Wow, Google may be about to become a 21st century Ma Bell. Instead of the government stepping in and saying we’ll provide the infrastructure for a next generation of high speed (100 times today’s speed) for consumers and businesses, looks like Google might. Google says that it won’t be a service provider, will allow others to resell.  On the positive side, we’ve all been hijacked into paying huge fees to Comcast and other service providers, so perhaps we’ll have more choice and lower costs?  On the other hand… maybe Google is just organizing the next expensive oligopoly?

HTML5 may be the biggest innovation in browser technology since… perhaps Netscape.  It’s really a game changer.  I was fascinated to read that Google will be sunsetting Gears in favor HTML5 , though it makes sense given that one of HTML5 coolest features is that it’s designed to support the sometimes connected computer.  This means that you’ll be able to continue to interact with Web sites or Web/SaaS applications when you’re offline, they will sync up when you’re back online.  Google implemented Gears for that purpose, but when HTML 5.0 is available, it will support that.  We’ll soon be able to take advantage of the Cloud even when we’re offline.

(Incidentally and ironically, I write this while flying at 35,000 feet on a wifi connection, so fortunately those offline pockets will become fewer and fewer in the future!)

Check out Google Wave, perhaps the biggest e-mail innovation since the 1990’s switch form Pine to desktop e-mail. See http://wave.google.com, the video is about 1hr 20min. The short story is that Google has created some really amazing innovations rendered in HTML 5.0 (which is also about to change the way you view the Web). The innovations include (a) merging chat and e-mail into a single app, (b) the ability to view e-mail as waves of collaboration that allow you to revisit, edit, append, and converse by thread, (c) highly integrated text, photos, gadgets, and feeds, and (d) if you join a wave late, you can “play” the wave sequentially to see who added content in the flow.

With over a 50% growth in new Twitter users last month, many of us find ourselves confounded by what rises to the top of the twitter ranks on a daily basis, and the fickleness with which they seem to come and go. Insight, patterns, wisdom have yet to be gleaned, but I put together a quick breakdown of the top ten twitter stories, and thought it might be worth sharing.

#Swine Flu #Swineflu Channeling my inner Kasey Kasem, coming in at number 1 (and 2)with a bullet is Swine Flu! Pursued by the media with the reckless abandon usually reserved for Brittany’s driving infractions, and warmly reminiscent of the beginning 2 minutes of every great zombie movie. Why not Pig Flu? Sounds so much less judgmental. Any favorite Troy McClure worthy media fueled panic headlines worth sharing?

# Specter, Alan Specter six term Republican senator from Pennsylvania has announced he’s changing his allegiance from Republican to Democrat. Some feel this is a political parry to better his chances for reelection, though as a known moderate, he claims he feels the Democratic party is now better aligned to his principles than the right shifting Republicans. This does mean that once Al Franken’s long contested appointment as Minesota Senator from Minnesota settles, the Dems will have a filibuster proof majority (veto proof is 2/3, but filibuster proof is a bigger carrot for the ruling party dems.)

#Chelsea. I was hoping the only begotten Clinton progeny did something to get herself in the headlines, but apparently Barcelona is playing Chelsea in Soccer. Can’t wait to bother every non-US native I know with a feigned interest in what looks to be a spectacular match!

#Barca #Barcelona. Apparently Barca is a common pet name for the Barcelona FC, who, as previously noted, are playing Chelsea in what looks to be a Spectacular match! Chelsea did come in a few ranks higher in the list, but most likely due to the fractured Barca/Barcelona denotation. Interestingly this (very(crudely)) projects a fairly even twitter distribution across both areas.

#Mexico. Cinco de Mayo, a celebration of a rich culture heritage, and the glorious victory against the French in 1862? Nope. Swine Flu. As in Mexican Swine Flu, though perhaps Mexico’s national PR agencies have been trying to drop this auspicious moniker, and are heavily behind an abbreviated “Swine Flu” or perhaps “San Fernando Valley Swine Flu”

#therescue Event to raise awareness and drive political action towards ending Ugandan war and large scale abduction of children to turn into foot soldiers. Great implementation of social media to drive this one, specifically on their ability to frame the campaign as a forward moving event. http://www.invisiblechildren.com/about/history/

#09ntc Nonprofit Technology Conference http://www.nten.org/ . April 26th-28th in San Francisco, looking at adoption of many peer communication tools.

There was a time when icons were just lowly functional images, to be seen, but not touched.  Their only human computer interaction comprised the occasional click of a mouse.  Well, that’s all over now baby!  Icons are all about touch these days, especially when it comes to iPhone applications.  Now we need to make clear and memorable icons that also have a target size for a wide range of human thumbs, large and small (and even index fingers, any of you out there?) .  It’s important to remember that in the brave new iPhone world where icons are to be seen AND touched, traditional approaches for iconography still apply.  Here are some best practices that we recommend:

• Simple — keep the design and colors visually simple
• Memorable — icons should be easy to associate and remember
• Familiar  — use iconography your audience will find recognize and associate rapidly
• Consistently styled — a group of icons should have a similar look
• Differentiated — don’t make one icon too similar to another
• High contrast — icons should have strong contrast to make them scannable
• Contiguous — icons should have a single contiguous image (not two images as a compounded icon)
• Consistent lighting — use shadows sparingly so the image is clear, use a consistent lighting source

Oh yes, and don’t forget to make ‘em big enough for my thumb.

As it turns out, according to research conducted by Chris Wilson at Slate and Prof. Lauren Ancel Meyers at the University of Texas, the “25 random things about me” trend on Facebook mirrors the “classic exponential growth of an epidemic curve.”  By way of background, many people on Facebook have been writing down 25 random things about themselves and then tagging 25 people with whom the information is shared.  As it turns out, each author is “contagious,” because among the recipients of the message, a predictable number of them produce a list of their own, and in turn, tag another 25 people.  The pattern of growth across the system follows a classic viral marketing curve that Prof. Meyers says replicates an epidemiological system exactly.   Here is the original article.

It would be interesting to study further the pattern of growth within viral marketing systems and the factors that contribute to the speed of that growth and decline.  For example, if we were tagging only 10 people, not 25, would the “virus” spread more slowly, but nevertheless, reach the same level of adoption within the system, just at a slower pace?  For example, once the trend has run its course, if 18% of Facebook users ultimately create a “25 random things” page, would that number remain the same if we tagged 10, not 25 people (tagging 10 people takes less effort)?  Alternatively, would more (or less) people participate if you only had to tag 10 friends instead of 25?  In the world of social computing, there are many potential levers to create viral growth, and we’re just beginning to understand what works best and how to optimize the effects.

I’ve just started to realize how much having an iPhone has changed my life in the past couple of months. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to put this post, so I stuck it on my personal blog, but I figured I would link to it from here, too.

Suffice to say, I’m finding that having this new device disruptive, but in a insanely great way.

Having been a Web consultant since 1995, I have learned a thing or two about bubbles.  As the dotcom era of the 1990s transitioned from irrational exuberance to disillusionment, the most important common denominator was the irrationality of both extremes. In recent years, Web 2.0 and social computing have driven a wave of investment with some people now concerned about another bubble.

The problem with the bubble metaphor in technology is that it implies an ephemeral, fragile, and rapidly rising trend which… pops.   The truth about the past dotcom bubble is that now, 8-years after the “pop” none of us could imagine running a modern corporation without e-mail and a browser on our desktop, to say nothing of E-Commerce, VOIP, chat, etc.

The term bubble is an oversimplification of a short-term speculative boom & bust, and most importantly, it is misleads investors, enterpreneurs and the public from a sustained and rational confidence in an underlying trend of lasting innovation.  This is not to say that there aren’t winners, losers, and lessons to be learned in the advent of any new technology, but social computing is here to stay.  We’re in the midst of a revolution in collective intelligence, with thriving and vibrant online communities breaking down boundaries between public and private life.  This is changing the way we work, play, and collaborate forever.  We’re really at the beginning of a new era in social computing, and a there is nothing temporary about it.

Say you have a new, wildly successful platform, the new hotness. Everyone wants to buy the hardware and developers can’t wait to get on board. You’ve set up a nifty distribution channel and things are rollig along. So, how do you make it fail?
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People sometimes ask me why I don’t blog.

The Short Version
I can’t produce ‘good content’.

The Long Version
Last weekend, a man named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died. His death (by which I mean his life) has inspired me to explain, in proper context, why I don’t blog.

Aleksandr produced many works that are worth reading. Therefore, almost no one reads them. Things that are worth reading are always hard to read. They take time. Sometimes things are so hard to explain, they actually require a captive audience, such his commencement address to Harvard University in 1978:

“The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law…. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.”

That’s simply not the kind of ‘content’ that people are looking for in a blog. They didn’t like it much at Harvard either. Luckily, no one paid much attention to what he was saying. Besides, that was, what, 30 years ago? Blogs are about what’s new and hot and important *today*.

I suppose I could give some tech tips in a blog. Here’s the best tech tip I know: read No Silver Bullet by Frederick P. Brooks, 1987:

“[L]et us examine the difficulties of that technology. Following Aristotle, I divide them into essence, the difficulties inherent in the nature of software, and accidents, those difficulties that today attend its production but are not inherent.

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: data sets, relationships among data items, algorithms, and invocations of functions. This essence is abstract in that such a conceptual construct is the same under many different representations. It is nonetheless highly precise and richly detailed.

I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.

We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems.

If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet.”

Great stuff, right? You didn’t even follow the link, did you? Yeah, nothing kills a good tech blog like the application of Aristotelian Metaphysics to explore the concept that software may, in fact, be hard. Definitely not ‘good content’. Never going to get on the cover of Wired with an attitude like that Fred; here in the 21st century we like our tech reliable and affordable, like Vista and the iPhone.

You see my dilemma? The only stuff that I read is difficult, and kind of depressing, stuff that no one would ever want to read about in a blog. Who wants to read that kind of stuff on a computer anyway? I mean, you can’t even make notes in the margins. The message just doesn’t fit the medium.

Rest in peace Alek. I am wiser for having heard your testament; God bless you and keep you.