Monthly Archive for June, 2009

Pixelate me

Published on June 23, 2009. Comments

A pixel, or picture element, is the smallest item of information in a digital image. It’s that single square in the mosaic that colors the screen upon which you are reading these words.

pix

It is essentially a dumb element, it knows only one thing — what color it is. It has no idea about the color of the other pixels around it. And, above all, it does not know what the totality of the pixels on the screen represents. A pixel is ignorant about whether it is playing a bit part in a digital photo of your dog or a completely black field.

In contrast to the pixel, the textual elements that you are reading here and markup language that tell your browser what to display are machine-readable, searchable and semantic. The future of the Internet is currently aimed at this semantic web,  the web of organized data as described by Tim Berners-Lee, the indexed web of Google and the computational web of Wolfram Alfa.

This post, however, sings the praise of the dumb pixel.

Paradoxically, due to the paucity of information contained in the pixel, collections of pixels, aka images, can penetrate filters and can spread information through unexpected channels. A good example would be photographs of protesters in Iran carrying signs in English designed to be distributed through blogs, newspapers and social networks. The textual filters of the Iranian government cannot make sense of what the group of pixels is expressing.

Another interesting setting to observe the power of the pixel is in the emerging use of Twitter avatars as an auxiliary communication channel. Huh? Once again turning to the political events in Iran, many thousands of people have used a simple green overlay on their twavatars to signify solidarity with the protesters. A few of the more geeky users are inserting badges and messages in their twavatars.

twavatars for Iran protests

Accompanying the 140 character tweet without consuming even 1 character is the meta-data, expressed in pixels: “This person supports the post-election protesters in Iran.”

The more geeky among you will point to advances being made in image recognition software. There will come a day that almost all images will be scanned, interpreted, amended with meta-data and converted into machine-understandable formats. OCR software is already quite sophisticated. On the other hand, there will be an endless game of whack-a-mole in which developers will try to construct images of dumb pixels that will fool recognition software. You can see this being played out today in the captcha images used in some site registration and blog commenting systems. Porn and spam merchants will, of course, lead the charge!

Until the day machines will be able to make as much sense of pixel mosaics as human beings can, let us take a moment to hail the humble pixel!

Published on June 23, 2009. Comments

Hot or not in Como, Italy

Published on June 13, 2009. Comments Tags: , , .

I will pass an important milestone at the end of August this year. Como, Italy will move into first place as the city in which I will have lived the longest, 17 years, surpassing North Bellmore, NY. Strange.

Man standing near Lake Como

Man standing near Lake Como

Italy is a funny place for a transplanted urban American to live. In no particular order, here is a quick list of everyday facts that you may find mildly amusing.

  • Many people still pay utility bills by lining up in the post office to pay in cash.
  • On Monday morning most local stores are closed, except for food stores. On Monday afternoon the situation reverses. The food stores close and the other stores open. This is the situation in Como. Each city will have its own schedule of odd openings and closings.
  • It’s not uncommon to find female janitors working in the mens’ bathroom in highway rest stops.
  • Most shoe stores here don’t sell shoe laces, those are found in the button shops along with sewing supplies, underwear and socks.

In recent years I have immersed my professional self in web and mobile culture and technology. It didn’t take long to realize that Como in particular, and Italy in general, are light years away from the SF Bay Area, from NY, from Boston, London and the other centers of entrepreneurial activity around the world. yet this is not really a problem for me as I like to work out of the echo chamber. It helps me keep a more holistic perspective.

On the other hand, I have come to understand that Italy has some deeply rooted cultural attitudes that will hold it back from taking part in the most interesting and radically different business models being developed around the world, the ones being catalyzed by digital connectedness. As an ex-pat and consultant I can just opt out, but it will take the changing of the generational guard before the business climate changes. I see these 3 factors as being especially relevant:

  • Italian business people tend to view the world as a zero sum game. If I win, you lose. The idea that working openly and cooperatively can grow the market for everybody so that tomorrow’s 10% market share can be bigger than yesterday’s 15% is a foreign concept.
  • Success is paradoxically viewed with suspicion. The assumption is that it was based on knowing someone on the inside or by immoral (at best) or illegal (at worst) activities. This is underscored by the behavior of most successful people; they rarely engage in mentoring or giving back to the market in which they succeeded. Happily there are some notable exceptions.
  • Lastly, and of crucial importance, the notion that an intelligent failure is often the prerequisite for success is not widely accepted. Italians play a kind of “hot or not” based on your most recent venture. Are you on your way up or way down? This is a shame because it stifles the creativity of entrepreneurs and will drive the best people to the Valley, London, NY or China.

What does this mean for me? For the time being, I still like that fact that I can take a break from work by walking down the old stone staircase into the piazza to have a great coffee in any one of many bars, or that I can take my bike to the pier, hop a ferry to a small lakeside town, have lunch and be back at work in a few hours. There is a very dependable and fast 3G signal here and my iPhone serves as a mobile office without breaking a sweat. Being connected to the net and being an hour away from 3 different international airports works for me.

And don’t forget that in Italy I can greet a friend with “Ciao, bella!” (cheek kissing included) without risking being taken for a pretentious dandy :-P  .

Published on June 13, 2009. Comments Tags: , , .

@everybody: stop drinking the Kool-aid

Published on June 5, 2009. Comments Tags: , , , .

Fail Whale Pale Ale label

Twitter has become a valuable asset to me and a part of my everyday reading and writing. So, I’m a fan. But.

By now you’ve probably read the fawning Time magazine article by Steven Johnson, “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live“. Now I don’t want to be contrarian just for the hell of it, but enough is enough.

OK, sure the media outlets love the Hollywood story that is Twitter. Of course Twitter’s high profile investors have a vested interest in evangelizing the phenomenon. And who could expect less from the Twitter-addict community? Even I have tasted the holy Kool-aid!

But when Twittermania flavors serious journalism, we need to be more critical.

For starters the article asserts that Facebook’s audience “is still several times as large as Twitter’s”. In fact Facebook’s audience and user base are most likely 20 times larger than Twitter’s, the churn of new users on Facebook is considerably lower than Twitter’s and Facebook is still growing much faster in absolute numbers.  “Several times as large” is just misleading. This is neither pedantic nor picayune.

And why is it that Johnson makes no mention of the Nielsen study about user retention?

Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent… Compare it to the two heavily-touted behemoths of social networking when they were just starting out. Doing so below, we found that even when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

The Nielsen study is not perfect and raises more questions than it answers, but it surely merits examination in any discussion of the Twitter phenomenon.

Another recent study (published too late to be included in the Time article), “New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets” by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, adds fuel to the fire.

Twitter’s usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

twitter research 2.jpg

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production… This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

Again, a lot more research needs to be done, but as one of those Twitter members in the active 10%, I do get the sensation that we are projecting the value that we get from Twitter onto the greater Twitterverse, without a shred of evidence to support this thesis.

It is paradoxical that the openness that Twitter, the company, says it embraces, from its API’s to its user-generated feature set, is so lacking when it comes to sharing their proprietary statistics, the politics of their suggested follow list or their plans with respect to providing access to their firehose and archives. Twitter is a privately held company and does not owe this to anyone, but then it should stop sending its executives around saying that they want Twitter to be like a public utility. They can’t have it both ways, but it won’t be for lack of trying.

The article correctly points out that Twitter’s deceivingly simple forumla — “the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching” — will become part of the fabric of our communication web regardless of how the Twitter the company fares.

They didn’t really invent any of the individual elements that make the service compelling, but they did stumble upon the recipe for mixing them together to create a tasty soufflé. Note that this word means “to blow up” or “puff up” and, of course, once taken out of the oven a soufflé tends to fall rather quickly.

Is this an apt analogy? Discuss.

Published on June 5, 2009. Comments Tags: , , , .

Everybody’s gone surfin’

Published on June 3, 2009. Comments Tags: , , , , .

I thought I’d take a shot at riffing on Google Wave, “a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web”, according to its creators. But before we get into the details, just to get into the mood, check out this BBC video — a gorgeous slow motion view of a surfer on the perfect wave. Wow:

Or see the high definition (HD) version here. It’s worth it.

That was also my first reaction to Google Wave, well, “wow” in lower case. It’s an evolutionary step that rhymes with so many parallel developments all around the net that it already seems inevitable just a week after its presentation.

I am most interested in watching just how open source the Wave platform will actually be. And just how open the API’s and protocols will be. I think we have good reason to be optimistic that they will remain true to the spirit of openness because it is also in their interest to do so.

Why is that? Well, the more that Wave’s protocols and syntax are open, the faster it will grow with a developer community going out there and building tools, containers and services with wild abandon. Do you think that Google might be positioned rather well to provide search within the Wave universe? Messages, media, documents, location and social graphs all crawlable. This looks to be an, um, a challenge for our privacy protection. Can we get some of you smart developers thinking about that now? Thanks, and please revert soonest!

Compare this scenario to today’s realtime darling Twitter. (Sarcasm? yeah just a little bit, but I am a Twitter member and have gotten a huge amount of value from it.) The Twitterverse consists of a central platform, a basic hosted service on the platform and an extremely active ecosystem of third party clients and applications that make it just barely usable.

In what other environment is there great competition among free client applications? Email comes first to mind and let’s not forget instant messaging. In both cases there is huge value obtained from the fact that the protocol is standard and open. It was not always so in instant messaging land, and still not universally the case, but today I can use Pidgin, Meebo, Digsby, Adium or Trillian to talk to my Jabber, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, iChat and AOL friends on one roster. So that seems to be where Twitter is headed — to be a protocol, and the biggest platform on the block adhering to that protocol.

I am hoping that Wave will be the catalyst to bring about the birth of a thousand new Twitters, truly open protocol and evolving realtime micro-messaging services, accessible through third party clients. XMPP has worked this way for years and it’s not for nothing that underneath Wave you find the XMPP protocol.

Published on June 3, 2009. Comments Tags: , , , , .