Douglas Engelbart – whose work led to the invention of hypertext, the mouse, networked computers, early GUI and more – passed recently. As a sort of intellectual mourning exercise, I’ve been watching The Mother of All Demos:

“The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart’s December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor.”

A detail from the demo caught my eye. Doug casually uses an embedded graph in a presentation to make a point (remember, this is 1968):

He is talking about the number of people working for his lab. See that huge dip towards the end? His lab was growing in fits and starts, and at one point, all that was left was him and one more person. Goes without saying, Doug didn’t let that bring him down and give up!

See also that long flat line in the beginning? That’s just him, working alone for many years.

This is the story of every grand success. What the world sees is the final success, the celebration, the appreciation. What most people don’t see are the hard years and struggle that go into pretty much everything worth striving for.

So, go and create your Doug-sized-dent in the universe, but don’t be surprised if it’s harder than you thought, takes longer than you hoped, if your co-conspirators don’t always believe in you, or if you have to slog all by yourself for many years.

In the end, if you do your job well, there will probably be a kid reading about you, watching  videos of your work – decades from now.

– Amit

When you call someone on their cellphone, and they are not available, do you ever wonder why the standard ‘leave a message’ message includes information on how to send a fax?

Really, how many people are actually trying to send a fax to a cellphone number, you wonder. And, how many cellphones even support such a functionality, you suppose. And by the fact that this valuable information got recently added to that message, only in the last couple of years, you’re wondering if you’ve missed a totes new trend that kids are all over – sending faxes!

Nope, none of those. The reason that message includes information about sending faxes is so the phone companies can make the length of the message longer. This is also why the message is getting slower in delivery, has extra pauses, and also tells you how to send a page. (page? really??)

And here’s the reveal – the length of the message is getting longer, so you trip over the 1 minute boundary when leaving your message. Since the phone calls are priced by the minute, the longer the initial message, the more likely you are to leave a message that’s more than 1 minute long. This helps both the caller and the callee, so there is no incentive for any phone company to go in the other direction.

More blood-sucking brought to you by your friendly phone company!

– Amit

PS: the original research for this was done by someone else – I heard about it a few years back. I haven’t been able to locate it – if someone points it out (tweet me), I’ll include it here.

Last month, Facebook silently acquired osmeta. Even though I ‘broke’ this news on Twitter, and emailed a few tech rags about it, no one has picked up on it yet – which is surprising given all the speculation about the Facebook Phone, and Facebook Home.

Using only public information (since I happen to know the founder), here’s why this is significant news.

What osmeta was trying to do

Details are sparse, as is to be expected from a stealth startup, but clues abound.

1. ‘osmeta’ – a reference to ‘meta operating system’ – potentially a virtualization technology that allows you to run the same ‘core functionality’ on top of any (potentially mobile) hardware?
2. A stellar team, to quote their own words:
   Our programming experience is even more impressive—both quantitatively and qualitatively. Between us, over the years, we have done pretty much “everything” in terms of software creation, including several first-in-the-world type of magical things. (Examples: Android, Chrome for Android, Chrome OS, Google Crawling, AdWords, ZooKeeper, BookKeeper, Pig (Hadoop), OSGi, Linux kernel control groups, network and other device drivers, cognitive computing, massive storage systems, unusual file systems, various types of virtualization, video game console emulation, and many, many others.)
3. Amit Singh, the founder,  is well-known for his penchant for virtualization technologies, and is a well-known Mac OS X author and hacker.
4. A tantalizing description of what they’re trying to achieve:
   Incredible possibilities, tremendous opportunities—for developers and users of many, many devices everywhere, including devices in cars, airplanes, and consumer electronics.

The most obvious clue that this is all about mobile is this image they post on the bare-bones website.

So, why Facebook? Because Facebook Home > Facebook Phone.

One possibility is that this is a straight-up acquihire. Clearly, the talent behind osmeta is immense – it’s possible they decided to stop doing what they’re doing, and just join Facebook. Wouldn’t be the first time.

The more intriguing possibility is this. What if Facebook decided that, strategically, they need Facebook Home to transcend every mobile device – not just Android. Who would you hire to build such a beast, and how would they go about doing it?

Perhaps what osmeta has built so far lets them spread Facebook Home across this fragmented device ecosystem, quickly, in a scalable fashion, and achieve a consistent, Facebook-centered experience, across all devices?

In other words, why would you build Facebook Phone, if you could have Facebook Home on all phones, tablets and (groan) phablets?

Looking forward to finding out! Knowing Amit, it won’t be long.

– (the other) Amit

Disclaimer: Amit Singh, founder of osmeta, was my classmate when we were studying together at IIT Delhi. However, I have purposely not communicated with him before writing this post, and used only publicly available information to hypothesize and speculate.

Do you know about Dan Martell’s Clarity? Their website is simply a web rendering of their iPhone UI:

If you think this odd, think again. ‘Mobile First‘ is fast becoming ‘Web, Perhaps’.

Amit

It’s true. In the early days of the Internet, you were know by your handle, thankfully those days are past. For the better, or perhaps worse, you are identified by your profile pic now – and dare you change it!

Quick, do you recognize these people?

Of course you do.

A profile pic that’s instantly recognizable is so important, that people are wary of changing it, much as they might hate it.

Here’s an interesting example. Dharmesh Shah recently updated his old, pixellated avatar – but chose to keep the exact same pose and expression in the new one, to avoid resetting the instant recognizability. Smart!

Amit

So, there are two possibilities.

• A celestial, well-coordinated practical joke is being played on me (good job, guys – I fell for it!)
• OR, Kenshoo is about to get acquired by IBM for $300 million.

How do I know? Either I’m being a good sleuth, or a big dummy. Decide for yourself, and comment below!

The first clues: Blog post on January 16

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Information geeks all over are relying on Twitter to keep them informed about everything that’s relevant to them. Was there an earthquake? What do people think of Google’s Privacy changes? What are the most interesting facts about the Facebook S-1? Where did everyone go for dinner last night?

Assuming you follow people relevant to your interests, and given enough time, someone will push what you need to know, right into your Twitter stream.

How does this happen? After all, we check Twitter only a few times a day, and only consume tweets originating around that time. Why don’t we miss out on major news events or interesting information?

Twitter’s product conventions and user dynamics make it more than just a glorified soapbox for the masses – I think it can in fact be analyzed as a formal information dissemination network, with clear parallels to traditional Computer Networks.

Parallels with Computer Networks

The Universe keeps you informed…

Structurally, Twitter streams are just a list of tweets from people one follows, sorted by the time of creation. Conceptually, however, we could view this stream as a multiplexed stream of information about various topics; with each person one follows contributing to various topics simultaneously, and to different degrees.
For instance, a set of people being followed might be tweeting about SES, another commenting on a football match that’s going on, while yet another set could be discussing the Facebook S-1. Of course, the people in these sets might very well overlap, with each such person participating in multiple conversations at about the same time. All of these tweets intersperse, and a picture of various topics emerges simultaneously.

In some sense, the Universe is conspiring to inform and educate, even if the people one follows couldn’t care less about our intellectual growth.

…in Tweet-sized chunks that resemble IP packets…

Due to the 140-character constraint, tweeters comment on topics in tweet-sized chunks. While they might sometimes continue the same thought over multiple tweets, generally, each tweet stands alone. Each of these tweets can be considered a separate informational entity as it flows through the Twitter network, being shared, retweeted and commented on.

Just like in IP networks, each tweet is expendable, since the underlying network is understood to be lossy. In other words, any given tweet could potentially be viewed by no one, and that’s perfectly consistent with the expectations of the network.

…via people acting like repeaters and routers…

As people interact with tweets, they act like repeaters and routers. When one retweets, for example, we’re essentially rebroadcasting an informational ‘packet’ from one subnet (one comprised of the followers of the person you’re retweeting) to a different ‘subnet’, the one comprised of all your followers.

In addition, since the retweets don’t have to happen right at the instant of the initial tweet, a retweet increases the TTL, ie, ‘time-to-live’ of the initial tweet. For instance, a tweet might be posted at 9:05am. It gets retweeted by someone who checked Twitter at 10:30am. Now, this retweet might be seen by someone who first checks Twitter at 11:35am that day – even if they missed the initial tweet.

The more people you’re following that have related interests, the more likely this routing effect is likely to happen, so connecting to relevant routers (active twitter users within relevant domains) is critical.

…while handling nodes that are down…

With a large enough number of followers with related interests, there might be enough critical mass for interesting information to flow, even if some part of the network is sleeping, in a flight, or busy in meetings!

In other words, there would be packet loss, but if there are enough nodes in the network, information flow would not be significantly impeded.

…for a reasonably lossless delivery.

This is still a pretty lossy channel, but as information dissemination architectures go, it seems to me to be a fairly robust organically evolving system. It certainly seems to be working very well for me!

Twitter doesn’t have to be real-time for this to work

Interestingly,  in this postulation, Twitter’s being real-time  is incidental, just like the fact that IP is ‘real-time’ is incidental to TCP/IP. In fact, the existence of ‘IP over Avian Carriers‘ shows that real-time-ness isn’t critical to the design of networking protocols – that’s just a repercussion of using an underlying electromagnetic substrate where bits flow pretty fast.

More analysis needed

I might be imagining things, but there seems to be enough meat in here for a PhD or two. I just don’t know if it will be in the Computer Science department, or the Sociology department!

Or, I might be way off base. Please comment below!

Amit

ApertureExpert.com noted a little while ago that edits made with iOS’s built-in photo tools appear as adjustments in Aperture. If you enable iCloud’s Photo Stream feature, any photos you edit in the Photos app will appear with the adjustments badge. In Aperture, you can hide and show the adjustments you made on iOS, or revert to the original photo entirely.

via Photo edits made on iOS appear as reversible, non-destructive adjustments in Aperture | Finer Things in iOS.

check out the bar at the top.

So here’s a germ of an idea. What if the Macbook Pros had a second camera, mounted right on the other side of the lid, across from the current camera?

Full-room video-conferencing

Let me set the scene for you. You’re at the office,  trying to setup an impromptu Skype conversation with your remote office (like ours, which you should join, by the way – it’s awesome). Let’s also assume you don’t have deep pockets, so you can’t afford to buy fancy high-end Cisco Telepresence products.

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