Northern Voice Keynote
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Keynote on my history and how I approach sharing that I gave at Northern Voice 2011 in Vancouver.
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Northern Voice Keynote
- 1. From Dial-up Modems to Post-”Social Media”: A Journey Chris Wilson @cwilso
- 2. Who are you? Flickr: loozrboy
- 3. Who am I?
- 4. Who am I?
- 5. Who am I?
- 6. Who am I? ( )
- 7. The Web is everywhere
- 8. From this...
- 9. To this.
- 10. My first Internet device
- 11. ULarn
- 12. NetHack
- 13. Nettrek
- 14. NOT a member of Flock of Seagulls (surprisingly)
- 15. NCSA Mosaic
- 16. non-NCSA Mosaic Flickr: rberteig
- 17. NCSA Mosaic
- 18. NCSA Mosaic
- 21. The long tail Art: Wikipedia, “long tail”
- 22. My personal long tail Flickr: endogamia
- 23. “Social media” is an implementation of the long tail Flickr: smenon
- 24. The Internet... ...is a big room full of imaginary friends. Flickr: toms
- 25. The Internet just enables human interactions to move faster, with fewer barriers and guardrails in the way.
- 26. The Internet just enables human interactions to move faster, with fewer barriers and guardrails in the way. That almost sounds like a good thing.
- 27. People suck.
- 28. People suck.
- 29. People suck. This pretty much describes 95% of all comments we ever had on the Internet Explorer Blog.
- 30. How am I going to treat other people?
- 31. What voice will I use? Inside voice or outside?
- 32. What voice will I use? Inside voice or outside?
- 33. Having multiple personalities Flickr: bibendum84
- 34. Being on your best behavior
- 35. Being careful Flickr: abulic_monkey
- 36. Being REALLY careful. Flickr: bixentro
- 37. How much do I want to share?
- 38. Diver down
- 39. What is this?
- 40. How transparent should I be?
- 41. How transparent should I be? Years ago, I chose to live my life with the kind of transparency that would create real connections to real people and ever since then my life became fantastically uncommonly amazing. Yes, it leaves me incredibly vulnerable, but it also creates an amazing amount of safety for me. Having real connections with people means that I have an enormous group of people who would take a bullet for me. The only regret I have is that I didn’t do it
- 42. Online sharing makes me tired
- 43. What if nobody shows up?
- 44. Sharing makes me happy!
- 45. Fin I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be. -Douglas Adams cwilso@[google.com|gmail.com] @cwilso cwilso.com
Editor's Notes
- Good morning. My name is Chris Wilson. Before I introduce myself any further, I wanted to get to know...\n
- ...a little more about you, because right now you’re just one big crowd, and this is my first time here. I’d like to ask a few questions.\n local vs. non-local? \n how long “on the web”?  Before Twitter/after Twitter? (that’s about five years)\n technical (developer/designer) vs consumer (blogger)? \n Mac vs PC?\n Firefox? IE? Safari? Chrome? (aw, come on, I’m from Google here) Opera? Oh yeah. Fight the power, little browser that could. (or aw, no love).\n \n
- Okay, now I’d like to introduce myself - to give you a little background on me.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV. Having made a name for myself as the “IE guy”, it’s been a little hard to shake - it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nWorking on Google TV has been pretty interesting, because it’s basically a project to make the Web the operating system for interactive TV - to bring the web to the TV, in the same way it’s become the common thread between mobile devices and desktop computers.\n
- Okay, now I’d like to introduce myself - to give you a little background on me.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV. Having made a name for myself as the “IE guy”, it’s been a little hard to shake - it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nWorking on Google TV has been pretty interesting, because it’s basically a project to make the Web the operating system for interactive TV - to bring the web to the TV, in the same way it’s become the common thread between mobile devices and desktop computers.\n
- Okay, now I’d like to introduce myself - to give you a little background on me.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV. Having made a name for myself as the “IE guy”, it’s been a little hard to shake - it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nWorking on Google TV has been pretty interesting, because it’s basically a project to make the Web the operating system for interactive TV - to bring the web to the TV, in the same way it’s become the common thread between mobile devices and desktop computers.\n
- Okay, now I’d like to introduce myself - to give you a little background on me.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV. Having made a name for myself as the “IE guy”, it’s been a little hard to shake - it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nWorking on Google TV has been pretty interesting, because it’s basically a project to make the Web the operating system for interactive TV - to bring the web to the TV, in the same way it’s become the common thread between mobile devices and desktop computers.\n
- Okay, now I’d like to introduce myself - to give you a little background on me.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV. Having made a name for myself as the “IE guy”, it’s been a little hard to shake - it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nWorking on Google TV has been pretty interesting, because it’s basically a project to make the Web the operating system for interactive TV - to bring the web to the TV, in the same way it’s become the common thread between mobile devices and desktop computers.\n
- Okay, now I’d like to introduce myself - to give you a little background on me.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV. Having made a name for myself as the “IE guy”, it’s been a little hard to shake - it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nWorking on Google TV has been pretty interesting, because it’s basically a project to make the Web the operating system for interactive TV - to bring the web to the TV, in the same way it’s become the common thread between mobile devices and desktop computers.\n
- Okay, now I’d like to introduce myself - to give you a little background on me.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV. Having made a name for myself as the “IE guy”, it’s been a little hard to shake - it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nWorking on Google TV has been pretty interesting, because it’s basically a project to make the Web the operating system for interactive TV - to bring the web to the TV, in the same way it’s become the common thread between mobile devices and desktop computers.\n
- Okay, now I’d like to introduce myself - to give you a little background on me.\n\nI’ve been working on web stuff since 1993, when I worked on Windows Mosaic at NCSA, then moved to Seattle; was a browser web platform guy at Microsoft for 15 years, participating in CSS1, HTML3.2 and other early core standards. Last fall, I left Microsoft, and for the past 5 months, I’ve been a Developer Advocate at Google, working on Google TV. Having made a name for myself as the “IE guy”, it’s been a little hard to shake - it was a little weird to be congratulated by a bunch of people at SXSW a month ago on the release of IE9.\n\nWorking on Google TV has been pretty interesting, because it’s basically a project to make the Web the operating system for interactive TV - to bring the web to the TV, in the same way it’s become the common thread between mobile devices and desktop computers.\n
- And fundamentally, that’s why I’ve been passionate about working on the web platform for so long - this is the pile of the current devices I use on a daily basis, minus my TV because I couldn’t fit it in the picture too, and the web goes across all these devices and more - of all the devices I own shown here, no more than two of them run the same operating system. The web, though, works well on all of them, and with the way I work now, I don’t have to drag my laptop home with me, I just use whatever computer’s at hand. When you have one platform that bridges and connects your data and applications across environments/devices, it’s really quite powerful. In the end, all I care about then is how I experience my services on a given device. Part of what I wanted to recognize today is just how far we’ve come in a relatively short span of time.\n
- In ten years, I went from this Motorola MicroTAC...\n
- to being able to hold my cell phone up in the air and have it tell me what music is playing, having the entire world map in my hand, having my phone show me a live map of the stars and planets I’m looking at, which meant I could actually tell my daughter real constellation names instead of making them up - “the princess”, “the donkey” - in short, having endless entertainment and connection. This is what I love about working in computers, and specifically on the web platform. So I’m here to tell a little bit of a story about how I got involved in the Internet, and a couple of lessons I’ve learned along the way.\n
- This was my first Internet device. I got this baby in 1990 free from my boss at a summer job. I had it connected to the University of Illinois’ computer system, which was connected to the Internet, via a smokin’ fast 2400baud modem. For reference - my cell phone gets a 300x faster connection through 3G - a 6000x faster connection on wifi. Of course, it was just a text terminal, so the connection speed wasn’t actually as important. \n
- Still, it was fast enough to play this - ultimate Larn, or ULarn. My freshman class at the UofI was the last class that did not automatically get email addresses assigned to each student - you had to go in and request an account - and Our accounts were on the university’s mainframe, and you had seven hours a week of allowed login time. I would usually burn through all my time in the first couple days of the week playing ularn, and then couldn’t check my email again until Saturday. Thankfully, email was not used for critical information for classes.\n
- Of course, I pretty quickly moved from ULarn to NetHack - NetHack was a pretty similar game, but it had one distinct advantage that I remember. As you explored dungeons in NetHack, you would occasionally run across the ghosts of previous players - REAL players, who had previously played NetHack on the same mainframe - who had died, along with all their gear. Even though it was turn-based game, and you weren’t playing simultaneously with other human players, there was a sense that you were playing this in the same world as other players - an early social experience.\n\n
- Once I started working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in 1991, I quickly started playing Net Trek and xTank, which were networked live games on x-windows UNIX workstations. This was a big step up. I mean, we worked with the Cray supercomputers, so we had better hardware lying around to play games on.\n My first project at NCSA was the PC version of Telnet and FTP - early protocols for logging in to and tranferring files to and from other computers on a network; and a group of friends and I ended up borrowing all the low-level networking code and writing our own networked space dogfight game for PCs - which became a shortlived fad on the engineering campus, and we hosted essentially early LAN gaming parties.\n But this isn’t going to be a review of all the video games I’ve been addicted to over the years, because we only have another 35 minutes or so.\n
- I graduated from the University of Illinois in 1992, but I liked my part-time job at NCSA so much, I stayed there after graduation, and turned it into a full-time job heading up the Windows software team. Well, team of underpaid undergraduate students. In 1993, the idea came up to take the software a couple of guys at NCSA had come up with on X Windows called Mosaic, which accessed Internet content over FTP, gopher, and some new thing called the world wide web, and used a prototype document language called HTML.\n
- So I started working on the Windows version of Mosaic - and that is what happened to the last 18 years of my life.\n\n
- This has, by the way, utterly RUINED the word “Mosaic” for me. I never get a mental image like this when somebody says that word.\n
- Keep in mind at this point you didn’t even typically have network support for Windows - Windows didn’t come with an implementation of TCP/IP - the underlying Internet protocol. You could buy a separate package from a third party that gave you networking; that was usually a hundred bucks or more. Then you had to actually pay for dialup service, which was measured in dollars per minute in those days!\n But at NCSA, we already had our own network stack from our PC telnet work - so we got it running in Windows, and then we rebuilt the HTML parsing and rendering stuff, and got Mosaic up and running. NCSA had a tradition of shipping beta releases early and often - I remember getting up to beta 22 of Telnet once before we decided to ship an actual release - so we put Windows Mosaic up on the FTP server, and I remember we were cheering when we saw that we ticked past 1,000 downloads in a week. For contrast, when Mozilla shipped version 4 of Firefox this past March, in two days they had over 15 MILLION downloads. They would have hit that 1000 downloads in about one ninetieth of a second.\n \n
- But what was really surprising was that the game DOOM came out this same year, and yet we still managed to get work done on Mosaic.\n Now I want to underscore that we were college kids, driving this project, with no idea what we were doing. A lot of things we did back then were misguided, like me thinking overlapping bold and italic tags were a good idea.\n\n
- But we did have a few insightful ideas, probably by pure chance. At NCSA, we had this idea that the cool thing about the web was that everyone could be an author, that everyone would generate content - we implemented, even in this browser that was totally primitive by today’s standards (no CSS, no Javascript, no HTML tables, not even any real font control!!) we implemented a group annotation feature. For any web page, you could write annotations on a common server, and whenever anyone in your “group” visited a web page you had written annotations for, they saw the annotations too.\n We also had the idea that web server software should be free, and everyone should run a server on their machine. Keep in mind that at the time, firewalls were exceedingly uncommon - I ran a web server on the PC in my office that was accessible world-wide, and there was no firewall to get to it. \n
- In fact, remember that networked space dogfight game I mentioned earlier? After we’d been playing it for a while, I had a brainstorm one day, and realized that I’d never explicitly disabled the background FTP server code in the PC telnet networking code. Sure enough, I had a friend of mine run the game, and I could FTP in to his machine and copy files off it! Good times.\n I clearly remember the wacky and random content that was out there at this time; for example, a guy named kevin hughes from the honolulu community college, who put up the HCC dinosaur museum exhibit as a web page. It was amazing the kind of things we started to see. there were books - actual paper-and-ink books - published that were just collections of pointers to websites. This book, which I pulled off my bookshelf right before I drove up here, was a user manual published for Mosaic - which seriously, didn’t have enough features to warrant a user pamphlet, let alone a manual - and half the book is a listing of web sites. Feel free to take a look after the talk. Powerful search engines, you understand, were still a few years off, but there was very quickly a lot of content being generated, on lots of varied topics.\n\n
- In fact, who here knows what I mean when I talk about the “long tail”? For the rest of you, the “long tail” refers to a probability distribution where a large portion of the population is in the “tail” - if or, to simplify the concept, it means that the web is incredible because people are just as interested in the less common topics than they are in the most popular topics.\nThe long tail also describes the retailing strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – for example, there are lots of fairly rare items on Amazon, that may only sell one or two items a year, but are the reason I think Amazon is so cool - I don’t really care that much that they sell iPads, which are immensely popular. I can’t find gaskets for my dishwasher at the Apple store.\n\n\n\n
- I did have my own personal example of the long tail - In 1996, I took a class in playing the didgeridoo - and part of the class covered how to make your own didgeridoos. How many of you remember Geocities?\n I put up a geocities site showing how to build didgeridoos from pieces of bamboo - complete with ASCII art, because I didn’t have a digital camera (remember, this was seven years before Canon came out with the Digital Rebel), and I put my Microsoft email address in the page. This page stayed up until Geocities shut down in late 2009 - and for all that time, for thirteen years, I consistently got about an email a month saying stuff like “hey, i saw your page and I was wondering where to get raw bamboo here in Finland.”\n Now, I tell this story because I expect few of you in the room are particularly interested in didgeridoos, and even fewer are interested in how to make didgeridoos out of bamboo - but you probably do have some interests that are just as rare. And for the record, no, I do not know somewhere here in Vancouver to buy bamboo.\n
- In many ways, I see “social media” as a natural outcome of the long tail concept - because social media thrives on making connections between people with similar interests. The Web is really...\n
- just a big room full of friends you may never meet in person. Somebody out there shares your interest, no matter what it is.\n\nTo illustrate, by now you may have noticed the photos I’m using in this talk. Many of these are my photos - but a lot of them are other photographers on Flickr, whom I’ve never met, and probably never WILL meet. I found this image when I searched for “bunny suit” on Flickr (with the appropriate creative commons license filter in Flickr search). This person clearly shares my interests.\n\nBut the internet is filled with people. I’ve been saying for many years...\n
- ...that all the Internet - electronic communication in general, actually - does, is allow human interactions to happen faster, with fewer barriers and guardrails in the way.\n\nThat almost sounds like a good thing. Of course, guardrails are usually there to keep you from driving off a cliff... they’re there to keep you on the road. They’re there to keep you from falling prey to another one of my favorite credos - that...\n
- ...people suck.\n I don’t actually mean that people suck - or at least, not everyone, not all the time. But I think people need some help remembering to play well with others sometimes, and they don’t always get it. One of my imaginary friends on the internet said... oh, wait, I’ve actually met Nicole in person, she’s not imaginary. But she said...\n In my experience, this is absolutely true. On the IE Blog - the blog for one of the most-hated products of all time, at least if you were talking to web developers - we got lots and lots of vitriolic comments....even when they had a good point, I often wanted to unapprove it.\n
- ...people suck.\n I don’t actually mean that people suck - or at least, not everyone, not all the time. But I think people need some help remembering to play well with others sometimes, and they don’t always get it. One of my imaginary friends on the internet said... oh, wait, I’ve actually met Nicole in person, she’s not imaginary. But she said...\n In my experience, this is absolutely true. On the IE Blog - the blog for one of the most-hated products of all time, at least if you were talking to web developers - we got lots and lots of vitriolic comments....even when they had a good point, I often wanted to unapprove it.\n
- ...but one thing we did very early on with the IE Blog was establish that as long as you weren’t obscene, disrespectful, didn’t threaten anyone or impersonate anyone, we would approve your comment. I did have someone claiming to be Satan offer me a job in the IEBlog comments once, telling me he would offer me more money than Microsoft - I would have unapproved it, but I couldn’t prove it wasn’t him, because I really didn’t want to follow up on the offer.\n
- Another lesson I’ve learned is to establish what kind of tone I want for myself - for example, how PG-rated my language is - and stick to it. If I’m kid-safe one day, and sound like Howard Stern the next, I might have a few problems.\nFor the record, I do swear (but not too much). Apparently, I swear like Gordon Ramsay - the Hell’s Kitchen chef guy on TV. Not sure how I feel about that - I don’t think I’ve ever made someone cry because they carmelized onions the wrong way. But I do say what I’m really thinking (unless it’s going to hurt someone personally, cause myself a tremendous amount of grief) or else I keep my mouth shut.\n
- There are additional challenges when you have multiple personalities - that is, if you have more than one blog, twitter account, etc., and you need to have different levels of professionalism, tone, etc., on each. I’d had to do this several times - when I wrote for the IE blog as well as my personal blog, and now, when I post to the Google TV twitter but also my personal twitter. In order to manage this, I just have to remind myself when I’m posting for work, to...\n
- Be on my best behavior, and to \n
- be careful.\n
- REALLY careful. [pause]\n
- One final lesson I want to share, something I had to establish for myself is how much I wanted to share about my real life - for example, Lauren, one of the organizers and a long-time friend, said to me last month, I noticed you put pics of your kids up publicly on Flickr, with names. We don't, and I'm not sure whether I'm paranoid or you're brave. Lauren, for the record, I don’t think you’re paranoid, but I’m not sure I’m particularly brave, either.\nThese are my daughters, Neve and Hannah; and yes, this was from my Flickr account. My Flickr account is entirely public; in fact, I post nearly every picture I take under a non-commercial creative commons license...\n
- ...I do a lot of scuba diving, and take a lot of pictures - and a number of times, I’ve had people ask me if they could use one of my pictures in a class, or pamphlet, or other use...\n
- ...and I think this is great. It makes me feel like I’m contributing as well as consuming the web.\n
- But I do take a calculated risk, particularly when I’m sharing something personal, like my family. Rather than trying to explain why I do this myself, I wanted to borrow the words of one of your fellow Canadians - my semi-imaginary (because I have met her a few times in real life) friend TAR-a Hunt. I’m going to break one of my cardinal presentation rules and read this to you, because I think it’s so perfect.\nTara really captured exactly how I feel about sharing myself online... although I will admit, ...\nhttp://www.horsepigcow.com/2011/04/getting-real-for-real/.\n
- Partly, it just makes me tired, trying to follow all those lessons I’ve shared. That’s probably why I Twitter far more than I blog - because it’s harder for me to be careful, respectful, etc., in a longer form. And I always have the fear, in the back of my mind, that \n
- that no one will show up to my party. But in reality, I have met some of the most fantastically uncommonly amazing people that way, and I recognize that...\n
- I’ve been blessed to lead a fantastically uncommonly amazing life, in large part because of my willingness to share.\n\n
- With that, I’d like to close, and thank you for sharing this with me. If there’s anything YOU want to share right now, I’m happy to discuss.\n
- \n
- Twitter is like being in a big room full of my friends, acquaintances, and people I admire - and sometimes we’re having direct conversations, and sometimes I overhear them saying something. And sometimes my nose is buried in my laptop and I’m ignoring them altogether, which kinda sucks if I have to figure out what happened later, or who changed jobs, or whatever. But the challenge is that sometimes I have to forcibly remind myself to close Tweetdeck and stop eavesdropping, and pay attention to getting something done. For the last couple of weeks, as I’ve prepared for this and two other presentations, I’ve been paying a lot less attention to Twitter than usual.\n
- \n
- \n
- \n
- This talk comes at an interesting time for me - my role at google has been very interesting because I converted to living my computing life mostly through web applications. I converted from having a digital life on my computer to having a digital life nearly entirely on the web - my primary email interface is a web one, all my documents are web documents, spreadsheets, you name it. I use web-hosted services for pretty much everything, and don’t use much installed, native software. As obvious as this might be, this was somewhat groundbreaking to me. My setup for a new computer is near zero - I don’t have to copy files, or install software, or anything. I’d still prefer not to have my laptop destroyed in interesting ways like in the ChromeOS commercials, but still - I have two laptops at work - I rarely take either one home, because I can effectively work from anywhere. That works well for me, because I bike to work, and, well, I’m lazy. But my role at GoogleTV has given me a interesting perspective, as it's taken me on a journey of discovering the web through a whole new portal - the television - for context, my job is really about evangelizing building web applications for couch potatoes. So I’m here today to talk about the universal platform the web has become, and what we all need to focus on next. The reason for the title of my talk - convergence of all things - is because I see the web on its way to becoming what I always hoped it would; the convergent platform for computing.\n\n
- That’s also why I’ve been really excited to be part of the Google TV project - because the idea of pushing the web platform as the interactive platform for TV is very compelling. After all, TVs are more common than computers or mobile devices - 80% for computers, 90% for mobile - and are used more than both of those put together. Television is the next big space for the web platform. There, I did my corporate service announcement, so I can expense my parking, I’m done.\n
- Nowhere has this revolution moved faster than in mobile. Five years ago, when the iPhone was released, I had one of these. - a Samsung Blackjack, with a web browser and the ability to install native Windows CE apps; it automatically synced with my email, calendar and contacts in Exchange server over the air. It gave me access to the WSDOT Traffic map - for anyone who lives here and commutes over the 520 bridge, a Godsend. In fact, that feature alone was why I bought it. the iPhone didn't come out until a year later, in 2007. So why was the iPhone so ground breaking? \nIn short, because it enabled building responsive, engaging mobile experiences, because of all the amazing interactivity - Touch screen is amazingly engaging, Accelerometer as a real controller, and more. Oh yeah, and an app store that made it EASY to get new applications.\nFor context, at the time the iPhone was released, by the way, I was over thirty-five. This was against the natural order of things.\n
- Nowhere has this revolution moved faster than in mobile. Five years ago, when the iPhone was released, I had one of these. - a Samsung Blackjack, with a web browser and the ability to install native Windows CE apps; it automatically synced with my email, calendar and contacts in Exchange server over the air. It gave me access to the WSDOT Traffic map - for anyone who lives here and commutes over the 520 bridge, a Godsend. In fact, that feature alone was why I bought it. the iPhone didn't come out until a year later, in 2007. So why was the iPhone so ground breaking? \nIn short, because it enabled building responsive, engaging mobile experiences, because of all the amazing interactivity - Touch screen is amazingly engaging, Accelerometer as a real controller, and more. Oh yeah, and an app store that made it EASY to get new applications.\nFor context, at the time the iPhone was released, by the way, I was over thirty-five. This was against the natural order of things.\n
- Nowhere has this revolution moved faster than in mobile. Five years ago, when the iPhone was released, I had one of these. - a Samsung Blackjack, with a web browser and the ability to install native Windows CE apps; it automatically synced with my email, calendar and contacts in Exchange server over the air. It gave me access to the WSDOT Traffic map - for anyone who lives here and commutes over the 520 bridge, a Godsend. In fact, that feature alone was why I bought it. the iPhone didn't come out until a year later, in 2007. So why was the iPhone so ground breaking? \nIn short, because it enabled building responsive, engaging mobile experiences, because of all the amazing interactivity - Touch screen is amazingly engaging, Accelerometer as a real controller, and more. Oh yeah, and an app store that made it EASY to get new applications.\nFor context, at the time the iPhone was released, by the way, I was over thirty-five. This was against the natural order of things.\n
- And of course, the iPhone raised the bar across the board for mobile platforms. In fact, for me personally, after I’d acquired an iPhone, and Microsoft was trying to figure out what its mobile story was after Mobile 5, I recall making this skeptical statement to a friend - I had a guitar in my office, and I used my iPhone as my guitar tuner. This quickly became a critical feature for me - I didn’t want to have to keep another guitar tuner around. In short, I was saying Windows Mobile’s future success rested on the number and quality of apps in its app store.So a few months ago, I decided I really needed to update my mobile phone from my 2.5yr old iphone 3G. I KNOW, what a relic! What can I say, I’m cheap. So I was at Google, and I got a Nexus S; and I managed to wrangle a Windows Phone 7 from a Microsoft friend. I’m happy to report all three of these devices had guitar tuner apps; and honestly, there weren’t a whole lot of native apps other than that that I cared about, because they all had good integration with the web services I use (although I think Win Phone 7 has some work to do with Twitter).Ultimately, my choice of which phone to stick with came down to one factor, and only one - can you guess what it was? Battery life.\n
- And of course, the iPhone raised the bar across the board for mobile platforms. In fact, for me personally, after I’d acquired an iPhone, and Microsoft was trying to figure out what its mobile story was after Mobile 5, I recall making this skeptical statement to a friend - I had a guitar in my office, and I used my iPhone as my guitar tuner. This quickly became a critical feature for me - I didn’t want to have to keep another guitar tuner around. In short, I was saying Windows Mobile’s future success rested on the number and quality of apps in its app store.So a few months ago, I decided I really needed to update my mobile phone from my 2.5yr old iphone 3G. I KNOW, what a relic! What can I say, I’m cheap. So I was at Google, and I got a Nexus S; and I managed to wrangle a Windows Phone 7 from a Microsoft friend. I’m happy to report all three of these devices had guitar tuner apps; and honestly, there weren’t a whole lot of native apps other than that that I cared about, because they all had good integration with the web services I use (although I think Win Phone 7 has some work to do with Twitter).Ultimately, my choice of which phone to stick with came down to one factor, and only one - can you guess what it was? Battery life.\n
- Don’t worry, my presentation today is not JUST a long stream of Douglas Adams quotes. Take bets now on how many there are, though. And how many LOLCATs.\n\nStill, this is amazingly true - anything invented before you’re born is simply the way the world works. I have a six year old daughter and a one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and it’s amazing what they take for granted. The six year old regularly steals my iPad, and I will pick it up to find it running a talking fairy application rather than Angry Birds (which she knows as the “birdie game,” by the way.) She assumes she always has access to a huge library of Disney princess movies, at any given time.\n\nSo the challenge, for those of us who are over thirty-five, is to learn how to adapt -to figure out how to be amazed and excited by things that are against the natural order, and then go figure out how they occurred and how to further pervert the natural order in interesting ways.\n
- In fact, I’m happy to report there is a guitar tuner in the Chrome Web Store - so the web can be my guitar tuner too! No, I’m not a salesdroid for Chrome or the Chrome Web Store - I’m just happy the web platform is getting these apps too - because I want my opinion of its chances to be higher than my opinion of Windows Mobile a couple years ago. Now I’m kind of cheating here, because this particular app uses Flash for the audio input - but only because the audio apis are currently still under a flag. Soon, my pet, soon.\n
- And finally, push the limits. One place that I’m getting really excited about the advance of web technology is music - starting about twenty-five years ago, I started building a home music studio - this was my first synthesizer, purchased in 1986. around 15 years ago, I really started adding to the studio - right about when software synthesizers started to come out for desktop computers, and you could replace thousands of dollars of hardware with software - although, of course, you had to put thousands of dollars into your computer to be able to run the complex applications. and now, you can get full replica models of complex analog gear in digital form, even for low-power tablet and mobile devices. Seeing these move into the iOS/Android space is heartening to me, because already those devices at least encourage the “remote storage” model. I think it’s one short step from there to Web applications. The next step, of course, is the web - and there are software synthesizers for the web already. I’m very excited to see where that goes... \n\nand everything else the future, and the convergence on the web, brings.\n
- And finally, push the limits. One place that I’m getting really excited about the advance of web technology is music - starting about twenty-five years ago, I started building a home music studio - this was my first synthesizer, purchased in 1986. around 15 years ago, I really started adding to the studio - right about when software synthesizers started to come out for desktop computers, and you could replace thousands of dollars of hardware with software - although, of course, you had to put thousands of dollars into your computer to be able to run the complex applications. and now, you can get full replica models of complex analog gear in digital form, even for low-power tablet and mobile devices. Seeing these move into the iOS/Android space is heartening to me, because already those devices at least encourage the “remote storage” model. I think it’s one short step from there to Web applications. The next step, of course, is the web - and there are software synthesizers for the web already. I’m very excited to see where that goes... \n\nand everything else the future, and the convergence on the web, brings.\n
- And finally, push the limits. One place that I’m getting really excited about the advance of web technology is music - starting about twenty-five years ago, I started building a home music studio - this was my first synthesizer, purchased in 1986. around 15 years ago, I really started adding to the studio - right about when software synthesizers started to come out for desktop computers, and you could replace thousands of dollars of hardware with software - although, of course, you had to put thousands of dollars into your computer to be able to run the complex applications. and now, you can get full replica models of complex analog gear in digital form, even for low-power tablet and mobile devices. Seeing these move into the iOS/Android space is heartening to me, because already those devices at least encourage the “remote storage” model. I think it’s one short step from there to Web applications. The next step, of course, is the web - and there are software synthesizers for the web already. I’m very excited to see where that goes... \n\nand everything else the future, and the convergence on the web, brings.\n
- And finally, push the limits. One place that I’m getting really excited about the advance of web technology is music - starting about twenty-five years ago, I started building a home music studio - this was my first synthesizer, purchased in 1986. around 15 years ago, I really started adding to the studio - right about when software synthesizers started to come out for desktop computers, and you could replace thousands of dollars of hardware with software - although, of course, you had to put thousands of dollars into your computer to be able to run the complex applications. and now, you can get full replica models of complex analog gear in digital form, even for low-power tablet and mobile devices. Seeing these move into the iOS/Android space is heartening to me, because already those devices at least encourage the “remote storage” model. I think it’s one short step from there to Web applications. The next step, of course, is the web - and there are software synthesizers for the web already. I’m very excited to see where that goes... \n\nand everything else the future, and the convergence on the web, brings.\n
- And finally, push the limits. One place that I’m getting really excited about the advance of web technology is music - starting about twenty-five years ago, I started building a home music studio - this was my first synthesizer, purchased in 1986. around 15 years ago, I really started adding to the studio - right about when software synthesizers started to come out for desktop computers, and you could replace thousands of dollars of hardware with software - although, of course, you had to put thousands of dollars into your computer to be able to run the complex applications. and now, you can get full replica models of complex analog gear in digital form, even for low-power tablet and mobile devices. Seeing these move into the iOS/Android space is heartening to me, because already those devices at least encourage the “remote storage” model. I think it’s one short step from there to Web applications. The next step, of course, is the web - and there are software synthesizers for the web already. I’m very excited to see where that goes... \n\nand everything else the future, and the convergence on the web, brings.\n
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- And we should all be pushing the platform forward, and pointing out the holes that need filling - if you can’t build what you want to build, because the web can’t do that yet, get involved. Don’t be dogmatic, or religious, and don’t be a browser fanboy - of ANY browser - be pragmatic and profit-motivated in your arguments. Greed is good. I know, and I don’t even work for Microsoft anymore!But from my experience in IE, web developers and designers were not great about clearly articulating what features they needed - or more particularly, WHY they needed those features. It can be hard to estimate the demand when the reasoning is just “because it would be cool,” rather than “because I want to build an application that uses a 3D canvas to build a virtual fishtank world.” or “because I want to build an image processing program and media library web app that needs to perform Javascript image filtering on 20-megapixel images efficiently.”I’d also encourage you to think through your own scenarios of when you use native applications, and why, and how you think those applications could get built as web apps in the future. What’s missing?\n\n
- And we should all be pushing the platform forward, and pointing out the holes that need filling - if you can’t build what you want to build, because the web can’t do that yet, get involved. Don’t be dogmatic, or religious, and don’t be a browser fanboy - of ANY browser - be pragmatic and profit-motivated in your arguments. Greed is good. I know, and I don’t even work for Microsoft anymore!But from my experience in IE, web developers and designers were not great about clearly articulating what features they needed - or more particularly, WHY they needed those features. It can be hard to estimate the demand when the reasoning is just “because it would be cool,” rather than “because I want to build an application that uses a 3D canvas to build a virtual fishtank world.” or “because I want to build an image processing program and media library web app that needs to perform Javascript image filtering on 20-megapixel images efficiently.”I’d also encourage you to think through your own scenarios of when you use native applications, and why, and how you think those applications could get built as web apps in the future. What’s missing?\n\n
- you have to let go of pixel-precision.\n