Credit: flickr / keso

Have you heard? Google is apparently making a new social network that will rival Facebook.

This is being derided because, well, how can anyone hope to challenge Facebook? (Language stats from InsideFacebook) And Orkut has, tellingly, been a “huge success in Brazil“.

I often find myself voicing the opinion that there is no need to create another social networking site – let people bring their existing networks to you (Disqus allows you to do this, I use it on this blog). And yet here, I’m excited and think there’s real potential.

Why? Because much as Facebook is presented as the only social networking site, that’s bunk. Google has a ton of social networks – aside from Orkut, it’s just that many of them are functional, useful sites with a layer of social, and they’re disparate. I’ve listed a bunch below (in no particular order) – can you think of any more?

• Reader – has social share aspect.
• Buzz – despite the fuss, there’s potential here (Scoble post) and images and links are done really well.
• Wave – OK, wasn’t the hit that some of us (OK, me) expected – but aside from your network in wave, it shows off some great real-time editing and updating capabilities, that are flowing into Google Docs.
• Gmail – yes, it’s private and they have to walk that line better, but emails can be studied as a social network (paper from HP).
• Lattitude – location based updating.
• Blogger
• Picasa
• Google Groups
• Social Search – Google is already working the whole newsfeed-esque aspect of “you’ll like stuff your friends like” (paper on how users who talk a lot tend to search for the same things).
• Google Docs – sharing folders is useful for organizations and/or colleagues.
• News

Don Norman wrote ages ago about the organizational structure of finding things on Google and how that might reflect on the organization itself:

Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from their home pages, whereas Google makes you search through other, much more complex pages. Why aren’t many of these just linked together? Why isn’t Google a unified application? Why are there so many odd, apparently free-standing services?

A long time ago, 1968 to be precise, a wise person named Conway wrote: “Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” So true: I can see this in products from many a company. Except with Google, there appears to be no organizational structure of the product. Hmm.

But what I see here, is that Google has all the components of a social networking site that would be technically far better than anything Facebook is doing; they have an existing, and huge, user base; they are also more trusted. But will they give users the option to assemble them in a coherent manner? Perhaps with the addition of widgets from outside, like Twitter, and allow people to manage their Twitter AND their Buzz from one place?

Or will they start from scratch?

I really hope it’s the former.

Posts with detailed notes about what I’ll be covering and the videos (which won’t work from Slideshare – boo!):

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Art

Part 3: Life

Part 4: Programming

This video shows the evolution of special effects in cinematography. Because the movie studios are often at the edge of computer graphics work, it illustrates the evolution of 100 years of technology.

Inventions that have Changed Humanity

Credit: flickr / takomabibelot, flickr / Kuzeytac ( So, SO busy…), flickr / HuTDoG83

Through human history, there have been various inventions and discoveries that have fundamentally changed things.

The first was probably fire – it’s suggested that the reason for the sudden growth in the size of the human brain was a result of early humans cooking meat.

Another was the printing press, which allowed for the easier sharing and distribution of information. Before the printing press, everything was hand-written – very time consuming. The church got very angry about this development, and tried to fight against it but ultimately they couldn’t stop the advance of technology. To show how utterly futile this attempt was, consider that in order to get enough copies of their reasons why the printing press was such a terrible thing, they had to use the printing press – because scribes couldn’t copy fast enough. We see similar reactions today from some industries and some religious organizations when it comes to the internet.

The combustion engine brought about great changes in production and human mobility. It’s made it possible to flit between continents, the way we take for granted today.

Model of the Internet

Taken by me at the Museum of Science and Technology, Tokyo, Japan

The internet is another such invention, and we’re just at the beginning of the changes that will ensue.

Timeline for the Evolution of the Internet

We can see here that the internet was created about 40 years ago, and email shortly after. The internet as we know it really starts with the invention of the “World Wide Web” over 20 years later, though. The internet is the infrastructure, and the web is the software that runs on top of it. Many people don’t understand the difference, but without the web the services like YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter would not be possible. Now, we’re at the start of the mobile web – by 2020 it’s predicted that more mobile devices will be accessing the internet than computers.

Growing Up

Credit: flickr / just Luh.

My childhood would probably be unrecognizable to children of today – No cellphones! No iPod! No DVDs! (instead there was VHS) No YouTube! No Facebook! No Twitter! My family didn’t have a computer until I was about 12 and it was very slow, and at first it didn’t have internet.

For previous generations, the differences weren’t this huge – they were, as I understand it, mostly differences in TV programs. However with things moving so fast, this has not been the case lately.

I Remember...

Credit: flickr / KhE 龙, flickr / hichako, flickr / macwagen, Wikipedia

The giant brick cellphone on the left? My dad had one of those when I was little! I remember the first iPod, “Dial up” internet, floppy disks, my first CD and DVD and (vaguely!) what using the internet was like before Google.

Proportion of People on the Internet

Figures from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Images credit: flickr / Wayan Vota, flickr / Pink Sherbet Photography

In Canada, about 75 people out of every 100 use the internet. In the US, 74 people out of every 100 do. In China, which is a developing country, just 27 people out of every 100 use the internet. Number like this are why I can say with confidence that the changes we see as a result of the internet and other advances in technology are just beginning. When the whole world is online, the world will be very different than it is now.

Global Internet Use

China is still ahead of the worldwide average, which is just 25.5 people out of every 100. We have a long way to go before the whole world is connected, but I think we’ll get there.

Old Style Internet Content

Old style blog design from http://www.shirky.com/

One of the huge changes that programmers have brought about, through the creation of software, is the possibility for everyone to create content. This is so new, because if you think about it – before we used to distribute everything in books and newspapers etc, which have much higher costs of distribution. This development is something that impacts many people every single day.

The content users could create used to look a little… plain and dull and required some know-how.

Beautiful Blog Designs

Credit: Kevin Cornell, Markus Zeeh, Veerle Pieters, Oliver Wagner, Roman Leinwather, Manuela Hoffmann, Nick La, Pedro Vitor Lamin Júnior, Design Disease

Now, very little knowledge (if any) is required and designers can create beautiful looking web pages, that showcase their artistic sensibilities as well as their content.

In fact, the creators of I Want You To Want me used blog content to make another installation – this one online – called “We Feel Fine”.

The Demise of the Newspaper

Credit: flickr / Steven2005

So there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to change, and one of those things we can say with a good degree of certainty, is that newspapers are going to die out. Some of the brands will remain, but we’ll access them in a different way than on giant pieces of paper.

Some people are getting very angry about this, but it’s pointless to cling onto a dying business model. Innovative companies will survive. Those who waste time complaining probably won’t.

What's Next?

Credit: Wave Screenshot, flickr / Meddy Garnet, flickr / Joe Wilcox, Apple Tablet Image

But innovation doesn’t just mean the destruction of old things, there will also be new things that are created. Tactile computing, like tablets and tables will become mainstream. Communications will evolve through services like Google Wave. And eventually we’ll have house cleaning robots! (Sooner the better!)

]]> http://www.catehuston.com/blog/2009/12/27/art-life-and-progamming-life/feed/ 0 http://www.catehuston.com/blog/2009/12/03/an-introduction-to-processing/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://www.catehuston.com/blog/2009/12/03/an-introduction-to-processing/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:50:40 +0000 Cate http://catehuston.com/blog/?p=981 Find the slides for this below. If you’re interested, there will be a session tonight in Wave at 7pm, but there will be another one later this week as well.

As ever – feedback welcome!

Screenshot below shows mutiple threads of conversation happening simultaniously:

Multiple Conversations

It’s also really easy to drag and drop screenshots, so that can help me see where people are at, and what could be going wrong.

Drag and Drop Screenshots

Wave has nice indentations (kind of like we indent in Java!) that show a diversion:

Indentation shows the flow of the conversation

Finally, trying to schedule when everyone can make the next session can be difficult – but Widgets sure make it easier!

Widgets help with scheduling

So, all in all, wish Wave was faster but I think it was a success. Hopefully as people build up more knowledge they’ll discuss amongst themselves more. We will leave this wave going as people work their way through the rest of the slides (and I can help if necessary) and move to a new wave for the next session.

I’ll keep you posted about when that will be – and will put the slides up here soon!

Thanks to everyone who participated.

I’m thinking to run a session on this tomorrow, with discussion going on via Wave. Will start at 10 or 11am EST and run for 2 hours, with another 2 hours in the afternoon.

Let me know if you’re interested. I know it’s short notice, so I may push back depending on when people want to do it, but this will happen in the next week or so.

What you’ll need:

• a Google Wave account
• Java SDK
• Eclipse
• Processing, free download – we won’t be using the IDE that comes with it, but try and locate core.jar

I’ll assume your computer savvy enough to install Java and Eclipse by yourself as this could take up a lot of time in the session.

What we’ll cover:

• Your first program – “Hello World”
• Simple types (building blocks)
• What Object Oriented programming means
• Getting started with processing, displaying stuff
• Conditions
• Loops
• Global vs. Local variables

This is loosely based on the teaching I’ve done and I have a lot of resources that I’ve created that I’ll share. I have enough to do a whole series of these online workshops, if there’s demand. As it gets cold and nasty outside this could be a good opportunity to learn to code if you’re interested in doing so.

As a result of this, I’ve discovered two things: 1. not having it on my list means I do other things instead, which is good – clearing my email in one go should be more efficient. 2. I dread doing this task.

Perhaps the thing is, that the people I want to talk to I am talking to – on Twitter, or Facebook, or Wave. So the emails I get are mostly tedious things that I need to attend to for someone else’s benefit. Except that one, and er, that one. And yours if you’re waiting a response from me.

I wonder if with real-time or near real-time communication I’m just getting to the point when something so asynchronous seems weird. I mean, if someone doesn’t respond to a Twitter message within 2 days, that’s it right? You don’t expect a response.

What’s bothering me? Too many services? To much mail, period?

I remember when getting a letter in the post from a friend was exciting. But now only getting a package is exciting, because letters consist of bills and things trying to get you to buy insurance or whatever. I wonder if I’m starting to see e-mail in a similar way. E-mails mostly consist of people asking me to do stuff, and spam.

Hmm.

Since I went back to university checking my email once a week has become impossible. Worse, though, even checking it once a day is infeasible because I’ve been using email as a collaboration tool, and it’s just not something it does well. I’ve tried to move to Google Docs, but that just means that I create a document, alert people I’m collaborating with by email, and wait. Sometimes I have to email a reminder to get them to look at it and then I’m checking my email – and my Google Docs account. Then maybe we discuss what we’re working on via email, even if the thing we’re working on is in Google Docs. In the worse case, the only thing saved is keeping the working document up to date.

I got my Wave invite early on, and when I used my invitations my priority was to invite people I collaborate with, whether that’s for socializing, WISE, or academically (my supervisor got one, for example – we’re ditching email for Wave). The invites finally came through and I’ve now had my first “Wave collaboration experience” and it was awesome. I have to write an outline/blog post for a project we’re working on. I added our VP communications to the Wave and wrote it, then she came in and made some corrections. Underneath the section we were editing, we had a short conversation about what we were working on.

Then, well, I cut and paste what we’d produced into an email because the other person who needs this isn’t yet on Wave. But still – significant improvement.

Screenshot below:

This is awesome; it’s what I hoped Wave would be good for and I’m finally starting to experience it. I don’t see it replacing email, but I hope that once more of my friends and the people who I work with are on Wave I can replace email with Wave to communicate with them, and email will be reserved for more formal things that I don’t want to be real-time, like university notifications, inquiries from students and job hunting – and I can cut back on checking it, perhaps to once a day? That would be nice!

I am out of invites – please don’t ask me for one.

Anyway, I’m an early adopter. I was on i’m in like with you back when it was hot and invitation only (now it’s more of a games site, before it was about flirting). So I’ve been bugging my friend who works at Google since I heard about Wave, and after he got in yesterday he very kindly sent me an invitation. I logged on, expecting to see something that would blow my mind… but it actually looks quite plain. See below:

Abstractly I think I thought that Wave would just replace my email. But I can’t send messages to people who aren’t on Wave, and the only contact I have is Dig. I also think Dig is getting bored of the incessant messaging (he, obviously, has a real job). Perhaps the most useful thing I can use it for at the moment is keeping track of the conversations in my head. I.e. I can have a Wave for a project, and write my little notes in it. However when my friends are on it, it’ll be amazing. At the moment we organize events through my Facebook status, but Wave is going to be a so much better solution. Ditto for WISE, sending out mass emails to 10+ people is a nightmare. People need to know what’s going on, but it clogs up your inbox. In a wave, you’ll just be able to skim the stuff that you need to be aware of and it’ll all be part of one conversation.

Having conversations online is not always that “usable” of an experience; they can be hard to follow, too many threads or responses can overwhelm your inbox or ability to keep up with them. I really think that from what I’ve seen so far Wave will improve that. It’s like – email (longer messages) meets IM (instantaneous, see when they’re typing) meets Facebook (converse with multiple people, passively watch threads) meets real life (yes/no/maybe and map gadgets allow you to gauge interest, plan routes etc – more gadgets are coming. Also not only can you see that someone is typing – you can see what they’re typing as they’re typing it) and something more. The conversations we have online, and how we have them are different from the way we communicate in real life. I think Wave might bring is back to a more “natural” way of conversing.

One last really cool thing, you can “play back” your conversation, see the button next to reply? If you had a long, confusing conversation I can see that being really useful.

More screenshots below:

By the way – I can’t invite people (yet). Wish I could! Sorry to the people who’ve already asked for invitations and those who want to after reading this!