While trying to investigate a bit into the rumor of Google buying Skype, I ran across this rather lengthy post. In there, I stumbled upon a thought which is simple and rather obvious, but which I haven’t had yet:
Google isn’t a search engine company; it brokers connections between people and corporations for profit.[…] Search is just one, albeit dominant.
I am using this blog to learn the thinking process once again. I believe I did it in the past a couple of times already, but somehow the skill vanishes and I have to redo the process. These days I’m going through a lot of information and what I noticed is that I don’t spend enough time thinking about what I read. It’s more like scrolling through, then a quick spark in my mind which I can’t even describe properly with words, then I think something like “Hold on a second… Hmm.. Oh, OK. Next!”, instead of “I agree with this because…”, or “I disagree because…”, or “I never thought of that this way. I better look into it more…”. As a result of this, I have a suspicion that I re-think the same things over and over without coming to any conclusions, researching the subject more, or simply dropping it as uninteresting. This has to stop.
So, I started blogging more, putting my comments – no matter how silly or insignificant – around the things that I read about. Hopefully these will get more interesting with time and practice.
… what would happen if your Google account get stolen? I know I haven’t. And I don’t want to. That would like losing a house in the flames, with all valuables inside it turning to ash. Something of that magnitude, but worse.
I need to do a backup or something. Do you?
The digital world is upon us. Everybody knows it and nobody ever argues with it anymore. But that’s too general. What is actually changing? What are the specific examples?  Today I came across one, while catching up with Slashdot news. Here is a quote from the post:
 “An inspired professor at University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom, made an interesting pedagogical experiment. Instead of vilifying Wikipedia as some academics are prone to do, she assigned the students enrolled in her environmental history course to contribute articles. The result has proven “transformative” to her students. They were no longer spending their time writing for one reader, says Groom, but were doing work of consequence in a “peer reviewed” environment, which enhanced the quality of their output.”
If you read through the comments to the post, there are many insightful thoughts too. Here is one of those that I liked (apart from the age criteria):
Wikipedia should be output, not input, for students past a certain age. It gets them used to writing for real people as opposed to just for getting graded, it gives them the experience of having their writing edited by people of varying abilities, and it gives them motivation for doing research. Another, easier, option would be to assign students to correct Wikipedia articles.
Another comment mentions that this is not by far the first time that this happens. It conveniently links to the page with more examples of school and university projects.
Nikos pinged me just in time about the MicroMedia 5 minute meetup. That’s basically a virtual meeting of a bunch of people, who each provide their own answer to one specific question. Since the meetup is virtual, the answers should have been provided virtually as well. And since it was all about micromedia, it was logical to expect micromedia tools to be used. The question this time was: “What is the future of communication?“.
That’s one broad question if seen from all perspectives. To avoid a non-stop thinking exercise, I limited myself to a version like “What is the future of communication from micro media point of view?“. For those of you, who don’t know what micro media is all about, here is a quote from the meetup wiki:
- Text: Microblogging tools like Jaiku, Twitter, Pownce, or Text messages
- Audio: Twitter Gram, Utterz, Audioblogger, or other
- Images: Get creative here, can you tell a story from photos?
These tools rushed into our digital lives recently, and got a large and important place there. The applications of these tools vary from personal notes to corporate meetings, but most people use these for communication purposes. So, here are the questions that I got thinking about:
There is a lot that I can say answering these, but most of it will be just water with no proof or reason to it. For me it’s mostly based on personal experiences and feelings, rather then any specific studies or statistical data or anything like that.
Before I go on, here is the short answer the meetup question that I posted to Twitter.
Twitter-type short text services with open API and mobile/SMS integration will rule the future for a long time.
Now, for the long story.
I think plain text will dominate images, video, and sound for a very long time. That’s not going to change in any foreseeable future. I think so because:
Now, most people will prefer short chunks of text to long chunks of text. I’d rather read two sentences and move on to the next news section or topic, than spend three days trying to figure out what the author is trying to say. Most people I know will have hard times writing an article one page long on any subject at all. All the same people will have no problem spitting out a sentence or two. Again, on any subject at all.
Because of the above, I think that short text services will blossom. And they already grow pretty fast.
Which of these are better? Those that are simpler to use. Twitter is doing a really good job here. One large text box, one submit button, and a counter of how many characters you have left for this message. Nothing more. It’s difficult to make it even simpler.
But ease of use shouldn’t be only for the end user. It should be from all sides of the service. And again Twitter is doing a pretty good job of it.  It has a simple and straightforward API, which allows programmers to create applications for this service in just a few lines of code (a few is as in one or two lines of code). It has an RSS feed for everything, so it’s easy to get things out of it. It has plenty of automation – TinyURL integration, direct messages, tracking, etc. It has SMS integration, so it’s easy to use on the move.
Stuff like that will be at the top of micro media, I think.
Of course, other technologies will move forward, as they always do. It will be easier and easier to create and move around sounds, videos, and whatever else is there. Devices will get smaller. Connections will get faster. The content will get richer.
But, as with many other things, the limiting factor won’t be in the technologies. It will be in people. Think about images for example. Those were with us for thousands of years. Yet, only a few of us can draw a semi-decent picture. And photography is of no help here. Millions of terrible images out there show as to how effective we are with cameras. We see things in 3D. Images are 2D. The software will hardly ever do a proper conversion. And humans will hardly spend the time learning about the topic to do it themselves. Videos are even more complex – we can’t manage static pictures properly, and now we have a full power to work with moving images. Sounds aren’t much different.
People are buying multi-core multi-CPU hi-end machines and use them to play minesweeper mostly.  You give them a mobile phone which can control half of the universe, and they won’t even bother about an address book in it. I don’t think this will ever change. Things might improve both from the people’s and technology’s sides, but the huge gap will always be there.
These are my thoughts on how this whole micro media communication will play out in the future…