Data Snacks and Data Meals

An author referred to the use of mobile computing as "snacking on data," which struck me as a clever metaphor, and then bounced around in my head and expanded to other digital channels.   I have to get it out of my head, and this seems like as good a place as any ...

Mobile: The Snack Bar

The original metaphor seemed an apt way to describe the mobile channel and the ways in which users approach it: a few bites of data to satisfy puckishness, but not a full meal.

My sense is that this metaphor is important to keep in mind in the face of the "shovelware" approach that is being taken on the mobile platform by some firms, in that they don't really consider the value of the medium as a thing unto itself, but consider the mobile device to be a portable computer that should have the full range of capabilities as any Web site.  That's entirely the wrong approach.

When mobile is done well, it gives the user a few bites that can be eaten out of hand while on the go.   You wouldn't want to build a financial plan or attempt to rebalance your portfolio on a mobile device, and it's doubtful the platform could even be used to make a well informed decision to buy or sell a single security - but if you're waiting in line or walking from one place to another and you feel the need to check your account balance or the price of a given stock, it's good for a quick bite to tide you over.

Voice/Store: The Full-Service Restaurant

Carrying the restaurant-format analogy to other media, it seems to me that the voice and store channels are more in the nature of a full-service restaurant, an eatery in which there is a broad menu of choices for consuming a sumptuous multi-course meal, conducted by a waiter who is there to answer your questions and offer suggestions.

The extension of the metaphor seems particularly apt in that regard: people who do not feel confident in making choices without advice need the kind of interactive help that only another human being can provide, and their visit or call indicates a willingness to spend a considerable amount of time.

Retuning to the financial services example, this may be an instance in which you call or visit a financial advisor to take on a larger task of considering your portfolio strategy or carefully weighing the merits of a given investment option.   It would be silly and excessive to have to call or visit to get a data "snack" - inconvenient to the patron and an annoying to the establishment.

Website: The Kitchen 

I'm not sure if the Web channel is analogous to a restaurant at all: if a dining metaphor is to be used at all, it would be likely more of a kitchen where there are a stock of ingredients, equipment, and supplies that you will use to prepare your own meal.  It provides much more than you need for the task at hand, including specialty tools you will use only once in a while - but having them available when needed is worthwhile.

In terms of assistance, there is no waiter and no cashier - there may be a rack of cookbooks to which you can refer when you need ideas and advice, but that is most often ignored.  The kind of person who steps into a kitchen is confident in their ability to prepare their own meal.

Back to the financial services example, the Web has the same capabilities as the brokerage that you would call or visit - arguably more because it is a self-service medium in which you will need the resources that are normally available to the advisor/broker who would normally assist you.

In fact, the reason that a user would prefer to visit the kitchen is because he does not want any "assistance" - as he knows exactly what he wants, any help or advice would be unwelcome meddling and interference.   There is also the notion that it is cheaper to do it yourself (backed by commission structures that discount Internet trading) and more convenient (there is Internet access in the home), though admittedly not as immediate (you must go home, or unpack your notebook in a place that has access, to use it).

As for contrast to the mobile channel, it seems reasonable that a person might go to the kitchen for a snack, or to a Web site for a quick bit of data to satisfy momentary curiosity ... but this seems a secondary motive that does not make full use of the capabilities, and for users with both mobile and internet, a slightly less convenient way to get a few bites of information.

Tablet: ????

In the interest of being comprehensive, I'd like to include the tablet, but I'm not quite sure how it fits.  It could be my own lack of insight into the medium, but it's also possible that those who provide services on the device haven't quite figured it out yet, either so it seems to be in flux.

It doesn't strike me as a particularly good "snack bar," as it's a rather cumbersome device that can't be used on-the-go except in the nature of a laptop (stop, sit, unpack, and eat), and because it can generally be used for a broader array of purposes, it would seem to fit into the "kitchen" category of a personal computer.

So is the tablet analogous to a lunchbox?  A picnic basket?  A chuck wagon? The only thing that seems certain is that it's not a full-service restaurant, but an acceptable analogy completely evades me.

The Misinformation Age

An article I read presented a study that suggested about 70% of customers are misinformed - such that the task of helping them select a product that is likely to meet their actual needs is made more difficult because the customers have done research on the internet and have been misled by inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading information.

I won't link to the article or the study because I find it to be specious, stilted, and unscientific. It was an informal survey done of salesman - whom I suspect to be strongly biased (to say the least) to dismiss any information that gives the customer the idea they don't need what the salesman wants to sell them. While I regard the survey as invalid, that's not to say it doesn't raise a very good point that would likely be supported by a less questionable investigation.

It speaks to the problem of half-wittedness, which I sense to be one of the major issues of the present age: a person who knows nothing is able to learn, but a person who knows something acts boldly and with confidence, even if the information he has is insufficient or wrong. Such people do a great deal of damage to themselves, and in some situation do a great deal of damage to others.

To better concretize the problem, consider the issue of medical information on the Internet: a person becomes very certain of his condition and the treatment he requires because of the incomplete and inaccurate information he is able to find online, even to the point that he becomes confrontational with a medical professional who is attempting to treat him.

If a doctor's diagnosis disagrees with what the patient has found online, he is likely to disregard the advice and regard the doctor as incompetent. The same problem is evident in a variety of situations: the misinformed patient, the misinformed customer, the misinformed executive, etc. In virtually any situation where information is taken into account when a decision is made, it has the potential to be poisoned by incomplete and inaccurate data - and given the degree to which people turn to the Internet as a tool for gathering information to make decisions, the potential is being fulfilled.

From what I have seen, social media is making the problem worse rather than better. When information from alternative sources disagrees with information from traditional sources, some people seem to believe that they have discovered something new or a truth that the establishment is attempting to prevent from leaking out, and they leverage social media to spread the disinformation.

Not only does this person spread misinformation, but social media metrics are based on the number of people who express an opinion, rather than the validity of the opinion itself. Therefor, a bad opinion that is widely discussed is given more prominence and, by some measures, more creditability that valid information.

This likely leads my meditation in a different direction than I had intended, so to drag it back on track ... the point I intended to work toward was that the amount of misinformation and the level of faith that is being placed in it makes it extremely difficult to provide good customer service. Where customers are misinformed, yet staunch in their belief that they have valid information, it is difficult to un-poison their minds and get them to recognize valid information.

The problem is so difficult that many firms seem to have given up even on trying: they give the customer exactly what the customer demands in order to please them immediately, but later find themselves in confrontations with dissatisfied customers because the product or service they specifically demanded did not achieve the outcome they had hoped for.

What results, in disturbingly many instances, is service providers that must defend their products against customers who found them to be unsatisfactory - by the wording of the contract, the print on the label, and the disclaimers on the Web site, the service provider has delivered as promised. This is generally a valid defense against consumer lawsuits, but it is also highly effective in preventing customer satisfaction.

There doesn't seem to be a singular solution to what has become a widespread problem - but it is a frequent, widespread, and persistent issue with which companies and brands must contend in the (mis)information age.

Shovelware and Shiny New Things

It's said that the point of studying history is so that we can learn from the mistakes of the past so that we can avoid making them again - and the tragedy is that we never seem to do so. We merely acknowledge, with distressing nonchalance, that we made the same mistake a second time (or a third, or a fourth, etc.) after we've already taken action.

Case in point: I was listening to a colleague vent about how his employer was presently attempting to recreate its entire Web presence on the iPad. To his way of thinking, it was "shiny new thing" syndrome - the executives were distracted by the tablet device and shifted significant budget to pursue it ... by cutting the budget to the smartphone development initiatives, which only a few years prior was funded by cutting budget to their Web site initiatives.

Each time, the abrupt change in focus left work half-completed in the previous channel, and work in the new channel-of-obsession was done in a hectic and sloppy manner. The repetition had him discouraged, and unable to commit himself wholeheartedly to his new projects because it seemed inevitable that, a year or two in the future, there would be a new platform (the iWatch or somesuch) for which his present work would be abandoned.

This took me back to 1994, a time when the Internet was relatively new to business, and their immediate reaction was to stop doing print and re-create all of their existing print documents online. As a result, many Web sites were a jumble of disorganized information, shoveled from archives of print documents that were written at different times, for different purposes, and for different audiences - and clients completely ignored the nature and potential of the new medium.

Perhaps I shouldn't complain too much, as it was the start of a fairly decent career when one savvy executive recognized the problem and reached outside the IT industry to get someone with a communications background to help make sense of it all - but one of the most frustrating aspects of my work from that day to this has been fighting against the shovelware mentality and the gormless enthusiasm for shiny new things.

No-one seems to have recognized that the mistake that is made when there's a heated rush to adopt a new channel and shovel over the content and functionality of older ones without regard to the nature, capabilities, and usage patterns of the channel. Or worse, they do recognize it, but issue the order to "just get something out there" and fix it later. But later, some other distraction comes along and the work that was done in a sloppy, heated rush is left that way indefinitely. Or worse still, the sloppy work that was done in other channels sets a precedent - it becomes a standard way of doing things that should be imitated in new channels for the sake of providing a consistent customer experience. Consistently awful, but consistent nonetheless.

I'm feeling far too pessimistic at the moment to propose a solution to the problem. Perhaps anyone with a long enough memory can use the example of the past to suggest we avoid, rather than repeat, the shovelware mistake in future. Or given the shorter span of time between platforms these days, perhaps it doesn't take so long of a memory to provide an example.

The point being that when the Internet came along in 1993 (or more accurately, that's when it went commercial and opened itself to the general public), there was not much in the way of a precedent. I think it was around the fifth century when books came to replace scrolls and tablets, and the originals probably were little more than collections of parchment and papyrus scrolls, cut apart and bound together without regard to whether the collection made much sense.

It took centuries to get books right, and decades to get the Web sorted out (if, indeed, it could be deemed "sorted" even today), and new media are bubbling up at such a frantic pace that it remains likely that decision-makers will latch on to them compulsively for a short amount of time, adopting them with reckless lust and abandoning them prematurely.

Historically speaking, it's a great time to be working in this industry if you enjoy fiddling around with shiny new things ... not so much if you care about doing things well.

Net Neutrality

The problem of bandwidth has cropped up again, as it periodically does. If anything, I'm surprised it's taken this long: I expected that the explosion of content that arose when "Web 2.0" enabled individuals to dump exabytes of text, photos, and video on the Internet would have jammed the network long before now.

The core conflict is between companies that own the networks an the companies that use the wires to transmit data. The latter camp has been more successful than usual in getting the media and certain members of the public spun up by representing the problem as a civil-rights issue rather than a technical problem, under the banner of "net neutrality."

Naturally, the propaganda has overwhelmed the facts, which are a bit complicated and far less interesting than a shouting-match among flamboyant buffoons. And naturally, those of us in the industry are being asked, "what's all this noise about net neutrality?"

And so ...

While the metaphor of "information superhighway" is a bit outdated and hackneyed, it's a good way to visualize the problem of traffic on the Internet, which sends data packets across networks in much the same way as vehicles travel across the network of roadways. In that way "bandwidth" can be understood as the capacity of the roads, and "congestion" as being akin to a traffic jam.

The challenge, since the beginning, has been in building out the roads to accommodate the traffic. Traffic can change in an instant, whereas it takes a significant amount of time and money to expand a roadway - and while the network providers have generally been attentive to the problem, there are times when the change in traffic patterns has taken place more quickly than expected, and the roads have become jammed.

When traffic jams occurs, traffic is diverted from the main highways: motorists discover that they can make their trip faster if they exit the main highway and cut across residential streets, which, in time, become jammed up with "highway traffic," such that the people who live in the neighborhood cannot back out of their own driveways due to a stream of traffic traveling across residential streets that were not designed to accommodate a constant flow 18-wheelers.

The solution for the residents is to close neighborhood roads to freeway traffic - in effect, to put up a "no trucks" sign and limit the traffic through their neighborhood to the residents and certain companies that are making deliveries to the neighborhood. With such a measure in place, the residents are happy, but the trucking companies who want to cut through their neighborhood to avoid the freeway traffic are stymied.

An in the case of "net neutrality," the trucking companies are claiming that they should have a right to drive their trucks through the neighborhood, and have spun up the residents of other neighborhoods by claiming that their inability to drive across the residential streets prevents them from delivering certain goods to the market - and therefore, that the "no trucks" restriction has harmed all by preventing certain goods to reach the marketplace.

Naturally, there's more to it than the metaphor will allow. When it comes to the Internet, even the superhighways are owned by private companies, the trucking companies pay for the right to use certain roads, the companies that maintain the roads are either unable to provide them with more capacity or unwilling to do so at a price customers are willing to pay, etc. You can easily stretch the metaphor to the breaking point, but I think it highlights some of the fundamental issues:

Primarily, while Internet congestion is a problem that ultimately affects users, the front lines of the battle are drawn between companies: specifically, the companies that own the networks, and the companies that want to send more traffic than the network can presently accommodate, without paying to upgrade the system.

Second, that "freedom of expression" has very little to do with the matter. To return to the analogy, the network providers don't care about the cargo inside the trucks, merely that there are too many vehicles on the road, and their restrictions are based on volume, giving preference to their own high-volume customers who pay for the use of their roads.

Third, that Internet congestion is temporary. Eventually, the lanes will be widened, traffic will flow, and everyone will be happy once again ... until even the expanded capacity is being consumed and there is yet again a need to expand. Seems to happen every so often, and I think it may be a while before it's possible to predict fluctuations with any degree of accuracy.

And finally, to be very cautions about the causes you support during times of crisis - because the restrictions and regulations put in place to cure a "temporary" problem will be even more damaging to your freedom and well-being in the long run. Witness the effects of the legislation put in place to address the great depression, or the terrorist incidents of the early 21st century - and the long-term effects of ill-conceived solution to short-term problems should be very clear.

Ten Thousand Lines of Bad Code

It's been a while since I've rolled up my sleeves and worked on the code behind the screen, and having pitched in to help out with those tasks in the past few days, I'm appalled by what I found there: a tangled mess of code that, while functional, is thoroughly rotten.

My shock and revulsion arises, in large part, from being one of the old dogs, who started back in the day when the average modem speed was 14.4 Kb speed, which seemed lightning fast compared to a 9600 baud model of the year before. And 14.4 Kb was a theoretical maximum - the average functional speed was about 1 KB per second.

In those days, your code had to be tight: every wasted character, every flabby graphic, seriously degraded the user experience where the main complaint was how long it took a page to download. It was difficult, and many developers and (especially) designers hated the constraints.

Nowadays, it's possible to cram a lot more data down the pipe, and unless you go hog wild, the download speed is fast enough that the user doesn't get a sense of delay while waiting for the page they requested to show up in the browser before them. And that's largely a good thing.

The only drawback is that designers and developers no longer need to pay much attention to page weight. Unless they do something egregious, it won't make a functional difference. And as a result, things have gotten very sloppy out there.

A few years ago, I was asked looked at the home page of a site that required a download of 180 KB of data to render. Evidently, some statistical software alerted the owner to the "problem" and they were curious as to the reason.

When I looked under the hood, I found the reasons:

• The content of the page that was being served was small, probably under 5K. Perhaps half of that was wasted on code that had been commented out in the development process but no-one bothered to delete it, excessive space and tab characters, and other sloppy code practices. But this was minor.
• The majority of the waste was images - and that's not saying that the images were unnecessary, just that they had not been optimized for the Web, and were between 70% and 90% flab. Back in the day, developers would skip this task because it could take a couple hours per image through a trial and error process. Now, there's a "save for Web" option in PhotoShop that takes a couple of minutes to try various formats and compression rates, so there really is no excuse.
• Another huge chunk was external CSS that, in addition to being full of complete junk (commented-out codes and whitespace characters), included loads of styles that were not used on the page itself. Perhaps hey were used on other pages, or just vestigial, but they weren't needed on the home page.
• Another sizable chunk were external JavaScript files, of the same nature: commented-out code, a blizzard of whitespace, and unnecessary functions

If memory serves me correctly, I was able to reduce the page size by about 70% in about four hours effort, which didn't address every little thing, just the major issues. The reaction: complete indifference. I don't believe anything was done to address the issue after that - and looking at the same Web page today, it has swelled to 345 KB, so their curiosity about the site's bloat was just a passing fancy, as they have allowed the problem to become even worse.

And again, "problem" is a matter of perspective. Someone like myself, with old-fashioned sensibilities about code, sees it as a serious issue: if 70% (or more) of bandwidth is wasted, the congestion on the Internet could be significantly reduced by simply tidying up. But that's in the nature of environmental concern, something that people pay lip-service to, but still throw trash out the window of a moving car because it's inconvenient to dispose of properly.

It's also a problem for the developers who work to maintain a site, who have to comb through thousands of lines of code and sort out all the references to find out what's "breaking" the page in a given browser. But that's been accepted as part of the job, and I don't expect a low-rank code peon to get much of an audience from the decision-makers.

And as a result, I have largely accepted that pointing out this issue is akin to talking to a brick wall: nobody is listening, nobody cares, and it's probably just waste of breath - or, ironically enough, waste of type.

Which is ironic, in that I'm hammering out a few thousand characters to grouse about the waste of several thousand other characters - but for anyone who's viewing this page, the content is probably only about 2% of the wasted data, given that I'm using blogging software that I expect will add 100 KB or more of completely useless junk on top of the content.

:: sigh ::

There is no such thing as Social TV

A series of posts at Trendspotting (link), along with a poorly conceived chapter in a book on social media (no link yet, study notes will appear later) has me thinking about the notion of "Social Television." Specifically, it's got me thinking that it's merely a notion, and not a "real" thing.

The concept of Social TV is the "enhancement" of broadcast programming with interactive features, such as the ability to interact with other viewers or post and access user-contributed reviews and ratings. But my point is: once you've added input devices such as a mouse or keyboard (or even an "enhanced" remote control that has similar input capabilities) to a television set, it's not a television set anymore, but a computer with a large monitor.

The qualities that define television as a medium are its broadcast nature (one sender to many receivers), scheduled programming (a program, or even coverage of an event, happens at a certain time), and the passive consumption by the audience (specifically, non-interactive).

The first quality (broadcasting) is not unique to the television medium. Any video presentation (or even a text one, such as a newspaper article or Web page) is a broadcast. The message is created by one person and transmitted to others. And if the others "interact" with the message, what they are in fact doing is creating a version of it and retransmitting it, becoming in effect a broadcaster of an altered message. Which is to say that, while television is a broadcast medium, not all broadcast media qualify as being "television."

The second quality (scheduled programming) was broken long ago, by home recording devices such as the VCR, which has evolved into the DVR, not to mention the release of television programs on hard media (a television series can be purchased on videotape or DVD), not to mention the availability via the Internet (on YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, or the broadcaster's own Web site). However, we make a clear distinction between the two: when a person is watching a sitcom episode on DVD or a Web site, they may be watching a program that originally aired on television, but they are not watching television.

The third quality (passive consumption) is perhaps the objective of the broadcasters, but is seldom fully realized. If an individual is watching television alone, and is wholly mesmerized by the program, that is passive consumption. But if other people (or just one other person) are in the room, they interact with one another only when the programming fails to hold their attention (commercial breaks, dull moments in the program, etc.), and in some instances, such as a thoroughly rotten movie, the interaction among viewers is more entertaining than the program. But it stands to note that this is not interacting with the program, but interacting with other people. In a holistic sense, the activity seems to involve both, but there are distinct differences between the moments when the viewers are actually watching television and other moments in which they are interacting with one another and not paying attention to the program.

The notion of Social TV undermines all three of these qualities that essentially define television as a medium. The activities that Social TV presumes to have introduced are already available on the Internet - a person can watch video content, post their ratings and tags, and interact with other viewers on a myriad of different Web sites. While there may be differences in the device or the room one might be sitting in, these are entirely incidental.

Which leads me to my conclusions. First, should "Social TV" become popular, I submit that it is not because the television medium has evolved and survived, but that television has died and been replaced by something that cannot rightly be considered to be "television" at all. Second, that the notion of Social TV is not new, but merely a label being placed on an activity that is already taking place in the Internet medium.