Il y a quelques temps, je faisais l’apologie de Ubiquity. Certes cette extension de Firefox est un peu “technophile” (même “geecky”). Mais, je ne pourrais plus vivre sans celle-ci aujourd’hui. Elle a même réussi le tour de force de me faire abandonner définitivement Safari.
L’équipe de Firefox travaille actuellement sur l’intégration de cette extension directement dans la barre d’adresse de son navigateur, avec pour objectif de rendre le tout un peu “techno”.
Voici les premiers résultats de leur équipe, il ne s’agit pour l’instant que d’une démo interactive. Mais je trouve çà déjà très prometteur.
In the past years we have seen that every online community that starts as free and open, sooner or later becomes an advertising platform.
Take YouTube. First it was a place to publish the video of your funny cat for the world to see. Now, beside being a collection of everyone’s funny cats, YouTube is an advertising channel for business, celebrities, broadcasting channels and political institutions. That’s fine. I can ignore them, if I want to, or use them to enrich my experience.
Take Facebook. Invented to connect college buddies it recently moved to the next phase, in which a company has the same kind of page as you and your buddies, functioning just as “another friend”, starting groups and promoting events. That sort of puts me off a little, but I can ignore them, too. I don’t have to befriend everybody.
Now take Wikipedia. The (French) article Pharmaceutical industry manipulates Wikipedia reveals the pharma industry’s marketing strategy for Wikipedia and shows how a subtle text manipulation can establish good reputation for a drug, discredit its competitors and conceal negative side effects.
Now, the problem with Wikipedia is that wherever you go on the site you, like Forrest Gump, “never know whatcha gonna get.” We all know that Wikipedia is written by everybody and we all know that the information might be incomplete and biased. But we still hope that somehow it will be okay.
Well, it’s not.
The rule that any open community is eventually used by somebody to make money is a reality. But Wikipedia is one of those communities which might not survive this shift because it discredits the whole idea.
Related reading: Eric Goldman “Doomed: why Wikipedia will fail“
Orange is introducing Tabbee, a multimedia tablet for “everywhere around the house and all the members of your family.” It has a 800×600 touchscreen and looks a little bit like a Macintosh display reduced to small size. Reading the text on the introduction website made me wonder about the underlying use scenarios.
The tablet can be carried around in your house and gives access “at any moment” to a range of information services, internet included. How often do we have the urge to consult the weather or our calendar while walking around our house? And even if you decide to walk around your house carrying the tablet wouldn’t you sit down to surf the net? And is a 800×600 screen then not somewhat on a small side for viewing websites?
The tablet can connect to your PC by wi-fi (so you DO still own a PC), on which you find your own stuff. I am not sure the tablet can store any stuff by itself and if not, it becomes an expensive PC remote viewer. Why then not carry around your laptop if your want to watch a movie quietly in your room?
The site does mention one believable use case, however: having the internet recipe before your eyes in the kitchen. Now there, I say, Orange did their user research well. You see, an average kitchen in Paris wouldn’t fit you AND your computer at once. It hardly fits you AND your kitchen equipment at once and you have to be truly creative in using the space. But then you would want to hang the tablet on the wall, because the wall is the only place left. In my kitchen, anyway.
A l’occasion d’une conférence durant le Salon “Display” ce matin, j’ai eu l’occasion de découvrir le travail de la société MuchoMedia (en collaboration avec la FING), sur un projet d’interface multitouch ET multiuser.
Sans détailler ce projet, ce qui m’a interpellé, c’est dans un premier temps, le fait qu’un nouvel acteur en France vienne adresser ce sujet des interfaces Multitouch. Avec Intuilab, cela fait 2 acteurs important, source d’innovation pour le domaine et démonstration que les créateurs français, dont nous espérons modestement faire partie, ont et auront à l’avenir leur mot à dire.
L’autre point intéressant, mis en lumière par le projet de Muchomédia est l’approche “multiuser” (plusieurs utilisateurs en même temps). Outre les nouveaux usages et les nouveaux comportements que cela engendre, se pose la question d’un nouveau défit : comment concevoir une interface mutliuser ?
Nous commençons, effectivement, à peine à appréhender la complexité de la conception “monouser” (un utilisateur dans une même unité de temps, d’action et de lieu) que déjà s’ouvre à nous un nouveau paradigme où l’on ramène le Web 2.0 du virtuel, à un lieu bien réel et unique.
L’interface ne proposera plus seulement “un jeu” individuel, mais véritablement un jeu social où les interacton humaines prendront certainement beaucoup plus de place que les interactions homme/machine.
Bonnes chances à Muchomédia… dans l’attente de voir leur projet se concrétiser.
Bien que la vidéo passe beaucoup de temps à nous montrer la “Wonder Wheel”, ce sont les premières options que j’attends avec impatience : filtre par type, par date, etc. (plus besoin de passer par la recherche avancée pour rapidement affiner ses recherches).
In her post on Presse-Citron Stephanie Booth appeals to bloggers to write about great women of science and technology, in honor of Lady Ada Lovelace, known as the first computer programmer. Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron, the Romantic poet. Her mother Anne Isabelle was a mathematician herself who, after separating from her husband right after her daughter’s birth, thought mathematics would be a solid antidote to the poet’s genetic “madness” and made sure the girl was taught science. Ada is famous for having envisioned a computer and written a program. Of course, there are also sources claiming that she did no such thing, that her role was merely secondary, that she was an unfaithful wife, an alcoholic and a “hysterical” woman. I am sure many great men of science were bad-tempered promiscuous alcoholics, but did it ever make anyone doubt THEIR scientific abilities? You can read more about Lady Ada here, but I would like to write about a Russian 19th century woman mathematician, Sofia Kovalevskaya - or Sophie Kowalevski, as she spent most of her adult life outside Russia. She left Russia when she was only 16 to study in Germany because, you see, Russian universities of that time did not allow women. She could only do so if her husband gave his official permission, so Sofia married Vladimir Kovalevsky: you had to have a husband, of course, to have his permission. She became the first woman to earn a doctorate in science and the first woman in history offered a full professorship in a university in Stockholm when she was 33. She won scientific prizes and made a celebrated discovery known as “Kovalevsky top”. Unfortunately both brilliant young women died young: Ada at 36 from cancer and Sofia at 41 from pneumonia.
A friend who just moved back to France after a long time in US complained about not having a French version of Yelp, a social review service allowing you “to decide on the best place to eat in any part of the country within minutes”. The service exists due to kind souls who sit down after a good meal (or a bad one) and write something about it. You’d be surprised how many kind souls there are if you look at the site. And not so kind ones too. Personally I wonder whether the urge to write a bad review is not slightly stronger than to write a good one (after a good meal you are satisfied, after a bad one you still crave something), which would make this kind of service unbalanced. But this is not the point. The point is that for a large number of things we now more often consult opinions of people “like ourselves” rather than experts on the subject. We “rely on the kindness of strangers” rather than institutions.
We had encyclopedia, written by scholars, now we have Wikipedia, written by… well, everybody. We had travel guides written by journalists, whose job it was to visit those places, now we go a social network to talk to other travelers. We had search engines, now we prefer to Twitter our question or pose it in our Facebook status. Someone would always answer and the answer would probably be exactly what we asked for, because those people happen to know us - and institutions do not.
One could argue that we now let ourselves be misled more often. But one could also argue that all information is always in some way subjective.
Just consider how many institutions are now on their way if not to extinction than at least to a profound transformation. Phone books. Yellow pages. Travel agencies - does anyone still go to those? Travel guides. Folding maps, so impractical when you have GPS on your mobile. Cook books - the last time you bought one was probably to give it to somebody as a present, and this person put it on the shelf and never looked at it again. “How-to” books - we have a YouTube category for that. Dictionaries - long live spell checker. Paper agendas - not flexible enough anymore. And so on.
In Italy I came across a typical British public phone booth, now a curiosity in somebody’s garden. Italians cannot live through a day without their mobile phone, so I thought this illustrates well my point.
