There is a beautiful diagram below, but it is one dimensional ... in reality many of the visions on the periphery will be interconnected. There is also a beautiful vision in the architecture described, but in reality there are many players with other visions, and what we get is chaos, difficult to predict where the future might take us.
[Phil Wolff: Blue Sky Radio] shares interesting perspectives from
[a klog apart klogging]
From .blog to converged client..
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.
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.
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: Blue Sky Radio]
1:27:23 AM 
|
