The End of Print

Note: While Chris' blog is down, he's going to be engaging in some "PiC Blogging" here on HorsePigCow. If you aren't familiar with his personal style, be warned...anything ethereal and 'out there' I have written is childplay compared with his rants. ;) I like to think of it as him being 'beyond' where the rest of us are... either way, I feel honoured to have him make a guest appearance at HPC.

Something interesting dawned on me this morning as Tara (who's reading a paper by Cloudalicious and ClaimID developer Terrell Russell) and I make our way down the peninsula to Redwood Shores and Palo Alto (respectively).

She's asked whether someone has created a way to markup documents that you come across on the web with highlights, notes and other notations, just as she's doing with Terrell's paper (of course in her case, with pen and highlighter). Why yes, I say, I believe there's an extension for that.

Because, ya know, she follows, that would be useful for academics writing papers needing to cite original sources. It would be a huge time saver.

And that's certainly an interesting and valid observation-slash-feature request. And thinking it over, I realized a much more powerful thought that further helps illuminate the way we see things at Flock.

Ok so get this: I tend to talk about the web as though it's an event stream -- a series of swiftly changing and multi-faceted social interactions spread out over a time horizon that covers synchronous and asynchronous interactions which vary in length from milliseconds to infinite. (Huff huff!)

We're moving away from the web as a collection of static documents. Flock doesn't create "bookmarks" for a reason; they're "favorites" or "stars" -- and they indicate continued, active interest, not simply or even necessarily pages that you want to find your way back to later on. Things that you favorite should just be things that caught your attention and are worthy of being called out somehow, maybe for you; maybe for your friends; maybe just because. It's not about going back in time later, it's about populating the future with stuff based on your current interests.

Just a small example: you have a friend, you want to keep in touch with her. Presumably you want to keep in touch with her in the future, and not so much the past -- so if you favorite her blog, you're going to be reading her blog and may eventually reach out and comment or email her based on something she blogged. So the "you" who favorited her blog -- who expressed original interest -- was preparing for that future possibility.

The implications of this go beyond just resulting in a tool that we're calling a "social browser". (And this is something that I'm only just beginning to understand the depth and breadth of --) But this also means that we're entering into a new era -- of elucidation and expansion with a technology that we had begun taking for granted as merely an extension of Gutenberg's printing press (that was Web One Dot Oh).

Think about it: at the library, at home, at work... the browser is still used for a tremendous amount of printing. Even my dad still prints out all of his emails (So I can have a record of them, he says).

But that's just it: it's not that we're living in oblivion or that the stuff that makes up our recent history isn't important. It's just that the priority is shifting to the present, the immediate, on the here and now -- on seeing what we can do today and tomorrow, right here, right now.

Y'know, when you really step back and think about it, our negligence towards the "print" feature in Flock's design process is not accidental -- no no, its subconsciously intentional. Let's not mince words here people! Printing is to the next generation "social" browser what the appendix is to the human body's central nervous system: yep -- you said it, not me: ee-rrelevant!

Parting $5 thought: When people are able to represent themselves purely through pixels and electrons, what happens to the plight of their meatspace-based identity? And perhaps more tellingly, what changes will occur in technology in response to humans homesteading on the digital landscape? Are MySpaces the most accommodating abodes or do we need something a touch... different?