This post concerns pulling. But no shoving, please.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I’m thinking about tiramisù. I just got to Barcelona for MWC 2011. It’s not that I am craving dessert, you see I’ve got pull on the brain. (Tiramisù literally means pull me up, but it can be translated colloquially as cheer me up.)

Pull. In moments of transition, we struggle to come up with models to explain what is happening, and inevitably we are stuck using the concepts and terminologies of the past to describe the future. And to synthesize in order to simplify and get to the heart of it.

And so it is with this pull thing, four letters that will help us to figure out how to turn our world upside down, and it’s about time.

But isn’t there somebody somewhere doing a bunch of pushing (of information into the system) so that pulling things in is worth the effort? And won’t other verbs also be useful here? Attracting, repelling, bouncing, reflecting, tilting, reaching, passing, catching and chasing are among others that come to mind. Some of this pulling, and maybe one day most of it, may be done lazily, and by this I mean it will be the exhaust of other activities re-examined, newly interpreted and then repackaged for a particular purpose or context. A simple example of how this done today would be how credit card companies track your usage patterns and when your exhaust smells funny, out pops a block of your account.

So, I will be running around MWC looking for the stuff that is most interesting to me right now — technology and applications that allow mobile devices to be more aware of what’s physically near with simple, lazy, ways to hook into the internet of things. Mix that with a pull model of information flow and I’m suddenly paying attention.

I’m reading a couple of books with the word pull in their titles, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion and Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business. By now it’s pretty clear that the mass adoption of the internets is creating a huge shift in power from the firms that produce and market their goods and services to the people that use them, that’s us AKA The People formerly known as the Audience.

Do what I want!

I was thinking about this after having played around with Wolfram Alpha. Actually what sparked this post was having seen so many tweets about it mistaking it for a search engine. The tagline of Wolfram Alpha is “computational knowledge engine”, not something like “find what you are looking for” or “let me find that for you?”

But people don’t read taglines very carefully and when they do they don’t think about them too seriously. They use past experience to parse the service and charge ahead accordingly.

In trying to keep it simple, and to develop a more natural language approach to the input field, the designers of the interface present a single text entry field followed by the plus sign [=] to communicate put your input here, click to see what we can compute from that.

The problem is that most people associate a plain input field with a submit button as = Google, not a computational knowledge engine. If you scan complaining tweets you will notice that the authors hit the [=] with a DWIW intention, expecting a search result, not computational knowledge.

We are living in the pre-dawn of a new age of human-computer interaction. Eventually we will get to the point at which a single input field (with textual, audio or even electro-neurological input) will  be semantically, behaviorally and contextually (time, place, device) aware — getting us that much closer to a true DWIW command. This will require a lot of groundwork, but seeing as though folks like Wolfram, Tim Berners-Lee and an army of others are on the case, I expect to see really cool developments becoming more commonplace over the next 5-20 years