Author: JP

I had asked earlier “If pearls begin with nacre then what do snowballs begin with?” in a Searlsian snowball sense. There have been a number of suggestions, ranging from flutter to nub to kernel.

I like Kernel. Thanks Sean. Let’s see what happens. If Kernel is to be the kernel then we will have a snowball…….

With over 12 gig of music in my iTunes, I’ve been playing with different approaches to choosing what to listen to. And trying to learn from them, taking a vicarious look at what Generation M may do.

Why? I think I’m straitjacketed, anchored and framed with my own experience, and (whether I want to admit it or not) more set in my ways than I think. But my personal corruption and inertial thought is probably more to do with classic information than multimedia information, so maybe I can stretch myself by using music as the proxy for my “information”, pretend to be Generation M for a short while. (Before my kids throw me out, screaming with laughter and ever-so-slightly embarrassed).

There’s one more reason. Something I remembered from one of Steve Job’s classic And Another Thing sessions. Probably the Panther one, when he suggested they’d been thinking of doing something about search, then realised they’d already solved it, for iTunes. And so to Spotlight.

You don’t have to agree with him. You don’t even have to like Apple. But thinking about how people access music today, how they might do so tomorrow, how they might want to do it the day after tomorrow, surely that’s worth while.

So what can I do today?

• I can pick something out explicitly. Choose a song.
• I can make a bulk selection. Album. Artist. Recently loaded. Recently played. Playlist. Most frequently played.
• I can choose a sequencing rule rather than a selection, ordering the population a particular way. Alphabetical. Number of plays. Even random.
• I can do some of these using someone else’s choices or rules, if they’ll let me. His playlist. Her most frequently played. Our collectively most recently loaded.
• I can even do weird things like order the items by size, select a start point and then play. This is what I’ve been doing recently, puts a slightly different spin on random. It is random, yet I can inspect what’s coming. Choose a start point accordingly.

Something for us to mull over. I haven’t even begun to add collaborative filtering and voting-based refinements and commonsense boolean operations and the heuristics that can be applied. I haven’t really started documenting the mashup mindset hitting enterprise information. Or the impact of mobility. Or of telephony becoming software. All later.
But I know already that I would want to train graduates and new hires using some variant of the playlist and the most frequently played concepts.

Comments welcome.

Thanks to David Terrar for pointing this out to me. Great article on The New Laws of Digital Technology from The Pfeiffer Report.

The Laws in brief:

• More features isn’t better, it’s worse.
• You can’t make things easier by adding to them.
  
• Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.
• Style matters
• Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
• Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.
• Unused features are not only useless, they can slow you down and diminish ease of use.
• Users do not want to think about technology: what really counts is what it does for them.
• Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user-experience.
• Less is difficult, that’s why less is more

Read the original for yourselves, it’s worth it. Even if you don’t agree with it, it may help you figure out what you do agree with. And this is an important subject. Simplicity and convenience are must-haves rather than nice-to-haves, and we have a lot to learn about how we provide them.
On the day I saw David Terrar’s post and the link to Pfeiffer, serendipity meant I had my copy of Richard Gabriel’s Patterns of Software with me, for a short time between one borrower and another. And that reminded me that I should re-read Worse Is Better (is Worse) (Is Not) in all its forms and arguments. For those of you interested in reading the papers, I’ve linked to a Gabriel article that points to ALL the pdfs here.

I will comment later on all this, but felt it was worth sharing the originals with you as soon as possible. The key for me? The Law that states

Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.

And, in my own warped way, I love the corollary that it suggests to me. Any feature that does not require learning will be adopted by a large fraction of users.

Generation M comes trained to expect things to work certain ways. They don’t recognise DRM and IPR and Identity and the dangers of multispeed internets and the problems with badly implemented IMS and the evils that can be done under the guise of privacy and security.

Privacy is important, security is important. When applied to the individual. Not when used as an excuse to create lock-in.

Thank God for Generation M. They may be able to achieve things that we haven’t: to take on lock-in specialists and win.