Ian M Rountree

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The “Heat Death” of Design and Technology

June 10, 2015 by Ian Leave a Comment

Flickr - chrisyarzab - Mountain of Fire

The universe passes around an awful lot of information – an awful lot of energy – all the time.

Go for a run? Bleed calories as heat into the air. Sun’s warm today! It’s shedding its worth into the ambient area at quite literally the speed of light. Atomic bombs? Self-explanatory.

The mechanics are all the same – physics is wonderfully complex but it’s not complicated. Which brings us to tech and design, weirdly.

It feels like every site on the web (including mine, for which I make little apology) features the same elements – because they’re popular and effective – all at the same time. Hero sliders, big images, stunning typography, literally the entire Material Design playbook in action – on every website it can be – 24/7 this year. Homogeneity at its best.

Why? It’s effective. We know what to expect. We know what a clickable link looks like on a desktop, and we can make simple guesses on mobile as to which regions are touch ready. It’s not bad in and of itself, but it will cause exhaustion, and go out of fashion.

Now tech is doing it too! This should not be a surprise.

This morning, Wired had a piece about everyone having the same plans for tech that’s damned accurate – and damning by way of its accuracy. From the article;

You can prefer one design or another, but that will be the only thing separating iOS from Android and Android from Windows. They’re just skins at this point. You’ll have access to all the same apps, all the same services.

Sounds great, right? And we can admit there’s less animosity between Mac users and PC users lately, just as there’s less ague in consumers over which phone to pick. As Wired says, “There are a few differentiators left, sure […] but they don’t matter to most users. A phone is a phone is a phone.”

Heat Death is at hand.

This is where we get back to physics. The idea of heat death centers on the passing of energies – that, and I’m paraphrasing a really large number of ideas here for the sake of demonstration – eventually, given enough passing, all of that energy will become homogenized. It’ll become the same. Momentum will be lost, among the many processes involved, and we’ll suffer the final doom of the universe; a lack of differentiation across all matter and energy, because there’s nowhere to go that hasn’t been gone before.

I feel like design, and tech, might spiral into a premature heat death situation by way of the hegemony of homogeneity.

Or I could be over thinking it. Maybe, as Wired says, this is what we need. Adoption is hard, and getting people on board with new systems is a challenge. Perhaps – going back to Clay Shirky – all of this stuff will become socially interesting as it becomes technologically boring.

Still, who wants to be bored by design items? Not me. How about you?

Filed Under: Content Strategy Tagged With: android, apple, commentary, design, internet, technology, windows

A Thought About iTunes Ping

September 17, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

Recently, Apple announced the new version of iTunes – iTunes 10. It’s got a lot of upgrades from previous versions – a tweaked, cleaner UI, some nice small changes to layouts and organization – all of these things are good. Yes, even the new icon, which has gotten bashed a bit for being generic and dippy. Hey – I like blue gradients, I don’t have a right to bash the logo.

However, one of the new features iTunes incorporates is what feels like an ad hoc social network, called Ping. Ping allows you to follow people, or musicians – get updates on new albums, things the people you’ve connected with like. I’m all for that, but I have to wonder; is it sustainable?

Ping is a flash in the pan.

I’m not the only one criticizing this. Ping has already been bashed as an inside sales tactic. That’s not my concern (everything is a sales tactic). I’m not even concerned about the system being centralized in iTunes, or being limited in features to half-Twitter, half-Facebook (or maybe all Google Buzz) style features. I don’t even care that it won’t let me blog more effectively.

My concern is breaking the rockstar illusion. Immediately on getting Ping set up, I started following some musicians. U2, for example, who have turned out to be quite vocal, in a mostly positive way. However, after actively checking in on Ping for a few days, I realized something. I don’t really care about musicians.

Don’t get me wrong – I love music.

I just can’t connect with musicians. I sing – I was part of a community chorale for years, and I loved it. I work with musicians daily. However, like economists or farmers, my day to day life has very little to do with the process of promoting music as an art. And that’s really what Ping is for; it’s a social network aimed at promoting music. The kind I like, the kinds my friends like. Forget that I might prefer Satriani to Motorhead, or Grateful Dead to K$sha – taste is important, but one thing’s for sure – and I think this is being overlooked.

I’m probably not the only person in the world who prefers to follow music, not musicians.

Anyone – even my friends – foisting their favorite band in my direction is likely to get indifference before interest.

But then, I wasn’t into MySpace either. And that’s who Ping really goes after – not bloggers or Twitter enthusiasts. So maybe I’m just the wrong audience.

And audience is important for music to be appreciated. Am I right?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: apple, flash in the pan, itunes, music, ping, social-networks

Why Apple Is Winning The Mobile Game

February 1, 2010 by Ian 4 Comments

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1063/698695902_cd1b9f4f01.jpgI want an iPhone. I’m probably going to wait until the next version, but it’ll happen eventually.

I’ve been a BlackBerry user for a couple years – the first of their devices I used was the old workhorse 7290, and I’ve owned a Bold and now a Curve 8520. My wife has an 8220. We spend a lot of time in Blackberry Messenger, rather than texting. It’s the name of BlackBerry’s game – full on communication.

I also do a lot with my berry all at once. I’ve got WordPress installed, I leave GoogleTalk and Live Messenger running all the time (feel free to flip me a message if we’re connected, I always respond), and have my Twitter client going as well. Multitasking is one thing that RIM certainly does far better than iPhone, but there’s a problem. The number of actual tasks a BlackBerry can DO is small, and it’s not growing very quickly.

So you’ve got Apps. Big whoop, so do I.

When AppWorld launched, I was pretty excited. Before then, there was no appreciable way of getting programs you could be sure to work onto a given model. However, even with AppWorld a year and more old, the app density is still very low. There’s not much for free aside from what I’ve got already, and finding specialized apps is a failing prospect. How long did it take me to find a decent Twitter client? Three weeks. Granted, I wasn’t searching hard, but I eventually did find SocialScope, which is wonderful, but still lacks support for some of the features I like in my PC-based clients. Guess what? The iPhone has massive amounts of support, both free and paid, for Twitter, Facebook, and other networks. And it has IM clients, even if the lack of multitasking is a pain. It’s an entirely different experience than BlackBerry.

Unfortunately, Research in Motion is not an experience business; they’re a production business.

The same gap is facing many device manufacturers these days. The game used to be develop, market, sell, warranty. But all that changes when someone breaks the process. When someone comes along and offers post-sale support and new features on an extending, nigh-infinite basis, businesses based in production start to fall very short. Especially when the new players begin to offer every possible feature a customer might want.

Oh, what? iPhone lacks a feature?

Oh. That Flash thing? I don’t care.

Cult of Mac reported that there’s no Flash on iPad because Apple is protecting content revenue. Duh! But seriously, I wonder how much this is actually going to matter to most people? Better still, will this be relevant to web developers and media designers? Flash is swiftly becoming a faux pas on high-end websites. HTML 5 is going to make a splash once adoption goes up. Tools like jQuery, AJAX and javascript-based text replacement are outgrowing Flash as a format. Want proof? My site uses all three, and the current theme took about a day’s work for me to hack together.

Flash may still be relevant for gaming, but I expect that game developers will eventually find it more useful to develop Apps for the iPhone OS that are paid, and encourage either ad-based revenue, or micro-transaction, modularized purchasing. When that gets bigger, Flash might die entirely.

Apple is interested in a never-ending transaction.

I owned an iPod Touch for almost a year before I gave it up for the sake of more storage space on an iPod Classic, because at the time I figured my BlackBerry would do everything I wanted. At the time it did.

What I forgot to gauge, however, was the number of apps I downloaded and used on a casual basis. As much as the opposition can rattle on about the high percentage of apps abandoned after first use,this is actually part of the key brilliance of Apple’s app store strategy; the massive number of programs available, in their wide variety, creates an endless well to draw from. There are free trials for just about everything, and if you’ve got the impetus, you can find an app for just about anything you want.

Once you start downloading apps, it’s really difficult to stop. This might be a bad thing for some people, but I can’t help but see it as an awesome way to encourage innovation.

Turning Enthusiasm Into Incentive.

Apple attracts developers and customers the same way: an innovative platform that’s easy to use, with massive extensibility and a market that’s not just competitive in pricing and profitability, but in advancement and interest. It’s the technological equivalent of the network effect, using hype as fuel to expand the same way trees use carbon dioxide to grow.

Despite silly product names and the constant barrage of hate because its mobile devices lack Flash, Apple is still winning. This isn’t because their devices are any better than their competitors hardware. It’s because they’re better at providing ongoing support.

But I’m still not convinced about the iPad.

Photo by The Pug Father.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: adobe, apple, blackberry, flash, hype, incentive, iPad, iphone, there's an app for that

The Need for a Three Dimensional Economy

January 29, 2010 by Ian 6 Comments

Trik or Treat. on Flickr
Photo by peasap.

Just like declaring any technology dead has become a bad joke, talking about alternative economic models seems to be popping up more and more. What we’re seeing is exploration into concepts like Whuffie, or a Relevance-based economy, the kinds of systems that look so good and tempting on paper that we’re willing to buy into them, support them – but they haven’t taken off yet. Like the ideal of Communism, non-capital economies are not fully formed enough yet to be worth adopting on a broad scale.

There are more aspects to the current economic model than most people suspect. This is one of the reasons why systems like Whuffie can’t take off until they become inclusive, rather than replacement systems. We need to explore not just alternatives, but additives to our current money-for-property system, because as society expands and changes, physical property is being diminished in its importance.

The obvious system is linear. It exists on a continuum of “Money <> Product” where the exchange is similarly obvious; the more complex, or impressive the product, the more money it’s going to cost. This means you basically have one choice to make. Do you want to keep your money and have nothing, or do you want to get the physical item, the souvenir of the transaction that you want to enact, and forgo the agile utility of liquid asset?

Money economy is simple. It’s not, however, complex enough. Not in today’s society.

We’re not going to get rid of money any time soon. The playing field is not level enough between the have’s and the have-nots to allow such a ubiquitous, obvious capital to die. So what about adding another layer? We’re doing this already, with social capitals like Whuffie. Whuffie is a social proofing system (there’s a full explanation on Wikipedia, as well as the Whuffie Bank) by which a new continuum is proposed: that of “Action <> Respect” where respect becomes a universal capital, and the time and effort your actions entail becomes the trade for this capital. It’s a brilliant system, because respect is virtually  impossible to fake.

Replacing the monetary system with another linear system is a failing concept because of complexity issues. However, when we add to the one-dimensional monetary system another, totally offset system like the Whuffie-based Action <> Respect economy, what we see is a more accurate representation of how people make decisions. Like in a pure relevance economy we can’t expect people to make decisions solely based on money, here is an example  of what this two-dimensional system may come to look like:

I want a television. I look at the brands and models available. Five sets all cost the same in my size range, and all of them fit my budget. How do I decide? I choose based on the company’s image. I’ll pick on Samsung because I know there are good people working there. When all the prices are the same, price alone cannot aid my decision.

This feels like a much more human decision making process. I’ve now removed money from the process, because it’s irrelevant in this transaction, and replaced it with a differentiator involving reputation. Far more thorough. But what happens when the reputation metric falls over? After enough time, with all of the major corporations eventually getting involved in the social space, democratizing their brands and building personalities, the idea of Whuffie will fall apart in the corporate sense, because someone will eventually come up with a new system where no publicly visible missteps are made. While I admit this is a reduction of rationality, let’s say the scenerio is proven, and reputation does become a reliable commodity. What then?

Real depth.

What will that look like? How will we make decisions? I suspect it will look a lot like it does now. Let’s take a fairly complex scenario about purchasing and break it down:

I need to replace a laptop. I do the research, figure out what my real needs are, and find that both an Apple MacBook Pro, and a very high end PC, such as a Toshiba or even an Alienware would suit my tasks. Budget is no object. How do I decide? I take the question to my peers, who return with a resounding support of Apple from the set who likes Apple, and some mixed reviews of Toshiba, a couple of Alienware droolers, and someone offhand giving me a very intense explanation of why I need to consider an HP. What do I buy? The Apple fans always say Apple, so they failed to differentiate. The Toshibas always give mixed reviews. The Alienware droolers are doing my shopping for themselves, but that one dude who suggested the HP had damned good reasons for doing so. We’ll assume it also helps that I did my research following the tip, and found the information to be accurate. So I’ll go buy the HP.

We took care of money by presupposing it’s not an object. We took care of reputation by adjusting for our reactions from our friends. Relevance does not apply because my needs are straight forward enough that any machine on the market of a certain calibre will accomplish my goals. How did I make my decision? An outside force, not the company I was purchasing from, grabbed my attention with a real, human plea about quality, experience, reliability, or something else that actually, legitimately makes the brand stand out over the competition.

We ask our friends for approval of purchases all the time. We budget with our families. We save. We do research. Are any of these things recognized as part of the measurable economic process? Sure they are. There are multinational corporations banking on being the most innocuous, convenient option. Wal-Mart choices. This, I’d say, amounts to the third dimension of a real three-dimensional economy. The “Convenience <> Information” continuum, and it’s the most difficult one to master.

We say all the time in the shop that there’s nothing so dangerous to profit margin than an informed consumer. It’s true, even if it’s an oversimplification. At the moment, consumers who qualify as informed, do minimal research on Google or Bing or Yahoo and come away mostly with answers backing up their assumptions, because no one’s taught them how to use search effectively, and our culture is not exactly encouraging of reliable dynamic thinking like changing your mind based on Wikipedia. There are good reasons for this – for now. But those reasons are shrinking.

Any economic model not sufficiently complex to cover the agile way in which humans make decisions is a failing, imperfect system. This process is simpler than we think; all we have to be able to do is plot the options in a space, and relate that space to our own needs, expectations, and resources. This kind of relational thinking is exactly why we are what we are, and where we ourselves fit on this grid is what makes us as individuals who we are.

Rational thinking is linear. Placing money on the opposite side as physical goods is obvious, and rational. It worked for a long time as the easiest to communicate system, when there were so many barriers to acquisition. Now, however, with all of the barriers crumbling and every wall to commerce falling as quickly as society can allow it to – and with so much diversity in product and method and resource now available – a linear system, any purely linear system, must be called obsolete.

And now I’ve fallen into my own trap.

Where do you see opportunities for more relational thinking? Economics isn’t just for transactions of goods. Economy of effort, of time, these things have the same implications, and require the same skills and know-how to navigate effectively. But we have to do so in a manner that allows us to be conscious of where the effort we’re putting in goes. Where is your effort going?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: action, alienware, apple, esteban contreras, goods, HP, justin kownacki, linear system, money, relevance, respect, sociology, whuffie, whuffie bank, wikipedia

Children's Games and Social Media

January 8, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

Follow the Leader - FlickrI was always crap at Simon Says. I was the kid who could only ever think of three things to have people do – stand up, sit down, run in place – and I’ve learned to mark this down to both an inability to develop internal go-to lists, and a dislike of having to issue mindless rapid-fire commands. Yet as I watch people tweet their lives away sometimes I wonder exactly how useful these skills are in real life? Like learning trigonometry, I had always figured it was something to get good at or avoid, but now I’m not so sure.

Like it or not, Social Media is here to stay. I hope someone comes up with a better, permanent term for what’s going on, because I dislike that buzzword, but there you are. I’m fortuitous to be getting into networking just now, because I have a nearly three year old son, and while considering the things we need to make sure he learns, at the same time I’m watching the foibles of high-powered people online, and seeing a lot of parallel.

One of the many things I dislike about Twitter’s ecosphere is the MLM phenomenon. It sounds like a pyramid scheme on the outside (and runs like one) but the behavior of the people involved, or at least the visible output of the bots, looks an awful lot like Simon Says. Rapid fire information with little available content driving people who are unlucky enough to get sucked in to useless products or a hookup to the scheme. It’s a social failing, but it’s one of those pendulum behaviors – those who understand just enough are exploiting those who don’t yet know.

How many pundit blogs do you read? I don’t specifically mean political pundits, I mean Apple and Google and Microsoft fanboy blogs as well. Notice anything about their habits? Suggesting certain new products, dropping bombs on others. For some reason this always reminds me of Red Light, Green Light.

The less said about Michael Arrington’s apparent tabloidism the better – but the entire leak culture feels like one big game of telephone.

Corporate recruiting feels a bit like Red Rover.

It’s amazing how often this kind of thing happens. Perhaps it’s early training, rearing it’s head on our adult lives. On the other hand, like just about anything, when you know just enough about how these habits form, you can exploit them. And when that gets old, you can become a benefactor and teach others either to exploit the habits, or how to avoid having these habits exploited.

Until you know where your habits come from, and what the tells are, how are you going to ensure you’re not being taken advantage of?

Otherwise, it’s duck-duck goose, and someone’s got their eye on turning you into the next goose.

Photo by Mykl Roventine

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: apple, boneheaded-businesses, ecospheres, ecosystems, fanboys, google, internet, media, michael arrington, microsoft, news, pyramid schemes, rant-alert, social-networks, sociology, technology, the-web

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