Your phone is probably not killing the Internet

When I first saw the title of Simone Santini‘s Is Your Phone Killing the Internet [PDF], I expected an article on how Internet usage is more and more moving toward cell phones, so that we spend less time browsing the Web using our laptop or desktop computers. I did not quite see how that might lead to the demise of the Internet, but my interest was piqued enough to actually read the article. In the end I was only more confused though.

According to the author, the generative nature of computers and the Internet helped them triumph over early, proprietary networks:

What made the Internet and the programmable personal computer a successful pair was a characteristic none of the alternatives offered: they are generative (J. Zittran, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Yale Univ. Press, 2008).

Generativity refers here to our ability to freely program and modify our computers and produce our own content. Any programmer can appreciate this and the Internet is full of examples where this has led to outlets of creativity to pass spare time (such as lolcats) as well as innovative solutions that would not have been possible before the Internet (such as Wikipedia or Facebook).

We are increasingly seeing devices that are less open in nature. The iPhone is an incredibly successful platform, but its app store and the associated app review process are much more restrictive and have drawn criticism because of it. Other examples of closed computing platforms are known, sometimes their software are modified remotely, sometimes apparently without the product owner’s approval.

The author appears to believe that this might lead to an overall negative change on the Web:

Things could evolve differently, though, due to the possible diffusion of Web 2.0. Its application programs are beginning to migrate from individuals’ computers to centralized webservers. This approach offers great and widely publicized convenience, but there are also great—and not so publicized—risks.
With centralized applications, the user loses control over the software’s evolution, even post facto—that is, even after using it to create data. While we can simply decide not to install the new version of a program if it lacks some useful feature, such a possibility doesn’t exist in the Web 2.0 environment.

It is curious that web 2.0 is being highlighted here. It seems like lots of early, successful websites (such as Amazon.com or eBay in the mid-to-late 90s) had some of those same symptoms without yet having any of the characteristics we have come to associate with web 2.0 in recent years.

The author concludes:

If Web 2.0 and its information guardians have their way, the future may be nothing more than a flashy version of Compuserve or Minitel, despite the allure of all their modern technological bells and whistles. The corporate model that the creative anarchy of the Internet defeated once might then return with permanent vengeance.

Going back to the title, I am confused how exactly the phone would be to be blamed for this. The web is still a very open environment. It has in fact in many ways become easier and cheaper to get server space and computing capacity, develop applications and make them available to the world. Many applications that now have strong user interfaces and also take advantage of features that aren’t easily conceivable without online access are also complex. Depending on the degree of complexity the likelihood of someone else simply building their own is of course decreased.

I think there will always be walled gardens, as well as open playgrounds. There will probably also always be a hacker culture (particularly following Paul Graham‘s definition) and so people will always strive to find smart new uses of systems (open or closed).

And some of those people will continue to look for interesting solutions, because they are intrinsically motivated by the joy of solving an interesting problem. As the author asserted, this kind of spirit drove a lot of the innovation on the net. I don’t think that is going to stop.

Affective gadgets?

Clive Thompson recently published The Emotional Gadget on Wired:

Projects like this are still in the lab. But they might not be for long, because today’s gadgets—particularly smartphones—are crammed with tech that’s ripe for emotion detection: motion sensors that know when you’re running frantically or sitting quietly, GPS that can tell whether you’re at work or in a bar.

I posted some notes on the subject in an earlier post, but apps on highly mobile devices are a nice angle. The article concludes:

Granted, the right way to respond to moods is not always clear. (Hell, this confuses most humans.) But if we can get it right, I predict we’ll soon see a fascinating new crop of devices: MP3 players that adapt a playlist to your mood, phones that hold off on text messages if you’re in a particularly intense face-to-face conversation. Our computers have been robots too long; it’s time they softened up.

If we sit in front of a laptop then the software may use a camera to detect facial expressions an evaluate the user’s mood. This does not seem nearly as practical with a smartphone. Maybe it will have to come down mostly to speech analysis for mood detection?

A new favorite: Hacker Monthly

Hacker News is one of my favorite sources of technical news and discussion. There is usually a nice variety of articles on the front page and the conversations around them tend to be more thoughtful than at many, many other websites.

Recently, Hacker Monthly was launched. It is a print magazine, based on Hacker News. Consider it a monthly best-of. This project is not affiliated with Y Combinator. Instead, it is a rather nice example of the community: A Hacker News reader saw this as an interesting project, took the initiative and decided to make it happen. Lim Cheng Soon approaches the authors of recently most popular articles and asks for permission to reprint in Hacker Monthly. If granted, the article gets published.

The PDF version of the first issue is available for free. After looking through it, I decided to also order a printed copy. I am impressed by the presentation as well as the content: This first issue contains an excellent mix of articles aimed at people interested in technology, software development and startups.

Even though a lot of my news consumption has moved online, I still read plenty of print magazines. Hacker Monthly is going to be on my regular list from now on. I appreciate the format and like the fact that the articles presumably had a successful run on the Hacker News front page.

I do not actually want to check in on the site all that frequently to see if there is something particularly good that is being voted up. Sure, social news websites can leave you feeling as if you should be coming back frequently, lest you miss something important. Now, I may not feel so bad though.

I may even be able to train myself to exercise patience and simply look forward to the next issue.

Smarter reading

Does This Headline Know You’re Reading It? discusses Text 2.0, a very interesting AI research project that focuses around this premise: What if your computer knew, what you are reading, as you are reading it?

This is an intriguing question and this work could lead to a multitude of interesting applications. The following video (it starts a bit slow, but includes interesting examples later on) shows just a few of those.

Explore this much more at the project’s homepage, where you can also find Processing Easy Eye Tracker Plugin (PEEP), which allows experimenting with custom eye-tracking applications (unfortunately not yet on the Mac).