Imran Ali

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale

Last week the UK's Home Office, began to considering plans to archive all email and telephony communication as part of the forthcoming Communications Data Bill and ongoing national security operations. As both the BBC and the Times have noted, the proposals originate from an administration that has a comically appalling record of data loss.

Like much coverage of privacy issues, debates flip between Orwellian panopticons at one extreme and absolute privacy at the other; neither is a viable or desirable position. The reality of privacy is that most people view it as less an absolutist human right and more a social construct or vehicle for social transaction; we often trade elements of our privacy for social, reputational and sometimes economic value.

Perhaps the most significant and desirable quality of privacy is a sense of control over how privacy can be revealed, retained and traded by the owner of information - this control is central to the theories of attention economists and startups such as Root Markets.

As such, it's possible to recast the plans of the Communications Data Bill as a benefit to citizens (note that I'm against this bill, but supportive of exploring services that might bring some benefits to archived communication.

Think of all the valuable metadata and media generated by your mobile phone in the course of a day - generally, this is visualised as a dry, itemised billing experienced, when in fact - as illustrated by Gmail - aggregating your personal communications can be immensely valuable. More so as we live our lives in a multi-modal soup of IM, email, SMS and voice calls.

Picture a service that logs numbers, costs, duration and partieds to a call...even transcribing the audio content automagically, or using human APIs. Each call becomes a searchable, replayable and accountable history of your telephony; as the concept screenshot above illustrates - our cellcos have this data, it's not difficult to see how this becomes a feeature of a service such as Google, perhaps even creating a new value chain in the attention economy between users, Google and telcos. Of course privacy converns remain unaltered, but the user in this scenario is extracting some palpable value and a modicum of control.

As time+distance becomes increasingly irrelevant in an world of VoIP, perhaps future value for telephony resides in brokerages for attention data. Ian, began to explore this as part of an R&D programme at Orange - Project Comcentrix - described as a 'Flickr for telephony'. However, perhaps the near ubiquity of Gmail and it's capability for archiving AIM, GTalk and email means that archived telephony is simply a telco-provided feature for webmail providers.

--

Wow, I just realised, Google's noted mission to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful' isn't so linguistically different from Philip K. Dick's 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale'!

--

UPDATE: Tim O'Reilly just Twittered that SkyDeck are working on the problem!

1-Click Data Portability

I used to be Freeserve+Wanadoo's digital identity futures guy - providing technology intel on Hailstorm, Liberty Alliance, Sxip and LID; eventually some of our work contributed to the adoption of  OpenID across Orange.

Throughout this work, no initiative ever seemed to begin with a simple exploration, storyboarding or visualisation of a user's journey or experience of a federated or shared identity. Consequently, the underlying technologies worked well, but failed to anticipate the motivations of real users.

Lately, I've been feeling the same anxieties on the development of standards around Open Data principles and Data Portability. Though individuals such as Marc Hedlund, with Wesabe's implementation of a Data Bill of Rights, have come at it from a user-centric perspective. It's about time some interaction designers got out ahead of the technology, schemas, standards and formats to understand how we'll all experience data interoperability, portability and sharing in a practical sense.

There are some clues in the design of applications like Flickrfs and the notion of a familiar filing system metaphor, but perhaps they aren't entirely appropriate...personally I feel the experience should be as simple as synchronising a pair of connected devices...hence my tongue in cheek visualisation above ;)

Sure synchronising, images, metadata, music, playlist, messages, social graphs and other media between web applications belies a great deal of technological complexity, but shouldn't the role of great design be to encapsulate complexity within simplicity?

Mixed Reality & Exploring Deep Place

In recent weeks I've been thinking that a confluence of innovations could begin to usher in an era of mixed reality and augmented reality applications...

• Together, Google's APIs for mobile maps and mobile search provide a ubiquitous substrate for locative media.

• Phones & cell networks  are now capable of multiple methods of locating themselves - GPS, cell-ID and even SMS commands.

• Gestural interfaces are becoming widely accepted thanks to the iPhone and Nintendo's Wii.

Though producers of actual reality games, such as area/code, gestural handset manufacturers like GeoVector and researchers such as Markus Kähäri have been exploring mixed reality platforms for many years, I believe the Android platform and the upcoming iPhone SDK are where we'll see some action in the next few months.

Rafael Spring and Max Braun have already taken up the Google Android developer challenge with Enkin (thanks Aaron), a 'link between maps and reality' that uses positioning data from GPS, accelerometers for orientation and gestures along with a number of web services to overlay data onto a 3D maps or live camera feeds. In essence, Enkin can alternately provide a God's Eye View of your immediate environment or a 'head-up display'  for whatever you happen to be looking at.

Though Enkin is ergonomically clunky, it points the way towards for multimodal mixed reality; there's no hardware used in Spring & Braun's work that's not in current and future handsets.

A couple years ago, I was mesmerised by the possibilities of my friend Victor's Herescan project at IDII - he playfully describes it as Exploring Deep Place. It looks like Mixed Reality is about to join the fabric of Actual Reality :)

UPDATE: One step closer with Evolution Robotics' ViPR visual search technology for the iPhone...check out the video demonstration on YouTube.

A dedicated iPlayer?

Last week the BBC announced the launch of it's iPlayer service for the Nintendo Wii, hot on the heels of iPhone and iPod touch support last month. It's great to see the BBC supporting so many platforms just a couple of months after the launch of the service and addresses the irony of having iPlayer available for every platform other than TV itself!

However iPlayer on Wii is said to be slow and jerky when running fullscreen, so I got to thinking about how difficult it'd be to create a dedicated iPlayer set-top box...

An Apple TV hacked to run full OSX is about the same cost as a Wii and includes handy support for a remote control, mouse or keyboard...you won't even need to trick your browser's user agent string into spoofing an iPhone or a Wii as the video and page format doesn't really vary.

Now if I had a £180 to spare, I'd give it a whirl...

UPDATE: Sadly, though Playstation 3 can play embedded Flash clips from YouTube, it doesn't seem to be able to cope with iPlayer (perhaps a later version of Flash) and I haven't figured how to hack the PS3 browser's user agent string.

TagTunes: Personal Discovery

Eight years of friction-free access to digital media mean I have so much music that it's becoming easy to forget what I do and don't own.

I know I have all four Bethany Curve albums, but after recently watching couple of the Indiana Jones movies I was surprised to find I also had one of the soundtracks!

Technologies such as Spotlight make it easy for us to locate items we know we have and social discovery services such as Last.FM help us surface music we know we don't have.

However, there's perhaps an opportunity for personal rather than discovery services; those that perform analytics on our existing media, recommending items we already own, but have neglected or simply forgotten about...tools that help us poke around in the unexplored corners of our music or photo collections for example.

It's not too difficult to envisage...

• extensions to iTunes that visualises your listening and creates recommended playlists of music you've not listened to yet, but that matches your other tastes; even unwatched episodes of TV shows you've already downloaded

• an adaptation of Flickr that reminds you of photos from a year ago today.

• an address book, IM network or email service that reminds you of close friends and family you haven't spoken to in some time.

Turkish Delight & The Slow Singularity

When I first heard of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, it was described to me as artificial-artificial-intelligence; the notion of wiring human intelligence into software is geekutopian, but strangely there are few great examples of mTurk applications...is this due to mTurk's potentially severe challenge to labour laws?

Yesterday, I undertook my first HIT (Human Intelligence Task), earning $0.30 for adding a specific URL to my del.icio.us account and tagging it as gardening and cool...enough revenue to pay for my S3 bills! It took me about a minute, so working a 40-hour week would project out to around $8700/year... here in the UK, that's definitely less than minimum wage.

How about some higher value mTurk applications...

• My friend Ian has been unable to IM much in recent days due to his RSI. We joked that he should mTurk some people to impersonate his digital presences in Live Messenger, Twitter and email; an interesting twist on the Turing Test ;)
• Recently I've had to fill out a number of governments forms, applying for public funding to sustain various startup ideas. I would love to mTurk these - they're tedious and I'd love to fire them into an API and pay to get completed forms back for submission :)

--

A few months ago, while we brainstormed our thoughts on emerging technologies, Surj coined the term Proborg - Programmable Human/Software Hybrids- the next step from the collective intelligence of social software and prediction markets.

If basic human cognition can be monetised by mTurk, the implications in connected places where cognition is cheap could give rise to an interesting Proborganism; a half-billion Indian and Chinese kids, equipped with mTurk-fed OLPCs and desktop fabs - the Slow Singularity?

28 Days

The month of Shawwal has been a symmetry of life and death for our family, bracketed by the passing of loved ones and punctuated by the arrival of new lives.

Twenty eight days ago, on the bright, crisp Autumn morning of Eid-ul-Fitr, we lost our beautiful baby sister Aisha after a long and debilitating illness...just three days ago, a distant cousin and my uncle Jawaid died suddenly and unexpectedly.

However, amidst our sorrow, I became an uncle myself with the arrival of my cousin Nadia's newborn son, Idris,...only days later, my youngest cousin Yousef was born.

--

Last Friday, Boing Boing posted a piece on networked tombstones; though ostensibly a morbid fad, the concept is actually quite sensitively articulated. Each headstone carries a device connected to an online memorial, containing genealogical information, a Facebook profile and a family tree. I find this to be a wonderful concept. Cemeteries are not simple places, but densely layered records of human history - overlapping stories of lives, times, places and people that are our shared heritage. To make available the stories of those lost is a fitting monument to a life and also the basis for a locative medium that speaks to us all.

A few months ago, I worked with students of IDII on digital identity, exploring the relationships between people, places and time. Many of the projects explored how we relate to places bustling with life and activity - notably cities and airports. To paraphrase James T. Kirk, if how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life then the places where our lives come to rest should be as significant a part of our digital identity as where our lives were lived.

Acronym.onio.us

I have an irritating habit - whenever I hear a three-letter acronym, my brain starts working on smutty, childish, innappropriate variations. Someone usually has to tell me to stop. In the last few minutes, Aaron and I ping-pong'd out the following from 'LCD'...

• Lonely Cantankerous Drunk
• Lizard Cock Dunker
• Lovely Cock Deepthroater
• Lying Crap Distribution
• Lobotomised Curly Dome
• Likely Colored Door
• Love Can Doom
• Lauren Can't Dance
• Lesbian (Cute) Dormitory

We deliriously thought that this'd make a fun web app - no wait...a game! A circle of players are assigned three letters, each have 10 seconds in turn to come up with something funny (other players 'digg' it), the player with the most thumbs up, wins the round and the chain is shared online. Dead simple, kinda like an online You Don't Know Jack :)

Snippets

Some random ideas that came out of a chat with Aaron yesterday...

• A variant of Terrapass that pays all contributions into an international publically owned and operated fund/trust/PAC for alternative energy issues.
• Smarter Buy It Now, Add To Shopping Basket, or Checkout buttons that show how much money you have in your account in a tooltip...of course you need an API to your bank account.
• Banking events as RSS feeds or some other form of notification stream. Warning me of overdraft events, credit limits - I wonder if such information, presented at the right point, could bring down US and UK consumer debt levels?
• Better online banking - the ability to tag, sort and organise transactions for  receipts, savings folders, intentions - 'put £100 in my Saving for a Macbook folder' - could such 'intentions' be used to drive affiliate programmes? Aaron tells me that this is what Marc Hedlund is working on at Wesabe.
• An IM client that'd automagically blog interesting conversations like this one :)

We finished with a quick chuckle at one of the new Apple ads...

Clickstop Computing

About a year ago I read a pair of articles that got me thinking about how much time I spend online and whether I use that time productively...

• You There, at the Computer- Pay Attention
• Why I'm giving up broadband

Coupled with the recent uptick in writing about the Attention Economy, I've noticed that there's a real need for computing environments that help you manage your attention healthily. I don't mean services that analyse your clickstreams or musical tastes, but tools that simply reflect what I'm doing and helping me make better choices about my behaviour. Reflective Computing perhaps? Some ideas...

• A daily report from my laptop that tells me how I'm spending my time - perhaps by task (email, blogs, surfing), by application or even the ratio of creation to consumption :)
• The ability to set personal rules - 'no work email after 6pm', 'only 1 hour of Bloglines a day' - that help me manage my time better.
• Subtle reminders - perhaps by IM, or Tangible Media - that police my rules and allow me to modify behaviour as circumstances change. Perhaps even suggestions like calling a friend or family member that I haven't contacted for some time.

Fortunately, there are a few tools beginning to emerge that at least support what I call Clickstop Computing - managing the time spent on various tasks and applications...

• Desktop Subversibles* -several playful applets that record, aggregate and visualise the activities of a group.
• Hoverstop Mouse - vibrates to remind carpal tunnel sufferers to take a break.
• SlimTimer - a web based stopwatch service.
• TimeSprite - tracks how much time you spend in different applications.

There's a lot of fruitful research and innovation to be had in this area - perhaps oriented around Maeda's emerging laws of simplicity...

--

* I remember seeing these at Media Lab Europe in 2003, but not really understanding the significance; they were cute, but actually I think they could be really useful now :)