Andrew Ferrier

I wrote recently about my indecision surrounding the domain of information design; should detail or simplicity win out? (as always, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle – but hey, that’s boring). Google Maps and Multimap provide an interesting example of what I’m talking about.

Google’s maps are simple; straightforward; and link together yellow pages data with mapping data – together with some cool APIs that enable rip-offs (an ancient term for a mashup). However, they also strip out contextual data that any professional navigator would consider important – landmarks, land type, buildings, etc. It seems apparent that Google are trying to hit a particular market – those who find conventional maps too confusing. And to be fair, they’re doing pretty well – empirical data suggests lots of folks use them. Their reasonably robust mobile maps are also quite handy.

Multimap, on the other hand, looks backward by modern standards: a confusing array of mostly-irrelevant fluff crowds the page. They have one strong advantage, however – they provide contextual information, since they simply use OS maps (at least at medium zoom levels). OS maps are excellent for providing detailed navigation data, and Multimap seems to be the only free online provider of them.

I actually use both sites – Google when I’m searching for things (e.g. dry cleaners in Winchester, of which there turn out not to be many), and Multimap when I want a printable map to navigate to somewhere specific. I would hazard a guess that Google’s map interface was designed by someone who works in a city, as they are virtually useless outside one. Google should be able to make the additional mapping data optional as an overlay – after all, there is already a hybrid interface that mixes maps with satellite pictures. This would be a welcome improvement. Multimap should focus on cleaning up their interface if they don’t want to be run out of town.

I’ve written about synchronicity vs. asynchronicity before, but I wanted to revisit the subject because it seems to be so key to modern services; as more and more communication mechanisms evolve out of available technology and entrepreneurs’ imagination, understanding customer’s usage patterns will be important when developing businesses around them. An excellent article by Gregor Hohpe, Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit (included in Joel Spolsky‘s Best Software Writing Vol. 1), is an examination of why understanding computer science concepts such as 2PC (and, I would argue, synchronicity) is important when engaging in business process engineering. There’s a large overlap between business and software engineering here, and this is why IBM sells products like WebSphere Process Server together with business consultants to help customers implement them. There are a number of other essays in Spolsky’s excellent book which also discuss related subjects.

Clay Shirky, in his essay A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy (also included in the same volume; the online copy is edited slightly differently from the printed one), notes how online (synchronous) discussions frequently descend into talk about sex – and that sexual banter is much more common in synchronous communication than asynchronous (how often have you flirted with someone over the phone compared to email? – please, no anecdotes in the comments section). I’m not a psychologist, but I assume that this has something to do with it being hard to retain the thrill of adult banter over the course of a (potentially lengthy) asynchronous discussion. The same arguments probably apply in a less dramatic fashion to non-sexual communication.

There’s a related observation to be made about the perceived economics of people’s time. In general, most folks implicitly value synchronous time as higher than asynchronous – if I ask advice of a mentor over a half-hour coffee, I feel more indebted to him than if he spends half an hour hour answering my email. I suspect the reasons are a combination of my having accurate information (I know exactly how long he spent drinking the coffee), the start-up and tear-down time (he actually took 5 minutes to get to the coffee shop), and knowing that I have his undivided attention (he wasn’t multi-tasking). Nevertheless, we still continue to rate synchronous time more highly than its opportunity costs compared to asynchronous time.

To relate the two assertions, wouldn’t you rather spend half an hour in person with your spouse / significant other / other politically correct phrase than an hour writing and exchanging emails with them? Synchronous communication has a strange attraction than its poor cousin doesn’t – despite all of asynchronicity’s time-shifting advantages. This is going to be a big challenge for a multi-time-zone world.

I went to a summit on Second Life and virtual worlds in Hursley today, hosted by Kevin Aires, Jack Mason, and Roo Reynolds – it’s becoming obvious that there’s a big buzz about Second Life both inside and outside IBM – a primary bit of evidence being IBM’s recent announcement of a $10m investment in virtual worlds such as Second Life. For obvious reasons, I can’t relate everything that was discussed. However, the discussion did get me thinking about Second Life in a slightly different way from before: as a basis for social networking applications, rather than as a basis for any application: an example of the former being The Greater IBM Connection, an IBM alumni community. In this respect, it seems to be more analogous to, say, LinkedIn, than another application platform (Windows, the web, etc.). This scope seems realistic – as I’ve stated before, meetings and conferences seem to be the best application of Second Life that’s been demonstrated so far. The consumer impact of Second Life is still TBD.

A sign in the Winchester branch states that WHSmith have joined the list of retailers who have stopped accepting cheques – Shell made headlines when they announced they were to do the same back in September last year. Apparently WHSmith are concerned about fraud, and this news story implies that it’s only an experiment, but it wouldn’t surprise me if part of the decision is also related to the cost of processing and handling, and that this will become permanent – after all, it’s rare that you see a cheque being used in a shop now, and with good reason – they are tedious, awkward, and slow to process.

To my mind, WHSmith have a bigger problem, though – they are getting boring and desperate. My stationery purchase was accompanied by two exhortations to buy other, totally unrelated, products. As Seth Godin has explained at length, this kind of marketing out of context just doesn’t cut it any more – and it annoyed me. I’m not really clear any more what it is that WHSmith sell, but I rarely go there – certainly high street branches – to buy anything, and this kind of behaviour doesn’t endear me to them. As their product set begins to die out (CDs are dying, DVDs will, papers and magazines will, books will, stationery will), it becomes hard to see what areas that can invest in.

Do WHSmith have a strategy for the future?

When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time tinkering with digital sound: mostly MOD files, on the venerable FastTracker. The highlight was remixing a track by Jim Young – I’ve unfortunately lost my version, but here‘s the original (any competent media player, such as XMMS or Winamp, should still be able to play MOD files with the right plugin). I used the sound of my CD drive opening as an ‘instrument’ (slowed down many times), and felt very silly when I came to listen it to some years later. Only later did I realise that the professionals do exactly the same thing; Gary Rydstrom, one of Hollywood’s leading sound designers, describes how he used exactly the same kind of found art – bottles, floors, etc. – to design sounds for Monsters Inc. on the DVD extras for same. Nevertheless, my efforts were still pushing unlistenable.

So I was very gratified to listen to the singing computers podcast from O’Reilly recently, wherein David Battino discussed the state-of-the-art in voice synthesis, including singing. Although I never really played with this very much (voice synthesis is still surprisingly immature, proprietary and expensive; only now are we beginning to approach synthesis indistinguisable from real speech), it was still a fascinating to listen to someone tinkering with sound in the same way as I used too – with plenty of samples of speech synthesis from different devices and systems, including the giggle-a-minute Dictionaraoke site, which mashes up speech synthesis with real songs (it features up there with listening to Chipmunked songs for something to do when you’re drunk).

The future of digital music and sound as an innovative area has never seemed less certain, as digital photography enters the mainstream (see Flickr), and digital video is probably only a few years off doing the same (as bandwidth and storage continue to expand). But digital sound hasn’t reached a peak – there are still many things that are unachieveable in that world – real and convincing speech and singing being one of them. There’s still wiggle room in the area of noise cancellation too (get a pair of noise-cancelling headphones if you value your music). It’d be a shame if sound has to take a back seat after years of innovation – 8-track, compact cassette, CDs, MP3s being but a few inventions we now struggle to see ourselves without.