Loss of shared experience

Growing up I remember a time when I could call my friends and talk to them about the TV program they were watching. It was obviously the same one as I was watching as there were only two channels, so I could even time it for the commercial break. The same thing happened in earlier times with the radio. This situation has obviously changed...I don't even watch TV anymore.

At work some people have an expectation that I've read the news in the newspaper and talk to me about news that was adjacent to the story we are discussing. It is quite jarring to the conversation when I admit to knowing nothing about what they're talking about. I hardly ever buy a 'paper, everytime they give it to us for free I realise that the joy of the accidental discoveries (advertisements, odd news, etc) does not outweigh the wads of paper I end up having to get rid of.

Pondering these two things I wonder if we are experiencing the loss of the shared experience; the iPod generation get to listen to (and now see whatever they want, whenever they want. The opportunity for serendipitous discoveries is lost; we listen to what we have selected and unless we choose to there is no chance of accidentally discovering something new. There is no "I listen to the radio station which I like ~60% of the time and discover a new song/group".

On-demand hosted video (YouTube) goes some way to reverse this trend, but the shared experience is only amongst your peer group; MySpace et al makes this easier but again only within the defined peer group. I am beginning to attribute the popularity of social networking to the ability to perform this sharing; to bridge the islands that we've placed ourselves in and regain the ability to talk about shared experiences even if we didn't share them at the same time or place.

Where will we go from here? Will the gaps between peer groups (grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren) grow greater? Will we find a different way to slice social networks so that you don't shock your parents with your latest drinking antics, but you do share the appropriate things with those groups? How will this happen over timelines to control a situation where grandchildren 20 years hence can join a group and see granddad vomiting on the pavement? As a video?

I can see a time when your social network profile is updated in real-time with your physical location and any and all of the things you are watching, listening to, or generally experiencing. twitter is only the beginning of this. Controlling the release (and archiving) of this information has got to be an eventual concern as it matures.

Food for thought. Sorry if you expected a conclusion.

In my day...

...we used to decode our ASN.1 PER by hand. In the rain. With no pencils.

I doubt many will get the joke. I had a conversation today about 3GPP CDRs and how icky they are. I said that they are TLV based and I really don't have a problem with them, they're infinitely preferable to XML, but I think my colleague has been sucked in by the "human-readable means it is simple" XML/SIP propaganda. Apparently his hand-crafted ASN.1 BER decoder crashes if it encounters unknown tags, or somesuch, which is precisely what ASN.1 BER was designed to avoid -- it is easily extensible without breaking backward compatibility.

For the record I've decoded a reasonable amount of unaligned ASN.1 PER by hand as H.323 uses it, and I actually appreciate the feelings of the people that said that SIP was easier because it was text. XML and ASN.1 PER are at the opposite ends of the spectrum of verboseness, and they both go too far. The reality is though that the encoding of the messages wasn't what was fundamentally hard about H.323, it was how all the protocol levels fitted together and the inherent complexity of what it was solving. SIP is basically as complicated as H.323 now, and just as fractured.

I actually like ASN.1 BER though, it is mature and extensible and both cheap to parse and reasonably compact. So I think I will build a little decoder for my poor colleagues and demonstrate the power of Erlang, ASN.1, and a bit of gumption. It'll make a good webpage that I'm sure will be of interest to others in the industry, and it'll fit nicely alongside the MEID one. The only problem will be cleaning up all the 3GPP specifications, the typo's are atrocious.

Teeth

A quick diversion today to recommend a dentist. Cliff Steven from Cliff Steven Dental in Johnsonville, Wellington, New Zealand.

If you live in the vicinity and you need a dentist for your child, go to him. Our 9 year old has been to lots of dentists due to enamel hypoplasia of his milk teeth, and has a strong gag reflex. Not generally an excellent combination for dental visits, especially when mixed with a general intolerance for submitting to discomfort.

Cliff fixed #1 son up smoothly, quickly, and almost painlessly. The x-ray, always a point of much choking, gagging and general failure to cooperate, went without a hitch. #1 was in shock as 15 minutes after arriving he was back in the car sans tooth. He said walking back to the car that doesn't ever want to go to a different dentist.

#1 is now fine, and according to Cliff he looks to have a future without braces or cavities. Yay.

Mobile TV: unicasting, multicasting and broadcasting

There appear to be many people after our attention. They want us watching their content, no sorry, paying for their content, and watching their advertisements. Even when in the bus.

So we have Mobile TV. I am really not sure if there is a market for it, but that hasn't stopped these ideas being hyped before so I don't think it will stop this one. It seems like a reasonable concept; watch TV anywhere, anytime. People love TV right?. It might even look okay with a iPhone or PSP type screen.

Behind the Mobile TV hype we have standards. MBMS, DVB-H, DMB, MediaFLO, and a few others bit players. All of these standards focus on a broadcast, or (as a concession to bandwidth) multicast model for delivery, and so I think all of them are missing the point.

The future is YouTube. People want to choose what to watch and when they watch it. If they get interrupted they want to pause it. They want to be able to share it with their friends in the same city, the same country, or on the same planet. They've got this freedom now and they won't forget about it, or accept that just because they are mobile they can't get it.

Apple seems to get this with their YouTube partnership, but the engineers in charge of the standards groups do not. I don't think they can see beyond the fact that unicasted content is a hideously inefficient model. It is a bare, naked, fact. Offering unicasted TV over the mobile infrastructure has the potential to suck up all the current mobile capacity serving only a tiny percentage of their customer base. It magnifies all the differences in load throughout the network e.g. CBD cell sites would overload during the day, but be idle at night when the urban cell sites would begin to overload. This kind of infrastructure costs big bucks to expand as you end up needing more physical sites, more antennas, more radio gear, and above all more connectivity from these remote sites to the core network.

Customers don't care. Every aspect of modern life, down to working hours, is becoming on-demand. Generation Y will not accept broadcast TV for much longer; TiVo and it's ilk are only a stepping stone to a full on-demand service. The shared experience of lives being worked around a central TV schedule is over. It's been talked about for years and YouTube accelerated it to fruition, even if it is worse than NTSC or PAL TV on a bad day.

There are other flaws in the standards proposed:

• MBMS soaks up huge amounts of capacity for a small number of channels. Think about returning to 3 channels everyone.
  
• DVB-H and MediaFLO require a new radio receiver in your phone, along with discrete chips etc etc. Yeah, like that'll work. I can imagine the small hole in that pitch: "I'll get you a million subscribers, but you'll have to give them all new phones or wait 3 years."

Mobile TV can only ever have niche market if it sticks to a broadcast model. I feel like taking people by the shoulders and shaking them. What part of this is so hard to understand?

SAAS educational software

Is it just me, or does all educational software suck? I can't work out why either, does "think of the children" mode mean that user testing, esp. user interface testing, is not required? Is the market really so small that no one has the money/motivation? Do kids just cope?

Anyway, I've had a mixed bag signing up my eldest for Mathletics. The product looks quite good, a good concept, and they've had a killer marketing idea by giving free access to primary schools in NZ and Australia for a week or so in order to promote Literacy and Numeracy Week (hey, Australian only?). Basically NZ and Australia fight it out for points (I think) with the individual students battling each other game by game. Neat. And the parents get to see the product en masse and (like me) sign up if they like it.

I'd never seen this product before, although it seems to have a critical mass (and good critical reviews). It does look like it will help and encourage Son #1 with his mental arithmetic and build on his already impressive spelling skills. The games are amusing, the head-to-head nature adds some competition element, and the parents can get week-by-week feedback on progress.

In game progress allows the purchase of add-ons to your avatar, although I must admit to being confused about the difference between points (earned per game, used for totals) and credits (earned per game at a different rate, used for avatar upgrades).

The game is totally flash based, with annoying new windows for login and some weird UI behaviour like no auto-focus on the entry box for some of the maths games. But it does work 99% of the time, and #1 seems to enjoy it.

I had an awful time signing up for a year (NZ$99 for maths and spelling, on special) as I got the dreaded ASP error n when returning from the payment portal (successfully, I might add). On the other hand I got a phone call (!) in response to my email within minutes. I've learned to just bit my tongue when people tell me it is my fault, and I dutifully did it all again with the same result. Then I wrote another email where I was more forceful about suggesting they fix it and not make me enter all the details again and have my CC charged again.

Next morning it was all fixed, so I have to recommend the customer service and the service as a whole. More reports in a month or so when we've had more time to evaluate the long-term effects.