A couple of months ago I met a new acquaintance that had some interesting business ideas. As luck would have it, they happened to correlate in part with some ancient ideas of my own and we instantly hit it off. Since then, a little voice in the back of my head has been telling me that I might have a record of the original brainstorming back in 2003. It’s not quite what we’re up to these days, but it is in many ways related. At least it was sort of the spore for me. More on that for a future post, perhaps.

Lo’ behold: I actually managed to find the original IM chat log between me and a good friend sometime first half of 2003 after some searching of archived CD-ROMs [sic], translated in parts from Norwegian. It’s a fun time capsule if nothing more and it’s interesting to see how the assessments and predictions for mobile devices, services and business models we had back in 2003 relate to the mobile reality of 2010 – or not.

If you’re of an overly sensitive nature, be warned that this post contains colourful adult language. I would also state for the record that my references to Nipponese people and Nipponese culture are not meant to be derogatory, defamatory or otherwise insulting. Far from it. I find Japanese people and culture most fascinating and inspiring.

To all telcos that might find statements, opinions and ideas in this post derogatory, defamatory or otherwise insulting – well life just ain’t fair, is it?

My friend’s IM nickname has been changed to protect the guilty. He knows who he is and what he has done.  ;)

So with no further ado I’ll let it all hang out here in the open  for posterity. What can I say. We were angry young men of low moral fiber young and needed the money:

BlackTar says:
http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/business/technology/5987828.htm [link no longer active - nice argument for permalinks - and I was not able to find it on wayback machine. Anyway, I seem to remember the article was about some new dating and geolocation thingy]

BlackTar says:
new? no

BlackTar says:
I’ve had an idea about the perfect Japanese mobile phone along those lines for a long time.. .

BlackTar says:
it’s gotta happen sooner or later – would bee nice to cash in ourselves

Friend says:
I thought this was cool when I read about it back in the tamagotchi days

BlackTar says:
yeah, but think about the possibility to cash in real money on perv nipponese (and the rest of the world for that matters)

Friend says:
I think that would be pretty kick-ass, actually…

BlackTar says:
there once was this Japanese hightech product that would let you plot in sexual and partner preference and it would indicate when someone with the same gizmo and matching profile would be in your vicinity

BlackTar says:
it never took off

Friend says:
not necessarily for perv purposes

BlackTar says:
no, true – but it’s more fun if you think about perverted nipponese

BlackTar says:
well.. . my idea is to enable each and every mobile phone with the same capabilities

Friend says:
separate the crap, sort of

BlackTar says:
either with a Java app together with a server based solution

BlackTar says:
low threshold

BlackTar says:
or just the server solution

BlackTar says:
ref. NetCom Buddy [early Norwegian geolocation service that you could set up in a web interface to have it report by sms where your friends were, based on opt-in consent and triangulation]

BlackTar says:
you can already receive notifications about where your friends are

Friend says:
hmm.. it cannot work other than server side.. or else you need new hardware

BlackTar says:
true, but the interface could be Java

BlackTar says:
instead of sending sms – but sms is a proven business model by now

Friend says:
if it can’t run piggyback on the standard mobile server traffic

BlackTar says:
it is a prerequisite that it can

BlackTar says:
(must)

Friend says:
but you can like request a ‘proximity check’ from the server, anyway.

BlackTar says:
yeah, but you do it via SMS!!!

BlackTar says:
that’s the genious part!

BlackTar says:
you constantly need to BUY services!!

Friend says:
yeahyeah, of course.. just thinking out aloud here

BlackTar says:
I think this is ripe for bigggg bucks

Friend says:
piggybucks!

BlackTar says:
piggy, piggy can’t you see.. .

BlackTar says:
imagine you are about to go out for a night on the town – then you just set up what you are looking for today/tonight – either via sms or web – then you can request proximity checks via sms afterwards

BlackTar says:
I believe and think this is worth insane amounts of money

BlackTar says:
after all – the human sex drive is probably the most proven business model of them all

BlackTar says:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/national/02INTE.html

BlackTar says:
wtf

Friend says:
Keep a lid on it!

BlackTar says:
riiiiiiiiiiiiight

BlackTar says:
how much does a patent cost?

Friend says:
the nipponese are probably working on this already.. better sleuth for some industrial espionage on the net

BlackTar says:
you are the only one I’ve told

BlackTar says:
no! I don’t think the nipponese even use sms

BlackTar says:
do they?

BlackTar says:
they probably have some sort of micropayment system

BlackTar says:
but.. . I picture this being just as big in the us of a

Friend says:
are they making money on devices or services or both.. sort of

BlackTar says:
both I think

BlackTar says:
they do have a completely different network

Friend says:
yeah well, usa have discovered sms and teletext only in the recent year or so

BlackTar says:
with 489587347598759 more features and bandwidth

Friend says:
hmm.. but they can’t launch a network just for this? .. probably radio

Friend says:
isn’t it only short distance that is of interest?

Friend says:
or

BlackTar says:
no, it could probably work on the nipponese network too

Friend says:
e.g. sitting at home checking out where the most likeminded are in the city at the moment

BlackTar says:
exactly

BlackTar says:
you can do this today with GSM

BlackTar says:
and probably with anything that sends and receives waves

Friend says:
yeah, with people you know…. ok I know how this can work

BlackTar says:
trinangulation between base stations

Friend says:
yeahyeah

BlackTar says:
it’s going to get much more fun when gps becomes a natural part of a mobile phone

Friend says:
but it can work exactly like the “where are my friends” thing

BlackTar says:
triangulation is even more accurate as of now, tho afaik

Friend says:
you don’t have to send any extra information between phone and central either

BlackTar says:
yeah! and one should also be able to do the “where are my friends” thing too

BlackTar says:
no, it only takes that you opt-in to allow your geolocation to be published

BlackTar says:
you’ll send a simple or advanced query to the server via SMS – it returns what it finds

Friend says:
because the numbers are categorized on the central [server] into interests you’ve been filling out over the internet.. and when one does a “my friends search” it does not search for the numbers you’ve added, but any number they’ve flagged prerequisites

Friend says:
the technology is already there

BlackTar says:
after a proprietary – a la google – sorting

BlackTar says:
there has to be some flexibility in handling the query such as you risk to never get a match [sic]

Friend says:
that you not? or? huh+

BlackTar says:
a lot of the success factor lays thus in the algorithm(s) for handling the matching of criteria

BlackTar says:
understandably you could make this hyper simple too

BlackTar says:
with if/else functions, booleans

Friend says:
hmm.. I don’t really see a problem with this.. you get % numbers on matches and it’s left to the user to decide if that’s good enough, sort of..

Friend says:
a fixed number of hits every time

BlackTar says:
% match is meaningless – ref websearch

Friend says:
hmmm….. can one buy oneself upwards on the lists?

BlackTar says:
hehe

Friend says:
el corrupto

BlackTar says:
that doesn’t work either ref websearch

BlackTar says:
but it’s clear that you have to specify degree of match you want when you request query per sms

BlackTar says:
hihi

BlackTar says:
so you have to send more than 1

BlackTar says:
and it is clear that you need heaps of parameters and features that you can adjust per sms

Friend says:
mo’ money

BlackTar says:
but just enough so that it becomes, stays functional

Friend says:
one can request info on hits

BlackTar says:
so, you see.. . it’s in actual fact the sane as Trepia – only smarter

BlackTar says:
regular people don’t understand hits

BlackTar says:
info on hits? more info, click hear plz

Friend says:
duh

BlackTar says:
tell me more about info on hits

Friend says:
Once you’re a member of the service you can enter personal info about yourself, this can be bought with sms, when MMS gets common you can have images/videos, whatever, too

BlackTar says:
yeah

BlackTar says:
yes

BlackTar says:
info on hit == profiles

BlackTar says:
brb

[snip, snip, snip. Lunch break and a funny digression about Cottage Cheese, Procter & Gamble, Amway and the Church of Satan. It happens, you know.]

BlackTar says:
what’s neat & sweet about the mobile service is that it is remarkably compatible with the multi level marketing [MLM] scheme!!!

BlackTar says:
you have a product (that in addition to be low cost – initial investment only) that people consume and come back to consume
- then you ‘franchise’ the system to agents below you (distribution companies, telcos, etc) who then resell the service to other subcontractors. We collect from every party from the bottom up!!

BlackTar says:
== daddy bigbucks

Friend says:
what’s the name of the friends search service thing from telenor?

BlackTar says:
no idea

BlackTar says:
[the service from] netcom is called ‘buddy’

[snip, snip, snip. A digression about SARS in China, ill friends and travel.]

Friend says:

http://telenormobil.no/mobilinfo/oversikt.jsp

Friend says:
#2

Friend says:
Pick-up tips?!!!! jesus

Friend says:
Jokes?!!! OMG

BlackTar says:
positioning

Friend says:
ho ho!

BlackTar says:
‘It costs NOK 0,0 per message that you receive.’

BlackTar says:
eh?

Friend says:
hmmm.. Whiskey Tango Foxrot ?!

Friend says:
ah.. you pay fixed

BlackTar says:
longitude and latitude?

BlackTar says:
how much does one pay fixed?

Friend says:
or?

Friend says:
no, then they would probably state it

Friend says:
‘The query is free but you have to pay for the answer.’

BlackTar says:
Probably an error

BlackTar says:
‘Get Bible verses directly to the mobile.
It costs NOK 3,0 per message that you receive.’

BlackTar says:
‘when do you want to be notified’

BlackTar says:
haha

BlackTar says:

http://telenormobil.no/mobilinfo/product/categories.jsp?maincategory=ENTERTAINMENT&category=CATEGORY0

BlackTar says:
fucking hell

Friend says:
what about a ‘get out of a meeting’ service? Order an incoming call in 20 mins. .. hoho you can use alarm clock wake up services for this

BlackTar says:
yupp

Friend says:
oops.. muyo importante, must go!

BlackTar says:

http://telenormobil.no/mobilinfo/product/product.jsp?productCode=BIORYTMER

Friend says:
hmmmmmm…..hmmmm…mhm…hmhmhm.hm……

BlackTar says:
kiss my.. .

BlackTar says:
“You will receive a total of two messages.
It costs NOK 5,- per received message.”

Friend says:
set sail for cock, assboat!

BlackTar says:
I too want to cash in on this NOW!!!

Friend says:
serialz straight to your mobile

BlackTar says:
gotta talk to [other friend].. . He knows some people who do bulk SMS server solutions

BlackTar says:
hihi

BlackTar says:
l/p pr0n craxx0r

BlackTar says:
abuse

BlackTar says:
send a message with the code ‘idiot’ and get an incoming call telling you off for being stupid enough to waste NOK 10,00 on the service

BlackTar says:
that would probably work too

Friend says:
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm… do you have a link to that ‘buddy’ thing?

BlackTar says:

http://www.netcom.no/

Friend says:
kinda wondering what kind of info you get back? your friend is situated at 4525 degrees north, 34 clicks west at sea level 341345?

BlackTar says:
in the street with number of the house

BlackTar says:
have tested

Friend says:
kool

BlackTar says:

http://mother.netcom.no/Forside/index.html

BlackTar says:

http://mother.netcom.no/Login/login_page.html?org=%2FBuddy%2Findex.html

Friend says:
if one does not find funding in a hurry, then it’s just to send a registered letter that explains the gig to telenor and netcom.. wait ca 1 year and then sue..

BlackTar says:
yup – file at lawyer and deposit box

BlackTar says:
stupid pages

BlackTar says:
ah! I got the buddy password right now

BlackTar says:
neat

BlackTar says:
can log in everywhere at netcom without being registered

Friend says:
yes, so get it theeeeeeeeeeeeeen

Friend says:
usually receives it immediately

BlackTar says:
yup

BlackTar says:
you got netcom?

Friend says:
yes

BlackTar says:
okidoki

Friend says:
hmmm… does it cost anything, come to think of it?

BlackTar says:
probably per received message

BlackTar says:
with MAP and stuff!!!

BlackTar says:
‘It is free to use Buddy from mother.no in August and September!’
Det er gratis å bruke Buddy fra mother.no i hele august og september!

BlackTar says:
[mobile phone number]?

Friend says:
yes

Friend says:
HELL! Why don’t I get a passsssssssssword

BlackTar says:
took 3 tries before I got one

BlackTar says:
search (reception) SMS WAP* and WEB
1 person NOK 3,00
Group 2-5 persons NOK 5,00
Group 6-10 persons NOK 8,00

Friend says:
I’m not fucking receiving one

Friend says:
maybe they canceled my subscription thingy?

Friend says:
haven’t tried to call lately…

BlackTar says:
wap & web per gprs.. . hmm whatwhat what

BlackTar says:
you need to invite people

BlackTar says:
so I’ll try to localize myself then

Friend says:
bah

[snip, snip, snip. Digression about HL2 screener, SMS gambling services, gen BS]

BlackTar says:
so

BlackTar says:
I’ve invited myself now

BlackTar says:
to netcom buddy

BlackTar says:
but now the html doesn’t work

BlackTar says:
damned shit

BlackTar says:
part of the secret about the sms thing is that it shouldn’t be as committing and explicit as the classifieds

BlackTar says:
so that you can remain anonymous but still create a feeling of excitement and adventure

BlackTar says:
so that most people possible would use it

Friend says:
yup.. the [Norwegian data storage supervision department] would probably like it too

BlackTar says:
BUT then you can of course choose to make it explicit by way of our anonymous sms chat system!

BlackTar says:
and that costs money ™ per message

Friend says:
the problem is to beef up the user numbers…..’

BlackTar says:
yes – the secret to that is to place the bar as low as possible

BlackTar says:
once they’re ‘in’ they’ll have a lot of features to burn away the money on

BlackTar says:
or they can stick with the simple features – which cost money still

BlackTar says:
it mustn’t cost too much either

Friend says:
join for free.. increase 10 cents per use until fixed price of NOK 3 or whatever

BlackTar says:
I think a fixed price per received message is the way to go

BlackTar says:
some services [features] are of course more expensive than others

Friend says:
important: finding out how the triangulation thing works with the telcos.. if it is at all possible to buy this service [from them]

BlackTar says:
it is – if they make money on it

BlackTar says:
think about it this way – we would be doing the least amount of work possible : 1. Own the rights 2. Manage the concept 3. Harvest money

BlackTar says:
the best bit is that the telcos would be responsible for the integration and technical parts themselves

BlackTar says:
we just want money per license and share per received sms – we are only going to invest in the concept

BlackTar says:
see the presentation on rebel.as

Friend says:
the technical part is there.. it just needs to be hooked up with the Whoremonger ™ sms services

BlackTar says:
yes, and that’s not our responsibility

BlackTar says:
that costs money

BlackTar says:
and those interested in making money on their networks should carry those costs

BlackTar says:
if we only make something that talk in standard tongue [made with open standards]

BlackTar says:
then the rest should be fine

BlackTar says:
I think the essence is to create a concept with a low bar for participation, and at the same time offer flexible and advanced features

Friend says:
hmmm.. the input part in itself … registering … criteria .. must work on mobile .. have to be pretty vague? preformatted multiple choice?

BlackTar says:
that’s of the essence

BlackTar says:
creating something that WORKS here

BlackTar says:
that concept must be thoroughly thought and worked out

BlackTar says:
where the already proven technology bits only gets included as independent elements one takes for granted

BlackTar says:
the concept is really just a combination of existing technologies and a proven business model – combined in a new way with a kickass ‘frontend’ (if you catch my drift) on top of it all

Friend says:
Indeed! I’m just a bit busy — must get things done in a hurry!

BlackTar says:
oki

BlackTar says:
me too – really – but can’t be bothered to work :-\

Friend says:
I’m attending a meeting soon and need to have stuff finished :=

Friend says:
“but can’t be bothered to work” so true so true . it’s boring

BlackTar says:
it’s eating me away

BlackTar says:
slowly

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. You’ve heard it all week; Buzz, Buzz, Buzz. I’m very guilty of adding to the… well… Buzz. (Sorry. Bad pun.) and I’ve almost had enough myself.

I think nobody knows exactly what Google Buzz is right now and where it’s going to go, evolve into. I think most agree it has tremendous potential. However, a most provocative thought occured to me today; Could this be a Blog killer replacement?

The gist of my hypothetical argument is that Google Buzz could probably replace most blogs given the ability to take it out of Gmail, customize, widgetize and skin it a la iGoogle. The Google vehicle is already there in the form of the current Google profile page or embedded externally over the Buzz API. The vehicle for an standalone service is already there as Google owns Blogger. The quest for unified commenting could also have been solved by the advent of Buzz. Further more, Google’s proven efficiency at filtering SPAM in Gmail, it stands to reason that they’d do an excellent job at eliminating comment SPAM.

Please share your take with me – I’d really like to hear what you think.

For those of you who live under a stone actually live wholesome, meaningful lives Buzz is a new service launched by Google.

Think of Google Buzz as something like twitter with no character restrictions and with comments or Facebook without Farrmville and the other horrible wonderful stuff, like FriendFeed if you’re of a more adventerous inclination – or perhaps a Blog?

Currently I hate the (as of writing) lock-in of the service with Gmail, but I’ll keep that for future posts.

The service has improvement potential and, shall we say some rough edges?

Here’s a primer on what you should know about Google Buzz to get started.

To keep in the spirit of ‘the now’, I’ve embedded the original Google Buzz thread (as a grotesque kludge – do tell if you know of a better way) below.

UPDATE 2012: Below we have the answer to the question in the headline. It’s a resounding “no”. Buzz is scheduled to be killed and old content is not embedable anymore.

UPDATE: Chris Anderson (@TEDchris) was right when he told me that this change would be for the better back in 2009. I accept now in hindsight that my initial reaction was perhaps mostly nostalgic about a future that couldn’t technically and socially exist. As the amount of my followers keept rising, it was becoming self-evident that the changes were needed. Nevertheless, I still feel some of the initial feeling of exciting serendipitous chaos that made Twitter very special back then is gone. I guess I’m still a bit nostalgic. What do you think?

Original post below:

This morning I read a blog post over at Read Write Web (RWW) that caught me by surprise. I recommend you read it too. It seems that twitter has removed what I consider an essential feature in their latest update.

I was so surprised that I wrote a comment in the emotional heat of the moment over at RWW and I decided to republish it here later on. My initial thoughts were as follows:

I’m quite appalled that twitter seems to me to be self confident – if not almost smirk – with removing a setting that potentially alters the mechanics of conversing and discovering on twitter on a fundamental level; In other words making twitter less like, well, twitter.

I find the idea of not listening to 2% of their user base quite grand. Did they do the maths? That’s not a tiny amount of people, is it? My guess is, that there are a lot of the early twitter adopters and evangelists in those 2% too.

Another bet of mine is that most of those 2% are most certainly not confused by the @ reply ‘system’. It’s inaccurate, not threaded and tracked – but who cares? It’s ‘the twitter way’ and some learned to live comfortably with it.

I’m also willing to bet that a much higher percentage was living under the illusion that they were getting every single public tweet from the people they were following and didn’t know that twitter was censoring and deciding what they could and could not see.

As to the topic of context, I personally find parts of the 2008 twitter blog post referred to in the comments over at RWW completely out of touch.

From the post:
“1) You should feel free to @reply people and not worry about it being out of context to some of your followers. In general, they won’t see it.”

To me, twitter is not instant messaging or email. To me, one of the most important aspects about twitter is enabling discovery, stumbling upon new interesting people, sparking curiosity, reading different perspectives. Why take all that away? I’m flabbergasted. Speechless.

Would it hurt too much to just leave the [promiscuous] setting as default OFF, but there to turn ON for the users who are comfortable with it?

Are there economical incentives involving either business plans or prohibitive cost-benefit ratios precluding it? If so, twitter should be up front and transparent about it.

Please bring ‘promiscuous’ back. I don’t want to have to subscribe to the RSS feed of every single user that I’m following in my reader of choice to get the complete unadulterated twitter stream (even from users that may have blocked me).

@blacktar

[tags]twitter, fail, twittermute, fixreplies, readwriteweb, rww[/tags]

There’s been some discussion about marketing and ‘the Conversation’ lately – or more perhaps more accurately an ‘ Anti-Conversation’ meme in the making.

Brian Oberkirch recently blogged about it too, which inspired me to share my take.

Personally, I think Bill Hicks nailed it with regards to marketing in general. ;)

On another note, markets are conversations. That genie is out of the bottle.

Marketing depts, product depts and hired marketing agency guns must clue up and take a good honest look at their position – then enter the Conversation in an honest, professional and constructive way, if it makes sense. No doubt that there are a lot of companies that will not benefit significantly from – heck, should not even consider – ‘conversational marketing’, if there ever was such a thing. I guess I just can’t think of many right now, but I’m sure there are others than say personnel mines and cluster bomb manufacturers that should perhaps hold back on the conversation sauce.

The bottom line seems to me that it has taken nine years for the Cluetrain Manifesto to grow into mainstream marketing. That may be considered a lifetime in Internet years, but then again, marketing as we know it was never particularly quick to adapt.

To me it’s like this with every new concept, disruptive change or meme? It’s just the hype cycle gone full circle. At the end of it, you’ll have clueless snake oil peddlers on every street corner desperately trying to cash in on a saturated market. In the end we just can’t stand it anymore. Tired and wary from the multichannel onslaught of buzzword abuse, we welcome any change – perhaps sometimes too rash and noncritical – creating a situation ripe for fleeting counter trends and anti-movements. Alas, the circle starts anew.

On another further note, could this emerging anti-conversation ‘movement’ be a conscious self-serving marketing ploy snowballing from a handful of self appointed social media marketing prophets trying to (re)position them from the quacks and to the gushing edge of Intarweb marketing?

You tell me.

[tags]marketing, conversation, cluetrain, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Oberkirch, Jeremy Toeman, Alex Hillman, snake oil, social, socialmedia, anticonversation, anti-conversation, anti-socialmedia, antisocialmedia, antisocial media[/tags]

I get to do cool things with Plone. Sometimes I even get to do it together with cool friends. On one such occasion we are using a very capable PDF generator called PDFlib to generate print quality PDFs through Plone. The actual version we are using is PDFlib Personalization Server (PPS) version 6. PDFlib is license based. More precisely it costs money for PPS licenses. Fair enough. In the course of our project (iconic brand customer to be publicized at later stage) we discovered that we needed more production servers to balance the load, so more servers were ordered.

What we then learned is that the PDFlib PPS v6 does not exactly play nice with new dual core based servers; PPS v6 treats each core as one separate CPU, each requiring a separate license. That is to say the licensing costs per CPU per server has now doubled. The standard price of a single PPS license is € 1350,- (ca USD 1852,-) . In the meantime the current version of PDFlib has matured to 7 which requires only one license per server, albeit a more expensive one.

As PPS v6 is already running in a mission critical system, upgrading to v7 is not an option at this time. All the servers in our new data center have at least dual core Xeon CPUs, adding to the dilemma. I called PDFlib Germany thinking they would be sensible, having changed the licensing for the better with v7. No dice.

No retroactive license change for v6. No flexible migration deals. No nothing.

I could either upgrade all existing servers to the more expensive single server license v7 (and additional licenses for each new server) or buy a single v6 license for each and every core. I would not mind paying something for a single server license upgrade for v6, but the limited options provided by PDFlib at the moment are just plain stupid in my opinion; I have the choice between the plague or cholera.

Update: We are currently considering throwing out PDFlib and using Reportlab instead. Reportlab is lacking some features, but the added development needed to reportlab is possibly outweighed by the senseless PDFlib license costs. Further more, it would be cool to be able to add functionality to reportlab and release it back to the open source community!

Do you think this is a lame clever business decision by PDFlib? Let them know. Do you think I’m wrong? Let me know. Have you ever been left hanging from changes to hardware and/or licensing? I’d love to hear about your predicament and how you dealt with it.

[tags]pdf, pdflib, plone, comlounge, licensing, payware, dualcore, development, software, PPS, PDFlib Personalization Server[/tags]

In software development you’ll – unfortunately – sooner or later end up having to compromise between usability and functionality. These compromises are often a result of either financial, time or technological constraints. However, the wonderful thing with software is that you can always improve, add and modify after the fact.

Services like jaiku and twitter enables you to let the world know every novel, quaint or painfully inane activity that you are up to at any time, through almost every thinkable mode of communication, save semaphores and smoke signals. One mode being sending and receiving updates per SMS via your mobile phone. A standard SMS text message is limited to 160 characters. As twitter and Jaiku also supports the sending and receiving updates via SMS, they have implemented the limitation set by this lowest common denominator. For instance twitter even keeps 20 characters for itself and you get to play with a remaining 140 characters per update.

I’ll leave it to others to ponder the consequences on the language and communication – if any. I wanted to bring the attention to a usability issue brought about by this technological constraint, not start a discussion about the evolution or devolution of language and communication, although interesting in itself.

To be able to post links (URLs) to pages on the Internet in their updates on twitter and Jaiku, people are using additional services like urlTea and tinyurl to help reduce the numbers of characters to transmit the address, but leaving it functional. Those services take a potentially long address like ‘https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ index.html’ and truncate it to ‘http://tinyurl.com/2b2kg9′, leaving more characters to write a personal message to go with the link with. However, any identity or clue as to where that address may lead has now been removed. (Not to mention the additional burden the use of those additional services places on the poor user. I’ll leave that discussion for later posts.)

I’ve illustrated how this looks when using the web interface of twitter below:

Notice that there are no clues in that address as to what to expect when you click on it. The clever twitterer might suggest that if you’ve been following Chris Pirillo for a little while you’d expect the link to be leading to one of his web casts on his site, but then again there is no information in that address to tell you at a glance what to expect. You can’t know if it’s linking to the story you already read two weeks ago, if it’s self promotion if it’s linking to a site you know and trust – it could even link to an address that would get you in trouble at work.

Enter ‘The Gulf of Evaluation’:

“Does the system provide a physical representation that can be directly perceived and that is directly interpretable in terms of the intention and expectations of the person?The Gulf of Evaluation reflects the amount of effort that the person must exert to interpret the physical state of the system and to determine how well the expectations and intentions have been met. The gulf is small when the system provides information its state in a form that is easy to get, is easy to interpret, and matches the way the person thinks about the system.” - Donald Norman in ‘The Design of Everyday Things‘, Doubleday 1990.

I’ll argue that the gulf of evaluation is light years wide in the case in question. I’d like to have some transparency please. Show me a proper address!

Of course it could be argued that some users of the mentioned services would actually support the extra layer of obscurity afforded by the use of nameless addresses – that it actually generates more traffic from people clicking blindly than it would if people could see the real address and source. I do not have a firm opinion about that, however.

There are of course ways to alleviate for this unfortunate loss of information, letting us know where we’re going before wasting our time or getting fired (if using Jaiku and/or twitter hasn’t already gotten you fired) by clicking on the wrong links anywhere but the SMS’. I’ll propose two modes of improvement. One involves internal changes to the services themselves, and the other external additions with no need for involvement from the Jaiku or twitter development team. They both have advantages and disadvantages.

I’ll start with the blatantly obvious one; Jaiku and twitter should look up the truncated addresses before they are rendered and parse them. That is to say a truncated address would be shown in full when using all web based interfaces. Why on earth should we be limited and constrained to the lowest common denominator on the web? We can have gazillions of characters! Heck, keep the limit to 140 characters displayed on the web , just like the current solution, but show those URLs in full in addition to those 140 characters. However this would require the time and attention from the official development teams that are probably already preoccupied with other challenges, fixes and policies.

The second and almost as obvious one would be to develop a plug in for e.g. Firefox that would identify addresses from services like tinyurl and urlTEA, look them up and show the complete address in the status bar below left and as a tool tip when hovering with the pointer over the link. I’ve illustrated how this may look below:

The two immediate advantages of this solution would be that it require no commitment from an internal development team and that it would work with any web page, not only with the content coming out from twitter or Jaiku.

Here’s a another perspective on URL shortenings from Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com

What are your thoughts? Leave me a comment!

[tags]usability, urltea, gulf of evaluation, software, development, twitter, jaiku, dontmakemethink, tinyurl, firefox[/tags]