Just as a note…

…on the off chance someone has come across this rather abandoned-seeming blog, it actually was revived as Coyote Tracks over at Tumblr. Carry on.

Revival

Yes, I’m considering reviving this weblog. Why? Because sometimes, I just want to rant about tech stuff. And cocktails. We’ll see if that mix works. Or if I even get to it, since I’m cleverly restarting this in the middle of crunch time on my current contract.

In the meantime, I’ve left the only two interesting posts from the 2007 incarnation of Coyote Yaps up.

Writing about writing about the iPhone

So what’s really interesting about the iPhone, at this point, isn’t the phone as much as the reactions to the phone. There may never have been a product before about which so many confident predictions of success or failure have been made before all but a few people have ever seen the damn thing in person. And there may never have been a product in consumer electronics before that’s making this big an entrance. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo wish they could have gotten this kind of buzz.

This doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot of slamming going on. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has all but been making a sport of tracking “iPhone Doubters,” most recently deconstructing a New York Times piece. The explanations for why the phone is sure to fail are predictable enough that most observers could have written half of them before the device was even announced: it’s too high-priced, it doesn’t do anything that other phones don’t already do, Apple has no experience in this market, the touch screen is a stupid idea for [pick one of a half-dozen reasons], the battery life will be terrible, the data speed is too slow. Only the wildly Apple-obsessive are going to go out and buy this when it’s first available and, well, nobody else will.

Other than the gratuitous Apple fan bashing (the psychology of that is best left for another post), most of those points are reasonable. It is a damn high price, you can get other devices (for less) that match the iPhone feature for feature or surpass it, the touch screen keyboard is a big unknown at best, and the cell data standard the iPhone uses is slow. What with all this common sense antidotes to the irrational iPhone hype, you’ve gotta wonder just what AT&T is thinking by telling their stores to beef up security and crowd control on June 29th. And what Sprint is thinking when they tell their staffers to expect up to 6% of their smart phone customers to abandon them immediately. What industry analysts are thinking when they write that the iPhone may capture 26% of the smart phone market. What financial analysts are thinking when they keep listing Apple’s stock as “outperform.”

Well, no, we don’t have to wonder what they’re thinking. They’re thinking the iPhone is going to be liquid money. Executives at the carriers who refused to deal with Apple are, at this moment, preparing their résumés.

So what does the iPhone actually have going for it?

Let’s look at the price a moment: $500 or $600, depending on whether the iPod is a 4G or 8G version. That is damn expensive for a smart phone, let’s face it. But think about it as an iPod alone for a moment: if you removed the phone part and just had this be a wide-screen iPod with the touch-screen UI they’ve demonstrated, you’d have a unit that Apple could probably get away with selling for $300 or more. This is arguably the best video iPod ever, not a phone that does MP3s as an afterthought. Is this $300 worth of iPod and $300 worth of phone? Before you write that off as completely irrational, ask how many people out there have spent more than $500 total on both an iPod and a smart phone already. Big number, right? That’s what Apple is betting the potential market is here, and on that point, I don’t think I’d bet against them.

But, okay. Is it really that good a smart phone, given what we know about it and what we know about smart phones on the market now? If I compare it to a Sidekick III, the iPhone seemingly gets its ass handed to it: the Sidekick has a web browser and e-mail client and SMS and camera and all those things, plus a real keyboard, plus an integrated SMS client, plus a large library of third-party applications you can get delivered to it over the air.

Of course, to actually make a phone call on the Sidekick, the process is something like: click the phone app, scroll to “look up contacts” and click, scroll down the contacts and click. In a phone call, you can mute it by, um, pressing the menu button and finding mute. I think. I’m sure there’s a way to do a conference call on it, but fuck if I know.

The takeaway point here is that the Sidekick is regarded—correctly—as having one of the good user interfaces for a smart phone. But from a usability standpoint, the iPhone kicks its ass.

I’m not going to wax rhapsodic and proclaim that the iPhone is a revolutionary reinvention of the mobile phone. The truth is, though, that a lot of consumer electronics products—car radios, video players, and definitely cell phones—have terrible human engineering. There’s little to no thought given to how self-evident a function is or how easy it is to access it relative to how often the function will be used.

And if there’s one thing that Apple is (usually) good at, it’s human engineering. The UI differentiated the iPod from its competitors; there were always MP3 players with more features, but it was just easier to use, and iTunes was easier to use library management software. At risk of linking to John Gruber again, he’s one of the people who’s gotten what the iPhone’s “killer app” is: it’s the interface, stupid.

The iPod is illustrative here. Some pundits and technophiles still don’t get why someone would “put up” with a device that has fewer features and costs more, and figure it must just be because they’re uninformed fashion-conscious sheep. In some cases, that’s probably true, and of course now the iTunes Store has the network effect going for it (which also applies to the iPhone, of course). But the idea that people might be choosing to buy iPods because they don’t want to “put up” with a device whose multitude of features are painful to use seems to be off the radar. It shouldn’t be.

So will I, your humble coyote, be in line to get an iPhone, to pony up $600 initially and $70 a month onward? (Not much more than I’m paying now, mind you, but even so.) I don’t know. I won’t say I’m not tempted, although I won’t say that I don’t have reservations, either. I trust folks who’ve actually used the iPhone, like Andy Ihnatko, who’ve said that the touch-screen keyboard works surprisingly well, but I’ve been known to hit 100 wpm on a normal keyboard and upwards of 30 wpm on a thumb board, and I just don’t see that happening without tactile feedback. (I suspect my Sidekick has also given me first stage RSI, so I’m not sure slowing me down wouldn’t have positive side effects.) I use my Sidekick a lot for IM.

And certainly not least, there’s an inherent risk in being an early adapter. A lot of the iPhone will crash and burn! articles are based on facts not in evidence or projection (“I’m not interested in an iPhone, so it can’t have that big a market”), but the million-dollar question is how well the iPhone’s been executed. Unless you’re Steve Jobs or Walt Mossberg, you don’t know yet, and Steve’s a biased source and Walt’s not talking.

But whether or not I’m actually in line on Friday (no, I’m not definitively ruling it out), I’m definitely going to be watching.

Ubiquitous Presence

I described Twitter in an earlier post as “micro-blogging,” which it is, sort of. If you go to the site and register, you will see a text field labeled:

What are you doing?

and an input box of 140 characters total. No more. Type something there, and it’s immediately posted on your Twitter page.

“And that’s it?”

Well, mostly. You can send these little “tweet” updates from an IM client, or a mobile phone. You can subscribe to someone’s Twitter “presence” as an RSS feed. The home page acts like a LiveJournal Friends page when you’re connected, showing the last “tweets” that people you’re following have sent. It can track conversations. And there are clients out there like Twitterrific which talk to the Twitter API.

“And… that’s it?”

Well, yeah, pretty much.

There are other Twitter-like services, most notably Jaiku, which lets you interconnect other “networking” sites in with your Jaiku presence page. Posts to my (somewhat neglected) tumbleblog or even this journal could show up in Jaiku if I wanted them to.

“And the point is what, exactly?”

That’s what I’ve been wondering for months, until just the other day. This is what occurred to me.

Futurists and technology pundits and sci-fi authors and fans have, for the past two decades or so, envisioned a highly-networked future—and we’ve mostly envisioned it as the “metaverse,” a virtual reality a la Snow Crash and Neuromancer. And each new lurch in technology in that direction gets examined in light of these fictional standard-bearers. Conversation? Check. A sense of place distinct from the real world? Check. Total immersion? Not so much. Yet Second Life is not only largely constructed by its inhabitants, it has a real economy, complete with currency exchange, property rights and rent; despite its crappy implementation, this is some serious virtual trailblazing. Futurists may have been mostly on the money with what Second Life represents; what Twitter represents, though, wasn’t even much on the radar.

Twitter—and understand that from this point on, I’m talking about the concepts it and Jaiku et. al. implement—is tying together the technologies that have been cascading down around us for the last decade. Ubiquitous computing is mostly here, and the aspect of that which I don’t think futurists who coined the phrase saw coming is ubiquitous presence. We are creating what amounts to opt-in telepathy: you can know what all your friends around the world are doing or thinking at any given time, and have a persistent (albeit not necessarily permanent) record: on this day at that time my friend told me this. And the records we’re creating can be automatically cross-referenced, hyperlinked, tagged and categorized.

When ideas like this have been written about in the past, it’s usually with a dystopic cast to them: your thoughts and actions and movements can be recorded and tracked without your consent, used for nefarious purposes by Big Government, Big Corporation, or whatever other Big Nasty you imagine. Britain’s proliferation of security cameras in public areas is the most oft-cited harbinger of this in the real world. (Out of all the tracking methods available to Big Siblings, those are actually among the least nefarious—but that’s another post.)

But Twitter is a completely different animal, one I don’t think any of us saw coming: millions and millions of people choosing to be tracked. Instead of bits of information about us that the observers choose to record, we are publishing as much information about ourselves as we choose to share. This is not journaling, pausing occasionally to share diary entries or mini-essays like this one. It’s immediate stream-of-consciousness, where am I and what am I thinking stuff. What’s John Gruber of Daring Fireball been thinking about? I can check. You can check. Hell, we can subscribe to an RSS feed of all of his friends’ tweets. And Leo Laporte, late of “The Screen Savers” and now running the TWiT podcasting empire, pretty much lives his life online.

The granularity of who can access that information is coarse: generally, either a white list (only those we designate as “friends”) or everyone. But many of us are, apparently, perfectly willing to share stuff with complete strangers as long as we’re the ones in control. We’re choosing what to share and what not to share. This can be weird stuff to people in my generation or older, but to people under, say, 20, this—not Twitter specifically, but the concept of ubiquitous presence—is just a part of life. You can choose to opt out, but it’d be a little weird, like admitting to your friends that you listen to classical music and don’t know any popular rock bands.

Again, this isn’t about the specific services and brands popular right now; it doesn’t matter if Twitter and Bebo and Facebook are also-rans in a year. This kind of interaction simply didn’t exist a decade ago, yet the foundational technologies—the Web, cell phones, and text messaging (IM or SMS)—are already deeply woven into our culture. All of these are fundamentally disruptive technologies. By blending them together, what’s being created is something new: the cyberpunk metaverse not as a separate entity, but as an overlay.

If this is a trend rather than a fad—and I’m pretty sure it’s a trend—there are far-reaching implications. Accessibility, privacy, and social interaction offline as well as online can be affected. To me, this is neither fantastic nor forbidding—but it’s fascinating. And, for all of the many jokes to be made about “Web 2.0,” I think it’s going to prove very important in the next decade or two.