Sunday, November 17, 2002

From .blog to converged client.. I met Bret Fausett at Digital ID World. Brett asks about the idea of a .blog top level domain (like a .com or .net). Lots of good comments; here are mine. I concur with the general objections stated before. The central identity of blogging is that a human voice (sometimes a small tribe) is found in one place, instead of being scattered in many large community sites. That said, what creative ways could we exploit a .blog tld? Might this help with search? In a world of microcontent, could DNS help each post be unqiuely identified or found? If so, would DNS take part in update notification, perhaps helping with threading of conversation? I know a number of people who blog anonymously or pseudonymously. Could the registrar help assure privacy of domain ownership? Assuming everyone will get at least one personal domain for blogging, this could be a very active registry. Compared to businesses, they have short lives too. Blogging is a form in transition. Personally, I think blogging as a form will merge with all the other forms of digital expression. With email and IM first. With voice/video conferencing, streaming videos, browsing, and PowerPointing later. Watch it change: as more people blog from their foto-mobiles as devices start to blog ("My car's day") as audiobloggers create radio shows and videobloggers create televsion programming as Sims characters start to blog. Moving forward, see a convergent software client emerge. Source: evanwolf group, 2002. A lot to shovel into one bucket. Why bother? Synergy and Usability.   Synergy because each of their abilities are horizontal and complementary to to the other functions. This is why spell checking rolled into word processors. Usability, because with great design, learning one feature makes it easier to learn and do the next. Once you learn spell check, any sort of text editing or proofreading tool is a snap. This slashes the incremental user burden of new features. So spell check, for instance, can cross into spreadsheets, presentations, email, even project management tools without taxing the new user. What else do you need from a converged user experience? What are our collective design goals? Simplicity. Unity. and Adaptability. The surfaces presented to a user will adapt to each medium and form. Perhaps I need a storyboard for planning a video; maybe it can also be used for planning a presentation, an extended blog post, an interaction with a customer. Are you presenting on a computer projector, a video stream, or paper? The software should understand how to adjust. The converged client should also adapt to people. A person's culture, experience, goals, interests, and skills. This is hard as adamantium, but it is what allows robust tools to work for most people in many situations. Some people need help and wizards and automatic spelling correction (think Microsoft Office), others need directly manipulable affordances (think Kai's Power Tools). Small children need different environments (Power Puff Girls) than teens than adults. Grokking world cultures and subcultures, and reflecting those in software, is a fine art. Adjust to hardware platforms. How do you incorporate the strengths and limitations od the PC fat client, game box, TV set top, and thin clients on the mobile phone and web browser? Embrace specialized content. Some database tools can automatically generate editing screens and menus and even workflows from data structures and definitions. We need to do the same thing, but across many kinds of content and activities. From blogging movie reviews (with extra metadata and internal structure) to IM conversations guided by scripts.  A constraint: Adapt while preserving and leveraging the user's prior knowledge, skills, and abilities. So. Contrast this with Anil Dash's microcontent client. I'm seeing the converged client as a conceptual superset or framework for building microcontent clients. Can you imagine the plumbing? You'd want to design for: Flexibility Interoperability Extensibility Scalability Polylingual Your architecture would need: Shared services. A common chassis.  Open APIs. So third party's can connect, communicate, and interact with the client. Plug-in sockets. So tool makers can add their own features and extend the client's abilities. Standards support. To increase interoperability. Heavy transcoding. Transcoding is a fancy term for converting content from one platform to others. The converged client will have to handle a wider range of content than most. From story outlines to storyboards. From audio tracks to text subtitles. From IM threads to blog posts. So what? We're on our way. Blogging tools are starting to interact with email and sounds. PIMs are managing contact information across multiple applications. Community and collaboration features are as critical to games as traditional gameplay. I'm calling it: 2003-2005 will see many clients converge, weblogs among them. The challenges? Immense. The rewards? Many and rich. The fun? Deep and lasting. [a klog apart klogging] [Phil Wolff: technology] 5:47:26 PM    trackback []     Articulate []