The Gist of Things

By | November 22, 2011
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(This is a copy of my Loose Wire Sevice column, produced for newspapers and other print publications. Hence the lack of links.)

By Jeremy Wagstaff

It’s interesting to see how we’ve changed in the past few years.

If you had predicted that we could follow someone’s activities by accessing a single page, right down to where they were, what restaurant they’d visited, where they’d been on holiday, what they were reading, what they were listening to, their employment history, what had made them laugh or cry, the reaction would probably have been somewhat negative.

Back then we had a different idea of privacy.

We basically saw privacy as a garden fence. Only neighbors could look in—unless they’ve got telescopes and twitching curtains. Our privacy wasn’t exactly a massive wall, but a shared understanding that there was a kind of wicker fence, or hedge, between us and the outside world.

Nowadays—maybe five years on—our views have changed. Well, they haven’t really changed, because I don’t think we really ponder it too much. Perhaps we’ve just tacitly accepted that the garden fence no longer exists.

This is probably because the benefits of accepting this outweigh the disadvantages.

Let’s look at the first bit again. If we befriend people on Facebook, we share with them tonnes of personal information, from our birthdays to our kids’ photos to our views and thoughts on the world, revealing either directly or indirectly all sorts of things about our lives.

Two friends died recently and Facebook was the vector for not only that information but for the grieving process of all their friends and relatives.

What was private or intimate is now public or semi-public.

LinkedIn blasts our CVs out there for everyone to see. What we once treated as confidential is now public—including our yearnings for another job. If you doubt me, scroll down to the bottom of a LinkedIn page and you’ll see how many people have opted to include the line “interested in career opportunities”. I’m surprised this doesn’t put more bosses’ noses out of joint.

Then there’s twitter: Every thing we feel, think, or get irked by is out there for everyone to see.

Music sites like Last.fm and Pandora share what you’re listening to, while Google Latitude and foursquare share your location.

You can get a sense of how all this fits together—and why, perhaps, it’s not such a bad thing—when you try out services like Gist. Gist assembles all the people in your address book and creates sort of virtual pages for them, populating each with whatever it can find on the Internet about them.

So, their LinkedIn page, their twitter feed, their MySpace page, their blog, any mentions of them in the media, are all collected together, alongside your email exchanges with them and other people involved in those email exchanges. Calendar entries, and email attachments, are all there easily found and reconciled.

The result is a somewhat disconcerting, but very useful, page which tells you everything you need to know about that person in order to remain in contact.

Indeed, that’s the purpose of Gist: to turn business networking into more of a science and less an art. You can see when you last communicated with them—and whether you should ping them to keep things bubbling.

Gist has even bought a service that flashes photos of your contacts at you to help you remember who they are.

From a privacy point of view, it’s unnerving to see your details so readily collated in someone else’s address book. And from a human point of view, it’s scary to see the personal reduced to a few algorithms and search spiders.

But it’s actually very useful, and turns our familiar tools of email and contact books into something more dynamic.

I don’t care so much about staying in touch with business contacts; I do, however, like to be able to see what my friends and colleagues have been talking about. And to be able to see all that on one page is a boon.

It bypasses both my address book and my email service. Gist finds pictures of the people I’m corresponding with before I’ve even met them. (Some surprises are in store: Not everyone is the gender you think they are.)

This, in short, is what has happened to our notions of privacy. What once would have been considered somewhat creepy stalking is now considered a valid means of staying on top of all the people and bits and pieces in your professional life.

No more garden fences. Now it’s more like a permanent open house cum garage sale, where anyone can poke around as much as they like.

And maybe offer you a job.

Podcast: Findability

By | November 22, 2011
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The BBC World Service Business Daily version of my column on Findability (the Business Daily podcast is here.)

To listen to the podcast, click on the button below. To subscribe, click here.

Loose Wireless 100408

 

To listen to Business Daily on the radio, tune into BBC World Service at the following times, or click here.

Australasia: Mon-Fri 0141*, 0741 
East Asia: Mon-Fri 0041, 1441 
South Asia: Tue-Fri 0141*, Mon-Fri 0741 
East Africa: Mon-Fri 1941 
West Africa: Mon-Fri 1541* 
Middle East: Mon-Fri 0141*, 1141* 
Europe: Mon-Fri 0741, 2132 
Americas: Tue-Fri 0141*, Mon-Fri 0741, 1041, 2132

Thanks to the BBC for allowing me to reproduce it as a podcast.

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Disappointed, But Looking

By | December 30, 2011
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(This is a copy of my Loose Wire Sevice column, produced for newspapers and other print publications.)

By Jeremy Wagstaff

Back in early 1987 I was lured into a store on the Tottenham Court Road by a window display of computers. And I’ve been disappointed ever since.

Well, actually they were called Word Processors. Made by a company called Amstrad which to my ear sounded impressive, a railroad-meets-violin mix of Amtrak and Stradivarius.(I only found out later it’s short for Alan Michael Sugar Trading, which isn’t quite as impressive.)

Anyway, I was working on a history thesis at the time, and as I glanced in the window thought I saw the potential of a computer to help me. That in itself was smart. But my mistake was—and remains—the notion that somehow I could bend the computer to my will.

I can’t. And it won’t. Or rather, we users are always hostage to the guy who writes the software that runs on the computer. A computer has to compute something, after all, and it computes what the software tells it to.

I guess I didn’t realize this when I asked the guy in the shop to tell me what the Amstrad PCW8512 did. I was collecting historical data on Thailand and Vietnam in the 1960s at the time and my tutor had taught me the importance of getting things in the right chronological order. (Simple advice: You’d be amazed how many historians don’t bother with such niceties.)

So would the PCW8512 help me do that?

“It lets you write letters,” the assistant said.

That sounds good, I replied, but would it, for example, create a table that let me put in dates and big slices of text and sort them?

“It has 512 kilobytes of RAM,” he said. “And two floppy disk drives.”

I’ll take it, I said.

And I’ve been unhappy ever since.

This is the problem, you see. We don’t buy what we need, we buy what’s available. I couldn’t then, and I still can’t, get a computer to do the things I want to do, I have to do what it wants me to do.

Sometimes this is good. Sometimes we don’t have a clear idea of what we want to do. No one went around saying I’d love to be able to swish, pinch and shake my device but when the iPhone came along everyone decided that was what they wanted to do. Nobody said “I want a device a bit smaller than a drinks tray that mesmerizes me on the couch so I forget who I’m married to and to feed the kids”, but doubtless the iPad will dazzle both users and Wall Street.

But heaven help you if you have a specific problem you want your computer to fix.

I remember when, four years after my Amstrad experience, I decided to buy a computer running Windows. I clearly hadn’t learned my lesson. I asked the guy in the shop to show me how to organize the windows in a specific way and keep them that way for the next time I used the computer. He looked at me as if I was mad.

“It has a 20-megabyte hard-drive,” he said.

I’ll take it, I replied.

Don’t get me wrong. There are lots of great programs out there. I love PersonalBrain for finding connections between ideas, people and things, and Liquid Story Binder is great for writing books. Evernote is great for saving stuff. ConnectedText is useful as a sort of personal database with cross-referencing. But they are all someone else’s idea of how to work. Not mine.

They don’t say to me: Tell me how you work, and how you want to work, and I’ll make the computer do it for you.

I have a vision of a computer, for example, that will let me throw anything at it and it will know what to do with it. This has a date on it, and some key words I recognize, so it needs to be added to a chronology, unless it’s in the future in which case it’s probably for the calendar.

In my wildest dreams I imagine a computer that just lets me start drawing on the screen and the computer can figure out I’m drawing a table. That what I put in there is text, but also drawings, calculations, images. Software, in short, that does what I want it to do, rather than what it thinks I should do.

That, in short, was my mistake on the Tottenham Court Road. I thought that thing I saw in the window was an intelligence, a thing that make me more productive at how I was already working, or wanted to work,

Turns out I was wrong. Turns out it was just a souped-up typewriter. Turns out that unless we all become programmers, we’ll never actually bend computers to our will.

And, yes, 23 years on, I still haven’t found a program that lets me add, sort and filter chronologies easily. I’m still looking though. Disappointed, but looking.

The Future: Findability

By | November 22, 2011
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We only noticed three months later, but we passed something of a milestone last December. I’m hoping it might, finally, wake us up to the real power of the Web: findability.

According to Ericsson, a mobile network company, in December we exchanged more data over our mobile devices than we talked on them. In short, we now do more email, social networking, all that stuff, on our mobile phones and mobile-connected laptops than we do voice.

Quite a turning point.

But a turning point of what, exactly?

Well, the conventional wisdom is that we will use our cellphone (or a netbook with a cellphone connection) to do all the things we used to do, or still do, on our desktop tethered laptop or PC. According to a report by Sandvine, another network company, released this month, one in five of us mobile data subscribers are using Facebook and video sharing website YouTube accounts for at least a 10th of all traffic.

But the conclusions they draw from this are wrong.

The thinking is that we’re somehow interested only in doing things that we did at our desk, even when we’re in the open air. Or on the couch.

Well, OK, but it betrays a lack of imagination of what we’ll do when we’re really untethered.

When we have access to everything the Internet has to offer–and when the Internet has access to us. Then we’ll have findability. By that we mean we can find the answer to pretty much every question we ask, from where’s the nearest 24-hour pizza place to what’s the capital of Slovakia. Or who was in that movie with John Cusack about a hit man returning to his high school prom?

We know that we know all this, even if we don’t know it. Because we have all this at our fingertips, because we have the Internet. No longer do we care about hoarding information because we know the Internet’s hoarding it for us, and Google or someone, is there to help us find it in a microsecond.

That’s one bit of findability. But there’s another bit. Connect all this to other bits of information about ourselves, drawn from sensors and other chips inside the device: where we are, what time of day it is, what that building in front of us is, who we’re with, what language they’re speaking, our body temperature, whether we’re moving or stationary, whether we’re upright, sitting or laying flat, whether our eyes are closed, whether we used voice, touch, eyes, keys or gestures to pose whatever question was on our mind.

All that adds extra layers of information to findability, by giving context to our search for information. Only our imagination can tell us how all these bits and pieces of data can be useful to us, but if you’ve used a map on your smartphone you’ll already get a glimpse of its potential.

Last December, we passed into this new era. The era when the potential of the Internet to move beyond the desk and lap, and start to mesh with our lives so that it is all around us. Where we, where everything,  can be found.

Podcast: 3D Phones, Chairs in Space

By | November 22, 2011
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Thispodcast is from my weekly slot on Radio Australia Today with Phil Kafcaloudes and Adelaine Ng, wherein I chat about:

  • Sick of the iPad? They’re bringing out a smaller one. And if that doesn’t get you, how about a 3D phone?
  • Facebook measures gross national happiness
  • Sending chairs into space: High altitude ballooning is the new thing.

To listen to the podcast, click on the button below. To subscribe, click here.

Loose Wireless 100409

I appear on Radio Australia Today every Friday at about 9.15 am Singapore time (that’s 0.15 GMT/UTC.) There’s a live stream of the broadcast here, or find out your local frequencies here.