The iPhone, Blackberry, Google Android, and the Mobile SupraSphere

Filed under: economy, messaging, mobile

I recently got an iPhone, mostly because I have heard a lot of buzz about it, they recently released an SDK, and since I serve as a sort of personal technology consultant to a number of individuals and businesses, I figured it was time that I developed an informed opinion of it.

Well, it’s quite a different device than the Blackberry, but I can safely say that if you like your Blackberry, do not, under any circumstances, get an iPhone.

The amazing thing about the Blackberry is how transparent it is. It just gets out of your way. Much like SupraSphere, it becomes like an extension of your brain.

On the other hand, here are some of the problems with the iPhone:

1. The network is *really*, *really* slow. The Blackberry that I last had ran over the same AT&T Edge network, but was so much faster for browsing, I am guessing because it serves up much smaller pages. Any benefit of having something closer to the “real web” on your phone is totally ruined by how horrible the browsing is with such a slow network experience.
2. Not only is the network horrendously slow, but the thing doesn’t seem to multitask. On the Blackberry, you could open a link on the browser and then do other things, like read or write emails or whatever (except calling) while the page was loading. The iPhone forces you to watch the page load, really…….really……..slowly. This also applies to email messages. It’s bad enough that iPhone doesn’t have Blackberry’s famed “push” technology, but you would think it could at least download messages in the background.
3. The typing is not nearly as good or as practical as the Blackberry. With the Blackberry, you can type quite quickly, without looking at the keyboard that much at all. Also, you can type pretty effectively and operate the device quite fantastically with one hand. The iPhone requires much more of your focus and concentration to operate.
4. The feature of the iPhone where it turns a webpage horizontally for better viewing/reading is kind of a neat gimmick at first, but they definitely should have made a way to lock it out with some sort of hardware switch. It doesn’t always respond quickly, and sometimes gets stuck in one direction, forcing you to turn the thing in all sorts of directions trying to get it to return to the direction you want. As an example, if you’re walking with the phone in your hand while using the browser to look at an address or directions to a location, each time you drop your hand to the side as you walk and then bring it back up to look at it, the screen will be in the wrong direction. As another example, if you try to show someone else something on the screen while still holding the device, it will often switch directions as you angle it over for the other person to see it better. On the whole, the negatives of the feature outweigh the positives at least 5 to 1.
5. The WiFi capability is pretty pointless, which in all fairness to Apple, has a lot to do with WiFi itself as opposed to the iPhone. Generally there aren’t many open wireless networks anymore, and even when there are, it forces you to stay within range of the WiFi to have the faster speeds making you a lot less mobile. Most of the time, if you’re going to be in a single place for a while, such as in a coffee shop or at home, you will want to use a laptop anyway. Starbucks is supposedly moving to AT&T and offering two hours of free WiFi a day, but it’s no consolation that the iPhone will operate more quickly for the five or ten minutes you might spend in Starbucks. Then, if I’m at a friend’s house, I am most likely not even going to bother asking them for their wireless key, which is even more of a pain to type into an iPhone than into a laptop. If I don’t have my own laptop with me, I’ll probably just ask to borrow theirs instead of using the iPhone.
6. The interface of the iPhone is definitely pretty, but more than occasionally things are not very intelligently laid out. Again, the Blackberry is an absolute interface marvel. Everything is so logical and internally coherent in how it all works together. The most convenient option is always in the right place. For one simple example, with the iPhone mail application, to go back to the Inbox, it’s all the way in the upper left of the screen, which is not the most logical place. For another example, if you go to a web page where you need to login, on the iPhone you have to click and then try to get the cursor into a small text input box or zoom the page so you can even click on the text input box, whereas on the Blackberry the cursor is always automatically selected into a text field and large enough that you can see what you’re typing . That isn’t to say that the Blackberry is perfect, but after using it for years, I can honestly think of only a couple of very minor nits to pick. Generally, you never end up thinking that on the Blackberry something wasn’t supremely logical or intuitive.
7. RIM owns the enterprise market, especially in the financial services industry and generally among C-level executives. That makes it particularly impressive that the Blackberry Pearl has strattled the consumer and enterprise markets so effectively. Still, support for the iPhone inside companies, despite news stories such as these, is very lacking and will continue to be for the forseeable future. There are enough challenges as it is trying to manage contacts and keep everything in sync between the Blackberry, Outlook, SalesForce.com and other systems without throwing another device into the mix. Since Apple has not historically had much success in the enterprise, is the iPhone going to be the start of a deeper commitment to business users for other products as well? That remains to be seen, and it’s hard to imagine the iPhone getting deep penetration within the enterprise without Apple’s also becoming more of a business-oriented company as far as its culture and across their other products and technologies.
8. The iPhone has no ability whatsoever to select text. That means no Copy/Cut/Paste. Totally pathetic!
9. The battery life isn’t that great at all and the battery’s not easily and quickly replaceable on top of it.
10. You have to use iTunes to manage it. Blech. Also see #7.

I could go on about the negatives (like it takes way, way longer to connect to a network after returning from a place with no coverage, like the subway). The only thing that is much better about the iPhone is visual voicemail.

Now that I’ve been very specific about the iPhone and the Blackberry, I would like to move to a slightly bigger picture perspective with respect to the mobile web/internet and where things are headed.

First, I’ll start with some of the negative. Here’s a good article that lists some of the reasons why cell phone carriers suck. One of my mother’s friends swore never to deal with AT&T again after they messed up his credit over some sort of incredibly old bill where they had told him that they wouldn’t charge him for something but then did. Unfortunately, it’s not like there is any option that’s even acceptable, much less good. You’ve heard the stories of insane cell phone bills, including this one for close to $85,000.00! Sprint is hemorrhaging customers and considering a merger with T-Mobile, who I hate and think I am going to file a small claims lawsuit against just for fun. I was a loyal and dedicated customer of theirs for 7 years, and they wouldn’t make a change to my bill because I discovered one of their mistakes “too late”. Rebate programs are a complete and total scam (and in some cases more tedious than filing your taxes), and T-Mobile never sent me a single check for any of the ones I filled out. Actually, I once asked one of their sales people to fill one out as a favor so I could make sure there weren’t any mistakes. Same result. With Sprint, another friend of mine got charged two month’s worth of cell phone service for one month because he changed his plan mid-month, and instead of pro-rating it, they charged him for both plans! It was a more expensive option on top of it! Maybe Sprint and T-Mobile deserve one another after all. “SprinT-Mobile, You can’t blame us for trying!™”. Basically, pretty much all the carriers nickle and dime you over petty pricing schemes, roaming charges, text messages, overages, and random fees.

Cell phone companies should absolutely be completely banned from interacting with credit bureaus, not like the lobbies would ever let that happen. I suppose we should be happy we got number portability. That was probably the only concession that will ever be made.

However, that really only scratches the surface of broader trends. You’ve heard the all controversy about telecom immunity. Whatever. Whoever is fighting those battles, don’t waste your breath. You’re like one person trying to stop a avalanche.

Here are some other gems in the news:

FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool

Is the government reading your email?

Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier — Congress Reacts

Here’s a very good, but surface analysis of why it’s all really stupid, totally unequal, and inherently unfair, no matter how good the hardware or how sophisticated the project. It’s not just that we are all counting on falafel to help catch terrorists, it’s that it completely misses the point regarding how completely backwards all of these approaches are to facing the emerging threats to society like terrorism. We are simultaneously missing a really big opportunity while we obsess over all the negatives, leaving no time and space for the positives to flourish. It’s not only that I’m jealous that the government already has the semantic web, I swear!

Without diving too deep into the utopia vs. dystopia false dichotomy, there are very few of us in my generation (as of now yet to be named, certainly not Gen X, but not what any of the marketers have tried to pin on us) who won’t have this image from the Matrix forever sketched in our heads. Do I have any semblance of autonomy, self-determination, rights in the digital age where there are so many shadowy organizations making all sorts of secret assertions about me, who all exercise individually, and especially considered in aggregate, a massively uneven amount of leverage, power, and control over me? They can ruin my credit, where I can’t even put a dent in theirs. I am not a conspiracy theorist at all (although they are often interesting mental exercises to debunk through comprehensive thinking and principles such as Occam’s Razor), but there is most certainly a confluence, not necessarily conscious coordination, of aligned interests in turning the end user into a highly predictable (no matter how irrational) slave to/of consumption and consumerism.

This is not just about privacy. The grievances are many and deep. It’s about the credit system and credit ratings and credit cards. It’s about identity theft and SPAM/SPIM, viruses, spyware, and adware. It’s about incomprehensible and unnecessarily long contracts and privacy policies that can be changed at any time, click-through-EULA’s, proprietary formats/protocols, software patents, and DRM. It’s about having to get fingerprinted to travel. It’s about our debt-dependent and driven financial system. It’s about obscene corruption in government and corporations. It’s about a general lack of trust in our institutions. It’s about every single organization who provides services (web or not) with the ability to pull the plug, or at least the rug out from under us at any time, who all exercise as much leverage and control as possible from every conceivable angle to squeeze as much money out of you as they can, even if they just slow play their hand. It’s like my friend Val says, “There is no burden greater than what the market will bear”.

So, the ideal mobile system would look like this. It would be open source, hopefully even with open hardware. It would run on an open, free, highly secure and private, distributed and redundant wireless mesh networking grid. It would have amazing social networking capabilities, with pluggable social protocols that could spread virally across regions depending on how effectively they normalize and harmonize within certain communities that adopt them.

When you take a picture, or record a video, it would be securely transferred back to your personal cloud, geotagged in the process. Your music would all be available for streaming directly from your phone. Your phone, being tethered to your own sphere and context, could store voice mail privately on your own server with virtually unlimited storage, with easy speech to text conversion. You could leave personalized voice or text messages for people when they call you, instead of having to call them and leave a message. Like what someone’s wearing on the train? Query their context for what they’re wearing. You could choose to let people query your context for your style and the brands that you are wearing or have worn, with an instruction for others to feel free to ask where you got it, which could actually be reported back to the place where you got it. While at the store shopping, you could call someone who recently purchased an item you are looking at for their opinion, and filter it by people who have been called already by someone else, who agreed to a rule that if they answer your call, you have to agree to write your own opinion afterwards and publish it in the context of the person you called so that other people who call the same person will have the aggregate opinion. This could also work for restaurants as well. With all of the social data available, and because privacy can be preserved, mobile search would actually work with all of the deep contextualization that can be applied to queries. Attributes of products could be stored, such as how far a product had to travel, the various organizations that “touched” it on its way, even with the ability to “search inside” any one of the companies at any level in the supply chain to understand attributes and opinions about each company both as the company presents them and within various spheres.

Synchronization would be totally automatic and transparent, where a change made one place would always be reflected in other contexts, simply because everything would be a query back to the individual’s own private context, with everything federated and centralized around the individual. You could use numerous different devices, like a Blackberry and and iPhone :), where they both read from the same data store for contacts and other information and you could choose which one you wanted to use, maybe just switching between them fluidly just for fun for a different experience or change. If you borrowed someone else’s device, or even traded devices with someone for a while, you could switch to your context and have the interface render and populate with your data.

Indeed, context would be king. Anywhere you went and listened to music or saw something interesting, your phone could query the system, and automatically save the music to your sphere. Your own geolocation would be intelligently managed. For example, it could be automatically published to your family or select contacts at all times, or with interesting rules such as “shared for 20 minutes before any meeting with all the individuals participating”, turned off completely or just masked in certain situations. You could walk around and listen to mini “podcasts” about an area (like those guided tour systems, just available anywhere), filtered according to various attributes, such as “historical”.

Don’t get me wrong. Things like this are cool and definitely a step in the right direction. Google Android is promising, especially when considered in conjunction with open social. But they don’t go nearly far enough, and no one has taken the plunge to take it to the next level, which is what it will take before people like us get really excited. One of my friends works for Google, and says that I shouldn’t be so sure that they wouldn’t be open to moving away from their pattern of trying to make people completely tethered to the Google Grid instead of giving people their own personal, private context. That is what we are doing, working to give individuals their own private grid from which they can individually, and collectively, cause any or all of the myriad of the organizations vying for control and influence to conform to the internal aesthetic of beauty as determined by the individual and their conscience, propagated intersubjectively.

My next post will detail how to get the level of cooperation and coordination from all companies and institutions necessary to bring about the mind-blowing opportunities and possibilities that lay dormant in mapping the social graph on our own, without any training wheels or hand holding.

Nothing described in the above is all that challenging technically and needn’t be that far out all, so I don’t mean to sound like one of those lame “visionaries” trying to say how things will be in the future. With all the buzz around “social networking”, the real challenge, not so ironically, is a social one after all.

“We are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born — a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed.” –Dee Hock, Founder of Visa International

Email and Messages.

Filed under: email, messaging, sphere

It’s now common knowledge that Mozilla wants to do an overhaul of Thunderbird. As for the progress they have thus far in fixing email and messaging, it’s too soon to tell. Don’t think I am a Thunderbird hater, I actually use it to manage my Gmail accounts when I’m on my laptop. However, my personal opinion is that you can’t fix email (and clients for that matter) if they aren’t broken.

Gmail as a web-based client is really nice, I must say. I’ve never really used Microsoft Outlook (except in college) so I can’t really voice my opinion on that. Evolution mail was nice considering Ubuntu integrated it into their desktop edition, but it was lacking in many areas, including the lack of Gmail support. Given the fact that the Thunderbird project is now being headed by Mozilla Messaging, could this mean that in the future, IM is incorporated into their email client? That has yet to be seen, but it’s beginning to look that way, considering the vision statement on the official website and news items like this. Funny thing is, there is this quote of interest:

“We’d like Thunderbird to do searches across common archives and have a better focal point and search system,” said Asher.

We are already there with the wonders of SupraSearch.

Now, the beauty of SS is the amazing *fanfare* email capabilities. Not only is SS an email client, but it is also mail server as well. Having this ability makes it that much easier to set up custom rules for mailing lists, automatic forwarding, and you can even forward mail into different spheres. The idea is that you can set it up to forward any message created in a sphere to forward either to all contacts, all members, or specific other email addresses. The cool thing about that is that when people reply, the reply will go directly into the sphere. It’s sort of like a shared “Sent Mail”, where all members of a sphere can see the sent mail at the same time, and when the person replies, it will show up in the sphere in real-time for all members to see. Attachments are easy to send, also enabling saving documents directly to the server. Interestingly, SS auto-converts all office documents to PDF format to make them fully searchable.

It just goes to show we do messaging differently.

Posts From Start to Finish.

Filed under: blogging, bookmarks, commenting, messaging, sphere

It’s ironic in a way to be using SS to write about it. However, it kind of serves as a practical application of SS’s uses.

Like any typical article that gets written, there is a planning stage. So, usually that begins with a startup of SupraSphere. I have a sphere set up called “Supra Blog Team” which is where I usually post ideas for the next couple of posts. David will usually refine the ideas via terse. After I have a set topic to write about, I *usually* will write a message outline, which I’ve not really gotten into yet with the posts here, but that’s going to be the next one. Commenting on it, it will receive some tweaks, and then I will start the writing process.

From right within SS, I’ll hit <crtl-t> which just like Firefox, opens a new tab, and I log into the blog and start writing. I should mention here that Wordpress is fully functional while in SS as well. Extra tabs also mean it’s easy to search for more information so I can flesh out ideas.

After I get a rough draft, I save the preliminary version, and preview it in another tab. Using the bookmark feature, I then post the bookmark in the Blog Team sphere. David will read it from there, and then using the comment feature to tweak it some more, editing it for grammar and the like. Then, finally, I’ll get the green light to click on “Publish” and another post goes live.

Real-time Webpage Highlighting.

Filed under: bookmarks, commenting, messaging

Most mornings, I get up and go through my routine, which usually ends with me drinking Mountain Dew, and sitting down at the dining-room table. Substituting the normal coffee intake and newspaper reading, I opt for soda and news via the web. My generation is the one that wants and usually gets everything that they want instantly. That being said, usually after about a half-hour of reading various CNN, Routers, Lifehacker and Wired posts, I begin to get a positively torrential amount of mail in my inbox with people cyber-shouting at me: “Quit sending me the same link over and over again! You sent it eleventy-seven times already!” To which I usually reply with: “But did you read the different comments I left for you?” *puppy dog eyes* Call it the caffeinated rush, but I have a lot to say, and to make matters worse, I expect comments back.

…Well, scratch that. That was before I started using SupraSphere. I’ve told you about spheres, terse messaging, and the supra search features. With the terse/bookmarking feature I alluded to, you can visit sites just like any other browser (tabbed no less) or insert bookmarks in terse messages an d in your different spheres. When you bookmark in a shared sphere, things get very cool very fast: everyone can comment on the bookmark.

One cool thing is that you are able to tell when someone reads the message. Their name off on the left hand “people” bar will go from blue to green. That way you won’t have to beg them to read it. ;) Of course you could prod them with a terse message to the bookmark, but once their name goes green you’ll know that they are reading it. You can simply reply to a bookmark via the terse messaging system, although there is another really cool feature to utilize.

What if there is a specific thing on the website that you want someone to see? In shared spheres, there is this big space where most of the time it shows terse messages in-line. However, when you click on a bookmark, a preview will show up in that large space.* At this point, you can still reply in terse, but the feature here is that while looking at that page, you can highlight just about anything and contextually select text to comment on. Simply highlight, right-click, and comment on the content you want them to read. A window pops up, allowing you do do that. If someone comments back, you can read their comment and reply to it. Contextual commenting really makes for some interesting conversation!

In SS, this comment feature is not just limited to bookmarks; email and messages can be commented on too! This along with the many other features of SS make it a truly innovative environment to work in!

*double-clicking on a bookmark will open it up in a new tab.

Simultaneous Messaging.

Filed under: messaging

Well, since I am a complete geek, I love being able to IM my friends. The problem though is that I can’t ever seem to find the important stuff they say while instant messaging. Often my conversations get garbled up because we’ll be talking about something and go so fast that we are actually discussing more than one thing, and we reply, but not fast enough. It’s the trouble with living in constant fast forward. :D

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying SupraSphere is an Instant Messenger, *but* SS incorporates and improves on IM. How is this even possible?

Well, first, let’s travel back in time to 1996, the birth of the modern message board. Back in the day absolutely everyone used message boards, because they had and still have some really great features. Threads were started and then replied to. Even though everything was organized, conversations were not held in real time. The problem was that we’d reply, but never fast enough keep up with the constant stream of communication. The meaning of what we replied was then lost to a swarm of other comments.

Ah, remember the days of chat rooms? Chats took the form of IRC and web based rooms where it was *almost* instant messaging. Good luck trying to reply in a room of 10+ people, as inevitably an entire page-worth of nonsensical multi-colored words were thrown down in literally a few seconds.

Now we have GTalk, Yahoo, AIM, Windows Live, ICQ, and other instant messaging services. Mostly I use mine for a more social aspect, considering I really don’t think it’d be appropriate for a co-worker to see my awesome new icon of the day :P or to see what my status says. Certainly these clients have more useful aspects of them, including SMS messaging, file transfer, image sharing, and direct to email capabilities in some, but these are lost in the over-all “web toy” feel they give off.

SS improves on all three of these forms of communication, with something we like to call “terse messaging”, which is easy and intuitive to use, but somewhat difficult for me to explain. :) It’s reminiscent of a web forum given that it’s threaded. Terse also reminds me of instant messaging and IRC seeing as how it’s real time and can be addressed to more than one recipient, so the meaning of messages is not lost. It provides a much-needed way to communicate the same message to different people, while still allowing you to expound on other trains of thought with other recipients; it could be said that it is “chaordic“. Essentially, I’m saying that SS becomes like an extension of our brains! ;)