I'm Todd Sieling, and I help design software experiences and strategies for the web. Here I write and can be contacted about creating humane, effective and memorable products for the connected world.
Learn about what I bring to making better softwareLike many, I watched the iPad announcement on Wednesday and then went straight to discussion forums to see what people were saying. As with any disruptive product, there’s a mix of reactions ranging from lust to uncertainty to outrage. What gets missed in the excitement for or against is the comprehensive and disciplined innovation strategy that Apple has used three times now, most recently in the iPad.
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Things are moving fast these days.
Only a few weeks ago (er, make that months), I wrote that major search engines were finding themselves ill-equipped to keep up with rapidly-emerging trends, while Twitter and other social networks were becoming good at this realtime reporting. I also thought that Twitter’s major business direction had been set straight for search given the focus on search throughout its website experience, and that they were bound to collide somehow.
After a long hot summer and into autumn I read that new deals with Twitter allow Bing and Google to include tweets in search results. Bing scores a second time through Microsoft’s stake in Facebook by also drawing in status updates from that community. These deals help solve for the search engines’ the problem of knowing what parts of the web are changing so that they can index significant changes almost immediately after they happen.
But this post isn’t really about what I got it right. Rather it’s about what parts I didn’t see coming, and what can be gleaned from that, which turns out to be more interesting.
Vancouver’s tech community learned yesterday that the beloved coworking facility Workspace is to close its doors tomorrow. Jayson Minard, who took over the business from founder Bill MacEwan less than a year ago, emailed members with the bad news, and a shocking imperative to clean out any personal belongings before the end of August 21.
I planted myself at Workspace part-time for two years, joining before the doors opened on the basis of an idea and a tour from Dane. I made new friends, enjoyed what was still Gastown’s best cup of coffee, and got things done against the view of peaceful mountains and the busy harbour. Though I worked more on remote projects, Workspace made me feel like I was working in the Vancouver community. Last last year I needed to change things up and ended my membership, but was still in there every two weeks for meetings. I have one last meeting there today at 4.
Workspace showed what the upper bar in coworking looks like, but more importantly it was a fantastic hub for Vancouver geeks and a symbol of innovation. It doesn’t sound like there will be a chance for a closing party to give it a proper sendoff.
Speaking of losses, the wider world of geekdom saw another one on the same day with the disappearance of the anonymous uber-coder _why. Not being a coder, I never knew much of _why, only that the work under that name was widely-respected and packed with personality. John Resig’s tribute sums up the value that _why brought to the community, and touches on the ephemerality of our works:
If there’s any analogy that I can make about _why, his online persona, and all the works that he’s produced over the years it’s to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of the sand mandala. After a mandala has been constructed – and displayed – it is ceremoniously deconstructed – which is meant “to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory nature of material life.”
It’s a fitting theme for those who work on digital products, which can have less durability than fresh sushi. Nick Sweeny recently wrote about the durability of things written down hundreds and even thousands of years ago, and the durability of what narratives are created by communities that form and live online.
Technology and business are relentless in the pursuit of tighter cycles, and the urgency can fool us into forgetting too easily what came before. I don’t think that the space left by the disappearance of _why or of Workspace will be so forgotten, as they live on in the better coding and better relationships that came out of their existence.
So, here’s to the life of things done well, all of which have their own ends.
Have you ever wondered if the web is the first medium where businesses could make something deeply valued by customers but struggle with how to actually make money from their innovation?
Radio and television must have faced the same problem, and born lacking a way to meter and charge individual use, broadcasters turned to predominantly ad-based subsidies for free content traded with consumers for their attention. If content producers for radio and TV had been able to control distribution like newspapers did (by nature of selling a physical medium) from the start, I suspect we’d live in a very different media universe. For starters, maybe we wouldn’t have to wonder about ironically-combined cable channel bundles.
Like TV and Radio, the web delivers content people value, and has tried to ape the ad-supported model with dubious results, the most dubious being the rapid consolidation into a monoculture ad economy where one player outweighs them all. The ad-supported model doesn’t seem to scale enough to float really successful web content or services. While the web can deliver on the alternative, metering and collecting payment for content and services, the culture has been saturated by TV and radio to expect the content for free. Now that’s a conundrum.
But you know what, none of that matters, because OMG Twitter changed its homepage. The change is more than aesthetics, and I think it shows how they intend to escape the conundrum of high value and the revenue vacuum.
About six weeks ago Apple kicked out a little preview party for the iPhone’s upcoming 3rd anniversary, complete with a big slice of Beta Cake for app developers. Most commentary so far seems split between speculation on somewhat vanilla, incremental hardware improvements and the overdue-ness, the zomg-ness of the decades-old desktop computing staple: Cut+Copy and Paste.
Copy and Paste is good to have. Its absence hasn’t bothered me much, but that’s me and I recognize it’s a pain for many, especially around URLS (though the explosion of shorteners, midwifed into necessity by Twitter, alleviates that). And the way Apple is implementing the feature in a touch-screen looks good in the video.
Engadget offers a tidy marquee feature list:
Besides adding oft-requested (and much needed) copy and paste functionality, the company also tacked on MMS, A2DP (stereo Bluetooth) support, peer-to-peer connectivity, unlocked Bluetooth support for the touch, and a brand new global search called Spotlight.
What I think reviewers are missing can only be seen when the iPhone is viewed part and parcel with the iTunes App Store and the changes coming with 3.0. Those changes, I believe, will have 3 big outcomes:
The short version of why: iPhone 3 makes every app a potential store. Here’s how.
Have you visited Twistori.com? If not, do so only with a few minutes to let slip away to wherever minutes go while we’re pleasantly distracted. Simply put, Twistori is a keyword browser that sits on top of Twitter posts, presenting what it finds in way not unlike watching water flow by in a stream; it’s somehow engaging, every changing, and meditative at the same time.
I liked, but often forgot about the Twistori website in moments that would have been perfect for it, so finding that a desktop app for Mac had been launched into beta was welcome news. While in beta, a license for Twistori Desktop can be had for just $12 (after beta, the price goes up to $16), and that sounded good to me but I recoiled at the only payment option: Google Checkout. And that’s how $12 started to turn into $25…
I’ve played it pretty low key as the iPhone has debuted in Canada, and while doing so has kept me out of long lineups, it’s been a haystack of frustration and misdirection from Fido. The Rogers subsidiary took my order by phone on July 11 around 3pm, and promised a delivery on July 18. My number would be transferred, my voice plan changed and the data plan magically activated that day. Call back for a tracking number, the agent cheerfully encouraged.
So I did, on Tuesday. The phone hadn’t shipped, and now it likely wouldn’t be in my hands until August 1. Why? No explanation.
Call #2, Wednesday. No, it’s not shipped, and now almost certainly won’t be in my hands until Aug 1. Why? The information was incorrect. We chatted a bit about whether I was misled or whether Fido is simply incompetent, at which point the customer service agent became angry, raised his voice with me and kept cutting my sentences short. I calmed the agent down, and asked to speak to a supervisor. After agreeing to that and checking for ‘availability’, he returned and said a supervisor would call back. Then he changed his mind and said there would be no supervisor callback until after the 18th, to ‘see if it comes anyway’. Without a tracking number. Right.
Call #3, Today. I asked if I could just go to a store and see if they had any in stock, as I’ve been hearing and reading that some stores do. It’s impossible to do that, I’ve been told. Today’s reason is that it’s all UPSs fault, that they can’t deliver them fast enough and that’s why it will be two weeks late. Why not – it was fiction on July 11, it might as well be fiction today.
When I asked about the activation of the data plan on the 18th even though I don’t have the phone, I was told that would go ahead. So I was expected to just pay for half a month of service I can’t use. Very nice. Oh, and here’s a further catch: the data plan doesn’t activate until midnight of the day you ask for the plan. So if you buy an iPhone at 8am, you pay .05/kb until midnight that evening. Sweet ride.
I convinced today’s agent to take the data plan off, but it’s my responsibility to call back and put it back on if and when I receive a phone. I mentioned that I might go and buy from Rogers, and was told I can’t cancel the order. I promised a chargeback on my visa and a report to Better Business Bureau if that happened, and demanded the first and last name of the agent. She challenged me to cancel my account then and there, cutting off phone service altogether.
I’m still considering what to do. Switch to Rogers? Stay with Fido and their mouthy phone agents, so brave and bold when protected by the distance of a phone line? I haven’t done much looking around to see if there are actually iPhones in Rogers stores in town, and I don’t like spending that much time chasing a device, but I feel like I’m getting the runaround from Fido, and that they don’t want my business.
I guess we’ll see about that ‘supervisor callback within 5 business days’. By then I might not even be a customer, which tells you a lot about Fido under Rogers:
And it’s not really worth writing more at this point. I only know of one other industry that treats people so badly while demanding thousands of dollars for service, and that’s air travel. I fly very little these days, mostly because I think air travel is done so poorly it’s not worth it. Trying to buy an iPhone from Fido has been just as fun, and might not even be worth it.
Update:
Fido becomes responsive when talk of account cancellation and chargebacks come into play. Late yesterday, a Fido supervisor accelerated my order and ensured its delivery, along with activation of all the right services, and today I received an iPhone ready to rock after a short transfer call. That’s great news, but it came after so much aggravation and misdirection that it feels more like finishing a forced march across the dessert.
Today I missed the callback from the Fido supervisor, whom I hope to thank for the attention, and to let him know where things went wrong. I’d call him back, but the number comes through as Unknown Number. From a telecom provider. Poetic, really.
