That is what is happening with Spain’s lawsuit against Google, which is claiming that individuals have a “right to forget” in ordering the search engine to remove links to embarrassing content for 90 people. Google refused that request in January and is now in a Spanish court.

The Right to Forget

Last fall, the European Union introduced legislation to protect Internet users by requiring an opt-in to permit companies to use their data. Some believe the U.S. should follow suit.

On the Pro side of this debate is the control individual’s would have over their digital footprint. The concerns are much greater for data volunteered under one context (e.g., registering to play a game) but re-sold to different contexts (e.g., mailing lists to spammers). In the case of the Google suit, however, Spain wants the online equivalent of being able to remove articles from printed newspapers. There is a big distinction to be made—and I hope that any policy-making decisions do understand this difference—between someone providing private data that is used in an unauthorized way and data generated because the world was paying attention to something you did in public.

Google is most concerned over what selective revisionist history would do to the quality of their search product, but I would argue the larger issue of historical context trumps both the technical concerns of an IT company and any embarrassment an individual has over matters of public record. As Dan Rowinski of R/W/W explains:

For instance, a lot of American history scholars use old broadsides, pamphlets, published letters and news articles to decipher and uncover pertinent historical data that helps us better understand our history. In the current era of technology the equivalent of such data are searchable news records, blog posts, tweets and more. In many ways, Google is the first line of historical preservation.

Rowinski goes on to point out that the online historical can be skewed by technology, too, citing the use of SEO tactics during the 2010 midterm elections to bring embarrassing articles of opponents into prominence during searches.

Idea for Google: Reveal, Don’t Retract

It would seem that the ideal solution is not censoring the public record, nor is it ignoring the concerns of those affected by outdated information. The best way to preserve history is to offer multiple views.

Add a "Counterpoint" icon to show a complementary content

In the past, Google has experimented with Digg-like voting mechanisms that would allow collective user input to adjust the weights on items in search results. What if search results had an easy way for a user to search for refuting articles from a single item? The doctor whose old malpractice suit ranks high on search results for his practice could easily find updated articles that reveal he was acquitted. If enough people perform these searches, perhaps that could trigger dual items showing up together.

The other big need to protect information longevity is what I expect to be a growing trend toward personal reflection. By the time we start to see most social media adopters with 2-3 years of content under their belt, there will certainly be a suite of tools like MemoLane that highlight one’s personal history and encourage reflection. Knowing where you have been makes it much easier to figure out where you are going. While this is often content curated directly by the individual, there is enough public sharing that attempts to pull a given piece of information back out of cyberspace would be a logistical impossibility.

Supporting any policy that allows the selected censorship of public record creates an impractical and damaging mindset that you can correct past mistakes through deletion, rather than improve the quality of what you do in the first place.

Honoring a half-century of manned space flight

Despite the Cold War bias, Gagarin remains one of the most popular figures in the space saga. His short flight gave the U.S.S.R. another early advantage over the U.S. space program and had him ranked #6—tied with Captain Kirk of Star Trek—in a 2010 Space Foundation survey as the most popular space hero. Gagarin is now the namesake for a superjet and the latest Soyuz capsule, which will rendezvous with the International Space Station tomorrow after a two-day journey.

Next Tuesday is Yuri’s Night (not Yuri’s Day, which is something else), a world party for space. Conceived in 2001, this is a space geek celebration of Gagarin’s journey, as well as the first Space Shuttle flight on the same date in 1981. I’m sure something special is planned for this special anniversary year, which will also see the end of the Shuttle program.

My Chicago Bears won Super Bowl XX in 1986

Twenty-five years ago, I was graduating from high school, seeing my valedictorian speech blow away in the wind, and surviving a lonely first semester at DePauw, away from family and friends. It is a year that stands out in my life due to all of this personal change, but it was also quite a year for events around the globe, too.

What is amazing to me are the similarities with the big events of today. In 1986 …

… the Space Shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after launch, killing seven crew. 2011 will mark the end of the Shuttle program.

… an earthquake in El Salvador hits 7.5 on the Richter Scale and kills 1,500 people. On March 11, 2011, the Sendai earthquake and subsequent tsunami claimed almost 10,000 lives with 17,000 more missing. Less than a year earlier, China was devastated by a 6.9 quake that killed 2,600.

… a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, leading to the worst nuclear disaster in history. Thanks to the Japan tsunami, the Fukushima nuclear power plant is becoming the second worst in history.

… Libya killed 3 and injured 230 in a bombing of a discotheque in Berlin. They are still the bad guys today, fighting a revolt and a U.N. coalition that just bombed the country to enforce a ceasefire (I’ll let that last bit of irony sink in).

… Jean-Claude Duvalier flees Haiti. After the devastating earthquake last year, “Baby Doc” returned to Haiti in January.

… the Khian Sea cargo barge began a 16-month journey to dump its toxic cargo. Some of it landed in Haiti. The rest of it was finally dumped in the Indian Ocean. The Gulf of Mexico was trashed this past year by BP’s huge oil slick.

… a Lebanese magazine reports that the U.S. has been trading arms with Iran for hostages, the Iran-Contra affair. Wikileaks recently released over 250,000 diplomatic cables, forcing a lot of unplanned transparency in international politics and leading to legal actions.

Here are some other things that happened 25 years ago:

• Polaroid wins the instant camera business, knocking Kodak out of the picture.
• My Bears win Super Bowl XX
• Pixar is launched
• Halley’s Comet returns
• U.S. Senate televises its debates on a trial basis
• Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault on live television, discovering only a bottle of moonshine
• Over 5 million people participated in Hands Across America, forming a human chain from New York to California to raise money to fight homelessness and hunger
• Len Bias dies from a cocaine overdose 48 hours after being selected 2nd in the NBA Draft
• Eric Thomas develops LISTSERV, the first email list management software
• Greg LeMond wins the Tour de France, becoming the first American to do so. He would win twice more and Lance Armstrong would claim seven straight titles.
• Patrick Sherrill kills 14 employees at a U.S. Post Office, leading to the phrase “going postal”
• Fox Broadcasting Company launches
• Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meet for unproductive talks about arms reduction between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.
• The centennial of the Statue of Liberty’s dedication is celebrated, just three months after it reopened to the public after an extensive refurbishment
• Mike Tyson wins his first world boxing title, defeating Trevor Berbick
• Lady GaGa was born. So were Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox. The deaths were more significant.

I wonder what will happen 25 years from now.

The beautiful artwork by artist Adam Long are like postcards from the past, commemorating some of the notable events that have led to our present social networking culture. These include:

• The Notificator, a message vending machine at British railway stations
• CompuServe, the first computer time sharing service
• CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), a computerized answering system born in the Chicago Blizzard of 1978. It survives today as chinet.
• The invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee
• Q-Link, the predecessor to America Online, that connected Commodore computers together (see the 1986 promotional video).
• The 2003 launch of social network systems on the Web, notably Friendster, MySpace, and LinkedIn
• Tim O’Reilly’s FOO Camp, a hand-picked curation of interesting people coming together for a conference with no set agenda
• The launch of Facebook, which in 6 years would eventually get to 500 million users in July 2010
• Dell Hell, the name given to Dell’s poor customer service
• The launch of Twitter, which just celebrated it’s 5th birthday, and its coming out party at SxSW in 2007.
• A Burger King employee takes a bath in a BK sink, demonstrating to businesses that there is no controlling a brand anymore.
• The Sacha Baron Cohen movie Bruno met an early death. Twitter buzz is credited. Twitter is also assigned importance in international politics, with the U.S. State Department urging the service to postpone a scheduled maintenance to keep Iranian protestors tweeting.
• The “United Breaks Guitars” trilogy chronicles the poor customer service of United Airlines. Later, Southwest gets a tweetful from filmmaker Kevin Smith, who was deemed “too fat to fly.”
• NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer tweets from space
• Japan’s win over Denmark in the 2010 World Cup sets a record with 3283 tweets per second (tps)
• Charlie Sheen sets a record as the fastest Twitter account to reach 1 million followers.
• Rebecca Black’s video, “Friday,” is at the moment is approaching 38 million views (the artwork pegged it at 18 million) despite being widely panned

The Command Center opened last month with Tim O’Reilly, Brian Solis and others speaking on social media. PeopleBrowsr recently released ReSearch.ly, allowing access to 1,000 days of Twitter data and creating a focus on collective memory.

A Map of the History of Science Fiction

According to the artist, “History of Science Fiction” is a graphic chronology mapping the genre from its roots in mythology and fantasy to the space operas of today:

The movement of years is from left to right, tracing the figure of a tentacled beast, derived from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds Martians. Science Fiction is seen as the offspring of the collision of the Enlightenment (providing science) and Romanticism, which birthed gothic fiction, source of not only SciFi, but crime novels, horror, westerns, and fantasy (all of which can be seen exiting through wormholes to their own diagrams, elsewhere). Science fiction progressed through a number of distinct periods, which are charted, citing hundreds of the most important works and authors. Film and television are covered as well.

The image was inadvertently leaked onto the Internet a couple weeks ago, going viral enough to prompt Shelley to start collecting emails from fans interested in a possible poster version of the map. In addition to being a visual delight to explore, it is also a great reading-viewing to-do list for a complete science fiction education.

Shelley—a Brooklyn artist specializing in large paintings and sculpture installations—has also done paintings depicting the evolution of Avant Garde, the New York downtown scene, media role models, and Fluxus.

Screenshots from Pennant

Pennant is an interactive visualization depicting Major League Baseball from 1951 through 2010. It is a gorgeous visual treatment of the kind of statistical data I enjoy browsing, from over 115,000 baseball games. You can view any team’s complete history, any given season, or re-play-by-play individual games. Since this is an interactive application drawing from time-based data, this is a great tool for exploring how the fate of teams changed over the course of a year or game. It costs $4.99 in the App Store, but it is great to have as a demonstration of what the iPad can be (as well as anticipating future updates).

The application was initially developed as a thesis project at Parsons by Steve Varga. Pennant was launched courtesy of data drawn from Retrosheet and The Baseball Databank. Varga created his own API to manipulate the raw data, to leverage new calculations that support the visualizations. He may release that massaged data to other applications in the future as an open API. More of Varga’s work is available at Vargatron.

The application isn’t perfect, of course:

• When searching the 1983 season for a game I went to, I was annoyed that going back to the season timeline always reset me to the middle of the season, not the game I was viewing.
• Navigation is clunky if you want to move laterally. There isn’t a way to look at the detail for a game and simply flick to the next game in that view (there should be).
• Keyword search is non-existent, making it impossible to search for references to Roger Clemens pitching against my White Sox and explore just those games.
• There is no player tracking. The data is available to follow an individual player through his career, like you can with an entire team. Imagine re-living the now tainted 1998 home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
• Customization isn’t supported, nor are personal histories or favorite games. I would love to go through my old stack of scorecards and ticket stubs and curate all of the games I attended in person. When player timelines are supported, it would be a great tool for documenting my annual fantasy baseball rosters.

Pennant is currently only available on the iPad and requires a wireless connection, so it may not yet be practical for taking to ball games to look up stats. It is, however, quite satisfying for replaying games I attended, like the time the White Sox knocked a young Roger Clemens out in the fifth inning or the “Ryne Sandberg” game on June 23, 1984.

Most of my applications are for work productivity, games, or news aggregation. I like the possibilities of specialized apps that allow easy and enjoyable exploration of large data sets in a specific domain. The tablet is wonderful for this kind quick interaction and could be quite useful to support journalism, tourism and attending conferences. This one is particularly well done, and I hope some updates are coming in time for the 2011 regular season.

UPDATE 10/19/2009: Less than one year after writing this post, Twitter has zoomed past 5 billion. Granted, in addition to the nuances described for the 1B mark, Twitter has also artificially advanced the tweet ID count to deal with Twitpocalypse I and II. It will be a little while before Twitter actually reaches #5,000,000,000.

GigaTweet counts down to the billionth tweet

Australia’s Nathan Reed—who created popacular, a tool to that tracks popular links included in tweets over the past month—started a countdown clock over a month ago, projecting when tweet number 1 billion would show up. Presumably, it had been calibrated to account for the U.S. election surge in activity on Twitter, as it was within a few hundred of the actual status record IDs in the public timeline with an hour to go.

The honors go to someone with a private account, one the API won’t let me see. The first public tweet in 10 digits belongs to a bot (CrystalLake) that posted, “CL News: PR Newswire Summary of Technology Copy, Nov. 10, 2008 – StreetInsider.com (subscript.. http://snipr.com/5barm” at November 11, 2008 at 12:49a. The bot’s included link doesn’t lead anywhere. Sadly, the last public tweet with a 9-digit ID is also an automatic feed.

Very anticlimactic.

UPDATE 11/12: Blair Blends of Charlotte, North Carolina tricked the API into revealing the identity of the private account. Evidence from the API XML response is here.

It figures. Tweet 1,000,000,001 is a bot with bad link.

All of this is speculative, of course. Twitter keeps their official stats tight to the vest, and they have varied the ID count enough to be certain what will be celebrated as tweet 1 billion actually isn’t.

According to creator Jack Dorsey in late February 2007, the former CEO of Twitter claimed the first tweet at 4:02p on March 21, 2006 (“inviting coworkers”). That tweet was status update record ID 29, an indication that some tests were done on the database during development. Number one million is credited to rentzsch on February 28, 2007 at 10:07p. That record ID was 5764000. While Reed’s assumptions are reasonable, it is equally likely the real billionth tweet is still 3 or more days away.

Still, why quibble with success. Whether or not November 11, 2008 goes down in the history books as the day Twitter reached 10 digits in the tweet count, breaking that barrier is inevitable. Congratulations to Twitter on a fun ride, and to Nathan Reed for reminding us how far the community has come.

Who’s starting the clock to 1 trillion?

6:00p – We convinced Carter to stop playing Wii to join us with our election watching. Archie, though, is watching Scooby Doo on the other iMac.

6:35p – BBC World News coverage rocks. Great for kids, too, since they explain everything. Lots of Brits and foreigners to educate.

6:43p – “90% say candidate’s race not an issue” text is juxtaposed with discussion of the Bradley Effect. Boys are whining over spilled milk, hoping the liquid will disappear on its own without interrupting Scooby.

6:58p – Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, and Vermont kick off the electoral college watch. It will be 6a in the UK by the time Sarah Palin’s Alaska closes their polls.

7:01p – projections: Kentucky (8) to McCain … Vermont (3) to Obama.

7:07p – The Brit announcers all have red poppy flower things in their lapels. Also, Liverpool won their football game on a penalty kick.

7:15p – Indiana plays the most prominent and pivotal role in the success of Barack Obama, according to Newsweek.

Newsweek Scorecard

7:24p – Watching the huge crowds in Grant Park and thinking about 13 year old girls in Somalia. Wondering how much effect changes in the US could have around the world.

7:28p – WFIU is giving Indiana back to Mitch Daniels. Bummer. Hoping for an Obama bump that would put Thompson in charge and get rid of Daylight Savings Time.

7:30p – North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia polls are closed.

7:34p – BBC reports FOX is calling West Virginia for McCain. BBC won’t call anything until they get their own information.

7:40p – Teeth in Archie’s mouth are brushed. Time to read, perchance to dream. America, don’t do anything foolish while I’m gone.

8:14p – Carter greeted me with news that his NaNoWriMo story is going to incorporate a Presidential race. Also, Monroe County voted for Mitch Daniels, but Elizabeth Dole lost her race (to the “heathen”).

8:18p – Obama is up 103-34 in the electoral vote count, thanks to a projected win in Pennsylvania. Only 32% of Indiana reporting thus far. … John Sununu lost his Senate seat, bringing the Dems up 5 seats. w00t!

8:25p – Best tweet of the night so far belongs to Jake Panovich: “Right now CNN reports Obama has about 1.337 million votes. How eleetist.”

8:31p – I’m loving our family politicking, but I’m jealous of my Informatics colleagues camped out at the IMU with Luke Russert of NBC. Obama up 103-49.

Luke Russert Reporting for NBC from IU

8:40p – Now added group chat on Meebo with Richie and other locals. Very multi-modal. We’ve got Twitter + chat + BBC + two computers + liveblog + NaNoWriMo. Still 90 minutes to Comedy Central. … Fail Whales starting, alas.

8:45 – Lake Shore Drive from 33st avenue to Grand is blocked off in Chicago. Sis-in-law Meg can’t get any closer, but she took a picture of George Bush frowning on the Crown Fountain.

8:55p – Locally, Geoff McKim and the other Democrats move into the lead for Monroe County Council with 5% of precincts reporting. BBC folks see 52% of Indiana in with 51-48 McCain lead.

9:01p – TechPresident is hosting the VoteReport liveblogging of the election. Obama up 171-52 now.

9:09p – Carter is at 4168 words in NaNoWriMo. He then exclaims: “This is so exciting. I never realized boring old votes could be so exciting.” … BBC says FOX is calling everything early, “Trying to get it out of the way, it seems.” Pip pip.

9:16p – BBC has two people sitting at laptops surfing the web for information. One mentioned Twitter, and then said an insider in the McCain camp in Florida says they lost the state (and probably the election).

9:24p – Indecision 2008 servers are swamped. Just trying to confirm when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are going to entertain. There is a chance Obama will clinch the nomination before it starts. I hope they are watching John Bolton put the “ass” in Ambassador.

9:35p – Obama leads 195-90. Katrina chased most of the Obama supporters out of Louisiana, giving it to McCain. The H-T has had their local election site down for most of the hour with the message: “Please stand by while we adjust for changes in accounting procedures at the clerk’s office … ”

9:42p – Carter, bounding around when Obama reached 200, has now been contained under a blanket on the couch. Just in time for Texas to give all their votes to McCain.

9:58p – Stunned by how far CNN’s breaking news email is behind Twitter. About to say goodbye to BBC World News and hello to Comedy Central.

10:07p – Epic intros by the Indecision ’08 folks. Stewart has blue cards. Colbert has red. And another favorite tweet by Noah: “Wolf Blitzer just told us that the red states are for McCain and the blue states are for Obama… ”

10:14p – The H-T came back up. Geoff McKim is in fourth, about 400 votes behind. Jason Jones is “live” in Chicago, in front of a Disney set of bluebirds and deer: “This is what Chicago looks like when Obama is in town”

10:18p – A special Twitter account, wfiuelection08, is reporting: “presidential race is tightening in Indiana, now 50% to 49% for McCain, 86% of precincts reporting”

10:26p – Flat-tax advocate and editor Steve Forbes is on Indecision 08. The last time I saw him, Daily Show was making fun of him for not blinking during an entire interview as a Presidential candidate in 2000, suggesting he was an alien. Also, Stewart on McCain: “Isn’t it odd that a guy with 14 houses is done in by a credit crisis.”

10:34p – Stephen Colbert is live blogging about Twittering tweets. … Monroe County is stuck on 73% precincts reporting, and Indiana is at 88%. Obama trails McCain by fewer than 4,000 votes, or the equivalent of an IU football game home crowd.

10:45p – Archie is up again, asking for water and ready to fall asleep again on the couch. Carter is demanding that Comedy Central be “live” … a problem when we are trying to filter out the late-night ads.

10:51p – Charles Ogeltree, a friend from Harvard, jokes that he thought the Obamas were going to be Republicans. Colbert is now looking at tonight as a big win. The answer to http://isobamapresident.com/ is: “Almost”

Is Obama President? … Almost

10:54p – Indiana just went Obama, with 93% of precincts reporting. About 6500 vote lead. Obama also just won Virginia, Democratic for the first time since “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho.”

11:01p – Jon Stewart called it for Obama, conveniently before signing off. CNN just called it, with 297 electoral votes for Obama, 145 for McCain.

Is Obama President? … Yes!

11:08p – Back to BBC. Ready for news about Indiana. 94% reporting. Archie is racked out on the couch, but Carter is happy like the rest of us.

11:17p – Just got Colorado to move to 306. Waiting for McCain’s concession so we can hear Obama’s victory speech. BBC is interviewing Tracy Chapman. Um, OK.

11:18p – McCain is conceding. His crowd is booing Obama. He offers sympathy for the death of his grandmother. “I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but in offering goodwill to come together.”

TwitScoop at the start of John McCain’s concession speech

11:30p – The boys didn’t make it through McCain’s speech. Glad Carter got to be around for the moment Obama got his electoral votes. The only suspense left: Will Indiana officially become blue, and what will the president-elect say?

11:45p – As anticipated, there was a huge surge of Twitter traffic the moment the word came that Obama got his 270 votes. I’m still getting the catch-up tweets. Looks like Obama may be speaking in about 15 minutes.

11:50p – This is the first time I have voted for the guy who won. Dukakis … Perot … No one … Nader … Barbara Lee … now, Obama. Lots of primary disappointments between 1988 and 2008. BTW, Gore Vidal is giving the BBC guy a difficult time (“I don’t know who you are” and “If you let me talk …” and “I’m surprised you asked the question, because I know so much about the topic.”). In true Brit form, the newscaster closes with, “Well, that was fun.”

11:58p – Up 23 seats in the House, some. Indiana is at 97% with a 6K lead for Obama, who is about to speak.

12:00p – “Tonight is your answer”

12:15p – “We are not red states or blue states. We are and always will be the United States of America.” … “Change has come to America.” … “We, as a people, will get there.” … “This victory tonight is not the change we seek. It is the chance to make that change.” … 106 years of America, as seen by Anne Nixon Cooper. …22 seats gained in the House. 6 seats gained in the Senate. And one new puppy in the White House.

TwitScoop in the midst of the Obama victory speech

Stuck at 97%

Still no word on Indiana. Still, not a bad day for a skinny kid with a funny name.

Carter: Did he really live on a peanut farm?

Archie: Or played in a park?

Carter: What is the favorite pet he ever had?

Me: How about you ask something that we couldn’t answer by searching the web.

Carter: Okay- what’s his favorite color?

Archie: Does he have a question for me?

Carter: Does he play Packrat?

Archie: Has he ever met George Washington?

Carter: Is he excited about Spore?

Archie: Does he even play Spore?

Carter: No one plays Spore. It isn’t out yet.

Archie: I meant, does he make creatures on Spore?

Carter: That’s called Spore Creature Creator.

Archie: Does he do that?

Carter: Does he think Obama should be president?

Archie: Has he ever had toys?

Carter: Every kid has toys.

Archie: I mean as an adult. Has he had adult toys?

Me: brief moment during which I am transformed into something from Beavis and Butthead

Archie: Has he ever tried to eat Panda Puffs?

Carter: If he doesn’t think Obama should be president, who does he think should be?

Archie: Has he ever made an oven?

Mmmmm. Not sure if Talk of the Nation is ready for our questions.

This main theme of disconnection between theory and practice was meant as a call to HCI theorists to improve both the communication and the pragmatics of technique, moving new ideas from abstraction to doable activities. That disconnection applies in the other direction, too, in how we perceive and intervene in the evolution of the World Wide Web. This article explores the role design has in what comes next.

What Version Are We Using?
The term “Web 2.0” arose with a conference held in San Francisco in October 2004, featuring an A-list of speakers that included Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Mark Cuban (HDNet), Marc Andreessen (Mosaic, Ning), Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons), and David Sifry (Technorati). A year later, the term had reached such a state of confusion—is it a philosophy, a paradigm shift, or a marketing buzzword?—that Tim O’Reilly attempted to sort out with a summary article describing the various flavors of definition.

In 2005, Tim O’Reilly provided some examples of how applications evolved.

Web 2.0 is a term that has been misappropriated in many ways. It is a production process and a consumer participation paradigm, a phrase with marketing cache and a justification for new startups to claim a spot on the envelope. Fifteen months after O’Reilly’s definitive guide, the term was refactored into the following:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called “harnessing collective intelligence.”)
source: O’Reilly Radar, “Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again” (December 10, 2006)

This fall, O’Reilly returned to the origins of the term—as a proclamation that the Internet had survived the Dot Com crash, not to represent an iteration of the brave new world.

The impetus for that clarification was a blogstorm of discussion around “Web 3.0.” Given its predecessor the term was inevitable, but credit is awarded to Jeffrey Zeldman, whose critique of Web 2.0 did the honors. What is not as certain is what this next phase of the Internet will look like.

Before exploring some of these new visions, it is important to do two things. First, we must recognize that the discussion seems to be led by practitioners looking to create theory—the opposite problem described by Rogers for the field of HCI. Second, before we can answer the question of what is to be designed, we must tackle the more fundamental question of why design at all.

Why Design?
Phillipe Starck’s spring lecture at TED was made available earlier this month. In it, Starck explained the reality of our existence:

Because the bacteria we was had no idea of what we are today. And today, we have no idea of what we shall be in 4 billion years.

He goes on to explain this is his motivation to continue to design comparably trivial items, such as toilet seats and toothbrushes. Take the context you have now—the materials, the knowledge, the resources, the social structure—and do the best you can to create wonderful things. The past is embedded in everything we do, and the future is completely unknown. “Now you have a duty,” Starck tells the next generation of designers. “Invent a new story. Invent a new poetry. The only rule is, we have not to have any idea about the next story.”

Whether or not Starck’s answer is correct, the question has merit. Why design? The fields of HCI and design are filled with attempts to answer the question of What to design. We study methods and techniques, ways of take a design from grounded concept to profitable product. We shift our focus on where the design resides. But the best we can do to answer the question of Why is to speak vaguely about personal passion or the noble goals of selecting a future. Why is the foundation for What.

We clearly don’t design for the purpose of creating opportunities to press buttons or pull down menus. Given any system, the motivation of a user is not to interact with a machine. Ultimately, the goal is connection with others.

In her 2006 book This Changes Everything, author Christina Robb details the history of three pioneering women whose groundbreaking work might transform psychology, and thus all the things that discipline touches. Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller and Judith Lewis Herman learned their trade in a man’s world, where the basic assumptions about behavior were blind to the experiences of everyone who isn’t white and male. Gilligan’s landmark work—In a Different Voice—challenged the established understanding of morality by showing that differences exist between the genders in how they deal with and evaluate responsibility to self and others. By the mid 1980s, a number of feminist psychologists had managed to find each other, listen to each other’s experiences, and plant the seeds for a new way of thinking about health.

Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) describes a healthy relationship as one that is capable of moving in and out of connection. Rather than strength being defined as overcoming interactions with others to become self-sufficient and independent, our strength resides in our ability to share dependence with each other. RCT proposes that growth-fostering relationships—defined by their cultural context—are a central human necessity throughout our lives; chronic disconnections are the source of problems.

When Brandon Schauer described the long wow this fall as “achieving long-term customer loyalty through systematically impressing your customers again and again,” he is describing business in terms of connection, disconnection and reconnection. The design of business is not about promotions, discounts or the widget itself. It is about growing an authentic relationship. When Sharon Lee writes, “A good website is built on two basic truths—that the internet is an interactive medium and that the end user is in fact human,” she is acknowledging that the purpose of web design is to connect the humans on the back end with the ones facing the buttons. The mutual empathy of RCT is the user experience of contemporary design.

The Why of design is simple: to facilitate human connection.

What Do We Design?
With connection as our foundation, our concept of design shifts. Design can be defined in many ways, from visuals to widgets to interaction and experience. Throughout the history of computer-based design, however, the common theme has been to express design as either an object or a process to produce an object.

When computers were young and enormous, their entire reason for being was computational. The code-breaking problems of World War II placed a premium on algorithms and functionality. The only users were experts, so all of the design attention was given to the machines and the technology that supported them. The constraints of the early days would quickly be overcome, but that was not known to the engineers designing computers and programming at the time. The result was a period of establishing persistent norms that defined our patterns of design in the future. Design was the object at the end of the process.

Human-computer interaction emerged in the 1980s out of a need to design for the user. As computers shrunk from rooms to desktop terminals, the problems became less about solving equations and more about improving business efficiency. The expert users gave way to the professional ones working as cogs in the wheels of the company machine. Human factors and ergonomics were created to deal with the physical limitations of these biological parts, as design attention shifted from the tool to the controller. Even by the time HCI was realizing that people should enjoy their experience using a computer, the design still considered the user an object to be manipulated through heuristics and bigger buttons. Design was the person expected to use our tools.

User Experience (UX) picked up on this notion of pleasurable state of mind in the 1990s—thanks in no small part to the influx of theory described by Rogers—and shifted the focus of design from the usability of windows, icons, menus and pointers to how a person might feel as the interaction takes place. Computers had moved well beyond businesses by this point and past the tethered desktop into mobile devices and appliances. Individuals, increasingly unable to fit into a nice demographic bucket, each had their own needs and requirements, reacting to the same tools in very different ways. Erik Stolterman has suggested that we objectify the interaction between the user and the artifact, turning the design into the interaction itself but leaving it in an object-oriented paradigm.

From a relational perspective, it is neither the artifact nor the individual that is as important as the interaction. This clearly distances design from the first two views of design-as-artifact and design-as-user. It is also potentially distinguishable from the Stolterman notion of design-as-interaction, provided the interaction continues to be defined as the relationship between the user and the tool. If the reason we design is to facilitate human connection, then we must also see the interface as the medium between people. This is perhaps a bit nuanced, but it is a powerful distinction to make. Design is setting the stage so beneficial interactions can occur, not about the players.

A physicist named Michelson once tested the existence of an invisible substance that filled the universe, always at rest and permeating all matter. Although ether was disproved as a physical property, it may still have life as a metaphor for design. The interaction ether is filled with any number of people, artifacts, tools and constraints. It has context dependent on time, sequence and cultural awareness. It is a space in which interactions and experiences occur. Design as ether requires that we understand not the specifics but the dynamics of the situation. People flow in and out of connection with each other. Strength comes in being able to reconnect, to have both the resources and the experience in how to wield them. Designers, by knowing well the relationships between objects in this environment, can help shape opportunities for quality interaction. Design facilitates a connection through an intentional change in the interaction ether.

What’s Next?
From Zeldman’s iteration in January 2006 to last month’s blog debates, the two dominant views of what the Web will become are technology based. In one camp, the future Web is as an evolution of artificial intelligence—computer collaborating with other computers in a semantically tagged network of information—and in another, it is a massively open database, tied together through special domain names, web services, and open standards. Perhaps Nova Spivack‘s all-encompassing vision of a third generation web—ubiquitous connectivity, open technologies and identity, distributed computing, intelligent web—is the next evolution, Starck’s “next story.”

If the Web were viewed only as a network of machinery serving documents, those might be good bets. The Web, however, is merely the infrastructure for human connection. Web 3.0, then, might be more about the people than the architecture.

Of all the answers the major players have offered over the past few years, the one that comes closest to placing humanity in center stage in the evolution is from Jerry Yang, founder of Yahoo! In Dan Farber’s coverage of TechNet’s Innovation Summit in November 2006, Yang was credited with the following (boldface added):

Web 2.0 is well documented and talked about. The power of the Net reached a critical mass, with capabilities that can be done on a network level. We are also seeing richer devices over last four years and richer ways of interacting with the network, not only in hardware like game consoles and mobile devices, but also in the software layer. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to create a program. We are seeing that manifest in Web 2.0 and 3.0 will be a great extension of that, a true communal medium…the distinction between professional, semi-professional and consumers will get blurred, creating a network effect of business and applications.

That is a message of co-creation. Of empowerment. Of placing the design of interaction spaces above the design of objects, no matter the form they take.

Cartoonist Robert Crumb predicted Twitter in the 1960′s. (source: Christopher Herot)

The seeds of tweets
The roots of microblogging owe to three main influences: Instant Relay Chat (IRC), chat status messages, and mobile phones.

IRC was invented by Jarkko Oikarinen back in 1988 after a couple decades of computer scientists toying with the idea of distributed chat. It is the forerunner to the instant messaging tools, like Yahoo! Messenger and GChat, which taught a generation of young Internet users how to synchronously chat with friends in real time. IRC also provided a rich language of protocols that used special characters to provide instruction from authors to readers. Two such examples are the namespace channel (#namespace) and the directed message (@username). Both conventions have propagated into current microblogging norms and are sometimes even hard-coded into the service.

The popularity of instant messaging evolved from merely instant communication with others who appear ready for a chat into a sub culture of creativity in the form of status messages. In most IM clients, a user can select a custom away message that will be displayed when a user goes idle or explicitly selects a dormant state. These messages became more and more creative, quickly moving from a standard “Not at my desk” to “Weeping softly in stairwell A. Back in 10.” This form of cultural communication also impacted social networking sites, most notably with the Facebook status message. In these ways, it became cultural behavior to express yourself and inquire about those you care about through short messages.

Finally, there is the mobile phone revolution, which was far more pronounced outside of the U.S. due to late adoption of technology and a less developed reliance on land-line phones. Texting became a legitimate use of a phone, as much or more than simply talking into the mouthpiece. The mobility meant that spontaneous urges to communicate could be met, and texting meant broadcast was possible to people who didn’t have phones (but did have computers). Texting—or, Short Message Service (SMS)—is celebrating its 15th birthday this year. In 1992, Neil Papworth sent the first message, “MERRY CHRISTMAS,” on December 3. It would be 1999, however, before SMS was able to communicate between providers, prompting an explosion of use. For 8-bit data messages, the maximum length is a familiar 140 characters.

In Twitter, we see strong evidence of all three of these cultures converging at an opportune moment. People are used to composing short messages on demand. They seek out such messages to gain awareness about what people in their social networks are doing. And the conventions they use when texting are persistent enough to provide some established community norms. This is the world into which Evan Williams hatched his idea.

Introducing … Twitter
Twitter is a thriving community of both members and, thanks to an early decision to open the API, developers. The company engineered several ways for members to post and receive tweets, the short 140-character messages published into the information stream. Text can be published through the Twitter web site, an instant messaging client, or by texting from a cell phone.

According to TwitDir—a third-party search tool keeping track of the big nodes in the network—Twitter currently boasts 593,645 public accounts and is growing by over 1000 new members daily. This, just over one year after the service officially launched. One has to have some 12,000 tweets and one-tenth that number in followers to make the top 100 in either category. I’ve had 1731 tweets myself with a reasonable following of 112 people. Intended use has a lot to do with that, as my primary interest is in keeping tabs on local Twitter members. The most active members are more about broadcast than mutual connection.

That’s not the story of Twitter. Twitter, after all, is about community.

Two key design strategies are instrumental to the success of the service. First, there is its simplicity. Unlike other microblogging entries, like Pownce, Twitter doesn’t try to be more than it is. Members compose short messages, and Twitter makes sure they are distributed in a self-organizing network. In fact, the added constraints that prevent things like file sharing and longer messages are part of the attraction. There is a very low barrier of entry, made even lower by the numerous ways you can now interact with the information streams.

The second key decision is an enterprise one: making access to the membership and content mechanisms available to developers. Most of the cool innovations with Twitter—such as the popular Macintosh desktop client, Twitterrific—have not been applications built by Obvious. They have been built by members so enamored with the service that they want to make it better. This creates a personal investment in Twitter for many people with influence to promote its use to a wider audience. The easier it becomes to access Twitter, the more new professions find ways to leverage the rapidly growing community and adopt tweeting as practice.

An invested community also means influence. So many people were using the IRC convention for individual replies that the service added support for the @ command, attaching those tweets to specific user content. There has been a lot of talk about supporting richer namespaces, or channels, that would allow members to follow topical discussions around a cause or convention. Jaiku, the European microblogging system recently acquired by Google, does support channels. Demand for blocking, search and term tracking led to improvements in the Twitter programming, although the community still demands tweaks. As more people look to social graph unification efforts, like OpenID and OpenSocial, conversation inevitably suggests future mashups.

The microblogging philosophy
In November, Twitter has been getting more and more play in both the blogosphere and the traditional media. One of the first attempts at a twitter guide for new users was probably Ed Dale’s Tao of Twitter movie. Two other major guides have been published, by Caroline Middlebrook and Dave Taylor, and several others have published overviews as well. All of them see a phenomenon in development.

Microblogging has been described in many ways. The most loving called it ambient intimacy. This is what Leisa Reichelt of Disambiguity had to say about Twitter back in early March:

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.

There are other apt descriptions. Clive Thompson’s analysis for Wired back in June likened the Twitter effect to a sixth sense, the kind that is incredibly useful in understanding when to interact with co-workers. It is a low-expectation IRC, the equivalent of saying “what’s up?” as you pass someone in the hall when you have no intention of finding out what is actually up, a phatic function.

Since Twitter’s splash at SxSW, several other microblogging services have tried to catch that same lighting in a bottle. Jaiku and Pownce are considered the biggest rivals of Twitter, but other entries into the new domain include Tumblr, MySay, Hictu, MoodMill, Frazr, IRateMyDay, Emotionr, Wamadu, Zannel, Soup, and PlaceShout. Some are blatant rip-offs of the idea, even going so far as to swipe markup code and terminology. Whenever new startup companies involve an information stream, the reviews inevitably compare them to Twitter. What separates Twitter from the crowd is its combination of timing, transparency and simplicity. And now, a community that is over a half million strong.

Free Entry – Edinburgh Castle
Edinburgh Castle, St Andrews Cathedral and St Andrews Castle will all be free on St Andrews Day (Thursday 30th November). St Andrew is the patron sint of Scotland. This year is extra special as it is ten years since the Stone of Destiny was returned to Scotland. It now lives in Edinburgh Castle.

The Stone of Destiny is where all Scottish kings placed their feet during their coronation. It was originally in Scone and was stolen by Edward 1 in 1293 and taken to England, where it stayed for seven centuries. Almost all English and later British monarchs have parked their backsides firmly over this stone during their coronation, including our present queen in 1953. So go and see Scotland’s most famous lump of rock!

All sites are open from 9-30am – 4-30pm.

Why is this of interest to a guy who only recently got further international than Toronto? Two reasons: Lineage, and Literature.

Before becoming a Makice, I was an Isbister. As such, I inherited a long legacy of northern Scotland, including a Loch, Town and Bay up in the Orkney Islands. My dream trip — currently being carried out vicariously by Kynthia — has me living the life of a Highlander for a few months, walking into pubs where every third person shares my birth name, and finding some lost birthright (I imagine pots of Viking gold, or magic powers) someplace in the ancient ruins of Isbister. I identify with the Scots, even if I am some dozen generations from being one.

In 1996, back when I was almost as poor as we are now, I took about 5 weeks off from intense freelance web design to write. The whole freelance gig was a response to not getting gainful employment elsewhere (ahem, Tellabs) and feeling like I could do all right just doing my thing. But the real reason I wanted to do the solo shop was the dream of working four days and writing for three. Never turned out to be the case, though, and I had to coast off a reasonably sized client check to be able to make an attempt at writing a screenplay. The subject? A news blurb about England finally returning the Stone of Destiny (also known as the Stone of Scone) 707 years after they first took it in conquest. Included in the news item I read was a reference to four Scottish nationalists who heisted the Stone during academic holiday in 1950.

Having already some interest in student thefts of iconic objects, I read a first-hand account written by one of the mastermind’s behind the student caper, Ian Hamilton. It was published less than two years after the 1950 incident and is ripe with both dated chauvinism and grad student pomposity. However, it details every step of the planning and the many obstacles in their path to glory. I jotted down notes as I read, eventually eschewing paper for BBEdit on the Mac. About 2/3 of the way through the first pass — during which I was also renaming characters, copying key dialogue, and writing some notes for a screenplay — I lost a bunch of text when the file got so large my Mac couldn’t open it. I corrected that problem and religiously saved my work frequently and in several places. When I bumped into a memory problem again, corrupting my main file, I calmly went to my backup on a Syquest drive. Those who are familiar with removable media from the past decade may have heard of the click of death. I did that day (and would later again with my Iomega Jazz Drive). It not only cost me my archives, but it also ruined me on writing for many years.

And so, my idea for a screenplay on the Stone of Destiny caper has sat dormant for a decade. Until Kynthia’s trip and my vicarious living. It is difficult to find time to sit down and do something that has absolutely no relevance to the task at hand — earning a Ph.D. and resuming some income-generating career. I did another read of the Hamilton book, though, and informally interviewed some foreigners while being one myself on my trip to WikiSym 2006 (the verdict: Scots know about it; no one else does). I’ve got Final Draft these days and some fifty copies of any writing work I’ve done, saved on CDs or hard drives. Maybe there’s some time this winter, ten years after I started, to get a draft written.

I’m not sure if this will make Planet Info, since I don’t pester that aggregate site with everything we write. But in case Kynthia pokes her browser this way, thanks.

For some other reading on the subject, try:

• Brigadoonery — “What often happens when people who were not born in Scotland pretend to be Scottish anyway.” These Canadians have a piece on whether the Stone a fake?
• Answers.com — An encyclopedia scraper with info and links to more info.
• Scottish Historical Review — Nick Aitchison reviews a 2003 book, The Stone of Destiny: Artefact and Icon.