Doing admin on a Sunday
I wonder what the psychological implications are of relatively important tasks (eg. banking and paying bills) being very similar, in terms of the physical actions required to complete them, to relatively unimportant tasks (eg. replying to jokey Facebook messages from friends-of-friends-of-friends and adding discs to my Lovefilm account).
All require a combination of me to sitting at a computer, entering a series of passwords, possibly digging out some paperwork for an obscure reference number, and hitting send when I’m sure I’ve put in the 20% effort required for 80% of the payoff.
Didn’t there used to be a difference between the frivolous and the serious? That you can (not that I have here) apply for a large amount of financial credit with very similar actions to those with which you can tend to your Farmville games seems very dangerous.
Oggcamp, accessibility and open source
I’m not exactly a hardcore Linux user – I just have a couple of knackered old laptops on which it’s installed, one that I use as I media centre and one that I use for geeky Frankenstein experiments. But I do really admire a lot of the principles behind open software and culture (especially Creative Commons – everything I write here is CC licensed).
For this reason I’m planning on attending OggCamp, a free software / free culture unconference organised by the presenters of the Ubuntu UK Podcast and Linux Outlaws (Are you coming? Join me on Plancast). At the moment I’m reading up on one of my recent pet interests, assistive and accessibility technology, to see if I can carve a suitable presentation out of the topic for the event. A lot of this sort of software is hugely expensive (£200 to 300+) as there of course isn’t the mass-market demand for it that there is for games, to-do list managers and iPhone fart apps, yet for many people with even mild disabilities they’re essential parts of daily computer use.
Often the accessibility features built into operating systems or mobile devices are more of a box-ticking marketing exercise than an attempt to genuinely make computers useful and usable for all. But I’ve a nascent theory that open-source software could make accessibility software technology much more affordable, given the gift economy that so often applies where its development is concerned.
Further, it could be argued that devices with a (partly) closed ecosystem like my beloved iPhone are at the mercy of the company that developed it in the first place as far as accessibility is concerned. Software to aid people with visual impairments, for example, requires special API access to the user interface so it can monitor and control it accordingly. The iPhone’s built-in zoom and text-to speech is rudimentary at best, and the rules for 3rd party apps mean it’s difficult (if not impossible) for a developer to create an alternative that could be run system wide.
So could the open-source Android platform form the basis for an truly accessible smartphone?
I’m no expert in software development, accessibility or open source, but I’m hugely interested in all of them. So I’m going to keep thinking at this cross-section of my interests, and hopefully form the outline of a theory that I can present at Oggcamp in May. I’m at a very early stage in my thinking (I don’t even know what sort of accessibility features Android ships with), so feel free to share any thoughts.
“Winning iPhone Strategies” report: case studies in app marketing
I’ve had a really interesting time recently talking to some of my favourite iPhone developers, carrying out a survey into app purchasing habits and generally thinking about cool mobile bits and pieces for the just-published “Winning iPhone Strategies” report that I co-wrote with a colleague.
Commissioned by regional development agency Northwest Vision and Media, it’s available to read online via Scribd, where I’m chuffed to say it’s received a good few thousand views in the handful of days it’s been available so far. I won’t go into huge depth about the report’s findings here – it’s a fairly easy read, so rather than me repeating its contents you might as well just go and have a look, or download it in PDF format 
There’s been some nice coverage of the report, notably a PocketGamer.biz article that focuses on the £2.99 “pricing sweet spot” that our survey highlighted, and a somewhat tongue-in-cheek piece on The Register hilariously titled “North England to replace satanic mills with iPhone app factories”. Needless to say, that wasn’t quite our conclusion…but their angle did prompt some fantastic comments.
I massively enjoyed writing my previous research paper into podcast business models, so was really pleased to get involved in “Winning iPhone Strategies”. I love being able to talk to smart people, think deeply about things I love and write up thoughts that’ll hopefully be useful to other people. Additional cool things about writing the report were:
- chatting to interesting people making games in Finland and Holland.
- hearing the well-informed views of Apple-fan Marco Arment, who makes two of my favourite Internet things: Instapaper (iPhone app) and Tumblr.
- learning an amazing rags-to-riches tale of a first time developer who hit it big with an app based on BBC comedy “I’m Alan Partridge“.
- talking to the design brain behind my fave iPhone game, Ramp Champ (Gedeon Maheux at Iconfactory).
ONML: the obligatory (or optional!) non-meta link
A silly idea that occurred to me, but I like throwing ideas at the wall that is the internet and seeing what sticks.
The short version: in boring tweets about Twitter, we should include an ONML, or obligatory non-meta link so we don’t get sucked into an existential black hole of self-reference.
The long version: Tumblr and Twitter are the two online communities where I spend most of my idle web-browsing time. And as I’m curious, nosy, and essentially a geek, I’m always interested in what goes on behind the scenes at these sites, both technically and business-wise. So a lot of my tweets and tumblelogging activities end up being about tweeting and tumblogging themselves.
I realised a while ago that this sort of meta-discussion is pretty dull for many people: not all my Twitter followers could really care about the platform itself, it just happens to be the place where they go to find out about music or politics or whatever interests them. Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror blog has a great post about how “Meta Is Murder“, where he gives Joel Spolsky‘s example that “all they’re talking about on this so-called ‘podcasting gear’ website is the podcasting gear website itself”. Which I’m sure you’ll agree is pretty useless (not to mention boring) if you’re actually more interested in the message than the medium, as I’d guess those without my geeky “how does it work?” tendencies are.
So I made a conscious effort not to talk to much about Twitter or Tumblr so as not to scare away/alienate/bore to death my followers who innocently followed me looking for some music links. And this self-imposed rule did mean my online output became a bit more focused. Atwood and Spolsky’s Stack Overflow programming discussion site employs a similar method of banishing all meta-discussion to a dedicated forum, so as not to destroy their community with feature suggestions for the community itself.
But I’ve realised recently that there is some merit to these discussions; I tweet about all forms of new media and technologies, so why exclude what may be genuine insight (or at least a LOL) about Twitter just because that happens to be the medium I’m using at the time? If nothing else, a shared interest every Tumblr user has is Tumblr itself. And we all like to write a blog post with “news about our blog” on the odd self-important occasion, right?
So perhaps the answer to the problem of meta-discussion is not to hide it all together, but to give it a value beyond self-reference. So I propose the introduction of an obligatory non-meta link (ONML) to be included in any tweet about Twitter or any blog post that’s just about how you’ve decided to change your WordPress theme. So rather than post something that may alienate some of my readers, I simply add an ONML like this, and voila: a post that was potentially only of interest to a handful of people instantly becomes valuable to everyone by the inclusion of something that’s not solely self-referential and meta. Because everyone likes pictures of cute stuff.
Or alternatively: I come across a lot of cool stuff online that I want to share, but don’t necessarily have much to say about it. It might not be the sort of thing my online friends would normally be interested in, but it’s worth pointing out nonetheless. So when characters are limited, why not kill two birds with one tweet (and mix metaphors while you’re at it) by mentioning something that would otherwise have been forgotten?
I’m going to try this a bit and see whether people are bemused or intrigued by it!
DailyBooth, 4chan and the importance of context
Apple's Photobooth application that ships with Mac OS
I know that title might sound like a PhD thesis, but stick with me; a few more posts and I think I’ll have the grand unified social meeja theory of everything…
Perhaps not, but there are of course a number of ideas I seem to notice throughout various online services, and TechCrunch’s piece today on a service called DailyBooth made me think of one of them. The TC post says “it’s a Twitter-like quick message service, only the main form of communication is pictures. You can send pictures of anything you want, though most users tend to send images of themselves, photo booth-style, and attach messages to them”. That’s sort of it, but I’d hold off on comparing to Twitter too much – TechCrunch (and most blogs) are well aware that lazy name drops of the Big T generate lots in interest in their posts.
What’s more accurate is a comment on the article that says “Wait what? This looks like they just slapped a new front end on 4chan. How is this news?”, referring of course to a cult message board that (arguably) gave birth to LOLcats, Rick Rolling and hundreds of other memes – it’s the grass roots (or cesspool?!) of web culture. There is a remarkable similarity, and undoubted influence (whether known to DailyBooth’s creators or not). 4chan wasn’t an original idea though – it’s just an imageboard, a type of message board popular in Japan. And looking at these imageboards, it’s clear that’s really all DailyBooth is, but with some real-time Web 2.0 buzzword magic thrown in.
So, if DailyBooth is just a community based around a bog-standard imageboard, why is it news that warrants a write-up on TechCrunch? One word:
Context.
And here’s my point: so many people get bogged down in what a site/service/app does from a technical or functional point of view (“but it’s just a 4chan/Twitter/Myspace clone!”), that they forget about what really makes these things what they are: their users, their design, the way they’re marketed, the attitude of their founders and so on. The context they’re placed in. (Not groundbreaking of course, but something it’s good to be reminded of).
No-one argues that LinkedIn is just a poor man’s Facebook. It’d be pretty difficult to argue that the former’s functionality is better – it’s actually pretty simplistic – but it’s the way LinkedIn is positioned as a “serious” social network that makes it popular with a certain type of user.
Similarly, Yammer is essentially a Twitter clone. But it’s aimed at businesses for use internally, which venture capitalists think makes it worth at least a $5million investment.
So by positioning itself as a “microblogging tool” (rather than a message board) at a time when such things are en vogue, DailyBooth has been able to get some mileage out of an old concept. Its changed the way people use this concept by guiding behavioural norms in the site’s community (eg. “post pics of yourself not random stuff you find online”). DailyBooth is transparent about its owners and terms of use, compared to the somewhat arcane shroud around 4chan. Most importantly, it seems to have a friendly community, rather than a cryptic network of in-jokes.
Admittedly, DailyBooth is not yet Myspace. But by changing the context of a simple imageboard, it’s overtaken a stalwart of internet culture (oops, incorrect stats – see comments) picked up a large number of users, got people talking and potentially begun to move the idea towards the mainstream, seemingly capturing the elusive teen audience along the way. So how many other simple, old ideas could become cool new web businesses by changing their context?
And next time someone says to you “that’s been done before!” or “that’s only 10 lines of code!“, just remember: context.
