Amateurisation - The way forward

I read a viewpoint on the BBC today about the "internet of things".  The author believed that when the "internet of things" comes about it should be more amateur than professional, and included a quote from Clay Shirky that "creating something personal, even of moderate quality, has a different kind of appeal to consuming something made by others, even of high quality".

I couldn't agree more, and I would go as far as saying that imperfect personal items are much more highly valued than high quality impersonal items.

With everything around us becoming more complicated, it is rare that we get the opportunity to truely create something ourselves.  A silent revolution is happening where we are being pushed further and further away from the origins of a product.  In fact, Apple's aim seems to be to make everything so easy to use that no one would want to perform their own modification, which has the unfortunate side effect of removing the sense of satisfaction you get when you hack something together to do what you want.

So bring on the dawn of the "internet of things" and let us once more take control of the word in which we live!

Social Media and the London Riots

For me the London riots are a bit too close to home with rioting, looting and disorder just a mile down the road.  Like many people in my situation I haven't been able to get enough of the news coverage.  I want to know exactly where the rioters are and what they're doing.

I've found that the news is about an hour behind twitter so I've just been sitting watching my twitter feed.  This is the first time I've used twitter like this and it's quite exciting, but it's also full of rubbish.  About half the tweets are about the Nandos and Krispy Kreme being set on fire which I'm sure is just a lie (the live TV feed is showing them still up).  And the same picture is being used as evidence for both, though the building on fire looks nothing like either of them.

But twitter could be doing something worse than spreading misinformation.  Local people tweeting live about what they can see from their windows are telling potential rioters where all the action is (assuming they're one of the unfortunate rioters who didn't get the blackberry message).  In fact the unfounded rumours they spread on twitter could start focal points of rioting where there was no previous plan to be.

What's the answer?  I don't think it's reasonable to prevent people from tweeting about what's happening, and I think it would be very difficult to stop the word getting round on any type of social media.  Maybe instead of stopping all messages the police should go the other way and flood social media such as bbm and twitter with messages dissuading the rioters.  Obviously messages from the police won't work but if they could get respected community leaders involved then they just might have a chance...

The flaw in Apple's business model

Apple can do no wrong at the moment - it's even reported that they are holding more cash than the USA.  But I just can't believe that their success is going to last.  And here's why.

Apple's business model seems to be:
(i) Release new hardware
(ii) Hardware is very cool so people flock out to buy it (even though it's much more expensive than competing products)
(iii) Protect the brand by tightly monitoring applications that third parties develop for the hardware
(iv) Take 30% of any revenue the developer gets
(v) Repeat 6 months later.

All this hardware development must be very expensive for Apple but they can't take a break and rely on their older products because they seem to be actively discouraging third party developers (cf. (iii) and (iv)).  Developers want to write software for Apple products because it is new and cool and thus they have a big market.  But after a few months other companies have caught up with Apple's hardware and, crucially, they aren't going to take 30% away from the developers.  So the developers move over to the other platforms and so the application offering on the Apple hardware stagnates.  We already see this at the moment with the Android app store being predicted to overtake Apple's app store later this month.

Thus the reason they need point (v).

But what happens when they release a bad hardware platform (it has to happen eventually!) or they just run out of ideas for new products that people might want?

That day, I believe, will be the beginning of the end for Apple.

Should we demand to pay for Social Media?

This week, GrrlScientist wrote an open letter to Google after her account was deactivated without warning:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/jul/28/google-open-letter-google

While she argues that she did not contravene their terms and conditions (as they were claiming), I believe that they are legally within their rights to deactivate it anyway.  And it raises an interesting point.  We all rely so much on free services provided by companies like Google and Facebook that we (or certainly I) would be lost without them.  If Google one day decided to deactivate my  gmail account then I would lose all my emails from the last few years.  And since I have a tendency to forget passwords for websites, I would be permanently logged out of most of my other accounts, because the websites have no other contact address for me.

And even worse, what if Google decided tomorrow that they had been successful enough and were going to stop trading immediately, deactivating all gmail accounts.  There would be complete chaos!

Because we are getting these services for free, the companies legally owe us very little.  The obvious solution would be for us to pay for the services and got more rights and guarantees in return.  I wouldn't dream of getting all my post sent to an address manned for free by someone who I had never met, so why do I do so with my emails?

Saying that, people have got too used to receiving all these services for free so it would be a very hard sell to get them to pay for it.

What do you think?  Is there another solution?

Hollywood vs. The Internet

Yesterday the UK's high court forced BT to block access for its customers to Newzbin2 - a file sharing site which has become a favourite for people who want to share films illegally.

I can imagine the scene in Hollywood at the moment.  Everyone jumping and cheering.  Banners everywhere.  Steven Spielberg declaring a new public holiday to rival the 4th July.  All the big names in the film industry already coming together to make a new blockbuster about it - they could call it "Saving Private Film Makers" or "Titanic Profits".

But of course that isn't happening.  And not just because of the size of the UK film market.

Hollywood is taking on an enemy who is much more agile than it can ever be.  It takes months of legal wrangling to get a site blocked.  But the site's owners can create a new one almost instantaneously. It might take a while the new site to get a following as big as the original - it could even take a whole 2 hours - but it won't get rid of file sharing forever.

Hollywood need a new tactic and they should look towards the music industry.  Illegally downloading music was a big problem 10 years ago.  But then companies like Apple came along and made itsimple to download music for a reasonable price.  If film companies could do the same, maybe setting the charge at £0.99, they could open up a new revenue stream and maybe come to embrace the internet.   Of course people could still download films for free but those with a chronic addiction to free media are never going to be cured, and the film studios shouldn't think that making them go cold turkey will chage anything.  But enough people will switch over to legal downloading to give the film studios a tidy profit.

Unfortunately I get the feeling that it will be a while yet before they can see past the epic storyline they are creating for themselves... *sigh*

Onavo - Too little, too late?

Today an app caught my eye. That app was Onavo.

Onavo is a data compression app and its developers claim that by using it you can
(i) double or triple your data plan, and
(ii) save up to 80% on your data bill. 

So far, so good.  The mobile internet is booming and in some countries (such as India) it could grow to be far more popular than the conventional internet, since it is much cheaper to buy a phone handset than to buy a fully blown computer.

But...

At the moment there are other forces at work in the mobile internet space.  The EU is currently looking to significantly reduce roaming charges when users move between EU countries, and it is not inconceivable that other countries will follow suit.  This removes one of the app's key selling points: reducing the cost of data abroad.

In addition, the rise of smart phones means that mobile users are also starting to use a lot more data.  Since they won't want to spend all of their disposable income on using their phone the way it was intended, either mobile contracts with free inclusive data will become a lot more common or data on a PAYG basis will become a lot cheaper.  So you won't even need to use this app at home either.

Despite all this I can still see Onavo becoming a winner.  And not for any of the reasons it claims.  I think Onavo might be able to solve an issue with mobile internet that isn't going to go away any time soon: speed. 

Using the internet on my mobile is a bit like going back 10 years to the days of dial up internet.  The days when you had to be very careful when browsing because one wrong click and you could be stuck for hours waiting for a page to load. 

If Onavo's compression means that I can access web pages faster (as there is less data travelling around) then this could be a real winner.  And I sincerely hope it is!

Mission (Impossible) Statement

The world of telecommunications and social media has changed so much in the last few years that it is inconceivable that anyone 10, or even 5, years ago could have predicted what it would look like today. 

But I like challenges (especially impossible ones!) and through this blog I will record my vision of the future.  Maybe in 10 years time I will be able to look back on what I have written here and see that I got everything spot on.  I'll be able to boast about my predictive powers and might even get a Mystic Meg-style slot on a lottery program.

Or, more likely, I will look back and see that I got almost all of my predictions wrong.  I will then point out any vaguely realised predictions to friends and family in the hope that the internet will have reduced their attention span to such an extent that they will get distracted before they read the rest.

So here it goes...