Oren’s Weblog

Will Wright (Maxis/Electronic Arts, and the creator of Sim City)

Models are a good way of abstracting data to make it understandable – building physical models is a good way of starting.

The idea that there could be a whole world living in your computer is fascinating. He showed the first version of Flight Simulator and the latest as a comparison.

One of the interesting things about games is that you can restart games from the begining – an iterative way of experiencing time. Games are a good way of understanding chaotic systems because you can see how small changes can create large differences in outcomes.

Possibility space – the shape of the landscape of possibilities is how you model the difficulty of achievement. Tried to model the Sims so that people needed to balance material and social success – but people tend to go for one side or the other. Now they’re doing dynamic tuning of the game based on data from real players and how they negotiate the space.

A story is a way of how to displace someone’s experience in time and space to apply it to another person. While you’re seeing one linear path of events, the drama is created by imagining all the other things that didn’t happen (“what would’ve happened if he had tripped here?”).

Kids will mash all the buttons, look at what’s happening on the screen, and build a model of the cause and effect relationships – kids are great at building a mental model of arbitrarily complex systems. Hey – just like science!

Games are doing the same thing – looking for simple compact rules that can create large spaces of possibilities.

Dynamics – the change of structures through time. We tend to think in terms of topologies, which are the parts of the systems, then there are the dynamics that occur to these things, then there are paradigms (network theory, adaptive systems, chaor theory, etc). Game player intuitively understand topologies within two or three minutes of playing.

A unique property of time is nested interaction loop with success and failure at each level. First you have to learn basic control, then you can deal with their needs, then you can get to the next level. The most intereseting side for most players is the failure side – that’s where people spend the most time. As long as people understand why they failed they are willing to go back and try it again.

Interesting book – the User Illusion. Most of our intelligence is pre-conscious.

When players look at games a similary thing happens – use visuals in the game to tell the player what the nouns and verbs are. In first-person shooters you discover things by going around and bashing everything with the noun you have.

Games run on two processors – the computer and the player’s imagination. A lot of what gets built in games is scaffolding for the player’s imagination. A lot of the trend lately in games is to go to more open-ended games where the player has a role of authorship.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2

Using time and time patterns to detect things.

Bob Pinner (CDC) – An internal medicine and infectious disease doc, now working on epidemiology – three major dimensions are time, place, and person. The structure of things they think about are similar to events. Infectious disease surveillance is what he works on – monitoring trends, or more recently, early detection. Can you go earlier than a specific diagnosis, to a syndrome, or even earlier, to a set of conditions. The earlier you get the less specific the signals are. Public health functions are organized locally by state and county – that’s good for local response but not so good for national distribution of medicine, for instance.

Steve Hofmayr (Sana Security) – Trying to detect malicious software on a single computer. Gathering information can leave you vulnerable. If you’re looking at time on your computer, looking at dynamic behavior of a system. When it behaves a little strangely, it’s not enough to define it as bad, but when it’s a lot strange it’s too late. With machines you can roll back what happened once you know. Analagous to the immune system, which doesn’t mount a massive response right when it sees something new, but waits to gather more information before responding. A classic example – You’d think if something on its machine that tries to hide itself is bad, but it’s not necessarily. Or if a process survives a reboot. But if enough of those kinds of events are correlated in time, then it becomes more likely that there is some malware.

Dan Doman – At doubleclick they had a vision of highly targeted advertising. Keeping track of demographic data is difficult – he got interested in inferring demographics – e.g. people who go to sports sites are likely to be guys, etc. Contextual advertising is delivering advertising within the context that the consumer is in now. You look for the numbers of times people are looking at things (“velocity”) over a period of time which indicate an intensity of interest.

Omar Tawakol (Revenue Science) – Behavioral targeting – advertisers and marketers have always wanted to reach people based on what they care about. Behavioral targeting talks about the person reading the page, not the text on a page. It also brings the notion of time into the equation – if you go to a car site, and then to an entertainment site, the entertainment site can show you car ads. In advertising there are two uses for time – one is branding, which is all about your interests; the other is direct response, where the goal is immediate response. Branding is more time independent – it you’re a golfer you probably will be in five years, but if you’re looking to buy a mortgage, you probably won’t buy again for five years.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2

Using time and time patterns to detect things.

Bob Pinner (CDC) – An internal medicine and infectious disease doc, now working on epidemiology – three major dimensions are time, place, and person. The structure of things they think about are similar to events. Infectious disease surveillance is what he works on – monitoring trends, or more recently, early detection. Can you go earlier than a specific diagnosis, to a syndrome, or even earlier, to a set of conditions. The earlier you get the less specific the signals are. Public health functions are organized locally by state and county – that’s good for local response but not so good for national distribution of medicine, for instance.

Steve Hofmayr (Sana Security) – Trying to detect malicious software on a single computer. Gathering information can leave you vulnerable. If you’re looking at time on your computer, looking at dynamic behavior of a system. When it behaves a little strangely, it’s not enough to define it as bad, but when it’s a lot strange it’s too late. With machines you can roll back what happened once you know. Analagous to the immune system, which doesn’t mount a massive response right when it sees something new, but waits to gather more information before responding. A classic example – You’d think if something on its machine that tries to hide itself is bad, but it’s not necessarily. Or if a process survives a reboot. But if enough of those kinds of events are correlated in time, then it becomes more likely that there is some malware.

Dan Doman – At doubleclick they had a vision of highly targeted advertising. Keeping track of demographic data is difficult – he got interested in inferring demographics – e.g. people who go to sports sites are likely to be guys, etc. Contextual advertising is delivering advertising within the context that the consumer is in now. You look for the numbers of times people are looking at things (“velocity”) over a period of time which indicate an intensity of interest.

Omar Tawakol (Revenue Science) – Behavioral targeting – advertisers and marketers have always wanted to reach people based on what they care about. Behavioral targeting talks about the person reading the page, not the text on a page. It also brings the notion of time into the equation – if you go to a car site, and then to an entertainment site, the entertainment site can show you car ads. In advertising there are two uses for time – one is branding, which is all about your interests; the other is direct response, where the goal is immediate response. Branding is more time independent – it you’re a golfer you probably will be in five years, but if you’re looking to buy a mortgage, you probably won’t buy again for five years.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2

Had a good time at lunch chatting with Lisa Dusseault from OSAF and Tantek Celik from Technorati about the hcalendar microformat, calendar urls, and lost of other interesting things.

The afternoon panel, on time and functionality is just starting.

Munjal Shah (RIYA) – Tagging lots of digital photo data – uses face recognition and text recognition to infer what and who are in a photo, and turn it into a searchable database. They do it for consumers on the desktop, and have a permissioning model for letting people search their friends. One insight is that consumer photos come with timestamps, which they used to enhance face recognition through time-based clustering. For instance, if there are ten photos of you at a party wearing a particular shirt and only one of them is full-face, they can infer that the other photos of the same shirt around the same time are also you.

Tantek Celik (Technorati) – Time searching on the web is terrible – try looking for just this year’s version of the conference. Technorati relies on pings from blog software for indexing. Before an event people are talking about it, during the event people are blogging it, after the event people write about it. What happens in short time windows? We find that humans are the best at knowing what’s going on right now – the most popular ten searches on Technorati. News – let’s look at what bloggers are linking to in the last forty-eight hours – turns out to not being the same topics a newspaper editor would choose. They see the names of bloggers in far-flung places around the globe that we may not have heard of – it dramatically flattens our view of the world.

Esther asks when most documents will have timestamps on the web – Tantek asks whether you can trust time information in documents? The ping is a more reliable time stamp, because Technorati knows when the ping was received and when they went out and retrieved the information. As we get used to copying info from the web we’ll make much more use of time-based information. Technorati is working on microformats, small extensions to html that enable information within web pages to identify the same kind of information as ical and vcards.

John Arenas (Worktopia) – Worktopia is about the premise that the ubiquitous network and collaboration tools are freeing the workforce from physical limitations. Matches demands such as temporary space with supply. Enables companies to have a distributed workforce. This kind of relationship allows hotels and other meeting spaces to tap short-term markets between big meetings, for example. John notes that Sun now has 1.5 workers per desk, so this is an accelerating trend.

Ben Cruze (Demand ID Systems) – enabling users to request live music events, and over time other kinds of events. Provide a market intelligence to show level of demand for a performer in any part of the country – that doesn’t exist today. On the back end, when an event is scheduled, they alert consumers who requested the event, so they can purchase tickets and merchandise. They can also alert sponsors to how many people might be likely to attend an event, so they can better plan and target their sponsorship dollars. The consumer service is under the brand name of Tourvote. Enabling people to have a voice in creating an event is important.

What’s the business model? Munjal – Search is the model – you’ll search for places, products, and things – not professional pictures but user generated pictures, which reflect reality better. The premise is that travel advertising will support the business. Tantek – Marketers are using Technorati to do research on their brands.

Mark Johnson from Intuit on how does time influence decision making? The (somewhat silly) example he gives is the decision of whether to spend $4 a day on a venti cappucinno vs. $4 a day on Starbuck’s stock. Esther comments on making latent demand visible – knowing that you’re part of a larger group that all want Bonnie Raitt to show up. How is our discount factor changing with respect to time?

Ben asks Munjal the question about whether people have the right to put up pictures of buildings and other businesses that they don’t own, and about the tension between business owners who want to link to photos of their businesses and the reality of what user photos might actually show (e.g. the cockroach in a hotel).

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, when2

Working Together Should Be Easier

Collaboratively constructed work products – stuff people put together with other people – e.g. presentations, documents, schedules, source code, etc.

Pavel would argue that we support this kind of activity very poorly.

Collaboration via email – everybody writes their own section, sends their section to one owner/victim, who pulls it together, unifying styles, sends it out to everybody, and everybody makes an edit. Victim coordinates and goes quiethly insane.

Collab via shared files – put draft out on a file server, each author editing on a single copy – but can’t author at the same time or when disconnected, so they make a copy…etc.

What do we really want? Never prevented from editing, can edit while disconnected, owner needs to review edits and selectively undo them, and to control who can edit what when.

Better collab vie email – send first draft as attachment, each user edits, application aggregates edits and sends back to everyone..

Really we just need to send the edits, not the whole documents – “delete N characters ad position P”

How do we make this work? Goal is that everybody sees the same story, including the order in which things happened – the order that “God” saw the edits, including disconnected edits. Involves some mucking about with the incoming edits coming by email. What makes a good order? Everybody can compute locally without talking to the server – given two edits which one comes earlier? Everybody gets the same story everywhere. Respect causality.

How to implement order – label every edit with its potential “causes” – what other edits were received before this edit? If edit A knew about strictly more edits than B, A comes later in the story. If neither edit knows more, use arbitrary rule to order.

Transform edits – can’t just take your edit and apply locally as if nothing else had happened, because I’ve been working on the doc. Must transform edits with knowledge of what’s changed. If i know what you knew when you made your edit, I can do that. It gets a little bit complicated, but it’s doable. Need two kinds of tools – transform before, and transform after. Then all becomes possible.

Current status – About sixteen years ago some guys in Texas defined the problem. People have been coming up with algorithms but not the transformations themselves. Pavel solved this problem – putting together an advanced team at Microsoft and building an app-indepndent toolkit. Resolving intellectual property issues within Microsoft.

Tantek asks whether Pavel’s used SubEthaEdit – Pavel is familiar with it, but hasn’t looked at it in depth. Solves some of these problems in a restricted domain.

Pavel – Collaboration is not a product, but it should be part of nearly every product. He’s looking forward to openly publishing this whole set of technologies, but there are other people at Microsoft who may have other opinions.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, When 2.0

Esther – We have a lack of standards – would having standards free up resources?

Mitch – it will free up developers from re-inventing the wheel. ICal is fine for representing the data of the event. But when you’re trying to coordinate multiple events among multiple people, that’s the realm that CalDAV and SSE are trying to get into.

Question – is Microsoft a part of the discussions? Ray – Not yet, but he’ll be chatting with Mitch shortly. (Huzzah!)

Raymie – it’s good that people are working toward interoperability of read/write of events, but the next frontier is the kind of things Yori is working on, the social aspects of scheduling and rescheduling.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, When 2.0

The first panel has:

Mitch Kapor, from OSAF: Why has Chandler focused on calendaring? Because we learned that with a gigantic vision it can’t all get done – need to innovate in a series of leaps. There’s much more pain around calendars than mail right now. The killer feature for the rest of us is to make it easy to share calendars in a variety of ways. Nothing has gotten above the bar so far, and when there is something usable there will be a lot of users who will adopt it. Outlook and Exchange have an enterprise focus when you get to calendar sharing – 200 million of them but zero of everybody else. We bring a bunch of skill and a good team, and a commitment to see something through. To get something that a big corporation might use is a huge undertaking.

Yori Nelkin – Timebridge is a coordination platform – view is that a scheduling is not a database loolup problem of free/busy – you may be free but not unless certain conditions are met. It’s a transactional exchange that, even in a business environment is very social. They plug into email as well as calendar – Outlook initially. There’s a lot of hidden motivations behind what people are doing, their goal is to keep as many balls in the air as people want until they make decisions – waiting to see who else is attending, what the agenda is, etc. Make a decision when it needs to be made, not before. Esther notes that the amount of disclosure is an issue – Yori provides some control of disclosure, but leans towards openness. Continuing conversations “out of band” in email is consistent with Timebridge. Shooting for release on Feb 8 or March 12.

Ray Ozzie – Esther asks – what would you like to do? Ray notes that he’s not in the Outlook group. Outlook in general – the things he’s seen indicates that it’s continuing to make forward progress, in a classic MS Office way each release continues to bring new features. Release 12 brings significant UI enhancements – no menus! Calendaring module now supplies overlaid calendars and integrated tasks. One of the pain points is managing many different sets of calendar entries and contacts with many different people – would like to have a mesh of sharing. Uses Outlook as an agregator, but would like to have co-editing of things with other people. Got together with some lead developers with Outlook, Exchange, MSN, Windows Mobile and asked why can’t we share among the products? Brainstormed and decided on agreement of two very simple things: vcards to represent contacts and icalendar to represent single events. Publish those with RSS, including some categorization. SSE is a way of synchronizing subscriptions bilaterallly. Individual products should take these things deep – whether it’s Chandler, Trumba, or Outlook.

Raymie Stata (Yahoo!) – Started Bloomba with an email client, with a specific vision to make email better – found that calendaring is really where the pain is – the tag line of the company was “change your outlook”. But learned that Exchange was really where the pain was. The innovation was to put the conflict resolution into the client so that the server side is simple storage, like WebDAV. There’s a mindset around these products – there’s what Exchange and Notes do today, but what we see in new products like Upcoming (not part of Yahoo) is a view of scheduling and event management that breaks out of that box – view of social relationships that is not contemplated in corporate products – the desire to talk about and discover events. The work around events at Yahoo will lead to being able to do “bloomba-like things” within a social network.

Esther – you can’t really manage time, but only what you do with it. What you really want to do is manage specific kinds of activities – the challenge is to represent activities, knowing which people, documents, etc are part of an event. The challenge is to represent the activity in software as something that happens over time, whether it’s a budget cycle or your kids’ college application process.

Mitch – Chandler made a choice to start out delivering the basics – in their case calendar with sharing, in order gain momentum through adoption. The price is that it will take them longer to get to fancy features. There’s a lot of web momentum around David Allen’s Getting Things Done. OSAF has drunk some of that kool-aid, which is activity oriented – tasks, projects, next actions. Your can use that system with a word processor, but that puts a lot of burden on the individual. Chandler will have some facilities to enable this kind of activity – tasks, emails, etc are all stored in a unified store, and have stamping, where you can make one item be multiple kinds of things – e.g. turn a task into an event so it has calendar-type attributes so you can structure its meaning in time. A lot of this is inherited from Lotus Agenda and will be experimental at first. Most open source projects do something that’s been done in other ways before within an open source context, but Chandler is trying to architect a project to do new things in an open source way. There’s a server piece called Cosmo, based on CalDAV for sharing. Mitch hopes to have some conversation with Ray later today about CalDAV and SSE and how to make things work together.

Esther – Innovation in calendaring seems to be coming from the consumer side, rather than the enterprise. Being enabled by the huge increase of people online.

Raymie – as we’ve been decomposing calendaring, at the end of the day what you manage is your commitments to other people at specific times. The calendar is to help you deal with that baseline commitment in ever more complicated lives, to make sure that you don’t overcommit. In introducing search into email, the amount of filing people do goes way down, saving people’s time. His theory is that the amount of time people spend organizing is constant – you can spend that time managing your past, by filing, or by organizing your future, by engaging in activity management.

Ray notes that the calendar is more than just commitments, but a shared space for exchanging information, including notes related to the calendar events.

Mitch notes that the 0.6 chandler release has shared read/write calendar sharing with a notes field – that’s the beginning of the kinds of things that Mitch is talking about.

Steve Farrell (IBM) – the hard thing is drawing links between disparate things that are part of the same activity.

Esther notes that she’s never seen a calendar that understands location – there’s general agreement. Mitch notes that there’s a timezone feature in Chandler, which is a step towards understanding location. Events have timezone attributes. It turns out that it’s difficult and nuanced to get something as simple as timezones right.

Mitch – read Getting Things DoneECAR 2005 Symposium – when that soaked into OSAF culture the way they did things really changed. If you’re looking to add value, look to make groups effective at working together – they all need help and tools and service, and that will drive innovation, more than what we do individually.

Esther – The role of the assistant is intriguing. More people in the room have lost assistants in the past three years than have acquired one. That’s a market.

Hans Bjordahl – The Outlook guy at Microsoft. It’s clear that time management is undergoing a shift from paper-based to electronic. They’re on board with ICal in the new release.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, When 2.0

The first panel has:

Mitch Kapor, from OSAF: Why has Chandler focused on calendaring? Because we learned that with a gigantic vision it can’t all get done – need to innovate in a series of leaps. There’s much more pain around calendars than mail right now. The killer feature for the rest of us is to make it easy to share calendars in a variety of ways. Nothing has gotten above the bar so far, and when there is something usable there will be a lot of users who will adopt it. Outlook and Exchange have an enterprise focus when you get to calendar sharing – 200 million of them but zero of everybody else. We bring a bunch of skill and a good team, and a commitment to see something through. To get something that a big corporation might use is a huge undertaking.

Yori Nelkin – Timebridge is a coordination platform – view is that a scheduling is not a database loolup problem of free/busy – you may be free but not unless certain conditions are met. It’s a transactional exchange that, even in a business environment is very social. They plug into email as well as calendar – Outlook initially. There’s a lot of hidden motivations behind what people are doing, their goal is to keep as many balls in the air as people want until they make decisions – waiting to see who else is attending, what the agenda is, etc. Make a decision when it needs to be made, not before. Esther notes that the amount of disclosure is an issue – Yori provides some control of disclosure, but leans towards openness. Continuing conversations “out of band” in email is consistent with Timebridge. Shooting for release on Feb 8 or March 12.

Ray Ozzie – Esther asks – what would you like to do? Ray notes that he’s not in the Outlook group. Outlook in general – the things he’s seen indicates that it’s continuing to make forward progress, in a classic MS Office way each release continues to bring new features. Release 12 brings significant UI enhancements – no menus! Calendaring module now supplies overlaid calendars and integrated tasks. One of the pain points is managing many different sets of calendar entries and contacts with many different people – would like to have a mesh of sharing. Uses Outlook as an agregator, but would like to have co-editing of things with other people. Got together with some lead developers with Outlook, Exchange, MSN, Windows Mobile and asked why can’t we share among the products? Brainstormed and decided on agreement of two very simple things: vcards to represent contacts and icalendar to represent single events. Publish those with RSS, including some categorization. SSE is a way of synchronizing subscriptions bilaterallly. Individual products should take these things deep – whether it’s Chandler, Trumba, or Outlook.

Raymie Stata (Yahoo!) – Started Bloomba with an email client, with a specific vision to make email better – found that calendaring is really where the pain is – the tag line of the company was “change your outlook”. But learned that Exchange was really where the pain was. The innovation was to put the conflict resolution into the client so that the server side is simple storage, like WebDAV. There’s a mindset around these products – there’s what Exchange and Notes do today, but what we see in new products like Upcoming (not part of Yahoo) is a view of scheduling and event management that breaks out of that box – view of social relationships that is not contemplated in corporate products – the desire to talk about and discover events. The work around events at Yahoo will lead to being able to do “bloomba-like things” within a social network.

Esther – you can’t really manage time, but only what you do with it. What you really want to do is manage specific kinds of activities – the challenge is to represent activities, knowing which people, documents, etc are part of an event. The challenge is to represent the activity in software as something that happens over time, whether it’s a budget cycle or your kids’ college application process.

Mitch – Chandler made a choice to start out delivering the basics – in their case calendar with sharing, in order gain momentum through adoption. The price is that it will take them longer to get to fancy features. There’s a lot of web momentum around David Allen’s Getting Things Done. OSAF has drunk some of that kool-aid, which is activity oriented – tasks, projects, next actions. Your can use that system with a word processor, but that puts a lot of burden on the individual. Chandler will have some facilities to enable this kind of activity – tasks, emails, etc are all stored in a unified store, and have stamping, where you can make one item be multiple kinds of things – e.g. turn a task into an event so it has calendar-type attributes so you can structure its meaning in time. A lot of this is inherited from Lotus Agenda and will be experimental at first. Most open source projects do something that’s been done in other ways before within an open source context, but Chandler is trying to architect a project to do new things in an open source way. There’s a server piece called Cosmo, based on CalDAV for sharing. Mitch hopes to have some conversation with Ray later today about CalDAV and SSE and how to make things work together.

Esther – Innovation in calendaring seems to be coming from the consumer side, rather than the enterprise. Being enabled by the huge increase of people online.

Raymie – as we’ve been decomposing calendaring, at the end of the day what you manage is your commitments to other people at specific times. The calendar is to help you deal with that baseline commitment in ever more complicated lives, to make sure that you don’t overcommit. In introducing search into email, the amount of filing people do goes way down, saving people’s time. His theory is that the amount of time people spend organizing is constant – you can spend that time managing your past, by filing, or by organizing your future, by engaging in activity management.

Ray notes that the calendar is more than just commitments, but a shared space for exchanging information, including notes related to the calendar events.

Mitch notes that the 0.6 chandler release has shared read/write calendar sharing with a notes field – that’s the beginning of the kinds of things that Mitch is talking about.

Steve Farrell (IBM) – the hard thing is drawing links between disparate things that are part of the same activity.

Esther notes that she’s never seen a calendar that understands location – there’s general agreement. Mitch notes that there’s a timezone feature in Chandler, which is a step towards understanding location. Events have timezone attributes. It turns out that it’s difficult and nuanced to get something as simple as timezones right.

Mitch – read Getting Things DoneECAR 2005 Symposium – when that soaked into OSAF culture the way they did things really changed. If you’re looking to add value, look to make groups effective at working together – they all need help and tools and service, and that will drive innovation, more than what we do individually.

Esther – The role of the assistant is intriguing. More people in the room have lost assistants in the past three years than have acquired one. That’s a market.

Hans Bjordahl – The Outlook guy at Microsoft. It’s clear that time management is undergoing a shift from paper-based to electronic. They’re on board with ICal in the new release.

Technorati Tags: Calendaring, When 2.0