buildcontext

Photo: Duncan Davidson

I wanted to capture my thoughts intermixed with quotes from Mitchell Baker, Chairman, Mozilla Foundation at the recent Web 2.0 Expo keynote entitled Opening the Mobile Web, it was truly a great concept and conversation and eye opening for me to see there is real commitment to making the browser (which Mitchell would say is a poor metaphor, but that’s another story) the true platform of the web regardless of the device. Video: Mitchel Baker: Opening the Mobile Web

Your Mobile experience just may be your web experience of tomorrow…

Seems counter intuitive huh? it did to me at first… we all know where we are as far as Mobile capabilities… browsers are clunky and don’t support the same things, the connection is slow and the screen is small so everyone you talk to says, “dumb down your design for mobile,” “find a few most important things and put them on the first page,” “think about your user only having a few seconds, in a rush, to get your key data,” after we hear all that we simplify our application, for mine it was just search and find a store for http://m.bestbuy.com my first run at a quick Mobile Web prototype… but is this really the direction we are heading because of technical inadequacy?

Mitchell Baker says no, and I very much agree… we are doing this because our customers want it to just work, to have unfettered access to our information from any context and any device… to simply and efficiently get to what they need wherever they are.

You should not be thinking about what data can I get to or I’ve got this device so I can get to this data… …or this device has a phone on it so I can’t really get to the Internet I can only get to some part of it… that’s a lousy setting… doesn’t work well for people doesn’t work well for developers — there is no reason we need to build a world that looks like that…

The key of the Internet should be the same and what is that key that core it’s information… What can I get to and what can I do with it… and that should not be dependent on the device I am holding.

Right, I agree give people access to what we know wherever they are, but the trap you quickly fall into is creating the Mobile version of everything, firing up new web servers, cutting features, rewriting copy, creating hundreds of Java apps… doubling (probably more) your work and removing at least some user value all in the name of making it Mobile… we need to find ways to put the critical information and functions back and make them work in the Mobile context without all this rework.

Because Mobile is different right?

Mitchell sees this trend too, we are all designing for the “new Mobile use cases” and that is all good and fine but asks are they really new? Web users want easier access to more and more relevant information, using less keystrokes and have it available from wherever they are… is that new? No… it’s not… she said and I believe, these paradigms will become more and more the accepted web (notice I didn’t say “Mobile”) practice, but it will involve a little rewiring.

I bet in a few years all of those use cases web are finding today for people using Mobile will be equally important wherever we are and that being at home doesn’t mean we will live with outdated or clunky techniques… so I’m on a Mobile device I want things quickly I want the information I want, I want to get at them with fewer keystrokes… why won’t I want that if I happen to be sitting at home?

These use cases are convenience cases that are driven by the constraints of the Mobile device that we will find very useful on machines that have bigger screens and memory and permanent connections… there are constraints when developing for the desktop we don’t have with mobile devices…  mental and human constraints, experience constrains us… we have had 35 years of desktop and laptop machines and coming up on 15 years of the graphical world wide web… those form knowledge, experience and baggage about how we approach things… as we explore the use cases of Mobile devices we will find new ways to use our computers that will be equally important if we are sitting in an office or at home on a differently formatted machine because mental constraints are often the hardest to get past.

Putting it out there, pushing the envelope towards “one web”.

There is one web for most people the Mobile Web is irrelevant, it should be something we don’t think about and basically is something we are not aware of… there is one web.

Mitchell is a “one web” purist, as you would and should expect from someone driving forward these concepts and taking them to reality and we should all appreciate it, it will simplify both our and our users lives.

I tend to take a different but very related tact, from everything I am gathering the browser can and will be the center of the Mobile Web as many of us had predicted and hoped. The work we are now doing to understand, optimize and simplify the web as part of Mobile use cases will be rewarded by our users and I can sleep better knowing that within the near future creating hundreds of versions of a Java clients will quickly go from a “feature” to a funny memory of the past like the classic “Under Construction” animated GIF.

Working within the current Mobile web browser set is possible — it’s not always fun — but it is possible and relatively reusable across many devices… As the iPhone metaphors and quality browsers emerge (WebKit, Mozilla) it will be even clearer that this is the path…Why not jump in now?

Jumping in…

That’s the way we will see the constraints and the creativity and this odd openness of expectations that has to be fulfilled on Mobile devices move back into our entire web experience… how do we get there? it’s a better world for users… there is one web… you don’t have to choose… your device doesn’t limit you to the data of experience you can have…. well to get there we need and open development platform, an open web based development platform and of course coming from Mozilla we view FireFox as that platform….

Hear, hear Mitchell looking forward to developing for Mozilla Fennec and the open Mobile Web.

Photo: Duncan Davidson

Shortly after the keynote by Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week we were treated to a talk with Clay Shirky author of Here Comes Everybody, his talk for me crystallized why the phenomenon of social interaction, sharing and co-creation is thriving on the web today and why this “little” emergent concept might just be getting started changing the world.

Thankfully the talk was captured on video by NewsBlaze.com: Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo (Video 17 minutes) and just now transcribed by Clay himself.

Foundation

Clay began foreshadowing this story with a story from the early industrial revolution as we put our collective minds and “civil surplus” to use creating libraries and museums, education for children, and electing leaders; that massive change from rural to urban and industrial ways of life taxed the minds of everyone involved… he told us the “cognitive heatsink” in that time was gin, dissipating the brain cycles and complication of changing from overwhelming our minds.

Fast forward to the 20th century as more and more of the workforce started working 8 to 5, Monday to Friday a new concept emerged… free time. With this new free time, we were taxed to figure out what to do with it. We needed to fill it… along came the new “cognative heatsink” television “dissipating thinking that may have built up and caused society to overheat”, successfully filling our time with entertaining stories and calming those pesky brain cycles as we adapted to the new way of working.

Human thought… burnt to a crisp.

Clay tells us today our “cognative heatsink” of choice, television, consumes 200 billion hours of human thought in the US alone, to put that in context Clay did some back of the envelope math that tells us the entirety of Wikipedia, all the pages, edits, talk pages, lines of code and the translation of every language is the equivalent of 100 million hours of human thought… That’s right, our “cognative heatsink” today burns about 2000 Wikipedia’s of human thought a year, in the US we spend 100 million hours (1 Wikipedia) a weekend just watching the ads.

This all builds to the premise, how do we harness this cognitive surplus and really to what magnitude could this change our society? He believes that media is a triathlon - “people like to consume but they also like to produce and they like to share”… but often we, the creators of the current web, don’t always allow or design for all three. Clay says “The interesting thing about a surplus is you don’t know what to do with them at first, you can’t… hence the sitcoms and the gin…” and that’s ok, but now that we are realizing it and there are a few good examples and experiments out there, but what are we ready to do now to put this surplus to work?

“Even a small change could have huge ramifications, lets say that everything stayed 99% the same, people watched 99% the television they used to but 1% is carved out for producing and sharing, the internet connected population watches roughly 1 trillion hours of TV a year that’s about 5 times the size of the US in terms of consumption… that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects a year work of participation… I think that’s going to be a big deal, don’t you?”

Exposing the possibility of participation.

Clay’s premise: “It’s always better to do something than do nothing…”

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan screws something up and they didn’t? I saw that one; I saw that one a lot when I was growing up.

Grown men sitting in their basements pretending to be elves [referring to World of Warcraft]… At least they were doing something!

Even Lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter by little captions, hold out a invitation to participation, when you see a Lolcat what it essentially says is if you have some san-serif fonts on your computer you can play this game too… And thats a big change, right?

I could do that too…

Building to a crescendo, what are we doing here? “We’re looking for the mouse.”

Clay tells a story from a guest at his dinner party:

“… a dad sitting with his 4 year old daughter watching a DVD, in the middle of the movie she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen… seems like a cute moment, maybe she was seeing if Dora was back there, but that isn’t what she was doing… she was rooting around and the cables, Dad said ‘What are you doing?’… she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said ‘looking for the mouse’”…

“Here’s what 4 year olds know a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken… Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for…”

“It’s also become my motto, when people ask what we [the collective industry] are doing… ‘we’re looking for the mouse’ we are going to look every place a user or reader or listener or a viewer has been locked out has been served a passive or fixed or canned experience and ask ourselves if we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus we now recognize could we make a good thing happen… I am betting we can.”

Building My Context

Clay’s story is both easily relatable to what we are seeing on the web and eye opening at the same time when you realize we haven’t even scratched the surface. The amount of time we burn off is staggering and the problems we could solve with that surplus are great. Working every day on the web we all know that Wikipedia itself along with other examples will be huge markers of our time, the level of collaboration and connectedness of the world it took to build these initiatives is unprecedented but the question always is creeping around “is this a fad?,” “who really does this stuff?,” “is this sustainable?,” “would I let those people edit my stuff? they’ll wreck it.” Clay’s story in part shows that the collective brain that is our society is looking for some exercise and genuinely wants to contribute; they need us as to open up, give up control and ask for help… to build participation and collaboration at the core of what we do and not as a bolt on non-integrated side forum to burn off their cycles.

Much of what we do, even as for profit corporations, is play in markets of quality of knowledge, quality of perspective and trust all of which could be bolstered significantly by listening and participating in an unfiltered way with any collaborator willing to pick up the mouse and keyboard. In the next projects I consult on, I promise to find a way to include “the mouse” in the box as a design goal rather than a reactionary bolt on.

Thank you Clay for the great talk…