Idea Amplifiers, Activity Streams, and the Distributed Supercomputer: A Conversation Around Hypervoice

Why are we stuck in a world where these ideas bounce around and don’t go anywhere? Why is hypervoice different?

Martin:  Just last week, I rewatched Steve Jobs launching the original iPhone, and he talks about the revolutions that are driven by the introduction of a new interaction paradigm. We had the mouse, the iPod, and I think the third one was touch.

So, what’s changing is that we can expect people to have a screen during every conversation. We can expect them to be interacting with digital objects during a conversation, whether it’s typing notes or adding a tag to a moment in the conversation.

But if you were to capture all this, it would be both too much and too little. It doesn’t indicate where the moments of significance actually are. You have to assume that, when I type some notes or mention something, it would be like Google. I would be attaching quite a bit of significance to the metadata.

Before Google, AltaVista tried to work out the significance of the page by the content on the page. Post-Google, if I type the word Volkswagen, then put an anchor around it and point it over there, I am saying that content is about Volkswagens, regardless of what it says on that page. So, it gave a great deal of significance to the implicit metadata that people were creating with these links and attributes.

This is the same. HarQen is the Google of hypervoice, Google is the Google of hypertext, and Twitter is the Google of hyper-messaging.

Steven: Is the world ready for this? I am thinking of how poorly we have all embraced other technologies like GPS (Global Positioning System). Ten or fifteen years ago, people like you and I worked on projects where we developed many of the possible ways to use location to enhance context and preemptively assist users. Yet the LBS (Location-Based Services) conversation today is still mostly talking about how to get better turn-by-turn directions using your GPS.

So, we use these enabling technologies poorly. If you waved a wand and everyone had hypervoice—or hyper-everything—this afternoon, would people use it? Would they use it right? Is this a generational shift, or can we move to not just implementing this, but using this within a reasonable timeframe?

Martin: There are a number of forces at play here, one of which is fixed and immutable, which is that human generations are turning over. So, there is a generation of people growing up with the expectation that much of their life is being recorded by computers.

Then, there’s a technology of readiness. The first Web browser was in about 1992. I can remember using Netscape on Unix in a windowless room, doing banking applications many years ago. It took two to three years for that to hit mainstream and years more before many issues were worked out.

I sense that this change is similar in that the technology is ready. There are all kinds of burrs and rough edges around the interfaces and interactions. How does search work? There’s a first level of etiquette around how telephone calls should work. But how do you manage the etiquette of a hypervoice call? We might both have to agree to be recorded, and if anyone wants to listen to the recording, it might require the assent of both parties. Or, maybe it’s recorded in half-duplex, so I am allowed to share the words I said, but I can’t share your words without your permission.

It wouldn’t surprise me if, twenty or thirty years from now, most conversations were hypervoice conversations—even ones like this: we could naturally record it.

Steven:  So, is it your expectation that you are going to have to decide some of this and essentially train people like telecoms did in the 1890s?

Martin: Maybe a little bit. When there’s a large organization taking a hypervoice approach, for example, even moving to social media and messaging is an organizational transformation that requires policies and training. But it should be an obvious, natural extension to social business. Thinking that social equals something like Twitter is too narrow. We network socially in many ways and have for millennia.

I have said that hypervoice is the missing carriage from the Cluetrain. [2]

There is a new organization to coordinate this. And they have all kinds of interesting and subtle problems to solve. From technology, to public policy, to social bonds. As I just said, how, for example, should assent be given to having our calls recorded. And, of course, hypervoice calls record much more, so how do existing call-recording laws relate to that? You may get into a conflict between laws that are about recording telephone calls and laws that are about recording every other type of media.

Or consider the impact of new protocols. Should I have a copy of the list of links you’ve been building during our shared hypervoice call? You’ve been typing notes. Am I allowed to use your notes as an index to my words?

Mudassir: Could there be a case where you are one caller opting out of a hypervoice call? Does this sort of scenario exist?

Martin:  This is why you start off doing things inside enterprises, where you basically have got an authoritarian environment. You have a form of imposed consent.

Steven: It’s nice to turn it on it’s head. Normally, they say you can’t record anything, but I like the obvious, no, we’ll record everything, but in a codified way, so we can all share it.

Martin: In my view, there’s a happy middle ground where all my calls should be recorded, but any access to that information, any use of the information, I should know about. Messaging this, so it’s clear and not overwhelming, is a serious problem though.

Steven: One of the things I see people talk about, especially when there is some crisis of plagiarism or Photoshopping a picture, is that you should always have access to the original source, so everyone can check the veracity.

And at first glance, it seems that you are making it easier for me to cherry-pick the data out of a voice stream, which otherwise would have been a pain to cut down.

But since you are building it from the ground up, I wonder if maybe this can go a bit toward some of the original intent of hypermedia and make everything two way.

Martin: You mentioned location services, where you have this binary thinking that either you share or don’t share. I am willing to share my location with lots of people, on the basis that, if they access it, I know and maybe give assent. Perhaps asking in an automated way: why do you need my location at this time?

If it were in the minutes leading up to this meeting, it would be utterly unremarkable if you were to want to know where I was.

Steven:  There’s this brilliant thing Jared Benson showed off at a conference we hosted in 2008. He had a little chart that described combining physical and social proximity.

You aren’t from Kansas City and have no family there, so I might reveal my location to you as Kansas City. But my wife needs to know I am at HyVee, because I don’t mind her knowing, and she can do something with that. It has to do with not just privacy, but relevance.

You, for the most part, I just need to know either that you are not nearby or you are in San Francisco and so am I! Related to your earlier thoughts about the Internet being generally unaware of time, I’d like to know you will be where I am, next week. So, we can integrate schedules and other data sources with this.

It’s exciting that you are working on something this early and this broadly, so you can look at all the failure points from before and fix them.

Martin: And the good news is that I don’t need to change telephony at all. Not that telephony won’t be changing as a market. The way we market and buy telecom services will be changing.

My belief is that the next realm of stuff is packaged cloud services. Just like telephony, this beautifully packaged service gives us all the productivity and all the features in one go that will become generic to all cloud services, and its relationship with the current Internet is not going to be the future. It is not mathematically going to be the future. That surprises a lot of people.

The expedient choices we made in the 1970s to take advantage of little things have a price, and we’re going to pay. The Internet has a bunch of fundamental problems that require major surgery or replacement.

Steven: I am reminded of all the times we almost got a different Internet. One I recall was an article on Hypercard. where the chief engineer said that, in retrospect, he drew the diagram incorrectly:

“Atkinson recalled engineers at Apple drawing network schematics in the form of a bunch of boxes linked together. Sun engineers, however, first drew the network's backbone and then hung boxes off of it. It's a critical difference, and he feels it hindered him.” [3]

We’re still living with this. We build computers that happen to plug in or happen to have radios instead of building networks. No matter how powerful it is now, we are still fundamentally building, say, a mobile app, and forget that it needs to attach to a service, so it does it very clumsily.

Martin: Actually, it’s all just computing. There is no network. There is no cloud. There is no device. All the dividing lines are in your head. This is only distributed computing; that’s all it is. There is an opportunity to recognize that networks are just large, distributed supercomputers and to kind of do what Apple did for devices to the network.

The conceptual foundations of the telecoms industry are missing. Computing has strong foundations. There is a whole discipline of computability. Turing sorted it. Telecoms is the business of translocating information. There is not a theory of translocation. As Turing envisaged computers, he fuzzed the network bits. He assumed the machine could see the tape. Time is left out of this. All networks do is move and delay stuff.

The whole of the telecoms industry has fractured foundations, and telcos act in all sorts of crazy, irrational ways without knowing it, because they don’t understand the fundamental nature of the business they are actually in.

Take queuing theory. They’ve started from the wrong place. They need to go way, way, way, all the way back. The very first assumption people made about networks is that they are machines that deliver packets. So that’s what we draw. There’s a belief system that is all about bandwidth, as if packets are still objects, and that is what’s going to help us in the future.

The packets are irrelevant. What we’re doing is trying to translocate information, and all this machine does is impair that process. Possibly infinitely.

So you have to step through the looking glass and see the whole thing from the other side. And when you do that, you realize that, actually, the place where you were standing was the mad world, and you’ve been born into the Wonderland side.

Steven: So, we need a general theory—and preferably a testable model-of translocatable computability.

Martin:  Some of my friends have developed this. We have it. Not really published, but the principles are out there in public. It turns out to be way simpler than you’d expect. The whole essence is that the system has two degrees of freedom. You have load, loss, and delay. Like temperature, pressure, volume. Pick any two, the other one is set. That’s it. That’s all networks do.

If you think that networks do work—because it’s part of the name—if you think they are about delivering packets, you get it all wrong, because you overdeliver packets, as it were. You stuff more packets into the system because you believe they deliver value.

But all you’re doing is putting things in the way of other things and, potentially, creating negative value.

Author’s note—For more information, read Martin Geddes’s presentation on lean networking.

Steven:  So, for example, when you have said QoS (Quality of Service) as it’s done today is bad, you mean the guarantee of a level of service, right?

Martin: It’s not the guarantee, but the concept of locally optimizing a system. The network effects are disastrous. Framing Quality of Service in a bandwidth messaging concept turns out to be a dumb idea. Because you are then in the business of allocating impairment, not of giving priority. You choose to impair some flows less. 

Notes

1. Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic, July 1945. Retrieved December 5, 2012.

2. Weinberger, David, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, and Doc Searls. The Cluetrain Manifesto. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basic Books, 2000.

3. Kahney, Leander. “HyperCard: What Could Have Been.” Wired, August 14, 2002. Retrieved December 7 2012.