What interests me about micro-content business is that the dynamics of micro-content business differs drastically between free contents versus paid contents.  Free contents are consumables.  Paid contents are properties.

Thinking of paid content as property is an emotional perspective.  I paid for it so I must own it even though it cost me only a quarter and its existance is tenuous.  Thus I think the best business models for paid content business must leverage this human weakness.

Seven years ago when XML-DEV was THE place to be for anyone interested in XML, XML-DEV mailing list members, including me, worked together to create a simple API for XML processing called SAX.  While we did make some mistakes, SAX API was swiftly defined and then adopted.  I have mixed feelings about SAX2 which suffers from the Namespace Curse, but at least I feel better about the SAX API than the DOM API, another standard I participated in creation of.

I would like to give a hearty welcome to David Megginson who led that effort seemingly effortlessly although not without some noteworthy regrets which I agree with.  While mild mannered, he took decisive actions when actions were called for and without causing much controversy.

Hullo, David.  Welcome to the neighborhood.

I searched myself on Web's Biggest (via Ross Mayfield) and got this ad-sponsored search result:

Shop For Don Park Large Selection
MonsterMarketplace features over 2000 merchants. Compare prices on Don Park and save

Hmm.  Apparently I am on sale.  So I followed the link and got:

Dog Park at Amazon.com
Amazon.com/dvd
Save up to 35% on top sellers. Qualified orders over $25 ship free

Ergo, I am a dog park available for 35% off at Amazon.  I wonder if being a dog park is better than being a fire hydrant.

Designing user interfaces is hard but designing products or services is even harder.  Why?  Because, with user interface design, you are only concerned about making user interfaces easy to use.  With product or service design, you have to also consider when, where, and how to make things difficult to use.

Services should be made easy to start using (i.e. one-click registration and subscription) but difficult to stop using.  Idiot designers will think in terms of walls, slopes, and mazes.  Smart designers will think in terms of incentives, habits, and addictions.

Fortunately (?!?), market moves too quickly for anyone except a handful of companies to do either properly, creating an atmosphere of tolerance for the mediocre or even torturous user interfaces, products, and services.

Still here…just busy and temporarily short of inspirational juice to write anything worthwhile.

Continuing my series on mobile platforms, I now think killer mobile apps need mobile devices designed like game consoles, meaning that it has one or two slots for application cartridges.  Each cartridge contains one or more applications.  Cellphones would come with a built-in cartridge containing the phone app as well as others.

Adding a cartridge adds new apps.  Applications have two modes: running and stopped.  The Next-App button (aka Appy button) activates (brings to front) each running apps in turn.  Some apps can activate itself when an event fires (phone call received).  To see the list of available apps, keep the Next-App button pressed for a second.

Eventually, app cartridges will be advance to become platform cartridges, taking over the full functionality of the mobile device to offer better application platform services than the one that came with the device (i.e. easy to use app download service that auto-configures apps for your device).  If you don't like the built-in calender, just stop it and run a third-party calendar instead.

Scott Loftesness agrees with parts of my Who r u? post but he prefers consumers over users and feels that enterprise market environment is different.  I think it is the same, if not more so.

In the consumer market, who is more important than what.  But in the enterprise market, what is more important than who because each person plays one or more roles.

If I, as an enterprise user, need to communicate with an IT administrator, I am not really interested in knowing who the person is.  I just want something done that an IT adminstrator can handle.  If I send a message to Bob, the admin, at bob@docuverse.com and Bob gets run over by a truck, the message is lost.  But if I sent it to admin@docuverse.com, then I am fine.

Names are still useful for better user experience and context recognition (I told Bob something last week so he should know what I am talking about this week).  But do they have to real names?  What if Bob was just an alias for admin and interaction history is easily accessible using a service that logs past interactions between 'Bob' and I?

The other day, I was thinking about wars in the future.  In one of them, soldiers were robots remotely controlled by kids sitting in front of a game console far away.  The question I was toying with was whether the make up of each squad has to be fixed, meaning each kid is assigned to a squad permanently.  If so, then most if not all the squads will be underpowered when they are deployed.

If kids are assigned as they login, then teamwork is lost because each soldier would not know nor trust others in his/her squad.  The solution I saw was to profile-based on-demand assignment.

Simplified version of the idea is this:

If it walks like Bob and talks like Bob, it's Bob to me.

My apologies if your name happens to be Bob.

Identity is big.  Too big.  And unnecessary for the most part.  IMHO, there is no technology on earth at this time that will assure someone else that I am who I am with absolute certainly.  So what is all this clamoring about identity?

Who needs to know my home address?  No one except a handful of delivery companies like Fedex.  Does Amazon needs to know where I live?  No.  Does my bank need to know?  No.

Who needs to know my email address?  No one.  They don't need my email address.  What they need is a way to send me a message.  An anonymous mailbox will do in 99% of the applications.

Who needs to know what my real name is?  Heck, I've been using my Americanized first name, Don, for all of my life in America, 28 years, instead of the name I was born with.  Only time I had to use my real name was at the DMV and at the airport lately.  My real name is DO-PIL.  In most situations, real names are unnecessary.

So what else remains in the identity basket?  Not much.  Certainly  not enough to warrant calling it identity in the sense most people seems to be thinking.  You want to know when I was born?  You want to know what my mother's maiden name is?  Why r u scrapping my skin cells to solve your problems?

Let's face it.  The online world is not screaming for identity services.  We are.  By we, I mean developers, entrepreneurs, marketeers, and reporters.  Control over identity mean nothing to the users.  It's control they are not even aware they need to have.  Giving users full control over their identity amounts to giving them full control over new chores they have to do.

User don't want control.  They don't want identity.  They just don't care.  What they do care about is all the forms they have to fill out, forms which offers zero benefits to them.  Trolls are what they are.

What about online businesses?  Do they really want all that customer info?  What they really want is money.   To get the money, they want to sell things to the users.  Somehow, that translates to pulling teeth from users.

Hogwash.  Forget identity.  Focus on the problems that seemingly calls for identity.  The ball is on the first base still folks.

I haven't been posting much but I am still here, a little busy, but here nonetheless.  On the last day of 2004, I am thinking about some of the ideas I'll be working on next year.

Most significant one is a new form of micropayment service.  I hesitate to call it technology because there is nothing new there in terms of technology.  Rather, it's pulling together old pieces into new configuration and wrapped with easy to use surface.  The goal is to make micro-content purchase addictive and hassle-free.

A less grandiose idea is hopefully a mobile killer app: HyperCard for mobile devices.  The goal here is to make it really easy for cellphone users to create and share simple mobile apps.

I am gonna start exploring and experimenting with both ideas and see where they might lead.

Happy New Year Everyone.

The tsunami born out of the massive 9.0 earthquake in the Indian Ocean took two hours to reach Sri Lanka, but there was no warning.  When the earthquake occured, another tsunami was born: tsunami of information.  Unprepared, tsunami of seawater across the ocean outraced tsunami of information across fabric of technology over social networks.

We can build a tsunami warning system in little time with just what we already have: networks of telephones, instant messaging, e-mail, news feeds, TV, and radio.  If spammers can 'inform' millions of people with a single button, any one of us could have sent tsunami warnings to all the TV and radio stations in the Indian Ocean.

This tragedy reminded me how important time really is in news processing.  While Google News obviously doing much more than time analysis, you can get a lot with simple keyword search for news articles created within a range of time that starts with approximate time of event.  Also general culture or region specific shape of news propagation can be used to increase or decrease search weights.

By combining time analysis with language analysis, it should be possible to identify smaller waves of news within a larger wave.  In a sense, each propation of news is a synchronization in language, meaning we tend to use the words we are exposed to.

Implementation is rather simple but time consuming.  You look for a set of keywords and time range that returns the desired shape.  This process can be short-circuited by increasing weights on words used by search engine users during the same time period.

Hmm.  Looks like I got side-tracked.