In a conversation yesterday, John Fandel, the general manager of The O’Reilly Network, made an interesting point: he wants to build our web publishing tools around the model of delivering “dial tone.”
As we talked, the idea took hold. I was reminded of Michael Crichton’s observation in his 1983 book Electronic Life that in the 1940’s there was concern that the telephone system was growing so fast that there wouldn’t be enough operators unless AT&T hired every person in America. AT&T solved the problem by creating automated switching systems that, in effect, did turn every person in the world into an operator–without hiring them. The principle of dial tone is to create a situation where users can do something for themselves that once required the intervention of an operator.
Dial-tone is also a fabulous metaphor for one of the key principles of Web 2.0, which I’ve called “the architecture of participation,” but which might also simply be described as the design of systems that leverage customer self-service. (Bill Janeway made this linkage to customer self-service as a key driver of success in the internet economy in a presentation he gave at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in 2004. Mitch Ratcliffe blogged his notes from a similar talk that Bill gave at a Red Herring conference.)
You can regard the history of the computer industry as pushing “dial tone” further and further up the stack. As Crichton noted, the rotary dial telephone was the first computer that allowed direct interaction between humans and computers. The personal computer pushed customer self service up the stack to programming, data processing, and eventually applications such as word processing and spreadsheets.
New applications often start out requiring operators, but eventually move towards dial-tone. For example, you can look at blogging as the “dial tone” equivalent of creating a web site. For ordinary folks (not most of my readers, but non-technical folks), creating a web site was something that required an operator. You went to a web design shop or an ISP and had them do it for you. The blogging revolution, the wiki revolution, the MySpace revolution, the CyWorld revolution, are really about providing a kind of self-service dial-tone for creating a web presence and community. P2P applications are dial tone for file transfer. sourceforge and <a href=http://www.collab.netcollab.net are software project hosting dial-tone. Craigslist is classified advertising dial-tone.
Similarly, you can look at personal databases like Access and Filemaker, and open source databases like MySQL as moving in the direction of providing database dial tone.
Once you frame the problem in this way, you understand that one of the challenges for IT departments and companies used to the IT mindset is to get the operators out of the way, and to build new processes that let users do the work for themselves. You also can ask yourself, where is dial tone going next?
Round 2: A series of occasional postings around the theme that patterns and ideas recur, or as Arlo Guthrie said in Alice’s Restaurant, “come around again on the gee-tar.”