Twitter280

It's interesting how technology, as well as having the potential to propel us into the future, has the equal ability to bind us to the past. The need for 'backward compatibility' - either in technology itself or the people using it - often prevents us making those let's-just-scrap-it-and-start-again leaps forward (any Windows users over the last two decades will be painfully aware of this). It's not always a problem, of course, as with the most immediately obvious example: the layout of the buttons I'm striking right now. Mind-blowingly the QWERTY layout was first devised in 1870 (to prevent type-writers from jamming); and it'll be with us as long as we're still using our fingers for the job, because, well, it actually works pretty good.  But sometimes the throwbacks aren’t so agreeable...

The origins of my current bugbear are back in 1985, which seems quite recent to some of us, but then let me remind those same people that Shakin' Stevens had the UK Christmas Number One that year; and even if he was aware of mobile phones at the time he certainly wasn't informed by text message, because they hadn't been invented yet. But this was the year that some bright spark first decided to add a short text messaging feature to the mobile telephony standard.  And, to cut a long story short, eventually the boffins figured out how they could squeeze a whopping 160 characters (7-bit for the geeks) down the control channel usually used for setting up voice calls. SMS was born.

Now, I would never have expected that over a quarter of a century (and no more Shakin' Stevens No. 1s) later my creativity would still being constrained by that 1985 limitation. Not when I am texting - oh no, seamless linking of multiple SMS messages did away with that years ago.  No, it's Twitter, I'm talking about.  And because space has to be reserved for the username when sending out tweets as texts, the limit is even lower: 140 characters!  That's 12.5% fewer than the bolted-on-at-the-last-minute 80's mobile texting technology.

Yeah, yeah, I get it.  Micro-blogging.  And yeah, yeah, I get it, many people around the world still use SMS to access Twitter.  But, to be honest, tough.  It's too late - the bird has flown.  Few people accommodate those users now anyway - they are oblivious to them.  A huge proportion of tweeters now circumvent the 140 character limit by just posting links to blogs (of the non-micro variety), which kinda defeats the point, and which people with non-smartphones can't access anyway.

So it's time to admit it. 140 characters just isn't enough. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting to remove the limit altogether, because I do buy into the concept. I just think the number was never right in the first place. So, let's bite the bullet and double it.  Simple.  Retweet #twitter280 if you agree and let's get it trending ... because length does matter!

[PS: apologies to all those third-party developers of Twitter-related apps who've used statically allocated arrays - but, well, that's just bad practice.]

Hardcover Story

Don’t get me wrong I’ve got nothing against ‘milking’. It brings back fond memories of A-Level economics.  I think we called it ‘price differentiation over time’ back then, and it’s ubiquitous in the marketplace, from train tickets to PlayStations. But the publishing industry is the only example I can think of that feels it has to dress it up as a different product. In this resource-conscious time, the right thing to do is bring the paperback out immediately and steadily bring it down in price. It’s not the price I object to, it’s the form factor. Of course, I know, this is not something an individual author or even publisher has much control over – the industry ‘just doesn’t work that way’. But my concern is that this is another sign the industry is unwilling to move with the times, to defend itself. Those pesky indie- and self-publishers (ahem) have mobilised – and, believe me, they’re not packing hardbacks.

(This was written to elaborate on my recent tweets regarding what will likely be my last ever purchase of a novel as a physical book, Killer Move by Michael Marshall (Smith))

Smartphone App 'Immaculart' Kick-Starts Global Recovery

[Still trying my hand at those tabloid headlines - expecting a call from Murdoch any day]

So I posed a question in my last blog post:

What class of product generates value from thin air?

Well, with no further ado, the answer I had in mind was...

...ART.

Not everyone likes art, I know.  But a lot - I'd say most - do. And the beauty of art (beyond the aesthetic kind) is that it can be owned at effectively zero cost.  It can be enjoyed without being consumed, appreciated without depreciating. It is an asset.  I'm not saying that if you are silly enough to buy a painting of a dot for ten grand that you'll ever recoup your outlay.  But if you discover a piece you really like and you're willing to pay a couple of hundred quid for it, then you can pretty much guarantee that there are a thousand other people out there that would do likewise.

And it is this ability to be both consumer product and asset at the same time that makes it a very useful tool for redistributing wealth in a socially ethical way (unlike, for instance, the insane notion of a lottery!! - sorry pet hate).

Of course many artists face difficultly in getting their art seen by those thousands who might appreciate it. So a few months back, when I had my epiphany, I began work on a little project. And at long last it takes its first tentative steps into the real world.

The project is called: immaculart.

It's an art gallery. For your phone.

It's an app where you can browse and buy real art by real artists.  And, also, for a more passive experience, you can allow the app to change your wallpaper periodically to a great piece of art from our collection.

Right now, it's just in a pilot phase, but it's live and you can try it out - only on Android at the moment I'm afraid.  But if it goes well, it will be made available on other platforms and more features are in the pipeline.

So, if you like art, do download the app, give it a try and let me know your thoughts (or any problems).  Or if know an artist, tell them to get in touch.  This is a way of them getting their work out to the world.

Contact me on paul.newell@immaculart.com or any of my other email addresses :)

Elixir of Value

So we all know that encouraging people to spend money is one way of stimulating the economy. But that's about as limited a notion as trying to measure the extent of that stimulation via GDP. After all, having a car crash stimulates the economy, and adds to GDP (by virtue of all the medical treatment and car fixing involved), but no one's suggesting we encourage those. The problem here is in measuring output and not outcome (a really nice way of putting it borrowed from Umair Haque).

But this is all covering ground I've discussed before. The point that's important here is that what we spend our money on is crucial. We have lots of choices on that front, and their outcomes are all different, so you'll be glad to learn I am not going to begin analysing them all here. But in putting thought to this a little while ago I stumbled across a particular type of product with a very special property: it generates value from thin air.

Let's just consider the individual cost of buying a normal product. If you spend, say, £500 on a TV, how much has it cost you? £500? Well no, because you now have a TV, which has a value. But it's now secondhand, so scarily enough it's probably already depreciated 50%. So the actual monetary cost to you is about £250. Over time it will depreciate to nothing and will cost you the full £500, but over that time you will value the utility from owning it at far greater than that. So all is good. But not great. We generated some value and then saw it witter away into nothingness.

Now, diamonds are cool (of course) - as are many minerals. They don't depreciate. If you spend £500 on diamonds, then they are still worth £500. And over time they are likely to actually appreciate in value.  Awesome. But, these already exist. All of them. There are only a finite number of diamonds in the world - that's why they hold their value. So there is no generation of value here - just the moving of it about a little.  (Without going into detail, houses can be considered similarly. Because, it's mostly the land that gives a house its value, and that is finite also.)

What if there were a product that could be made from basic materials, such that it has added value over and above those materials (just like a TV), but that then appreciates in value over time? That would be ... really interesting. Why? Because, if person A (Alice) could make these things, and person B (Bob) wanted one, then a rather intriguing scenario ensues. If Alice has £20 and Bob has £500, and Alice can make a product from £20-worth of raw materials that Bob is happy to pay £500 for, then Alice now has £500 and Bob has something which is worth £500 (and will be worth even more in the future). We've generated permanent value from nowhere!

Is this possible?

Yes.

So what is this magical product? Well, let me know your thoughts...

Honey, I Shrunk the Economy

So, you want to know who broke the economy? I admit it:  it was me.

(See how I've heeded the lessons of good journalism by opening with a snappy but exaggerated claim which I'll go on to caveat heavily until its interest is eroded to nothing?  Here I go...)

Okay, not just me, but the demographic to which I belong. And okay, not broke exactly (that was the bankers, we all know that), but at least left in tatters.

The thing that struck me about the UK's flailing attempts over the last fours years to save us from a financial meltdown, is that the two main waves of attack seemed oddly opposed. First we had Quantitative Easing Brown (which sounds dodgier than I'd hoped) with his plan to spend spend spend our way out of trouble; and then came Osbourne's message to tighten the purse strings and pay down the debt (both his and ours).  It makes you wonder where we might be right now if we'd done nothing all along. But of course, it's more complicated than that.  Well, actually, no it isn't more complicated, it's really simple. What we really need, is both. We need the people who have money, to spend it. And the people who don't have money ... wait for it ... to not spend it. That's it in essence, but trying to promote this behaviour via government policy isn't so easy.

This is where it becomes my fault. Because I am in the fortunate position (like many in fact) of having benefited from the Global Financial Crisis. Not life-changingly, but I still have a job ... and my mortgage rate is lower than ever. So, it is in part my responsibility to give something back. How? Well, I could buy a new car a year-or-so earlier than I was planning to; or upgrade my TV like I've being saying I would forever (12-year-old CRT still going strong!). And this extra-extravagance on my part would help, of course (if others like me did similar). But it's not really very sustainable. It's basically getting the economy going via the policy of throwing stuff out - which I can't begin to promote. It's also not a very direct stimulus. Buying Panasonic isn't going to greatly aid the local community.

But there is one other commodity that maybe I, and maybe lots of people who can afford to, should invest in more of ... time. Not investing time, but investing in time. Buying it. Because the nub of the problem is this. There are millions of people who can't find work, and there are millions of people who work too much. I am at the most financially secure of my life and yet I work longer hours now than I ever have, if you count the 2hrs commuting a day (something I said I would never ever do). There is enough work - it just needs to be shared out a little better. The most extreme method of redressing this inbalance is for more people - those who can afford it - to work part time. But I'm not suggesting this at all.  For there is a way of buying time at a much lower price. In fact, there are hundreds. Especially if you are a low-skilled lazy-ass like me. Let me just reel some off...

Firstly, no brainer in my opinion. Get your groceries delivered.  It costs five quid and saves an hour of your life every time; and give a packer and a driver a job. Next, get your windows cleaned by the local man with a bucket. Maybe consider a cleaner for the inside of your house too. Pay a youth to mow your lawn. And don't put aside that weekend to paint your house, get the decorators in, and take yourself to the seaside. Don't struggle with DIY tasks that an odd-job man on the next street can get done in a fraction of the time. You see, it's all about specializing. You do what you're good at every day at work.  Offload some of the other jobs to other people. Go on, buy yourself some time - you've earned it. And the economy needs it.

Give yourself a break. Give someone else a job.

Addendum:  Please don't take any of this the wrong way - (a) This is mostly directed at me (and a subset of the economy) and (b) I don't know what I'm talking about.  Tomorrow, however, I genuinely will reveal how you can generate value from nothing!  Quantitative easing, without the downside.  Watch this blog.

Democracy or Fallacy?

It only occurred to me the other day that one of the greatest hurdles in solving the world's problems is that we don't live in a democracy.  Not even close.  Most people would probably agree that it takes a balanced cross-section of skills to make a society run smooth.  The right mix of, say, doctors, scientists, engineers, carpenters, teachers, artists, and so on.  It's impossible to say what the exact ratio should be, but what we can say is that in a democracy each should get an equal say in what's best for the country.  Now, it's true we all get an equal right to vote.  But in a developed and (relatively) stable country like the UK a vote doesn't count for much as the alternatives are so similar.  We only have three main parties and two of them are in power!  So every couple of years or so the doctors and the scientists, etc., each get to vote in some fairly meaningless election, whereas every day it is only politicians that get to vote in the important legislation-making decisions.  Now, if doctors know about medicine and carpenters are skillful with wood, what are the skills that set politicians apart?  There are a lot of negative answers to this one, but keeping positive, politicians are good at making arguments.  Essentially, they are good at having opinions, and making the case for those opinions.

Ah, I hear you argue, but politicians may come from any background.  This is true, but in no one's imagination is the make-up of any political body representative of the population at large.  Take the US congress.  Of its 535 members, 222 of them are ... wait for it ... lawyers.  Ten of them are scientists.  The latter group are trained to ascertain facts.  The former group are trained in the selective use of facts to win arguments.  With whom would it be best to entrust our most important decisions?

Finally, to illustrate this point most sharply, I want to re-tell a story I read about the UK Chancellor, George Osborne.  He is currently grappling with the biggest economic challenge of our era, maybe ever; a problem which no one understands.  It's comforting to note then that Osborne has no formal training in economics.  But there is one thing he is outstanding at, illustrated nicely by this tale.  At the age of 17 George was due to take part in a debate about nuclear disarmament, and he was arguing the case for maintaining a nuclear deterrent.  A tall order in itself, but as he rose to speak he was called away to play in a rugby match. Leaving his notes behind, some guy in the audience stood and read them for him.  He won unanimously.  He won, without even being there, by the strength of his arguments only.  Just as a footnote, Osborne didn't even know he wanted to be a politician, he just fell into a role of researcher at the Conservative Office and then a speech writer (of course) for William Hague.

So, the country (world) is being run be a bunch of individuals who are very good at getting their point across, sometimes despite the facts.  But then, of course, it is just as ludicrous to consider that we have a referendum on every state decision.  Maybe if we've got a point to make we all need to get together an stand outside a church ... no, hold on, don't think that's such a good idea either.

Social Media: It's Time to Open Up

The final straw has been cast onto the camel's back of my social-media tolerance.  And now you must endure my whinging about said straw ... and the two before that - you lucky lucky things.

The final straw was cast by the mobile handset manufacturer HTC - who I did have a lot of respect for - but who have now spent however many millions of dollars on developing a very slick and feature-rich phone.  It looks like a nice phone.  I might even have considered it for my next upgrade.  Except for one tiny little detail.  And that tiny little detail happens to be a rather familiar blue-square-with-a-white-F-in-it motif.  Yes, it's been unashamedly branded as a Facebook phone.  I don't just mean it's a phone on which you can use Facebook - you can do that on any smartphone.  No, I mean that this phone's one-and-only little button, is none other than the aforementioned blue square we cannot seem to escape these days.  And what does the button do?  Well it rather nauseatingly offers a 'one touch to Facebook' capability, of course.  Excuse me while I decide whether to cry or vomit.

The penultimate straw was Google+.  I've lived through FriendsReunited and MySpace and Facebook and the one positive that can be stated for this progression is that it was a progression in the that the forerunners fell by the way side and slipped into near obscurity.  But this trend has stopped.  New services are forming without the old ones dying off. Google+ is the latest to join the fray.  Does the world really need another address book to manage?  Before the internet, I only had one!  Technology was supposed to make life easier.  It was supposed to do away with mundane tasks, not pile on evermore layers of social bookkeeping.

The antepenultimate straw was the explosion of these social media brands into every corner of my life, in particular onto public services like the BBC.  I don't believe that it's appropriate for a supposedly non-commercial and impartial entity like the BBC to say the words Facebook and Twitter a million times a day.  How is it different from them saying, "and if you'd like a drink after the show, why not try Coca-Cola?"  And it's not just those two names, many times I've heard the News chaps say "and joining us by Skype".  Why do we need to know?  Do they think it makes them seem hip and trendy?  It doesn't.  It's product placement just the same.

So, that's it.  I've had enough.  It's time for me to spell out the next great evolutionary step that the internet must take - for all our sakes.  But we'll get to that.  First, let me offer some context.

You would be forgiven for thinking that we didn't know how to communicate before the likes of Twitterbook and SkypedIn and whatever the hell other globalised monsters have emerged from the Valley of Silicon.  But we did know, and we did so without the utterance of a brand name or the reliance on bespoke technology.  We never had to say 'send me a RoyalMail' or 'I'll give you a BritishTelecom later.'  And even when the internet trundled into existence we could simply 'email' people - we didn't have to 'Hotmail' them.  I didn't need to have a Hotmail account to email someone who did, or a Lycos account to email someone who chose that as their provider.  It almost went that way.  In the early days, CompuServe and (the original form of) AOL were closed off networks, with the internet just providing the route to their door.  But common sense (or something) prevailed, open standards were written, and lo we could all communicate and exchange our various monikers in a brandless fashion.  Even when the web came along, it was all beautifully non-proprietary.  At the end of the BBC News they never had to say, visit our 'Yahoo page' - they still don't.

Fortunately, it was understood at an early stage that an electronic mail system and the world wide web would only ever work as an open enterprise, because these two services are arguably the two most fundamental services built on top of the internet.  Of course, the internet hosts countless other applications: multi-player video games, financial transactions, video conferencing, streaming TV and radio.  But there is a key difference with these applications ... it doesn't matter if people don't all use the same one.  It doesn't matter if some people play Call of Duty, some play World of Warcraft and some play Pacman - and it doesn't matter if these games don't interact with each other.  In fact, it's better that way ... it's called competition.  But with email and the web - just like the internet that underpins them - we all have to be a part of the same system.  We all have to be part of a single globally defined addressing and naming scheme.

Think of the web (or email) like a railway system.  The stations can all be owned by different people and look totally different, just like websites or email providers do.  But there can only be one rail network running between them.  And the trains themselves, well they can have anything in them, just like your emails can, as long as the outside of the train is the right shape.  The magic would is protocol.  Anyone can build a train, or lay tracks or run a rail service, just as long as there is an agreed protocol that they all conform to.  Such a non-proprietary protocol is often called an 'open standard' - one which anyone is free to use.

So what does this have to do with Facebook phones?  Well, I have a very serious point to make.  In fact, I have what might be termed a Big Idea.  It's an idea that could revolutionize the internet.  Or it could be read by about 6 people and ignored.  Time will tell.  Anyway, my Big Idea is this:

An open standard to exchange social media information

Boring, huh?  Well maybe, but revolutionary it is too.  Because social media is no longer a little experiment by a few enterprising start-ups.  There are in fact no words to describe just how big it is.  Facebook is pushing a billion users all on its own.  A billion.  That's insane.  On this scale we cannot deny that a social media facility is now the third fundamental service offered by the internet, after email and the web.  It's time for it to be recognised as such and it's time for it to be treated in the same way.  And by the same way, I mean: a single social media addressing system and a choice of whatever vendor's application you like to exploit it - just like email or the web.

The belief that this makes sense hinges on the realisation that we have reached a point where all the social media sites are converging on the same set of features.  Those being:

• Defining a set of contacts (be they friends, associates or whoever)
• Posting status updates
• Uploading pictures
• Instant messaging
• Video/voice chat
• Installation of arbitrary third-party apps/plug-ins.

All of the following do no more than the above: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Skype.  And yet I have an account with all of them!  I don't want to have.  All I want is a single application, with fine control over who-sees-what (and indeed, what-I-see).  And what would be the result?  Well, I could use Facebook and you could use Google+ and somebody else could use an open source offering - and we could all share our social media.  How jolly!  Only in this way can we avoid in a few years time an endless list of brands being reeled off at the end of every TV and radio show: "follow us on this, join our page on that, visit us over here".  Only in this way can we avoid having to jump on a new social bandwagon every few years, with all the overheads that entails.

So it's time for me to stand up and make a request to the world for

An open standard to exchange social media information.

It is feasible.  Not trivial, but feasible.  I know, as well as anyone, how much effort it will require to put together such a standard.  But it is needed.  I absolutely believe that it is.  If you believe that it is too, please just spread the word.  I here social media is a good way of doing that :)

Over and out,
Newell ... you can follow me on Twitter ;)