Hello all, it's been a while since my last post. These last months were spent mostly dedicated to finish my unfinished thesis - Ever heard of PhD comics? No? Well, it works better than Dilbert for me. Here's a nice one ... And here's the drop.io to my submitted manuscript, if anyone cares (warning: heavy maths) -
Anyway, a lot has happened during these months (of course), and it's time, after four years of blogging about the shift of paradigm from the desktop to the webtop, to wander if the title still makes any sense today, or if it has aged? Is it time to go? Or is it time to keep on rock-and-roll?
First, let's recap the last months (more or less in the chronological order, as I far as I can remember -too lazy to do scrupulous search-):
1) Google announces the Chrome OS and its stateless, diskless version of the netbook. It runs web-apps and web-apps only. It boots zilch-fast, less than 2 seconds. Yet to be sold, reportedly by the end of 2010.
2) Html5 and some new video codecs are getting alot of buzz. Html5 allows non-flash video, offline caching for making cooler web-apps and more semantic-tags (remember the semantic-web meme?).
3) Apple launches the iPad and a new version of the iPhone OS. It still ditches Adobe's Flash in all its "magic-top"/"casual-top"/"touch-top" (erase the names you don't like) platforms (to keep control on the iDevelopers). The iPad is a magical device providing the best web-surfing experience EVER (so they say). It sheds another spotlight in this gadget that I'm very fond of, the Amazon Kindle, the revolutionary e-book reader. This means that the ebook trend will go up with all these great surface delivery platforms. That's a good thing. Furthermore, iPhone OS 4 adds background processes (only for 3GS phones). Finally, the old media renaissance hype on the iPad is decreted a fad by uber-geek-techy-mac-fanboys (too expensive, no sharing allowed, hence, too frustrating).
4) Google launches and sells the Nexus One, a google-branded Android powered smartphone. No other hardware known by man matches the iPhone, yet. Android doesn't beat the UX design of the iPhone neither (too many heads designing). BUT... the Android is the best web-touch-top available out there: it's always in sync with all your gmail, contacts, docs, calendar etc... So, my view is that it's a trade off between having a better sensorial multi-touch magic (choose iPhone) or a better, more open, more functional, sync-in-cloud machine (choose Android). Both the App Store and the Android market have lots of apps available (150K VS 35K) and both have quite strong titles. Frankly, I'm more bent towards the Android, as what I really need in a smartphone (with very limited autonomy) are my contacts, gmail and google stuff all synched-in-the-cloud. Then, maybe later, toss in a twitter and a facebook app, and I'll be fine. Smartphones are too slow and too battery limited and have a too tiny screen for me to go really heavy on apps. Most apps are just fads to me. They have a lot of hype because the App store delivers money to developpers. But, somehow, that's sadening to me (more on that later).
5) Palm is declared to be dying. Windows announces a windows mobile 7 phone and they report it as being great. We'll see...
6) Facebook keeps on steadily ramping up and roaring the whole world into its swirl. They have the fastest web-app out there, that I can think of. It just works lightning fast. A third of my friends (if not more) are all on facebook. I use twitter to make contact with geeks, but I use facebook (and email) for my non-geek friends. That's good, because it *is* added value. That's also bad because it's quite a closed garden. And how I don't like closed gardens :'( There should be an "openbook" social-app ...
7) "Game-mechanics" was the latest meme triggered by overhyped location-based apps, foursquare and gowalla. Very rough edges versions. They did standardized the "check-in" concept pioneered by Brightkite, as far as I can tell. At tne SXSW festival, gowalla won (but they played at home). It will be interesting to see how these apps evolve...
8) Twitter announces (finally) its business model (adtweets) and will add metadata to the tweets. Twitter builds a more solid partnership with its developpers (taking the queue from the App store success, for sure). It also buys the best clients out there for iPhone (Tweetie).
9) Last, but not least, the settled buzz over the basic tools for the cloud's infrastructure are called memcached, hadoop and map-reduce.
10) Where's the money? Google's business model (selling text ads in their search results) is well-developed for the desktop web experience but they needed to start from scratch in the mobile space. You see, when people search on mobile, they're only looking for a quick answer. No time to click on anything else, like, say, an interesting ad. But if people are casual-gaming, then maybe, they can spare a few seconds and click on some interesting banner ad. So the cash-cow in mobile advertising, so far, is displaying banner ads in apps. People are doing apps right now in mobile, more than anything else, a lot more than search. Banner ads in apps give money. This is what admob does and does very well. And that is why Google bought them and is working with them.
But Admob CEO is right when he said that mobile advertising is in the "Yahoo phase". I believe apps are only great for gaming, casual gaming, and they're mostly a fad. I believe in more powerful ways to make smartphones smarter. There is still a lot of work to be done. Namely, speech-to-text techniques need to be a hell of a lot better, and the processor power and snappyness needs still to become waaayy better. Telepathy-texting would also be a nice way to perform elaborated searches on mobile devices. Advertising needs also to take a serious advantage on the location-awareness of the hardware. Basically, admob banner ads is only at stage zero, and Google may buy them just to show off a few bucks made, but the biggest game-changing technologies in mobile need yet to be made: faster (processing-power), longer (battery-life), smarter (human-device communication channels -voice,thought,touch-). I'll admit that Apple solved the multi-touch human-device communication channel, and that's a lot! But we need faster and better voice-to-text tech, faster and better image and sound search. It's all about the smart use of all the sensors stuffed in our smartphones. We've only used but a small fraction of what they could do.
Anyway, I have mostly two more ideas that I want to share with you. The first idea is that I'm sensing a reversing in the vision of the webtop. There are too many developers with the app-store gold fever, spending way too much time learning Objective-C and Cocoa and not learning javascript and css tricks. I'm at this point, as in the story of "Dune", where Paul Atreides envisions two plausible pathways for the future to unfold. He drank from the sacred water and it shows either to go "webtop" or to go "mobile apps". In my vision of the future unfolding, I say it should definitively be web-based-mobile-apps, that's where I want to go; but Apple keeps luring developers in droves to its development platform, and this makes the webtop/cloudtop, whatever you want to name it, a little bit more distant. So, unless it is pushed by Google, the webtop will sit idle until things change. Thus, for me, the app store is the *evil*, the *dark*-side of the force. The *white-light* side of the force are web-apps, with html5, javascript, css, apache, php, couchdb, memcached. Those are the ones baby, the one and only.
Why I'm not all in for apps? Too platform specific. But most important of all, not open enough. Cutting short of Tim Berners Lee's vision is not where I want to be. Sure, games make gamers happy. Not my cup of tea, though.
The second idea (or trend, really) is that the free-model is reverting as well. Developers start to reinvidicate (righteously) for users to pay (take Ning for example). This has been imposed by the worldwide economic recession and also by taking the queue from the hottest platform of the moment, the app-store and the itunes store. This is partly good.
A couple of years ago, the most bleeding-edge mobile app developers were betting on windows mobile and blackberry, and they would use .NET and ASPX to develop their web-sites (like Loopt or Wizi). Mobile windows developers will be glad to hear that microsoft is teaming once more with them, and shipping a new and potentially big-deal mobile platform.
All in all, you guessed it: the webtopmania is here to stay. I predict a blossoming of touchtablets-oriented web-sites and the Google cloud productivity suite will get more and more traction. Long live the chrome OS, and may they build another "magical" tablet, one with Android or Chrome OS within...
Finally, a last thought about my vision of the ultimate ebook reader. Hint, it's not an iPad. What's 10 hour autonomy, compared to 10,000 hours? Besides, I like reading in B/W...
Oh, and this augmented-reality thingy? We'll see it popping around again in the near-future, somewhere near you ;)
As for me, I'll have to decide wether I'll keep investing in the web, whether in academia, whether I can do both... and start acting.