/Message

A New Take On Operating Systems: Responding to Chrome OS

Everyone is all spun up to the point of having their heads explode about Chrome OS.

This is being cast in a very obvious way: an attack on Microsoft whose future remains tightly linked to Windows.

But what is happening here is the first foray into a new generation of user experience, and unltimately, a new paradigm for the Web, more than for the desktop.

Way back in October 2007, Jasons Calacanis tried to brand something Web 3.0, and I responded with this:

[via /Message: Jason Calacanis on Web 3.0]

Personally, I feel the vague lineaments of something beyond Web 2.0, and they involve some fairly radical steps. Imagine a Web without browsers. Imagine breaking completely away from the document metaphor, or a true blurring of application and information. That's what Web 3.0 will be, but I bet we will call it something else.

Paradoxically, Google (or whoever) building a new operating system for edge devices (all our PCs, laptops, netbooks, handhelds, cell phones) that is predicated on the Web existing as the primary model of interaction and information access and storage will spell the end of the browser as we know it.

Think how odd it is to have a bazillion apps that we run on our desktops, but a single porthole to the web? A porthole that has to do a mazillion things?

If we rethink the operating environment for edge devices under the assumption that they will (nearly) always be connected to the Web, then a single swiss army knife tool to access everything online is a dumb approach. Instead, build browserish capabilities into the OS so that developers are free to construct all sorts of different and specialized apps, relying on common services for caching, messaging, and so on.

Yes, Microsft will be the ox first gored by this, but so will Apple -- whose OS is still stuck in the 90's, although much much better than Windows, lord knows -- as well as Linux and all the old school phone OS's.

It will all rapidly shift into a very different world. We will all be reformatting our hard drives in the near future, and never looking back.

Typepad 2.0: Ready For The Next Phase

I recently gave the new Typepad a trial. Note that I was strongly biased against Six Apart ever getting it together and doing something innovative and cool with the aging Typepad system. I had skinned my knees and bumped my head on all the weird, fucked-up, and plan dumb design decisions embedded in the old Typepad, as only a hardcore, heavily invested user can do.

So, I had planned to exit Typepad just as soon as I could figure out one little snag: finding another blogging solution that could regenerate the same URLs for all my posts. That turned out to be a considerable barrier, although I found a few (like Squarespace) that seemed to have at least a possibility of getting there.

But I decided to give ole Typepad one more look.

I officially announce that the Six Apart folks have done something pretty cool, and that I am going to keep my /message blog here, after all. (They might have been happier if I left, considering all the griping they get from me.)

Much of the old Typepad is still there, under new wall paper, and some of that is still annoying. (As one example, Typepad supports handy lisks that you can create and publish in the sidebar of your blog. You can add, edit, and delete the items in these so-called Typelists, but you can't reorder them. Who thought that was a nice-to-have and not an essential feature of lists?)

On the other hand, they have extensively reworked the editor and the commenting system, as well as transitioning to a streaming model for the core user experience, providing a whole new sort of social dimension to Typepad that inherits the following model of Tumblr in a very cool way. A number of small things --- like an easy way to post to Twitter -- are helpful, but the big thing is a new concept of socializing around blogs presented in a streaming user experience for the blogger.

In the screenshot above I have captured my 'dashboard', which displays recent activities from those that I am following in Typepad and me. It displays comments, who is following who, and other social actions. I don't understand why it doesn't stream my posts or posts those that I am following -- at least a title and excerpt -- but I hope they will adopt that convention in the future as well.

They have regrooved the comment system to be more of a competitor to tools like Disqus, which, try as I might, I never came to more than tolerate. As a result, I have turned on Typepad commenting again on this blog, and installed Typepad code into my Tumblr blog, /ambivalence, as well. (I also plan to roll it out onto other Tumblr blogs, like Microsyntax.org, over the next weeks.)

These external blog comments also show up in the dashboard stream which will make distributed comments easier to deal with over time.

Mostly, though, this generation-- Typepad 2.0, basically -- demonstrates that the folks at Six Apart are ready, willing and able to reconceive their tools in the light of new ideas about plumbing in social media. Now guys, could you please fix that niddling little bug with the Typelists?

New Research Discovers Way To Avoid Organizational Incompentence: Promote Randomly

Alessandro Pluchino and colleagues from Universita di Catania used an agent-based simulation approach to try to figure out how incompetence happens in organizations, and how to avoid it. This replays the Peter Principle -- "All new members in a hierarchical organization climb the hierarchy until they reach their level of maximum incompetence." -- and suggests that there really is something wrong with always selecting the best at level N in an organization and promoting them to levl N+1:

[via Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Why Incompetence Spreads through Big Organizations

But is there a better way of choosing individuals for promotion? It turns out that there is, say Pluchino and co. Their model shows that two other strategies outperform the conventional method of promotion.

The first is to alternately promote first the most competent and then the least competent individuals. And the second is to promote individuals at random. Both of these methods improve, or at least do not diminish, the efficiency of an organization.

Interesting idea that would be fascinating to see in action. What would be a suitable prize for the first CEO to implement such a policy?

The promotion at random idea is so wonderfully oblique: it sounds like Borges "Lottery In Babylon", where each year the station of all people in some fantastic country was decided by lottery.

David Weinberger on News and Nets

[via News is a network by David Weinberger]

The notion that newspapers give you your daily requirement of global news — which works out to wondering, along with Howard, if there is such a thing as “news” — seems to me to be as vulnerable as the old idea of objectivity. Like objectivity: (1) It’s presented as one of the basic reasons to read a newspaper; (2) it hides the fact that it’s based on cultural values; and (3) it doesn’t scale well in the age of the Net.

Ultimately, this myth is enabled – as so many of the myths of news and knowledge are — by paper. Take away the paper and the newspaper doesn’t become a paperless newspaper. It becomes a network. That’s what’s happening now, IMO. From object to network … and networks are far far harder to “monetize” (giving myself a yech here) than objects.

Yes, exactly. Because networks are hard to objectify, unlike objects. So look to social objects embedded in the networks to be objectified, and monetized.

Russia Has World’s Most Engaged Social Networking Audience?

According to a recent study by comScore, Russia has the most connected population for web-based social networking, so long as you exclude internet cafes and mobile access. (I wonder where the most connected place is with those considerations folded back in?)

[via Russia has World’s Most Engaged Social Networking Audience - comScore, Inc]

Two-Thirds of Global Internet Users Access Social Networking Sites

Of the 1.1 billion people age 15 and older worldwide who accessed the Internet from a home or work location in May 2009, 734.2 million visited at least one social networking site during the month, representing a penetration of 65 percent of the worldwide Internet audience. The Russian social networking audience had the highest engagement among the 40 individual countries reported by comScore, with an average of 6.6 hours and 1,307 pages consumed per visitor. Brazil ranked close behind at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours).

I want to see the comparison with TV viewing.

I guess it is no surprise that most of the top ten social networking sites in Russia are Russian, with Facebook at the seventh spot. No Twitter to be seen.