this idea mind you) I wanted Flock and Firefox to team up — to work together to show their collective usefulness across a wider and more diverse community — one that a single browser simply wouldn’t be able to appeal to as effectively as two designed with different intents. In fact, with Internet Explorer 7 on the horizon, incorporating many of the features that have set Firefox apart, I wonder whether either Flock or Firefox will have much of a chance at widespread adoption without a concerted effort to spell out more clearly the benefits of both platforms — and how developers can leverage their work across both simulataneously.

This is the challenge as it stands and as I see it. As the features that formerly set Firefox apart become standard fare in modern browsers, one way to form the question is to consider whether Firefox has served its purpose — causing Redmond to wake up and to change its flagship browser. If so, then ok, keep building it out and improving it, but tell the fans that they can go home until next season.

If the fight or the battle or the … non-violent conflict … is only beginning, then I guess I’d like to see a clear declaration of intentions. I’d like to see Mozilla stand up and declare the principles, ideas, dreams and ambitions that set it apart and keep its proponents up at night, dreaming of ways to get the story out there to an ever-widening audience. Anything less, and the juggernaut will bowl us over, diminishing the effects of the incredible achievements that have been made in the past two years. I’m looking at this as a ten-year struggle — as a hugely powerful Hydra that must be faced on each branch, what I’m talking about is the future of the web and the tools that we will use to navigate, explore, publish and own it with. In order to stay in the game and continue to participate in the conversation (or ever set the tone), we need a strategy, we need a plan, we need people and we ought get started now.

I’m open for ideas, have a few of my own, but mostly just want to know: What’s next for Firefox advocacy?

Identity Twenny is the new cross-platform

I’ve been spending a lot of time working over the idea of identity representation and validation over the past couple weeks… a topic that is both deep and wide and includes many players.

For the moment, I’m partial to OpenID, as it seems lightweight, decentralized and championed by my buddy Scott Kveton at JanRain (who is now also a Citizen Agency advisor). In fact, now that ClaimID has implemented OpenID, I have a good working example to show off.

But OpenID isn’t the only game in town. And many people are aware of this — in fact, wanting to become the next Passport standard that actually gets widespread adoption. Because once you become that standard, you have a lot of power, both over individual meta-data as well as the social networks that someone is connected to.

In our beginning conversations with Marc on his PeopleAggregator, this is apparent (we’re taking Marc on as a client to act as the community advocate, shortening the product feedback loop). As is increasingly clear, identity lock-in is where the next big battles will be fought, especially as more and more Web Twenny sites open up ports on their data but require authentication in exchange for access (the PeopleAggregator, for example, offers distributed login choices including SXIP, OpenID via LiveJournal, Flickr auth).

Over on the Identity 2.0 blog, there’s an interesting post by Dick on Google Account Authentication — looking at the desktop-based side of authentication (that you’d find in Picasa or Google Earth or even GTalk, for example) and web-based applications, like Joga). He makes the point, as ZDNet latches on to, that Google is “deepening of the identity silo”. And, of course, with Google Checkout, you can see the tenacles of the beast spreading out further without any likelihood of opening up.

So what’s interesting in seeing all these implementations emerge is the opportunity, as Marc has caught on to, of providing a man-in-the-middle “Debabelizer” between auth standards and social networks — what’s been called a “meta social network”. My buddy Scott, though, has also seen this opportunity. And both, fortunately are taking the open source approach (even if not all parties call it that).

So anyway, with all this going on and big players making moves in the space, the one thing that is clear to me about where we’re going is this: in the not-too-distant future, when someone asks if you’re “cross-platform” they’ll no longer be referring to the operating system that you’re running, but whether their identity or authentication standard is supported on your site. And furthermore, whether you’ve made it possible to bring in their existing social network/buddy list from other networks — because, let’s face it: it’s irrelevant whether you build for the Mac, PC and Linux; you’ve got the web, you can make your app universal. The big concern will be whether the social environment that I’ve spent years cultivating can travel with me and cross the chasm from the place where I first built it to populate the host that you’re building.

Then there was BarCamp San Francisco

I really shouldn’t post anymore before at least mentioning that BarCamp San Francisco has come and gone, offering something between a roar and a whimper. The truth is, it was such a big, multi-tiered kind of experience that I think it’ll take me awhile to unravel it.

Fortunately there’s lots of photos and even some interesting video available in the meanwhile.

Thanks again to the folks who really made it possible: especially the lead organizer and my favorite co-camper, Tara, and Tantek, Nima and the host of awesome volunteers who pitched in throughout the event. And don’t forget our extremely supportive sponsors who fed us and gave us nice things to drink all weekend. The event simply wouldn’t have been possible — or nearly as satisfyingly exhausting — if it weren’t for all the additive efforts of these folks.

The War Tapes & the future of killing

My buddy Sean Coon pointed me The War Tapes (trailer) — a documentary I’d run into on his blog before — that was shot entirely by US soldiers in Iraq.

I’ve not seen it yet, but intend to tonight at a free screening at the Castro Theater.

What I’m looking forward to is the narrative offered by the people actually engaged in the battle and who were trained in warfare, as opposed to the embedded journalists we heard from earlier on, who were not trained so much in survival or in the rules of war, but in the telling of stories and of “objective analysis”. Think about it: when you’ve got a semi-automatic weapon, people are out to kill you (and you’re “allowed” to kill them) and you’ve got a video camera, your perspective is going to be vastly different from someone who’s just along for the ride to “report back” to TV viewers back home.

Put another way: you might not be suprised, but I’ve never shot anyone with a deadly weapon. I have been shot and shot at, but only with paintballs and BBs. My life was never at risk. I never put someone else’s life at risk. And it seems odd to me that there are humans, all over the world, with these weapons whose primary purpose is the destruction of other humans. Looking specifically at guns, but also at the lot of weaponry that has been developed over the course of human history, I can’t help but find the whole business of killing other people a tad… perplexing.

Still, it’s rather lucrative and there are even companies that offer people for hire who are exceptionally good at killing other people. And if that doesn’t seem palatable, well, there are always robots and remote killing machines that can do the job instead.

So anyway, this is so curious to me because of how “citizen journalism” enlarges the conversation. I mean, these stories now come from regular people, people who have left their families and their friends, on a mission to protect American interests and “National Security”, who can speak openly, and without the kind of spin, hyberole or censure that you might find elsewhere. Regardless, I don’t know or even care much about whether this is propaganda, because what it is is the telling of stories by people living in the trenches who get up everyday and might kill other humans by the time they go to sleep the same night.

And I just can’t fathom what that’s like.

I do hope — somehow, again, perhaps naively — that this connected medium, someday, will make it increasingly difficult to substantiate the killing of other people. It just strikes me that the coming generation of always-on connected kids will be far too connected to people across the Earth — to allow for their friends to be fired upon, shot at, or bombed. The test may come soon enough, depending on what happens with Iran — given that it seems much more wired than Iraq (even as of a year ago). I mean, what if? Should the Bush administration decide to take military action, will the Iranian blogosphere inspire the sympathies of the liberal digerati and make an act of violence against the Iranian people political suicide? When we can directly connect with the people that our government intends to bomb, how does that change diplomacy and the ability of the government to act?

These are not questions that I have answers to, but that this kind of documentary inspires. Objectively, whether the story is being told by US soldiers, the Taleban, Al Qaeda, Iranians, Canadians or anyone else directly involved, this changes things. And it changes our understanding and the proximity of killing. Will it, I wonder, change behavior?