Warning: this is a highly geeky post and if you're not familiar with financial technical analysis it will probably be really boring.

One of my hobbies is trading options and futures.  I dig technical analysis; the idea of assessing market psychology using data visualization appeals to me.  I think the fact that I owned a business intelligence company doesn't hurt, either.  I'm always interested in new and novel approaches to visualizing data, especially when they provide a better understanding of the underlying data.

Financial data, especially options data, is extremely complex.  There's just gobs of it there that you might want to analyze, and the analysis tools that I've seen don't come close to helping you understand it in a useful way.  I imagine there are many other industries and areas with data this complex that suffer from the same problem.

The problem as I see it is that technical analysis tools have been stuck in two dimensions forever.  There are probably some custom applications that hedge funds and investment banks have written, but every commercial product that I've seen and used for trading has been two-dimensional.  Now, two dimensional trading platforms have become very advanced over the years, and offer a plethora of indicators, but they're still stuck in two dimensions.

But the amount of data you need to look at at one time does not lend itself well to two dimensions.  It's just really clunky.  Especially when you get into options trading, where there is literally a three-dimensional array of prices and multiple attributes associated with each price (such as volume and open interest).  For each month you have an options chain, which is an array of put and call options at various strike prices for that month.

But that's just for one month.  If you want to look at more than one month at a time, which is a common thing to do, you lose a lot of the resolution you get when looking at an individual month (because you're losing a dimension).

Imagine how hard it would be to chart these individual option prices over TIME.  (You can't.)  People have devised some pretty elaborate grids to handle complex data, but nothing nearly as intuitive as the standard line chart is for simple price information.

Surely with all of the advances in human/computer interaction in recent years, something better is possible.  There are the obvious 3D charts, but most of the time they're just for looks and don't do much with the extra dimension.  One of the ways I've fantasized about seeing options data is similar to an elevation map, with price on the Y axis, time on the X axis, and month on the Z axis.  You could even use the color to show open interest or something.

But even with simpler data, such as price over time, I'd even be happy with TRUE 3D charts.  Why can't I plot price on the Y axis, time on the X axis, and volume on the Z axis?  Why can't I draw technical analysis support and resistance lines as 3D objects? 

Ideally I would love to be able to flip between 3D visualization models and draw technical analysis studies in 3D space.  There are some interesting data visualization tools out there, but they're typically applied to physics modeling rather than financial data.

Of course, drawing lines and such would become much more complex in a true 3D environment like this.  However, coupled with 3-dimensional user input such as the interactions enabled by the Wii remote, I think this would create a compelling user interface for these complex data sets.

I've played with these ideas a bit, and the financial data just isn't accessible enough for me to play with on a hobby basis.  The API's and infrastructure are all very archaic at this point, they haven't caught up to where the consumer Web was five years ago yet.  It'll most likely involve some concentrated design and coding time, time I just don't have at the present.  Oh well... a project for someday when I'm retired I suppose:)

At some point in a person's life--I THINK every person's life, but obviously I'm not sure because I only have first-hand experience with one--he discovers what he wants to do his life.  Paul Graham calls it what you love to do.  I wanted to be a computer programmer from the time I was 11 (yes, I have been a geek for a while now :).  You always hear about wanting to be a fireman or an astronaut when you grow up, but I dreamed about being the best computer programmer in the world.  (I still haven't achieved that yet, but I'm still learning and I'm still relatively young ;) 

After I had worked as a programmer for years, I realized that the true art behind building software does not lie in writing elegant code, but in creating a great user experience and adding value for your user.  I learned that both from owning my own software company (purification by FIRE) and by learning from Steve Jobs.  So my goal has evolved a bit over time, but not too much.  In the end I still just want to create things that make people happy.  I think that's why I enjoy painting as well.

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir mens blood and probably will not themselves be realized."
- Daniel Burnham

Aside from myself, I've only seen this moment, when a young person finds out what they want to do with their life, a few times.  It seems like it usually happens at about 11 to 14 years old.  And while some are certainly motivated by money, many are not.  It seems to be almost random, and I don't know what triggers it.  Mother Teresa had a passion for helping people.  I think that's fantastic, and it has to be one of the most fulfilling ways to spend your life.  (Not coincidentally, if you read about her, you'll find she also decided what she wanted to do at age 12.)

The ethereal thing that determines if the person actually reaches their aspirations seems to be "ambition".  Throughout my life I've often heard people say that I'm "ambitious", and after thinking about it for a while I think the only difference between myself and others is that I have no doubt about the fact that I CAN reach my goals if I just keep trying.  Other people have great dreams, but as they don't think they're within the realm of reason they never do anything about them, or they scale them back significantly.  Thus, by taking the fact that people apply this label to me and that's the only difference I can see between myself and others to whom the label is not applied, I consider "ambition" to be the idea that you CAN reach your goal.

The period of time when a child figures out what his aspirations are seems absolutely critical.  It defines the rest of his life.  It can go one of two ways, and the direction it goes seems very dependent on his environment.

Down the first path, the child will receive the encouragement and support he needs to pursue his dreams.  The person who goes down this path gains what is known as "ambition", because he believes that if just keeps on going he will eventually reach his goal.  Because of this ambition, nothing stands in his way for long.  He will go under, over, around, or through whatever comes between him and his dream.

Down the second path, his parents and other people who supposedly know more about the world will try to "talk sense" into him.  As in, try to talk the child into a goal that's more in line with their view of the world.  The sad thing is that kids don't share the preconceived notions that adults do about what's "realistic" and what's not.  They are a blank slate.  But that also means that they soak up whatever their parents tell them about life.  So from the very point they realize what it is that will make them happy and fulfilled, they are being told to scale back their aspirations and bring them in line with their parents.  I imagine the same phenomenon occurs when a parent tries to live vicariously through their child, trying to shoehorn him into the aspirations that they themselves never pursued and have regrets about.

Do you know people who always look unhappy?  There was a guy like that on Hell's Kitchen this season (Matt)--Jessica and I would always laugh at this guy because he always looked constipated.  I also know several people like this myself, who shall go un-named :)  Now, I can't speak from experience, but I can guess that if I were to scale back my aspirations in any way I would be pretty miserable spending my life doing things I had no passion for, and I suspect that this is where a lot of these people get that expression.  Being told that you can't do what you want to do for the rest of your life would be a pretty terrible experience, I suspect, enough to scar you with a permanent scowl if you believed it.

The interesting thing is that there seems to be a window of time after a person realizes what his aspiration is where he will hold onto that dream regardless of the negative feedback he gets from his parents.  I remember sitting at a wedding years back talking to a young guy who wanted to be a computer programmer.  He was 16 at the time and had been trying to teach himself to program from books--he didn't even have his own computer, and he'd been trying to teach himself anyway.  For obvious reasons I felt a connection with this kid, and I was trying to encourage him and even volunteered to give him an old computer I had.  At the same time his mother was sitting next to him pooh-poohing the idea, telling him to stop talking nonsense, and literally telling him that he couldn't take the computer I was trying to give him.  (And all he wanted to do was PROGRAM COMPUTERS, not make cold fusion work or something!)  I literally argued with her about it, and she would not let him take a free computer from me.  Something about "pride", I think.  I wanted to slap her.  Needless to say, last time I heard about this kid he had given up on being a programmer and had joined the Marines.  Tragic.

Sean Park wrote a post that touches on a problem that is near and dear to my heart, and one that I don't have an answer to:  how to find young people who are in negative environments and are in that "window of opportunity" to get that ambition they need.  I've often told Jessica that if I could find a way to identify and help these kids I would immediately start a charity to do so.  The problem is, there are a number of challenges involved with this. 

The first problem is how to identify and locate these individuals.  I've only run into them by chance, and I can't see any way to do this other than having somewhat deep conversations with them.  That doesn't scale well.  The second problem is, what do you do once you find them? Certainly you can offer them encouragement and guidance, but is that enough?  Obviously I wasn't able to help the young man from my example earlier.  These people face negative reinforcement twenty-four hours a day at home, is that little bit of encouragement you give them enough to overcome that?  Certainly providing them with some level of equipment and/or connectivity to more encouragement is a huge step in the right direction.  But even then, you yourself may still have to overcome parental obstacles just to get to that point, as I failed to do.

Sean wonders if the Internet can't help in some way, and I imagine that it can:

I wonder (I hope) if perhaps there are ways to use the power of the web, social media, ubiquitous and cheap communication to open previously closed horizons to young people who haven't had the good fortune to be born in the right place, to the right parents. To afford them the self-evident right to have ambition. To dream.

I have the same hope.  Is there some kind of social network or application that doesn't exist yet which will help identify these individuals and bring them to the attention of people who can help motivate them and push them forward?  Can we build some sort of social network scanner which will identify these people?  Does anyone have the right solution to this problem?  I don't know.  If there is I would love to participate in it.  Helping young people gain and keep the ambition to keep driving toward their dreams and aspirations would be one of the most fulfilling endeavors I can think of.  And the contributions that these people would make to society would almost certainly repay your time and effort many times over.

P.S.  I hope nobody takes this post the wrong way.  It's not meant to be egotistical in any way, but rather to help define a problem that I seriously think about on a regular basis and am hoping that the Internet community can eventually find a solution to.

In what has to be one of the most interesting ideas in recent days, Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch has proposed building an open source tablet PC specifically designed for surfing the Web.  If he pulls this off it could change the way hardware is built and marketed.

His plans are ambitious (and supposedly realistic).  He envisions a device that:

• Costs $200
• Is MacBook Air-thin
• Runs FireFox and Skype
• Has built-in wifi, 500MB of RAM, and a 4GB hard drive
• Has a headphone jack, speakers, and a microphone

The device itself sounds pretty cool, I'd probably buy one for surfing on the couch at home.  He's absolutely right about the concept, something is needed to surf the Internet in an easy, unobtrusive manner.  But I think Mike's plan for making the product materialize is even more interesting:

We’ll organize a small team of people to spec this out. First is the marketing document that just outlines what the machine will do - we have a first draft of that already and will post it soon. Then we’ll spec out the hardware and get people to help write the customized Linux and Firefox code. Once we’ve completed the design we’ll start to work with the supply chain company to get an idea on the cost of the machine (the goal is $200), and hopefully build a few prototypes. Anyone who contributes significantly to the project would get one of those first prototypes. If everything works well, we’d then open source the design and software and let anyone build one that wants to.

If this actually works it could be the first time that a relatively complex piece of hardware is actually brought to reality via an open-source initiative.  This, I think, is even cooler than the device itself, as to this point in time sophisticated hardware has only come from highly specialized electronics companies like Apple, Sony, Samsung, etc.  Opening this market to the community is an exciting idea that I hadn't even thought of much up to this point.

We're pretty used to open source software at this point, just about everybody uses it in some form or another.  (The higher your "geek quotient" the more likely you are to use open source software, but MANY people I know who aren't in the tech industry use FireFox now.)  Extending this comfort and familiarity into the physical realm and making open source hardware common would change a LOT of things.  I can envision open source televisions, stereos, headsets, and even full laptops coming invading the market if this gets traction.

There's already open source hardware out there, but it's REALLY rough around the edges.  There's an MP3 player and at least the software portion of an open source mobile phone, but they're not ready for prime time.  I wonder if something like Arrington's Internet tablet might propel this idea of open source hardware to the extent that it could really get some legs and make an impact in the marketplace.  Setting up a business where consumers can configure and order a customized piece of electronics from open source designs might be an intriguing business idea in the next couple of years.

The other day I wrote a post about unified communications, and how I feel the term "Unified Communications" (UC) is in danger of becoming too fuzzy to be practically useful.  While anecdotal evidence suggests that the term is gaining momentum at incredible speed, I noted that its definition seems to be becoming muddied in direct correlation with its popularity.  Don Price does a good job of summing up my view on this topic:

"It is interesting and I tend to agree in a perverse way [that] just about any application could be part of [a] UC experience. Once convergence is complete for all IT services then the boundaries where a person communicates and where they are just using IT systems will be hard to distinguish. Yet without clear  definition of a label, and what it applies to, it is very hard for us to move a concept forward."

Bingo.  My post answered the question of what UC means to me (a consistent communications experience transparent across all communication channels, emerging from a unified online identity), I was curious what UC means to others who use it on a regular basis.  So I posed the question to the UC Google group, which is made up of UC analysts, vendors, customers, and consultants.  They had some interesting input on their definition of UC, almost none of which jived with mine :)

• "My initial opinion is that the definition of UC should involve a key reference to Presence which to me seems a key component of the UC." - Mike England
  • My take:  I agree with this assessment, and presence seems to come up repeatedly from various people.  This makes me believe that XMPP will be a fundamental technology in UC, especially considering that it's baked into the new iPhone.
• "UC to the end user is about knowing who is available when and how AND then having the tools easily available to reach them from within a unified interface... [and] leveraging network and telephony infrastructures to utilize economies of scale to reduce costs." - Herb Pyles
  • My take:  Presence by any other name sounds just as sweet.  The idea of a unified interface to utilize many different forms of communication is just now becoming viable with widespread adoption of smart phones, especially the iPhone.  (If you start to get the idea that I think Apple will be a big player in the UC space you'd be right!)
• "In a perverse way, essentially [every] piece of equipment connected to the IP network is UC and any application running on those devices [is] UC." - Kip Heuertz
  • My take:  I agree, and that's the main reason I started this discussion.  If the definition isn't nailed down fast, UC is in danger of becoming meaningless.
• "UC is a vision or philosophy that leads to solutions - it is not a product." - Blair Pleasant
  • My take:  This makes a whole lot of sense from an English standpoint, however the "UC as a product" train has already left the station.  "UC as an architecture" DOES in fact make more sense than "UC as a product", but when MAJOR companies are selling "UC as a product" I think that's a battle that will not be easily won.
• "You cannot call a communications vendor and buy UC as a product - no SKUs I know of. It is a solution, not in the sense of the traditional sense of a 'vertical solution'. This solution is made up of multiple "features" that can be viewed in a modular sense." - Herb Pyles
  • My take:  This is one of my favorite definitions.  Or rather, anti-definitions.  UC is the sum of its parts, which enables the UC philosophy.  That makes a lot of sense to me.
• "To be unified means the services are accessible (not Section 508) from any of the elements... Whatever the underlying technology used to support accessibility it is [a] set of services which make such interchanges work as demanded by the user." - Don Price
  
  • My take:  Aha!  A PRACTICAL definition of UC!  I really like this, in fact.  It is a practical definition which is usable when setting a strategy.

I really like Don's definition.  It is actually USABLE in the sense that you can build an architecture around it, and it adheres to the "philosophical" definition of UC as defined by many others.  UC as an architectural philosophy demands that all of the elements of the communications network be usable by any other element and they work together in the manner that the user desires.  In that sense it is an extension of both the Web 2.0 "make everything re-usable by the user" philosophy and the service-oriented architecture "expose your functionality on the network" philosophy.

The one thing that nobody but me seems to care about is the online identity aspect.  This is so key, in my opinion, but I could be off base here as I'm the only one talking about it.  However, I don't think I am, and I think this idea going to enter the discussion in short order as Apple is quickly forcing the issue.

I was recently asked what I thought about the future of voicemail.  I had to give this some thought.  Voicemail isn't one of those things I think about often.  In all honesty, I try to avoid voicemail.  I regard voicemail as a nuisance.  In fact, I haven't even set up my voicemail box at Cisco yet, and I've been working there almost a year.

But why does it have to be this way?  Surely there's value in hearing someone's voice rather than forcing them to type out a message (especially if they're a hunt-and-peck'er).  Not only can I catch the nuance in their voice and potentially derive more information from the message, but it's much easier on the person who's sending the message, especially if they don't spend much time in front of a keyboard.  Voice, by its nature, has a much lower participation premium associated with using it than text does.  There must be a solution to this problem, because there is value to be added there.

For one thing, there's the unified communications issue.  I hate multiple phone numbers.  My online identity is already fragmented enough, I don't want to be forced to deal with multiple phone numbers as well.  I have a phone, it's my cell phone.  Anything beyond that is superfluous and a hassle.  I never, EVER use my office phone, except for outgoing calls when I'm sitting at my desk.  I don't use my home phone, either.  I don't even know the number.  The ONLY number I ever give out anymore is my GrandCentral number.  A device is just a conduit to my online identity, which is my connection to the network.  That's my definition of unified communication.  I don't care if it's my desktop, my laptop, my desk phone, my mobile phone or my refrigerator, I am still me.  I only need one point of contact, the device is just a consequence of my location.  Don't force me to remember more than one identifier.  In the short term I'm ok with separate identifiers for data, email and voice, but that too will converge (see:  XMPP!)

So why do I use GrandCentral as my sole phone number?  Because I can point it at other phone numbers that I don't then have to remember, so if I have to switch mobile numbers at some point it's no big deal.  No need to send out updates to my entire contact list, they already have it.  And because I tell GrandCentral how to handle the call.  If the caller is one of my VIP contacts they can get through to me at any time.  If they're not, I can set up rules around what times they're allowed to contact me before they're sent to voicemail.  If I don't know the person calling (they're not in my contact list), GrandCentral will ask them to identify themselves before asking me if I want to take their call.  This saves me time, my most precious asset.

Beyond that, GrandCentral extends what I can do with a voicemail.  The voicemail I get with my mobile provider is dumb.  All I can do is check it, save it, delete it, and forward it (if I'm lucky, this has never actually worked for me).  Look at all the things GrandCentral will let me do with a voicemail:

There's a whole slew of things I can do with this that adds value to the voicemail beyond the original message:

• Flag it for followup
• Add the caller to my contacts
• Send the voicemail via email
• Map where the call came from
• Embed the voicemail on a Web page

The only thing missing is to send the voicemail via instant message or Twitter!  Well, that and speech-to-text.  I really love personal voice recognition, and Jott has really gotten me spoiled on it.  There are times, like when I'm driving, when I can't type something easily and the only data input method I have available to me is voice.  At these times there is no alternative to voice if I want to send someone a message.  HOWEVER, they might be like me and would rather read the message in text form instead of voicemail.  Speech-to-text allows me to take a voice message and insert it into the global data stream, whether that be the internal email system, Twitter, or an application.

Voicemail is just another type of message.  The method I use to put the message into the network should be irrelevant, whether it's a keyboard, my voice, or a video camera.  All that matters is that the recipient receives the message and that it is EASY for him to use it (not just hear/see it, but USE it).  If there is even a momentary hesitation because he has to think about the steps to retrieve it or remember a password or a number, the message delivery has FAILED for all intents and purposes.  And once he has the message, it should also be easy for him to re-use the message in another system as he sees fit, delivery should not be the end of the message's useful life.

So that is my thinking on voicemail in the traditional sense.  I call you, don't reach you, and leave a message.  I think this type of voicemail has somewhat limited value.

In another sense, however, voicemail can be extremely powerful.  If you think of it as voice MESSAGES instead of voice MAIL, a whole new world of opportunity opens up for it.  Instead of a verbal sticky note, the voice message is freed to do all kinds of things that the voicemail paradigm doesn't really allow.  GrandCentral hints at this, but there is more.

For example, consider the traditional voicemail publishing paradigm.  It is almost always one to one.  One sender, one recipient.  But this is not always how a voice message SHOULD be distributed.  If you crack this nut open and allow voice messages to be broadcast to a wider audience, it becomes much more powerful.  Instead of simply saying "call me back", you can use the power of voice and video to convey the nuances in a conversation and text just can't capture.

Podcasting hints at this, but the participation premium is too high.  You must have a podcasting system set up, and very few people will take the time to rehearse a podcast and polish it until it's ready for distribution.  If it's quick and easy to broadcast a rich media message to the people who want to hear/see it, however, much more content will flow and communication will improve.  This is the Twitter philosophy and it applies to voice and video as well as text.

I'm thinking of real-time, rich conversations here.  Virtual meetings save time and money, yes?  Why must it always be a scheduled meeting?  If I'm working with one person in San Jose and another in Timbuktu, why should we have to schedule a time to meet when somebody's going to have to get up in the middle of the night?  Instead, let's inject our thoughts into a real-time rich-media conversation.  If I'm working on it and have a thought about something, I should be able to use a Jott-like application to send that thought in verbal form to everyone who wants to hear it, instead of trying to figure out a way to remember it for the next meeting.

The traditional meeting is broken in a bad way, and the whole concept needs to be rethought.  It just doesn't work well for widely distributed teams (let alone small, local teams--the potential for abuse here is just mind-boggling).  It's inefficient and it's not ENOUGH interaction.  Instant messaging helps, but it doesn't scale well, and it relies of people to take the initiative to tell everyone who needs to know what they're saying.  What's needed is a multi-media conversation cloud, and what better way to approach that than with the tool that's been used for conversations since the 1800's, voice?  Yay, we'll be back in 1890 again someday soon! :)

"Unified communications" is one of the hottest buzzwords I've seen in a while.  Everyone is jumping onto the unified communications (UC) bandwagon these days:  Cisco, Microsoft, and several small players have all got the UC religion.  And, I believe, Apple and Google are sneaking in the back door.  It's interesting because I can literally see the buzz growing around this in real-time.  Google's starting to send a substantial amount of traffic to my blog from UC-related queries, and I now belong to a LinkedIn group and a Google Group focused solely on UC.

However, the definition of UC still seems fuzzy.  Depending on who's using it, it can mean:

• Using the same network for voice, video, and data, or...
• Using the same device for all forms of communication, or...
• Mixing media types (audio + video + data combo) in the same stream of communication

And there are probably other definitions as well.  In fact, I think unified communications is in danger of becoming a fuzzy buzzword just like Web 2.0 is--its definition can be changed to suit your immediate purpose.  Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, fuzzy buzzwords seem to have a way of being what people want them to be, so they can be good from a marketing perspective.  Position yourself as a leader in UC and you're a leader in just about anything you can label as UC.  But it also makes it tricky to craft a coherent strategy, because a strategy implies definition and measurable goals and numbers to meet and so forth.  Anyone care to identify a measurable goal around a Web 2.0 strategy?  (Thought not.)

In my opinion, Microsoft was the first with a truly unified communication product with Exchange, which unifies your calendar, contact list, and inbox.  Lotus has similar functionality, although the database features of their product get in the way of a clear marketing direction.  GroupWise is also in this space to some degree.  But all are primarily fat client and none have any concept of a mobile platform.  There's also not much in the way of voice or video there, although Microsoft is starting to address that.

There seems to be a lot of emphasis on converging communication channels, but not enough on the user experience.  I would argue that if there isn't a benefit to the end-user all you're doing is commoditizing the pipes that carry the information.  That's nice because it brings significant cost savings, but then you're competing on the cost of bits and bytes.

The real interesting and somewhat neglected aspect of unified communications is at the end user.  While communication is starting to flow over a single channel, the user experience is still very fragmented.  I counted 7 distinct products on Microsoft's UC Roadmap.  If you have to stick it together with duct tape is it still Unified?

I'm probably in the minority here, but I see unified identity as the linchpin to unified communications, and I see Apple taking the early lead here.  Microsoft, while they have yet to unify their customer experience, gets this identity bit in the enterprise space--it's the basis of Active Directory.  But Apple, they get it in the consumer space.  Mobile Me is a big deal, it's Apple's foray into the UC space starting from the identity up.  (Don't forget that Apple has existing patents on the iPhone to enable video conferencing!)  Notice how they bill Mobile Me as "Exchange for the rest of us".  I've been saying for years that the first company to launch an Exchange clone for the common man will make money hand over fist.  When my friends and family first saw my Blackberry and all the cool things it could do they thought it was REALLY nifty.  They can have it now with Mobile Me.  (RIMM is effectively dead, by the way... unless they pull a BIG old rabbit out of their hat.)  Bringing this capability to Joe Public is going to create some interesting changes in the market as consumers get used to a unified communications experience and start to demand change when they see an experience that's inherently fragmented.  The line between enterprise and consumer is going to blur whether enterprise companies want it to or not.

Apple and Microsoft both have their weaknesses in this space, and they're related to being closed and locking users in.  Mobile Me is not open--like everything else from Apple it's closed and controlled.  Fine.  It's better than what we had before outside of the enterprise (nothing).  Exchange is also tightly controlled, but it's from a licensing perspective.  The most they've done to open up Exchange in all of the years it's been available is to host Exchange on the Web recently.  Microsoft is clinging tightly to the family jewels, and while they do that they're leaving the window open for new and hungry competitors to boot them from the top of the mountain.  Now, if they were to open a consumer-facing Exchange-based competitor to Mobile Me, THAT would be a big deal.  However, they'll never do it because Exchange is such a cash cow for them.  (If I were Ray Ozzie I'd bake Exchange into the next version of Windows--it might already be too late, but it's worth a shot.)

Google, I think, is a wild card here.  They certainly have the beginnings of a UC product line.  With a Google account I can now get email, chat, instant messaging, and voice chat.  And I use their GrandCentral product to front-end all of my voice communications because I love the way it ties in with my contact list and acts as a virtual personal assistant.  The key will be what they end up doing with their mobile Android operating system.  If they manage to get traction with that it could be an interesting way to both unify the communications experience and, eventually, penetrate the enterprise. 

There seems to be a unified communications "stack" emerging here, and I don't think any player addresses the whole thing yet.  You have the device, which Apple owns at a consumer level (barring an Android revolution) and is completely fragmented at the enterprise level (Microsoft is pushing the desktop--ick--and everyone else is pushing devices).  Then there's the identity layer, which Microsoft owns in the enterprise but Google and Apple are starting to break into from the consumer side.  And then there's the network, which everyone owns.  (It is interesting that Google recently tried to purchase wireless spectrum, to me this implies that they're trying to own the entire stack.)

The real question, I think, is whose vision is the most ambitious and most aligns with the future.  I have big doubts about Microsoft, they're stuck trying to defend the desktop which is a losing proposition in the long run.  I'm just speculating about what Google is doing.  But I was really impressed when I saw Steve Jobs unveil Mobile Me a few months ago, it really shows Steve Job's vision.  My reaction was "he really gets it".  It'll be interesting to see how each of these visions pan out.  Gentlemen, place your bets!

P.S.  I'm not going to comment on Cisco's strategy because I'm not sure what I legally can and can't say--so I just stay away from it.

In person, participating in a conversation doesn't cost much.  It only costs a few seconds of my time to participate in a conversation in the hallway, so I don't mind shooting the breeze about things I don't really care about like the Red Sox (hehe, I know, this is heresy in Boston, please don't stone me! :)  But when not in person, the time premium associated with participation rises considerably.  Even reading what the conversation is about takes time.  I forward all email that I'm only cc'd on into a "special" file that only gets reviewed as needed.  I rarely need to.  (Now watch, that trick will no longer work).

Contributing to an online conversation takes work.  I have to fully understand the context of the conversation before I can even begin to formulate something intelligent to add.  If I want to write a blog post about it I also need to have a blog set up first, and if I want to leave a comment I usually need an account on the site I'm using.  In order from most expensive to least expensive, these are the ways I can think of to participate in an online conversation:

1. Writing a book
2. Writing a magazine article
3. Writing a blog post
4. Writing a comment
5. Writing a tweet
6. Clicking a button

There are others, of course, like leaving a video response or a podcast, but these are the most common.  One of the great things about the Web 2.0 phenomenon is that it caused developers to focus on making the user interface so transparent (usable) that each of these ways to participate became easier and easier.  The participation premium got lower and lower.  Before Blogger, setting up a blog required you to do a lot of legwork around hosting and software setup.  Before Digg, you had to actually write something in order to contribute to the conversation, you couldn't just click a button to say whether you agree or disagree with something.

Software usability is really a euphemism for transparency.  There is an idea behind each element of the user interface, but if the user has to stare at it and wonder what it does, and maybe mouse-over it hoping for a hint of some kind, the developer has failed then and there to make the user interface "usable".  Usability is inverse to the amount of time the user spends thinking about it.

For example, I've been playing with an XMPP client lately.  It has TONS of features, and it's really great in that department.  But it exposes all of them in the interface.  And so trying to send a message makes me stop and think about all of those capabilities before sending the message.  It takes at least twice as long as a tweet.  So I don't use it.  The time premium is too high.  (BTW anyone know of a good XMPP client for Windows?)

I like the idea of Twitter because I don't invest much in using it--I have a thought, and out it goes.  I don't even spend much time proofreading it, because the thoughts I express via Twitter usually aren't worth it.  If they are, that thought turns into a blog post, like this one :)

It's funny how insignificant usability seems at times.  It's usually an afterthought in the software development process, yet I've seen it sell software time over time.  Everyone should--and does, at a subconscious level, I suppse--strive to seek out the tools that lower the conversation premium the most.  It's the reason Apple does so well with its hardware.  Not only does it make life more pleasant, it also encourages us to participate more than before.  It also makes the software companies that sell those tools a great deal of money.

Heh, not really, I think I'll let Obama win this year.  But this is a really creative use of Flash, I thought it was pretty hilarious--especially the tattoo.  Plug your name in, it's fun! :)

http://www.news3online.com/spread.php?firstname=&lastname=&email=

I know I'm a little late to the game with this review, but I still run across a whole bunch of people have never tried Twitter.  Now that I've been using it for something like a month now, I thought I'd jot down my thoughts about it.  I still have some mixed feelings about it, but I really like what it's doing to our concept of peer-to-peer messaging.

• It is not chat and it is not IM.  It is a conversation with a broad surface area.  It feels a lot like hanging out with a large group of people.  When Cisco crew was at Cisco Live and everyone was tweeting it was great--I can now make fun of Bergelson for wearing a French cuffed shirt and no tie.  Before, I would have had no way of knowing about his blatant disdain for fashion :)
• The concept of sending a message out without having a particular recipient in mind is fantastic.  This is a killer way to communicate amongst a team.  If Twitter doesn't enter the enterprise market immediately they are stupid.
• I don't like hearing what people are doing.  I don't really care about that.  I like hearing what people are THINKING.
• I really like the way the combo Web/SMS/Fat client interface has made people realize that there really is no distinction between types of messaging except for the delivery channel.  Can you say unified communication?  For some reason this fundamental principle is not recognized by many people.
• For me at least, the fat client is extremely important.  It can't be a realtime conversation if I have to break my workflow and visit a Web page.  A nice clean, unobtrusive interface is essential.  This is the first application in a long time that I really feel needs a fat client.
• The 140 character limit.  I like the idea, but it's too stinkin' short.  I think I need like 200.  Please, allow me at least one grammatically correct sentence and a link.  Geez.
• The architecture.  Is a DISASTER.  And you know what?  They could easily fix it, but they'd lose control.  They could easily allow services to republish their feed and reduce server load instantly, but they'd give up control of the messages which is the meat of the service.  This will be overcome once an open source version of Twitter becomes popular.  If you don't think there will be go look at how many ways there are to build Digg now.  If they don't sit down and play nice Twitter will get run over by the community.

So yeah, in general though I need to eat crow here and say that I was wrong.  The concept of an open-ended conversation hasn't been done before, and I didn't realize that's what Twitter was.  If you're like me and you considered Twitter a crippled blogging platform you should really give it a try.  I have illusions about using it long-term, but it's worthwhile to see the different type of conversations people are having on it.  And I still believe that its potential in the enterprise space is enormous.

If you're interested in following my Twitter feed it's at http://www.twitter.com/jasonkolb.

And thanks again to Trent Adams for telling me that I should give Twitter another look.  I would have missed something important if I hadn't.

What does it mean to own your online identity?

Does it mean that you're free to take your data from a walled garden and move it elsewhere, a la Data Portability?

Or does it mean that you have complete control over it and you're free to mold it into whatever form you need it to take, delete it, share it, and otherwise do whatever you like with it?

Tony Hail wrote an interesting post discussing some of the more philosophical points of identity ownership in the digital age, and it sparked memories of some of the posts I wrote a while back about online identity ownership.  My thoughts haven't changed much in the years since I originally wrote about this, but it seems that more people are starting to think along these lines, and it's certainly a topic that's important enough to warrant further, extended, conversation.

My online identity is made of up the data I put on the Web.  My data IS my online identity.  Every blog post, tweet, and comment I put out into the Web becomes part of my online identity.  Right now, I only REALLY own the data in my blog.  This blog, right here, jasonkolb.com, is the only part of my online identity that I actually own.  *I* own the domain, *I* set the terms of service, *I* set the license for other people to use the content, and *I* decide what I want to let out into the wild.  Other than this blog, my identity is owned by LinkedIn, Twitter, and every other service that I put my data into.

Identity ownership is about owning versus renting.  Data Portability is about being able to move your furniture from one place to another when you move, identity ownership is about being able to tear down walls, put in an inground pool, and throw wild parties if you feel like it.  Both are important, but they're not the same thing.

Online identity ownership is all about DATA ownership.  Beyond the philosophical implications, this is actually a legal conversation.  This becomes obvious when people are forced to hand over their LinkedIn contacts by courts, and FaceBook and MySpace continually make strides towards locking users into their own walled gardens.  If you don't own the place where you're putting the data, you don't own the data, period.  You might get really pissed at your social networks for locking you in, but you are completely at their mercy in this regard, and unless the free market forces them to comply there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

The only real solution to this is to allow users to own the storage container for their data.  This is kind of an obscure concept, but it's an important one.  While the public at large might not be clamoring for this--yet--the early adopter crowd surely is, hence the visibility of the Data Portability movement.  But there are already solutions available today that will actually, really, for real, let you OWN your data, and that chunk of your online identity.  I truly feel that they're the wave of the future.

Amazon S3 is the 900 lb. gorilla in the TRUE data ownership area.  There are other pretenders to the throne, but S3 is the first and in my opinion the best service.  It doesn't focus on a pretty front-end or anything even remotely relating to usability, but that's OK.  It's personal storage--a utility, like electricity.  You pay for what you use.  And you do truly OWN the data.  It provides a glimpse of the future in the area of identity ownership.

JungleDisk, for example, lets you hook up S3 as a virtual drive on your machine.  You pay 15 cents a month per gig (to Amazon), but you own the data, nobody else can touch it.  SmugMug is like Flickr but better, because it also hosts your pictures on your own S3 account.  The only thing you're missing is the Flickr community, but that's the choice you're making when you use it--owning versus renting.  The first social network to allow users to store their data in their S3 account in a standarized format is going to score a major coup with the early adopter crowd.

There's no doubt in my mind that this is going to become a VERY hot issue over time, especially as the line between work and personal lives online continues to blur.  Unfortunately, when nobody explicitly owns the data except for a third party, it leaves the data in legal limbo and true ownership is left up to the courts.  This is uncharted water.  But the epiphany around this is on the way, and it's going to affect the startup arena in a big way when it does.