The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 9

“Listen to the technology; find out what it is telling you.” – Carver Mead

The DOS-era was marked by a certain style of computing.  It was primitive, largely devoid of graphics, and for developers, an exercise in scarcity management.

In fact, the scarcity mindset was so endemic to the time that it gave rise to the urban legend that Microsoft’s Bill Gates even once sagely noted that “640K (of program memory) ought to be enough for everyone.” (the story is likely apocryphal);

Windows, in turn, gave rise to another computing form, one that was ubiquitous, almost to the point of homogeneity; it was also graphical and added connectivity to the mix, a trend that Microsoft was able to leverage into near-total hegemony during the first decade of the Internet Age.

Now, all of this is giving rise to another era, the age of Mobile Broadband, best exemplified by the iPhone, the first caveat-free mobile platform.

In two short years, the iPhone has enveloped the planet, with a 77 country global footprint, a 40M iPhone/iPod touch user base, 65K apps rolled out, those same apps downloaded 1.5B times and a 100K developer ecosystem.

This got me thinking about Carver Mead’s mantra. If DOS had one form of “native” application, and Windows had another, what then are the cornerstones of a native mobile broadband app?

Put another way; before iPhone, the industry answer to the mobile question was more akin to coaxing a dog to walk on its hind legs than watching a bird fly.  In other words, more hack and parlor trick than true dharma.

The Message is the Medium

Forty years ago, media theorist Marshall McLuhan asserted that the “medium is the message,” as a way of underscoring how different forms of media are imbued with their own contextual forms of meaning.

Yet, as we sit at the waking hours of the Mobile Broadband Era, it is hard not to conclude that it is The Message that is to be the defining characteristic of this era.

Why, The Message?  Simply put, messages have compelling attributes.  One, they can be date stamped and packaged up to elegantly deal with both real-time and asynchronous communication scenarios.

Two, messages can be transported on a one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, man-to-man, man-to-machine, and machine-to-machine basis (e.g., device to server, device to device), facilitating a wide variety of unidirectional, multidirectional, manual, automated and programmatic communication flows.

Three, as Twitter’s simple “140 characters meets open API” model suggests, a message can simultaneously be simple (it doesn’t get much simpler than 140 characters) AND support rich payloads, auto-generate events, catalyze discussion threads, and be designed to make creating derivatives easy, all the while supporting the exposition, partitioning and instantiation of all sorts of Client, Server and Service application hybrids.

That’s why it’s “interesting” that when Google announced Wave, its open source, open protocol messaging platform, the blogosphere’s response ranged from applause to derision and confusion.

In part, this is understandable, inasmuch as Wave represents an evolved sense of what real-time communication flows look like, and sometimes, the most game-changing ideas take a while to germinate (let alone actually execute the value proposition).

Hence, it’s reasonable to expect that they will initially be met with a shrug.

At its core, though, I think that Google is solving the right problem by focusing on messaging, and would suggest that the most basic thing that they can do relative to making Wave a success is to eat their own dog food by writing and exposing wrappers to all of their services directly within Wave.

At its most basic, Wave begs the question of why can't Mail, Maps, YouTube, Gmail, News, Feeds, Documents and Blogger be better integrated within Google?

But beyond that, if Google is serious about Wave they should enable developers (and meta developers – e.g., the former Visual Basic crowd) to build their own Wave apps by compositing Google service functions through one simplified wizard-like interface.

Similarly, Google should take what they have done with shortcuts in Gmail, and expand it to their other products so that users have a palette of simplified scripts that they can call upon in a context-aware fashion with little technical know how (i.e., what can be called in Maps may be different than Gmail or News for that matter).

Then, Google can focus on providing the best client, service, media, search, analytics and developer tools for Wave on a number of platforms, an approach which is congruent with supporting Chrome and Android, while remaining open to iPhone, Windows, the Mac, etc.

And of course, a whole ecosystem of data feed services, tool builders and service providers can piggyback on all of this goodness.

Information Mobility is Superconductivity

Like many people, I am a member of multiple social (Facebook), professional (LinkedIn) and affiliated interest networks (favorite blogs), places where I cultivate my online persona, build a profile, upload content, participate in conversations and manage my connections with friends, followers and the like.

In the old days, I had to create my identity over and over, upload the same content repeatedly and perform unnatural acts to cobble together the sum total of my online efforts in some meaningful way.

But, thanks to services like Facebook Connect, Twitter API, OpenSocial, and “embeddable” flash widgets, I can create, converge and connect locally, but share that same information globally with minimal (or, much less) effort.

This is the power of information mobility, the premise that a user’s online actions, from login and session instantiation to status updating, profile exchange, photo posting, tweets, comments, movies/music buying/watching/rating can be spread liberally across all of their devices, networks and runtime spaces.

It’s about command, control and orchestration of the online “Me,” a domain which touches realms like publishing, distribution, information management, and privacy.

This is why information mobility, when it really kicks in (i.e., is on the right side of S-curve), becomes a self-affirming engine of systemic growth.

Cloud-ification is Upon Us

When mobile broadband is stripped to its core, you are really left with two underlying constructs.  One is the premise of being able to access your media, information and apps anytime, anywhere, and two is the precept that you need fast, perpetual connectivity to make the user experience reliable and robust enough to become mission critical.

This is the domain of cloud computing, a mode whereby software, hardware and service layers are loosely coupled enough that the data, logic and presentation elements of an application can be partitioned (as needed) between local and remote instances.

In essence, when applications are cloud-ified, they gain persistency, federation and derivation capabilities, enabling the same core to be assembled in a way that addresses the needs of specific runtime scenarios, device environments and scaling requirements.

As such, cloud-ified apps become liberated from a single instance or a single client application, enabling all sorts of interesting composite applications to promulgate.

That is why the same Twitter tweet can be presented so dramatically different in a desktop Twitter dashboard application, like TweetDeck, the Twitter.com website and the Tweetie iPhone client.

Similarly, it is the reason a website like StockTwits, which is built on top of the Twitter ecosystem, can simultaneously parse specific tweets pertaining to a particular stock or between members of a given investing circle, and a StockTwits-aware client app, like the afore-mentioned TweetDeck, can automatically create a filtered view of that same data.

In fact, Apple’s rise to it’s current lofty place can be traced to a decision to embrace cloud computing by tightly coupling iTunes (which has a service tier, desktop tier and device runtime tier) first to the iPod, and then to the iPhone (and the iPod touch).

The breakout success of App Store is a by-product of embracing and extending this same model by overlaying interfaces for developers and applications.

Finally, MobileMe takes this same computing model and applies it to a user’s personal data, backing it up, synchronizing it between devices and making it universally available across those same devices via a Web client, a native Mac/Windows client and, you guessed it, a native iPhone/iPod touch client.

But, to be clear, while Apple is the current patron saint of this model at work, we are at the beginning of this wave, not at the end game stage. Apple will not run the table.

Net It Out for Me

I am really bullish on the potential to create new, highly innovative user experiences that are fully native to the Mobile Broadband Era. 

They will be message-aware, information and media rich, mobility premised, and optimized to a specific application, service and/or device.

This is the next wave in its purest form.

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