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The iPad is the Context-Aware Monitor You Can Take Anywhere

Posted on June 5, 2010 by jessestay

For those that don’t follow my Twitter or Facebook or FriendFeed streams, a few weeks ago I bought an iPad. I was sitting down at the Pool in Hawaii next to Chris Pirillo (we were both speaking at a conference – tough life, huh?), and he pulled out his iPad and immediately started working right there in Paradise. It was that which convinced me I needed to see what this device could do for me and why it was special. But what does make it special? Why is it so “magical”?

I’ve been debating that over the last several weeks. I have a 17″ Macbook Pro that works great and I can take it anywhere I go that I need a full computer. I have an iPhone that I can take everywhere else and access the internet, take brief notes, and get things done. Why would I need an iPad?

I had this discussion with a co-worker the other day, and it got me thinking. He suggested that the value in the iPad is not what it is, but what it could be, and most of all where this technology in general is going. He suggested the concept of bringing his iPhone or Android phone with him wherever he goes, and if he’s near a monitor and keyboard, pulling up an entire OS experience on the monitor via Bluetooth connection. That got me thinking back to the iPad – in reality, the iPad is about context. It’s about having a monitor-sized device that you can carry around in your backpack and display, in a large form-factor, images, video, and text that are relevant to the place you are at that very moment. It’s the monitor I can carry everywhere I go, but more than that – the potential is it could very well be a monitor that communicates with my iPhone, a monitor that communicates with my car, a monitor that communicates with my keyboard at work.

Steve Gillmor inferred this in his Keynote at the Kynetx Impact Conference recently. The Kynetx platform is all about providing a unified API experience that enables developers to provide contextually relevant experiences no matter where the user is. The iPad, in many ways is doing just this. It’s transforming the web from being just data endpoints that require their own displays that stay static, in one place (like TVs and Computer Monitors), to adaptable display interfaces you can take with you wherever you go. Now, instead of needing a TV, you can take the TV with you. Now, instead of your desk needing a monitor, you can take that monitor with you. Now, instead of needing displays throughout your house to control your thermostat, lights, music, etc., you can do all that with a device you have wherever you go.

One of the big rumors for the upcoming June 6 WWDC Keynote by Steve Jobs is that Apple will be announcing a new Apple TV device that is based on the iPhone OS. When you think about it, this idea is not that far-fetched. Now, on the same operating system developers are writing applications for that already stream TV (think Slingbox or Netflix), surf the web, pull up your favorite magazine publications, and more, developers just need to change the screen size to adapt the experience for that specific screen size and experience. For instance, the Scrabble application, when purchased on the iPad, has a mode that you can play Scrabble with different opponents around a table and allow those opponents to use their iPhones as letter holders so no one else in the room can see each opponent’s letters. The two different screen sizes adapt, and work with each other. The iPad, in that case, adapts to become the board in a board game.

The future of tech is in that contextual, ubiquitous experience. In the future, you’ll be able to take your iPad with you and when it detects a keyboard it will provide a different experience that works with the keyboard than the one that doesn’t. Future iPads will detect where you are, and provide new UIs based on the location you are at currently. The future of the tablet device will adapt based on the environment around it and provide an experience that fits the size and form factor of the screen it was built for. The future computing experience is about each display and/or device in the room adapting to the experience the user is having at any given moment.

This isn’t about your desktop becoming more portable. This isn’t about your iPhone becoming bigger. I believe what the iPad has done is rather reinvent the monitor, making the monitor itself more portable, smarter, and more adaptable than ever before. What I’m carrying around in my hands with my new iPad is not a new type of computer. It’s a monitor, a display interface, that follows me around wherever I go.

If you’ve got an iPad and you like this concept, be sure to check out the Air Display app, by Avatron Software, Inc., which turns your iPad into an entirely separate monitor that you can add to your existing Mac when it’s nearby.

What do you think the iPad is?

The Web is No Longer Open

Posted on March 3, 2010 by jessestay

“So it can benefit everyone.”

That’s what a Google employee said today as he tried to explain Google’s recent push to have websites use the ‘rel=”me”‘ meta HTML tags to identify pages a user owns on the web. It’s not a bad strategy – index the entire web, know every single website out there, and when they change, and now the web is your network. The thing is, since the “open” web hasn’t had a natural way of identifying websites owned by users, Google, the current controller of this network, needed a way to do it. Why not make people identify their websites to Google’s SocialGraph network, and call it “open” so it benefits everyone? I’m sorry, but the “open” web that we all grew up in is dead now that 2 or 3 entities have indexed it all. This is now their network.

Let’s contrast that to Facebook, the “Walled Garden”, criticized for being closed due to tight privacy controls and not willing to open up to the outside web. Of course, all that is a myth – Facebook too has provided ways for website owners to identify themselves to Facebook on the “open” web, making Facebook itself the controller of that social graph data, thereby giving Facebook a new role in who “owns” the “open” web. Facebook has even made known in its developer roadmap its intention to build an “OpenGraph API”, making every website owner’s site a Facebook Fan Page in the Facebook network. Don’t kid yourself that Facebook wants a role in this as well. They’re a major threat to Google, too because of this.

Then there’s Twitter, just starting to realize how to play in this game, now starting to collect user data for search in their own network. Don’t count them out just yet, as they too will soon be trying to find ways to get you to identify your website on their network.

So we’ll soon have 3 ways of identifying our websites on the “open” web. I can identify my site through Facebook, as you see by the Facebook Connect login buttons scattered around. I can identify myself in the Google SocialGraph APIs, which, if you view the source of this site you’ll see a ‘rel=”me”‘ meta tag identifying my site so Google can search it. Who knows what Twitter will provide to bring my site into its network. Each network is providing its easiest ways of identifying your site within their own Social Graph, and calling it “open” so other developers can bring their stuff into their networks easily, without rewriting code.

I think it’s time we stop tricking ourselves into thinking the web is open at all. Google is in control of the web – they have it all indexed. Now that we are seeing that he who owns the Social Graph has a new way of controlling and indexing the web, which we are seeing by Facebook’s massive growth (400+ million users!), I think Google feels threatened. They’ll play every “open” term in the book to gain that control back. Of course the new meta tags are beneficial – is it really beneficial to “everybody” though? I argue the one entity it benefits most is Google. Yeah, it benefits developers if we can get everyone to agree on what “open” is, but that will never happen. I think it’s time we accept that now that the web is controlled and indexed by only a few large corporations, it is far from “open”. “Open” is nothing more than a marketing term, and I think we can thank Google for that. No, that’s not a bad thing – it’s just reality.

Do these technologies really “benefit everyone” when no other search startup has a remote chance of competing with owning the “open web” network?

Further note:

How do we solve this? I truly believe the only solution to giving the user control of the web again is via client-side, truly user-controlled technologies like what Kynetx offers. Action Cards, Information Cards, Selectors, and browser-side technologies that bring context back in the user’s hands are the only way we’re going to make the web “open” again. The future will be the battle for the client – I hope the user wins that battle.

Image courtesy Leo Reynolds

UPDATE: DeWitt Clinton of Google, who wrote the quote above this post is in response to, issued his own response here. The comments there are interesting, albeit a lot of current and former Google employees trying to defend their case. I still hold that no matter what Google does now, due to the size of their index, any promotion of the “open web” is still to their benefit. I don’t think Google should be denying that.

UPDATE 2: My response to DeWitt’s response is here – why didn’t Google just clone Facebook’s APIs if their intention was to benefit the developer and end-user?

Kynetx Launches Chrome Extension Support for Their Platform

Posted on December 20, 2009 by jessestay

Editor’s note: Kynetx is something you have to use to fully understand! If nothing in this article makes sense, please skip down to the bottom and at least try out the extensions these guys have built in their app directory and you can see the power of what this platform can do! This is very powerful technology – I really believe this is the future of the web!

Friday afternoon Kynetx launched support in their developer platform to build extensions for the Google Chrome Browser. The company, which provides a standardized, open framework for building web browser extensions (among other supported technologies such as Action Cards), became the first extension-building platform that supports all 3 of the top browsers on the web. The move is unprecedented, as now with Kynetx in comparison to GreaseMonkey, possibly their closest comparison in this instance, you can write code once, and immediately have extensions and plugins that work in Firefox, Chrome, and even IE with the click of a button. Kynetx makes customization of the user experience in the browser a cinch with their platform.

I visited Kynetx on Friday for their weekly Kynetx developers lunch (which they invite the public to, just asking that you let them know in advance), and they were hard at work getting the final quirks worked out of the Chrome extension. Developers like myself are now rejoicing, as Chrome is very quickly, with the backing of Google, proving to be one of the most responsive, most extensive browsers on the internet. It also has an integrated development environment so extensions such as Firebug for Firefox don’t even need to be installed. They all come with the browser, providing a much smoother and faster experience for the developer.

Kynetx is positioning themselves to become the ubiquitous controller for user experience and context on the web. With their technology, users have the potential to fully control what they allow and don’t allow to be displayed on the web. At the same time businesses are each given the opportunity, with the user’s permission, to change the experience for that user on the web.

Kynetx recently launched a tool with the Better Business Bureau enabling, with installation of a simple extension (in any of your favorite browsers now!), display of BBB accredited business seals in Google Local search results. When a business has been approved by the Better Business Bureau a little seal appears next to their name in search results, enabling a more educated experience for users in the browser. All of this is done without any need to form a special relationship with Google to customize those results. Because of the ease of development and broad install base for extensions like the new Chrome extension launched Friday, any business has the potential to customize the experience for the user in a similar manner.

The new Chrome extension works across all versions of Chrome that support extensions. While the official Chrome for Mac does not yet support this yet, the PC version does, as do developer builds of Chromium for Mac. It is rumored that Chrome for Mac will be supporting extensions very soon. The other advantage Chrome brings to the Kynetx environment is the availability of Jails for each extension. With Chrome, developers can enable extensions to not be able to talk with each other or affect each other. This introduces some interesting and secure identity and authentication/authorization implications which I’m sure we’ll be seeing from the Kynetx team in the future.

If you’re a developer with some knowledge of the DOM and Javascript, you should really check out the power of what the Kynetx platform can bring to your company and business. This goes way beyond the browser, and makes context-aware applications a user-controlled standard that goes with that user anywhere. Be sure to check out a little glimpse of what this stuff will enable in my previous article. You can get started developing for this platform immediately on their AppBuilder site.

Just a user? Be sure to check out their App Directory here, download the extensions and try them out in your favorite browser!

It’s Time to Free the Twitter Client

Posted on December 1, 2009 by jessestay

Dave Winer wants a programmable Twitter client. I think it’s a great idea. It’s something the browser has had for quite awhile now via extensions, frameworks, and plugins. Up until this point Twitter clients have been closed systems that can’t really be extended in any way. Loic Lemeur thinks he has the answer with the ability to extend his company’s Seesmic Desktop client – I applaud them for this – it’s something that I think would allow apps like my SocialToo.com to help clean up the stream both in and out of Twitter. In this way the Twitter client isn’t stuck with exclusive relationships where partners have to pay large sums of money to participate. Developers and users have full control over the experience they get from the client. I have a recommendation for Loic, Iain, and other social browser developers though: extend your browsers using open standards if you’re going to do it.

Up to this point we’ve been talking server-based open architectures. You have OpenID, OAuth, Wave, rssCloud, Pubsub Hubbub, heck, you even have HTTP, SMTP, and even TCP/IP. But up until now there haven’t been many client-based architectures that extend across any client enabling developers to easily write code for any web client on the client side and have that port from the AIR client to another AIR client, to the browser, and to any other app that touches the web. Fortunately that technology is here now, and I think the Twitter and Facebook client developers have the opportunity to push this stuff mainstream and put pressure on the generic web browser developers to do the same with their own extension architectures. That technology is the Selector – Action cards.

Craig Burton said the Cookie is dead, and this is why: Cookies can’t extend across multiple applications on a single computer. The Selector has that potential. Imagine a plugin architecture that read an Information Card to identify you on Twitter or Facebook, etc. You could add to it an Action card from a site like SocialToo (my site), and based on that Action card and the settings set forth in the Action card by the user the entire Seesmic Desktop experience will be customized based on the settings SocialToo set for that user based on their preferences. The cool thing about this is it can all be done in simple (and open) Javascript using frameworks like Kynetx’ KRL.

If I were Loic Lemeur I would seriously be studying the open standard of Information cards and especially Action cards right now. He has the opportunity to follow an open standard in this plugin development architecture that would extend across his app into other apps and even the browser. This is Seesmic’s opportunity to lead in this effort. If not other clients will take the ball by embracing these standards – developers will flock to this if it’s done right.

My hope is that Seesmic and any other Twitter or Facebook client can do these plugin architectures the right way. Information cards and Action cards right now are the most open and extensive way for any desktop (or even mobile) client to put control back in the developers’, and more importantly, the users’ hands. I hope they do the right thing.

I commented on Loic’s blog post but did not receive a response – hopefully we can hear more about their plans for this new architecture soon, and let’s hope it’s built on open standards. If you write the first Twitter client to support Information cards or Action cards let me know and you’ll get a big fat blog post here promoting the heck out of it. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the future of the web and we need to be pushing it as much as possible. I’m calling all client developers to action.

Be sure to read my article on my vision for no log in buttons here – it will help you understand this stuff, and more of my vision, even further.