Updating Ideas

I feel like my web skills have been swept out from underneath me. You go away for a few months, and come back, and everything has changed so much. So much. And that’s in a very short space of time.

Adobe are now compiling their core Flash runtime down to standard machine code. Is the iPhone App Store about to explode? Or will it implode?

A Tsunami hit the South Pacific. And a Wave is hitting the web.

The hardest thing to grasp about this, as someone who came from the era of old-skool HTML — where we were building networks of hyperlinked pages and hacking HTML tables and spacer gifs to get as much visual structure and typography as we could onto the web, from backgrounds in print-design — is the transformative interaction that happens inline, live in the browser.

Back in the 1990s, a lot of people thought (or wanted) the web to go in the direction of Television. Big, flashy, high-concept media and visual interaction. What they didn’t understand, was that e-mail was (and still is) the lowest common denominator, and was the one ongoing source of attraction that enabled the internet to take off at a mass level in society.

So we are stuck with that malformed, much maligned format of email. It works because we fill in the gaps mentally – we can project our own shape and form onto the basic synchronous tit-for-tat exchange of texts. But when we use it frequently, it wastes a lot of time.

What interests me the most is the standardization and understanding that now exists in the realm of realtime collaborative document editing. It is actually quite a straightforward concept, but requires some very nasty clever tricks to get working in a reliable way.

Differential synchronization breaks down the synchronous nature of sending messages back and forward in a conversation to the micro-scale of typing and deleting individual characters in a document.

At a high level, the core function of this lock-free collaborative editing is a merging process that occurs whenever a conflict is triggered when two people try to edit the same part of a document.

It is already clear how this is going to transform corporate “knowledge work”, what is less clear, is the influence it will have on arts and media development.

Or the opposite might be true – the only difference being that instead of people sitting around a table arguing, they will be sitting at their desks arguing through their keyboards (or even sitting around a table and arguing via their respective laptops and phones).