This is a delicious look back at the complete #fail, in Twitter vernacular, of Clifford Stroll’s prediction made in 1995 that the internet will fail. In the same way that John Gruber delights in his “claim chowder” pieces (where he publishes claims about technology made by others for the express purpose of showing how misguided they were) this is pretty easy stuff do to - benefit of hindsight etc etc.

However, what is perhaps more interesting is how right he is in many areas. Take this:

“Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.”

About this, of course, he is 100% accurate. And it’s got worse since then. But he missed the $167.5bn solution: Google, and more broadly, the power of accurate filtering of the signal to noise ratio. These tools have proved adept at allowing users to connect with the info, news, friends that they seek without being suffocated by the Usenet dross.

It is for this reason that services like Twitter are proving so successful because they allow people to create groups of influence who they listen to, and further help to distil the important from the vacuous.

And it is Twitter’s restrictive simplicity that has helped make this so effective. By contrast Buzz may also be useful here but its current user experience design actually contributes to noise by allowing much-followed sites like Mashable to overwhelm everything else in one’s inbox with the number of comments (and currently no way to collapse threads).

Anyway, the point is that the future utility of the web is as much about filtration & collation tools providing the hyper-personal information stream (to paraphrase Marissa Mayer & Jeff Jarvis) as the continuing proliferation of available data.

Posted via email from willbank's posterous

Posted via web from willbank's posterous

Way to go Sussex Council.

So, I had an old and valued customer sign off an email to me today with the line: 

Bet you have already tested the new iPad with a fully formed opinion?

And so I dashed off the following:

iPad is certainly good looking but the recklessly wild speculation means that for many it does not live up to the hype. I am worried about the lack of the ability to run background apps (as with the iPhone) as this limits its use as a computer replacement for long periods. On the flip, the $499 min price is shockingly good - how they managed to get there is an industry phenomenon. It will, more likely than not, change the industry because of the apps that are made for it & its penetration rather than for anything that was demo'd yesterday.

Also, I believe that this is very much a question of Apple's Rev A product and it will be iterated aggressively with more features over the next 2 years - by most accounts Steve J has been working on the Tablet concept for 4 years and it was getting later and later as they tried to ship something that was "Apple-phenomenal". They had to shut down the spec and ship it or they'd miss the boat. They even had to design and build their own silicone, the Apple A4 chip! That is radical and is testament to just how much frustration they must have felt with all the options that were open to them from all the other mobile computing component vendors (which tellingly are all that their competitors are stuck using). And don't forget they have in the past had industry kingpins like Intel custom-make silicone for them (in the MacBook Air) - so if they couldn't even get Intel to make what they wanted then you can bet that what the rest of the world is using (or even will be using for some time to come) is not nearly as good. And the proof is in the pudding - I hear that the iPad is very, very quick in the hands.

But, here is a worry. The nature of the tech industry is white-hot innovation. It is very hard for any one company to stay at the fore-front of technological change... some, like Intel, manage it by being in very niche sectors and investing hugely. But what you have here is a company working to be the best innovator across some VAST sectors: operating system development, mobile OS development, hardware, industrial design and now silicone too. That is a very, very big challenge and one that is probably unsustainable over the long term. However, one thing can be said for them: they are very practical and if they start to lose their advantage in one area they may well be radical in changing it out (see the complete dumping of the Classic OS for OS X, the dumping of Motorola PowerPC for Intel etc).

And on re-reading this it pretty much encapsulates my entire take on it... so no need to write an official iPad response post ;-)

• Top chefs moving downmarket
• Upmarket fast foods
• The year of the sausage?
• Traditional British
• British artisanal cheese
• Beerlists
• Steak 
• Seasonal fruit and veg
• The return of the winebar
• Casual Italian 
• New Nordic
• Tea 
• Meal deals 
• Apps
• Self publishing

And 5 that could bomb

• Bacon
• Food trucks
• Korean
• Dessert bars
• Natural wines

And then, via Gruber & in turn Joel Spolsky, this from Microsoft's careers advertising:

“If you’re looking for a new role where you’ll focus on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for KT and Steve B in ‘Compete’, build a complete left to right understanding of the subsidiary, have a large amount of executive exposure, build and manage the activities of a v-team of 13 district Linux& Open Office Compete Leads, and develop a broad set of marketing skills and report to a management team committed to development and recognized for high WHI this is the position for you!”

That is too mangled to attract anyone with a talent for cutting through the crap. Groan.

It took Squarespace about a billion years to come out with the iPhone app but we didn't blame them because we knew that was Apple's fault (we did know, right?). But they had the "Social Integration" icon on their homepage for months... and then suddenly it's gone - like, today.

What happened? This was a huge part of my move to SS. Help! But then good old Amit came to the rescue and through the beauty of Feedburner the presence of this post will now get tweeted. It ain't full social integration by any means but it is a start

I think it is a shame that blogs tend to atrophy (not that mine ever really got going) because it is so easy to tweet - and so tying them together makes a lot of sense. A brief subject can be tweeted but explored on the blog. That's the idea anyway.

As I discovered a couple of days ago the noted tech journalist Kate Bevan (@katebevan) has a blog of which the last line of the last post reads:

Now that I’m back, I’m back, and will update regularly.

Written on February 28 2009 at 3:05 pm.

But still, her tweet-count now stands at 21,820.

It has been reported that 3% of AT&T's customers use 40% of the network bandwidth - but isn't this the opportunity, the glimpse of the future where mobile connectivity is the norm and is used as such? At this stage surely the correct move is to build a better, faster network to keep these customers once the iPhone goes multi-carrier and therefore to ensure a long, profitable and dominant future for AT&T who got this artificial peep down the rabbit-hole of the telco situation of 2019.

But, I can't put it better than Dan Lyons, the writer of the brilliant Fake Steve blog (which purports to be Steve Jobs' personal take on things but which is actually tech industry commentary with excellent satire):

Check out the rant here. Beautifully done.