Find ‘Twitter’, Replace with ‘Second Life’

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In the past week both Apple and Twitter have carpet bombed on their respective development communities. As I’ve written about previously – I’ve been off Twitter now for nearly 2 months.

This week an interesting switch flipped in my head.

When I hear ‘Twitter’, my head replaces it with another corporate site I have little presence within. Most often it’s ‘World of Warcraft’ or ‘Second Life’. Sometimes it’s ‘MySpace’.

It gives whatever statement a quaint, historical tint to it. Rather than the blanket of pretension I’ve been feeling lately.

Elsewhere:

“Twitter vs Facebook battle he alludes to is already over, and Facebook wins….There’s just more value in being able to share anything.” – Fred Oliveira

“When [Twitter’s] conversion to OAuth is complete they will be in a position to instantly block any application they don’t like, which they have already started doing. “-Eric Woodward

Considering His Lyrics

For decades, I’ve been a fan of Tim Quirk’s lyrics. He has a way of expressing the melancholy of defeat with cutting brevity and a touch of wordplay.

‘Topless at the Arco Arena’ rolled through the iTunes this afternoon and I stopped to savor these three lines:

Some rise by sin,
Some by virtue fall,
We’re not getting anywhere at all.
– Wonderlicks’ ‘The CEO Considers His Holdings’

If you’d like to give it a listen, it’s the 12th song down in the little player. Along the way, I highly recommend ‘All Boys Want’, ‘Fear of Chicago’, ‘The King of Bad Decisions’, and ‘Everybody Loves Jenny’.

Safari is Apple’s Middleware

“And, obviously, such a meta-platform would be out of Apple’s control. Consider a world where some other company’s cross-platform toolkit proved wildly popular. Then Apple releases major new features to iPhone OS, and that other company’s toolkit is slow to adopt them.” – John Gruber

Substitute “toolkit” for “website”. Now, remember when Jobs proudly announced:

“you can write great apps for the iPhone: they’re called ‘web sites’”

Giles Bowkett sums the situation up nicely:

“Geeks control the Internet because geeks built the Internet. We earned the freedom we have here. We earned it by creating something incredibly valuable and sharing it with millions and millions of people. What did we earn with the App Store? Did we build the App Store? Did we write iPhone OS? Did we design the groundbreaking hardware? Or are we just customers?…If geeks want the power to make any kind of decision in this situation, they need to get off their lazy asses and stop imagining that the world owes them a favor” – Giles Bowkett

How do I make a contribution to the U.S. government?

“Citizens who wish to make a general donation to the U.S. government may send contributions to a specific account called ‘Gifts to the United States.’ This account was established in 1843 to accept gifts, such as bequests, from individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States. Money deposited into this account is for general use by the federal government and can be available for budget needs. These contributions are considered an unconditional gift to the government. Financial gifts can be made by check or money order payable to the United States Treasury and mailed to the address below.”

Thanks to Mark Perry for the pointer.

The Apple iPad is an Ambient Information Device

Update 26 May 2010.
Video proof of my position.

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

The keyboard + dock for my iPad arrived today – which marks what I’m considering the start of my actual evaluation of the device’s strengths.

The Apple iPad is quite comfortable in the dock, and both sit quite comfortably in the corner of my desk.

For a while, I had it play through my photo library. Then I let it sit on today’s view in the calendar. I found myself wanting to flip the faux pages in the Calendar. And more generally, I wanted to flip from photo slideshow to Calendar to Weather Station and back.

Overall, It felt quite comfortable in the corner of my eye, quietly reminding me where the day was at.

Like the clock on the wall and the thermometer out the window.

The iPad is an ambient information device. It’s not a competitor to laptops – it’s a competitor to the Ambient Orb the Chumby [1], and digital picture frames.

As has been discussed everywhere else, while scrolling through Google Maps on the iPad is a joy, more precise input isn’t. Reaching to the touchscreen then back to the physical keyboard is a flow killer. Ironically, when I set myself in front of the iPad to type, it felt like typing on a manual typewriter. Intimate and error prone.

With this in mind, the question is – what kind of apps and websites does the iPad bias?

Those presenting at-a-glance changes in data. Think of high resolution Dashboard widgets, like the ones Edward Tufte describes for the iPhone.

Today, we have iPad-compatible websites.

Tomorrow, with web sockets – we’ll see more websites like the Panic’s Status Board or Cultured Code’s Development Arrival board. A single page, continually updated, information dense, and communicates at-a-glance.

Extrapolating all the way out on this line – video, movies.

But unlike television – I don’t think the iPad actually wants to be continuously engaged with you [2]. If there’s any benefit to the limited capability of this first release – it’s that you should get back to work and the iPad is good with you doing so.

No worries, It’ll be there when you need to know what time it is.

Comparing the iPad to a wall clock also explains why a) it’s not redundant to have both an iPad and an iPhone and b) why traveling with the iPad is a little silly.

ELSEWHERE

“The iPad looks and feels like a massive photo frame—and that’s how you should design for it.” – InformationArchitects.jp

  1. The Chumby prefers Adobe Flash-base apps.
  2. Amazon’s Kindle rewards a lengthy, continuous engagement.