Organising in 3D

This has been kicking around at the back of my subconscious for a while, partly born of frustration with organisation systems like GTD. It’s not that there’s fundamental flaws with them, so much as there are fundamental limitations to how organised I can be. That’s partly why I don’t have a lot of time for 43 Folder-style blogs - the constant striving towards GTD nirvana strikes me as too reminiscent of Catholic attitudes to sin. By any objective standard I seem to be reasonably well-organised, as far as it’s possible to be self-aware of this - but comparison with the true devotees of the One True Way To Organisation just leave me feeling depressed at how slovenly my pile of “stuff to look at” has become.

Then I came across isochrones - geographical maps with a temporal overlay - so they can answer questions such as “how long will it take me to get to point A from point B?” The best examples I’ve seen were produced by MySociety, and were “heatmaps” of travelling time via public transport which you could also overlay housing costs. These enabled you to ask multi-variable questions like “where can I afford to live within an hour of work?”

I started wondering whether there are implied isochrones around daily activities. If you look at someone’s desk - or pretty much any space, for that matter - the more important something is, the closer it’s kept. My iPhone is generally never more than an arm’s length away, because it’s my primary means of communication and access to my email, calendar, contacts, to-do list and the kind of photographs that would in earlier times be kept in a wallet. I might not be able to lay my hands on a pen unless I’m at my desk, because I tend not to physically write anything when I’m not sat down.

And when it comes to work, the same patterns apply. Working materials are directly in front of us, and the more useful the article the more likely that it’ll be within easy reach. That also applies to the tchozkes that we surround ourselves with, too - photos of the kids are usually pinned up in clear view. [I can't find the reference at the moment, but when the UK's Department of Work and Pensions embarked on a pointy-haired programme of "efficiency improvements" by enforcing at HR-driven-disciplinary-point a "clear desk policy", the thing that *really* upset people wasn't the fact that they were being told to keep their pencils in a drawer. Instead, it was the insistence on tidying away the kind of personal items that soften the right angles of work environments - the photos, the monitor pets, the post-it notes with shopping list-type scribbles. Oh, and being told where the right place to keep a banana was.]

Unimportant stuff gets pushed away. If you suddenly need to find something that you’ve not used or thought about in weeks, the chances are it’s going to be *under* something. In fact, if it’s in clear view, the chances are you’re going to overlook it, because we’re almost conditioned to expect finding something lost to be more complicated than it turns out to be. Reference materials are filed, if you’re lucky and organised. But either way, immediate personal space is populated by the important and relevant.

All of which is a (very) roundabout way of wondering if we could take this one stage further, and use proximity as a metaphor for urgency in an organisational tool. What if you could use physical - or virtual - distance as a means of organisation? Imagine a system where tasks existed in a (probably pseudo) three-dimensional, and gradually encroached as the urgency became greater. The larger something loomed, the more important it is - and reprioritisation would be done by “pushing” items away, back into the future as it were.

I suppose that categorisation could probably be overlaid, as well - imagine work tasks raining down from above, while personal stuff sneaked in from left field. Switching context from one to the other could be as simple as moving your head to the side, to bring a new context into view. And if physical location could be tied into this somehow, you’d have a situation where the context of tasks could be directly related to where you were at that moment - so work tasks would only rain down in work, and the list of things you were supposed to pick up from the shops would only appear when some kind of near-field trigger alerted the system to the fact that you were entering the mall.

Would it work? I’m not sure - three-dimensional interfaces haven’t exactly been a roaring success outside of the games industry. And interacting with the physical environment would be dependent on the sensor infrastructure being in place, which seems unlikely any time soon - at least not until Jacqui Smith turns the UK into Minority Report. It would be fun trying, though.

More than just a website

One of the things that I try and emphasise when talking to clients is that a website is much more than it first appears. It’s better to think of a site as an application in its own right, in the same way as you’d think of a web browser, or an inventory management system, or (if you really, really have to) a spreadsheet.

On a technical level, that means using REST techniques when building the site. It’s too big a subject to go into detail about here, but the basic idea is that you have a very simple set of common actions that you can perform on the objects in your system - create, read, update and delete - and you “expose” those actions through a consistent set of site addresses. So an address of “http://something/1″ that arrives at the server is automagically assumed to be a “read” action that’s aimed at the object 1. That’s a drastic simplification, but it’s good enough to get the basic drift.

That’s important because it provides consistency - if it works for object 1, it’ll also work for 2 and 3 and beyond. And that makes interfacing other sites with yours very much easier.

It’s also important because it makes your site extensible - which means that you can hook other systems into it at a later stage, and you’re not necessarily going to need us to do it for you. Anyone who knows about the basic principles of REST will be able to figure it out.

While it’s clever at a geeky level, it’s also a bit arcane if you’re thinking in “website” terms - and particularly if only you’re thinking about interacting with a site in a browser. This makes explaining it - and justifying why it will make building your site slightly more expensive in the short-term, but a much better investment in the long-term - a bit tricky at times.

A conversation earlier today reinforced this - there’s a potential client who are looking to redevelop their website - but they seem to be struggling to think of it as anything beyond a simple electronic brochure.

So I got quite excited when I stumbled across something the Guardian are doing with their RSS feeds, because it’s a tangible application of exactly these principles. They’ve taken the same REST approach and applied it to their feeds, but done it in a way that makes sense in the browser or RSS reader.

For the Guardian, it starts with a consistent addressing structure - so the UK news section is accessible via a simple “www.guardian.co.uk/uk” URL.

Then the same applies to getting at the associated RSS feed - tack “/rss” on the end, and you’ll find the same (and full) content but formatted for consumption in an RSS reader.

That’s an example of a “destination”, but there’s also the option to do the same thing by “theme” - so content that’s about politics will show up at “/politics“.

And this gets remixed further with the actual topic, so political news about Labour will show up at “/politics/labour”. Again, if you want this in RSS form, just tack on “/rss” to the end.

This is very, very clever, and got me rather excited at the simplicity of it all - but it doesn’t stop there. You can start to combine various topics together SIMPLY BY CHANGING THE URL - if you want to see everything that’s related to Labour and the environment, change the URL to “politics/labour+environment/climatechange” and the results are now a mash up of the two topics. Tack “/rss” on the end, and you’ve got a machine-readable format.

So why is this so interesting, and why should you care if you’re not an RSS geek like me?

Well, simply that the Guardian has just given ME the ability to create a customised feed of news to fit my requirements. They don’t know me, and they’ve got no way of knowing what my specific requirements are - nor for that matter are they likely to have the resources to satisfy them if they did. But that doesn’t matter - if I can figure out the options that they’ve exposed, I can create something bespoke for myself - which greatly increases the value of their service to me, and makes it far more likely that I’ll stick around.

The crucial point here is that they’ve gone beyond thinking of the website simply as a publication, and are thinking of it in terms of being a service or application in its own right. They’ve got no way of predicting exactly how people are going to use it, and to a certain extent they’ve got little control. But what they ARE doing is making their core service much more useful to me, which massively increases its potential value to them.

Now instead of thinking in terms of news content, think cinema listings, or train times. Or imagine exposing your product information and inventory in this way - “tell me about the specifications of all the blue left-handed widgets”, but done through a simple web address. You start to get a glimpse of the possibilities that might be out there if more sites worked this way. It might make the initial build slightly more expensive, but the long-term possibilities are greatly increased.

FryPhone 2.0

The Greatest Living Englishman on the iPhone, with a quote about enterprise IT that should be tattooed onto the retinas of CIOs as they assume their position:

the iPhone is now a serious corporate contender: employee pester-power will see to it that it becomes the tool of choice for medium to large businesses that aren’t so pompous and deluded as to think dullness and bad design are a sign of probity and business acumen.

Collateral damage

According to Jonathan Zittrain, we’re all going to go to hell in a handbasket because devices are increasingly closed.

According to Adam Thierer, it doesn’t matter because they’ll get cracked open anyway:

So, Jonathan, I hate to pick on you again buddy, but what exactly is the problem? Apple has put another great device on the market and people immediately took steps to open it up and see if they can make it even better. Sounds like progress to me.

The Zittrain thesis is just getting harder and harder for me to take seriously.

Well, yes, up to a point. The issue isn’t that it’s possible to crack open devices like the iPhone. The issue is the collateral damage that gets caused when heavy-handed legislation is used to try to prevent what’s going to happen anyway:

Germany has just passed a new law that adds more “anti-hacker” provisions to the German criminal code. Although the new rules are meant to apply narrowly to hacking, critics are already complaining that they may prevent necessary security and network research.

The Future Of The Web, and the Past Of Panel Events

It’s said that you should never meet your heroes in case they turn out to be a disappointment. That’s not something that’s ever really bothered me before - the chances of bumping into Asterix and Biggles is fairly low - but I was a bit apprehensive about seeing Tim Berners-Lee speak at NESTA’s The Future Of The Web event last night. In the event it was a bit of a disappointment, although nothing to do with the man himself.

Mr Modesty

The Great Man himself probably doesn’t like being billed as that - refreshingly, he comes across as being totally free of ego. Ten minutes prior to the presentation, he was on his hands and knees plugging in his Mac, which is the antithesis of the superstar CEO keynote speaker.

Hearing the story of the genesis of the web from the man who invented it made it worth the trip, although he was at pains to point out that he wasn’t the web’s creator - just the inventor of a small part of it. And just as fascinating was hearing that in the early days, he had difficulty in explaining to people what it was.

Berners-Lee also has passionately held opinions about net neutrality and privacy. One of the later questions referred to ISPs as the “villain of the piece”, which prompted the nearest thing to an outburst that I think you’re likely to hear from him - he wants just three things from an internet service: “give me plenty of bandwidth, don’t sell my clickstream and let me connect to anybody”.

And the others

And that’s about as much as it’s possible to say about Tim Berners Lee, because that’s about all we got to hear from him. He was bookended by Charles Leadbetter, author of “We Think“, and Andy Duncan, Chief Executive of Channel 4. Whether that was because the organisers thought the audience might get bored of just one speaker I’m not sure, but the end result was frustrating in the extreme - Leadbetter is such a talking head it’s possible to hear him any night of the week, whereas Berners Lee speaks much less frequently.

And Andy Duncan was something of a bizarre choice given the main speaker. I really wasn’t sure about his description of Channel 4 as “open source television” - I suspect he might have different ideas if I was to take a creative commons approach to his content and start remixing it? His other main point seemed to be a plea to Google to “put more back” - presumably the cry of a man watching his traditional advertising revenues disappearing online.

The evening itself was the usual tired NESTA format - three suits on a stage, compered by a simpering Chief Executive. There was no attempt to control either of the two subsidiary speakers, who rambled on at length, and that was aggravated by the frankly bizarre practice of taking questions in threes. All that happens is that the first two get lost, particularly if the chair doesn’t prevent the habit of the usual suspects forgetting that questions have a question mark at the end.

Fortunately for my blood pressure, there was an active backchannel on Twitter, which was being “monitored” during the event itself. I know there are conflicting opinions about the benefits or otherwise of a backchannel, but if it rises above the bitching it can become a great aggregation tool for catching points and opinions that you might otherwise have missed.

See you there again?

Despite the problems with the format, it was an excellent evening - it’s not often you get to meet the person who started this all. And despite the inevitability of the format being repeated, I’ll likely go along to the next one, if only because they tend to attract interesting people to talk to - and moan about the format with - over the canapes afterwards.

Everything that is wrong and broken with corporate IT, summed up in a single, sad sentence:

Everything that is wrong and broken with corporate IT, summed up in a single, sad sentence:

“I have nothing against iPhone. It’s great,” says Manjit Singh, CIO at Chiquita Brands International Inc. “But we’re a BlackBerry shop, and I don’t think iPhone brings anything new to the table. It has a great user experience, but that’s all.”

Computerworld: iPhones trickle in the enterprise

Social contracts

Spotted on Hugh McLeods’s blog - “how does a software company make money, if all software is free?” - an observation about the difference between closed-source aka Microsoft and open-source:

It took me a while to figure this out, but what applies to Open Source, also applies to Microsoft.

When you buy a Microsoft product, you’re not just getting ones and zeros. There’s also a form of “social contract” implicit in the commercial transaction. You gave them money, this entitles you to certain expectations.

A few weeks ago, I met a young developer who worked in an IT department of a large insurance company. I asked him what kind of software did he use. Answer: About 75% Microsoft, 25% Open Source. I asked him why did he not use more Open Source? I thought IT people loved Open Source?

“If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community.”

And the community, as much as we may love it, is unpredictable. It might care about your problem and want to fix it, then again, it may not. Anyone who has ever witnessed something online go “viral”, good or bad, will know what I’m talking about.

Which is only true for a given subsection of the Microsoft user base. If you don’t have access to that level of support - and most organisations below a certain size don’t - then you’re thrown back on the exactly same type of community resources regardless of whether you’re using open or closed source. The difference being that the open-source model provides the visibility of the source code, and the potential for fixed that this presents.

Mobile green screen

In case there was any doubt why the iPhone gets all the attention, compare and contrast these screenshots from Twitter clients for iPhone and Windows Mobile Live Personal Client 2007 (or whatever it’s called these days):

First, PocketTweets (for iPhone)

Then iTweet (also for iPhone)

And finally, Twmobile. Guess which platform?

After six months of fighting with my t-Mobile MDA Vario II, I dumped it in favour of an iPhone, flogged the Vario on ebay and haven’t looked back.

Tragedy of the wifi commons

One of the gimmicks marketing ploys that National Express East Coast employed when they took over the East Coast rail service from GNER was to extend the onboard wifi service that GNER had introduced. Prior to the NXEC takeover, wifi onboard was free to first-class passengers, and a minimum of £4.95 an hour for those travelling in cattle standard class.

In the GNER days, the service wasn’t bad - the connection speed was generally slightly faster than you’d get using a 3G connection, and reasonably reliable. The technology behind the service was innovative, too, using a combination of GSM and 3G links to maintain a pretty robust connection in fairly hostile circumstances.

The downside if you were travelling in standard class was that you had to pay out for the service. When someone else was going to pick up the tab, I generally paid up - after all, £4.95 isn’t *that* much if you’re going to get something productive done as a result. In first class it was free, which meant that my Sunday night trips were usually productive - or at least less boring - ones.

Then along came NXEC, and threw open the service free for all. In the process, they took something which was pretty useful, and turned it into something which is actually worse than useless. Despite the increased usage, they haven’t increased either the backhaul bandwidth or the onboard infrastructure - which means that most of the time the throughput has dropped to single-figures of kbps, and ping times have increased to the point where the average is generally several seconds or more. And that’s if you can actually get onto the network in the first place - the DHCP scopes are often exhausted, and the authentication gateway regularly buckles under the strain and drops your connection, meaning you have to re-authenticate.

All of which means that travellers would actually be better off without the service at all, because of the time that gets wasted trying to get the connection working.

Technorati Tags: nationalexpress, nxec, trains

On Microsoft + Yahoo:

Microsoft’s web technologies are as unrelated to Yahoo!’s as the Dark and Light sides of the Force. Before you even begin your Comp. Sci. degree you’ve already made a decision to join one camp or the other. There’s no love lost between the two sides, and very few developers jump from one camp to the other mid-career.

Perl, PHP and Ruby developers carry PowerBooks with startup stickers on them, ride a bicycle and wear a tee and jeans. They are too skinny. They are more likely to have an iPod earbud in their ear than a phone. Microsoft developers wear chinos and a business shirt or collared tee, carry a black generic laptop identical to their coworkers. They are a little overweight, but only because they have a good wife at home who loves to cook. They have a full schedule of meetings and tasks always with them in their Exchange-connected phone, which they carry in a leather holster on their belt, with a blinking-blue Bluetooth headset always jammed in their ear. They think the Zune is “kinda cool” but like a quiet working environment.