Earlier this month, I wrote about new, bi-directional, head's up eyeglasses that could change the way we look at (and through) our computers. In that article I mentioned that since my days of programming early microprocessors by loading machine code via toggle switches, I have joked that I wanted a DWIW opcode (Do What I Want).

Well, mind reading technology is a lot closer to reality than I had realized.

Yesterday, InformationWeek reported that,

"Toyota researchers in Japan have built a brain/machine interface (BMI) that has been demonstrated to control a wheelchair using a person's thoughts."

And Toyota is not the only player in the BMI space.  On March 31 of this year, Honda released a video demonstration of its BMI technology that allowed researchers to command a robot to do one of several commands simply by thinking about it.

This YouTube video shows a researcher demonstrating the use of the BMI-controlled wheelchair.

Researchers indicate that with this wheelchair application, they are able to attain a mind-recognition accuracy of about 95%.  This is already an improvement over Honda's demonstration of 90% accuracy just three months ago.

Something to Think About

I'm 50 years old.  I started dabbling with analog electronics, soldering together discrete transistor (and even a few vacuum tube!) projects in the early '70s.  By the mid-70's I was into digital electronics and was dabbling with flip-flops, counters, gates, and the very new, and hyper-cool early microprocessor and memory chips.

In high school, I had access to Western Michigan University's DEC-10 systems and I started learning about software.  And I started imagining what the world might be like in "the future" when I was "old" (like, say, 50) and CPUs were "thousands of times faster", RAM and disk storage "thousands of times bigger."  I remember many a conversation—with my dad, my friends, a few teachers—about how one day, computers will be everywhere doing amazing things for us like storing all of our music, books, photos, recipes, medical records, and doing amazing calculations for us like mapping routes between cities, forecasting the weather, generating 3-D graphics, etc.

In college, I studied all the usual computer engineering subjects—software architectures, compiler construction, computer graphics, etc.—but a few topics really resonated: artificial intelligence, robotics, and one that came as quite a surprise to me, an engineering philosophy course taught by Henryk Skolimowski.  Those got me to thinking about how all this technology is more than just gadgets and tools.  Technology shapes the way we live.

Then sometime around 1982 or so, I read Douglas Hofstadter's wonderful Gödel, Escher Back—A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll. And shortly thereafter, Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.  Those authors got me thinking about how the line between minds and machines is very blurry.  Technology not only shapes the way we live, it shapes the way we are.

And by "the way we are," I mean our very nature as human beings.  We have been evolving for millions of years—or billions of years depending where you choose to start the clock.  But the point is, we've been evolving for a long time... slowly.  But we, as a species, are at the cusp of something very different.  We are in a position, for the first time in our history (and perhaps the first time in all history), to take conscious control of our own evolution.

To some degree, we have been doing this for a while.  For example, its no longer necessary to be born with a resistance to polio, or rubella, or pertussis in order to survive childhood.  We have engineered vaccines that allow us to work around those issues. It is no longer (absolutely) necessary to have good heart valves, or kidneys, to live a relatively long and happy life.  But today, our technologies are letting us manipulate our selves at much more fundamental levels—DNA manipulation, nanotechnologies, and brain/machine interfacing.  At the same time, we are Transcending Moore's Law, driving computing power exponentially upward.

In this context, I recently finished reading Hofstadter's latest book, I Am a Strange Loop, in which he refines and expands on the arguments he made in GEB, that the line between minds and machines is blurry because there may, in fact, be no line at all.

When I think of the changes we've seen just since I was 8 years old, it is pretty staggering.  But the rate of change has been, and is likely to remain, exponential.  My kids are 8 and 6 (and 6).  I wonder what (human) life will be like when they are 50.  I suspect it will be very, very different than today.  And when their kids are 50?  Radically different.

How radically different?  Possibly, different enough to merit a new name.  And that name has already been proposed: Homo Evolutis.  Crazy?  Maybe.  But watch the Juan Enriquez TED talk on mind boggling science.  It's pretty sane.

Consumer and market analysis giant Nielsen released a summary report on the state of the social media landscape as of last month.

Highlights:

• People are spending more time on social media and blog sites than ever before.
• Twitter.com was the fastest growing web brand but growth has begun to slow.
• Average time spent on Twitter is up nearly 300% in the past 12 months.
• Facebook remains the largest social media destination.
• Myspace.com remains the top social media video stream provider.

Download Nielsen's May 2009 report on social networks (PDF)

I just finished reading Sarah Perez's Where Does Real-Time Matter? In Viewing the Stream or Searching It? (Facebook Bets on the Latter) on Read Write Web.

Setting aside the debate over the "real-time" terminology, to me the article offers a false dichotomy.  Yes, "real-time" matters, and it matters in many different use cases, including viewing and searching.

Fast flowing information streams—whether the result of search, friend timelines, whatever—are like drinking from a fire hose. These must rely on some type of filtering to provide the lens through which the raw streaming information is consumed.

This is nothing new. The radio spectrum is teeming with information streams that we are incapable of consuming en mass. So are your eyes, for that matter. We use radios to tune into specific "channels" of information to provide a lens on the radio spectrum. Our brain and nervous system uses clever image processing tricks to provide a lens on the visible light hitting our eyes.

We will continue to evolve (develop) a variety of lenses through which to view digital information streams from Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. Facebook search, Twitter search, TweetDeck groups, are just three examples of specific lenses. It's not a question of where real-time matters. It matters everywhere. It's more a question of which lenses are best suited for different objectives.

I was delighted to learn that TweetDeck 0.26 became available this evening and quickly upgraded TweetDeck on my MacBook Pro and installed the newly available iPhone version.  I have long been wishing for TweetDeck on the iPhone and, so far, I am thrilled with the implementation.  The TweetDeck team did a great job translating the TweetDeck client UI experience to the iPhone.

Highlights

• iPhone Support—TweetDeck for the iPhone is now available as a free download in the iTunes store.
• TweetDeck Account/Synchronization—This defines an account that automatically backs up your TweetDeck settings to a web service, allowing you to synchronize TweetDeck instances running on different machines.  For example, I can now sync TweetDeck on my Windows machines and Tweet Deck on my iPhone with my "master" TweetDeck on my MacBook Pro.
• Multiple Twitter Accounts—Just as the previous version could post to your Twitter account and/or your Facebook account, TweetDeck 0.26 lets you define multiple Twitter accounts and makes it very easy to specify which account(s) to post to.  Thus, you can easily manage multiple Twitter "personas" from the TweetDeck UI.
• Reply All—This new command lets you easily reply to all people referenced in a tweet.
• Block—This new command lets you quickly block a user.
• Block & Report Spam—This command lets you block a user and report the user as spam all in one operation.
• Reference To—This command adds to a new tweet a shortened URL that references an existing tweet.

(Note: I've not done an exhaustive review; if I've missed something new, please post a comment and I'll update this post.)

Wish List

While I love the new version, there are a couple hot button features I would still like to see added in the next version:

• bit.ly Credentials—I'd like TweetDeck to use my bit.ly account credentials when shortening URLs.  This would make it easier to track usage statistics on those URLs within the bit.ly account dashboard.
• TweetPhoto Support—Currently TweetDeck offers a choice of TwitPic or YFrog for picture publishing.  I'd prefer to use the TweetPhoto service.

Bug

While installing the iPhone application, I ran across what appears to be a bug in the new TweetDeck Account feature on the iPhone.  After several attempts, I could not get the iPhone client to accept a TweetDeck Account name based on the myst-technology.com domain name.  TweetDeck kept insisting that the account name contained an invalid character.  Eventually, I tried using domain names without a dash character and those worked.

This is a nuisance bug that was easy to work around.

Conclusion

With cross-machine synchronization and multi-account support, TweetDeck has become an industrial strength Twitter client with features needed by power users.  At the same time, the clean, intuitive UI makes it an ideal client for casual or beginner Twitter users.

Congratulations, Twitter team!

I just read the Time article How Facebook Is Affecting School Reunions, and I was reminded, once again, of the value of information.  Way back in 2003, I wrote a blog post on agile content that began:

"Information has become a key asset—if not the key asset—in most organizations.  Just about every company is really in the information business.  Let that sink in for a minute."

The next month, in Thanks for the (Corporate) Memories, I noted how a Harvard Business School publication had nicely reinforced this idea by stating:

"Knowledge is the new capital, but it's worthless unless it's accessible, communicated, and enhanced."

Fast forward to 2009.

Today's Time article quotes Andrew Shaindlin, executive director of the Caltech Alumni Association on the effect of Facebook playing an increasingly significant role in planning reunions:

"It's going to affect donations," says Shaindlin. "We've lost our monopoly over the data on how to communicate with schoolmates. We need to step back and figure out how to remain relevant, because there may be some point three or five or seven years from now when we're going to hold a reunion and almost nobody is going to sign up." (emphasis mine)

So, Caltech's Alumni Association is not really so much in the organizing-reunion business as it is in the information-about-who-goes-to-reunions business.  The business value of organizing reunions is not actually to have reunions, or even to make money organizing reunions.  The real business value is ensuring that the alumni association maintain detailed knowledge of schoolmates from whom donations can be solicited.

[Note: there is one upside to all this; Facebook is proving disruptive to classmates.com.  Thanks to Facebook connectivity among my own schoolmates, I have been able to completely purge my identity from classmates.com.  And for that, my inbox thanks me.]

[Note 2: When finding the link for classmates.com complaints at consumeraffairs.com, I noticed their tagline is "knowledge is power."  Nice tie-in.]

Yep, kids, I remember it liken it wuz just an hour ago.  Twitter wuz all a buzz for days 'bout the coming rush for Facebook vanity URLs that wuz to take place at 12:01 AM Eastern Daylight Time on that there mornin' of June 13, 2009.  So wuz all the great online journals back in them days — InformationWeek, ZDNet, Mashable, The Daily Beast, ... you know, all the mainstream journals.

There I wuz, sittin' at my keyboard at 11:59 AM Eastern Daylight Time on the night of June 12, 2009—just hittin' F5 awaitin for the big day.  Then just like that, I seen it.  I could register my own user name on Facebook.

I wuz one of the lucky ones.  I struck solid gold.  I grabbed www.facebook.com/faseidl fer my very own.  It wuz incredible.  It matched my Twitter name, my blogsite domain name, my e-mail name, my Intense Debate nickname, you name it.  Then I got double lucky cuz I ran over to Carol's laptop and I grabbed fer her www.facebook.com/caseidl.  Unbelievable.

Then I just sat back and waited for the SEO to kick in and watch my traffic spike.

While I wuz waitin' I wuz Twitterin' with a bunch of nice folks that were all a gettin' their own vanity URLs.  One nice fella named @skydiver wuz even talking to another guy named @Mashable (they have funny names sometimes on Twitter) and they wuz a sayin' that in the first hour and six minutes over a million folks grabbed their own vanity URLs.

Then another guy named @nullsession (see what I mean about funny names?) wuz sayin' that somebody should just hurry on up and get it over with and make a special app that would find and friend all of a persons Twitter friends, but this time in Facebook.  And I guess it wuz a pretty good idea because not five minutes later this other guy named @AdamPieniazek (see what I mean again?) wuz a tweetin' that Facebook wuz a warnin' him that he wuz friendin' folks too fast and they wuz gonna get mad at him (but I don't think they ever really did cause about 85% friended him back right away.)

After just a few minutes, the first Facebook vanity URLs were already fer sale on this web site called www.assetize.com and it wuz someone sellin' "alex".  But this one guy named @Jesse on Twitter wuz askin' how could a body be sellin' a 4-letter name when 5-letter name's wuz the minimum you could register unlessen one of them Facebook people wuz already sellin' their own special rules name.

Anyway, there wuz lots of chit chat (ya know, tweetin') about that kind of stuff for a long time and then it wuz pretty much over.  Turned out I didn't never get a huge traffic spike because of special SEO juice from my Facebook URL.  But that Facebook company sure got lots a good PR, and later on for a while, they got lots a search referrals to Facebook-branded user profile pages which I guess helped them out for a while.

No matter, a couple years later, there wuz a whole bunch a new ways folks wuz hookin' up online and not too many folks wuz chattin' about Facebook no more.  It wuz still around for a few more years after that, but eventually it got to be kinda like Compuserve and them others.

But yesiree, I wuz there in them wild 66 minutes fer the great Facebook Land Grab of aught 9.  It wuz pure crazy.

InformationWeek just published a story that strikes me as rather silly.  The article, entitled Computers: A Rising Health Hazard, contains an image of a wheelchair and begins ominously:

Computers may be harmful to your health, not only in terms of repetitive stress injuries, musculoskeletal disorders, and vision issues, but also as dangerous obstacles.

Researchers have documented a more-than-sevenfold increase in computer-related injuries arising from tripping over computer equipment, head injuries from falling computer monitors, and other collisions with computers, according to a study scheduled to appear in the July 2009 issue of the American Journal Of Preventive Medicine.

The article goes on to describe some of the most common methods of injury:

Some of the most common methods of injury include colliding with computer equipment, catching computer equipment ("Here, toss me that laser printer ..."), tripping or falling over computer equipment, standing where falling computer equipment lands, and muscle strain following attempts to lift or carry computer equipment.

Really?  This is news?

Of course, it is possible to trip over a computer.  (Just as it is possible to trip over a tennis shoe or a flower pot.)  And, of course, it is possible to get injured when you trip over anything, including a computer.  The study looked at the increase in injuries from computers from 1994 to 2006 and found the greatest number of injuries occurred in the home (which is also where there was the greatest increase in the number of home computers, of course.)

The study did point out that the rate of injury increased faster than the rate of new computer purchases by about a factor of two, but this is not surprising either.  In the early days of home computers, the computer was a special, expensive purchase.  It was typically located at a special computer desk, often in the "computer room" of the house.  But over time, computers became cheaper, more common, and less sacred—and more likely to be placed in high-traffic areas of the home, where they can be tripped over (or even "tossed" to somebody, I guess.)

Perhaps, soon we'll see someone selling child safety computer helmets.

According to a ZDNet story today by Chris Jablonski, a German technology company, Fraunhofer IPMS, is working on data eyeglasses that not only display data on the lenses of the glasses, but also tracks your eye movements, turning your eyes into a computer input device.

"Without having to use any other devices to enter instructions, the wearer can display new content, scroll through a menu or shift picture elements simply by moving her eyes or fixing on certain points in the image."

Imagine this bidirectional eyeglass technology combined with the wearable computer prototype demonstrated at a TED talk in February of this year. (See: Changing the Internet (and Human Capability) as we Know It)

The potential of the wearable computer is enormous, but the weakest element of the prototype was its output mechanism.  The prototype used a small projector, mounted on the wearer's chest, to project a computer display onto any nearby surface—a wall, another person, etc.  While this was impressive, it has many drawbacks, the most obvious of which is: What if there is no nearby surface?  Plus, the mechanical logistics of such a projector are troubling (e.g., stabilization, power consumption, interference with physical activity, etc.)

These eyeglasses may be able to overcome most of these drawbacks with the added benefit of being able to use eye movement as an input signal.  A combination of eye gestures and voice commands may be able to provide an incredible level of "hands-free" control over applications.

Since my days of programming early microprocessors by loading machine code via toggle switches, I have joked that I wanted a DWIW opcode (Do What I Want).  Eye movement can be such an effortless—often subconscious—activity, that it may seem that an eye-movement-driven application is doing just that.

I began frequent business flying, in 1989 after selling my first software company to Pansophic Systems, Inc., headquartered in Lisle, Illinois.  Nearby O'Hare International Airport was a hub location for both United and American airlines.  As a result, I ended up flying American very often as it was the company's preferred carrier.

American Airlines always went the little extra mile toward making travelers, especially AAdvantage members, feel special.  After all, their slogan was "We're American Airlines—Something Special in the Air."

Even after I moved back to Ann Arbor, I continued to fly American, despite the fact that nearby Detroit Metro International Airport was, and remains a hub for Northwest but not American.  Over the years, I had developed a strong brand loyalty to American.

But slowly, that brand loyalty started to deteriorate as American took more and more quality shortcuts (as did many airlines during tough economic times.)  Over the past several years, a combination of many factors caused my brand loyalty to balance equally between Northwest and American.  By rights, Northwest should have earned my loyalty away from American, after all, in this area, Northwest has more flights, better facilities, etc.  But my long established history of satisfaction with American was keeping me loyal.

But last week, American (more specifically, its AAdvantage folks) undid all that with a combination of misleading information (I'm tempted to say intentionally misleading, but I can't prove that) and a "customer is always wrong" attitude.

I had been saving some frequent flier miles for the past two years with the thought of using them for a Paris trip for Carol's birthday next year.  (Without saying her age, I can say its a significant milestone birthday ;-)  Last year, to ensure the miles did not expire, I opened up an AAdvantage credit card account and made the necessary purchase to preserve the miles.

So a couple weeks ago, on May 13 to be precise, I took careful notice when I received an e-mail from Rob Friedman, President, AAdvantage Marketing Programs, that began:

Dear Frank,
Time is running out! Your AAdvantage^® miles may expire within the next month. But they don't have to. Simply earn miles at least once every 18 months, and your account remains active.

Since I was just leaving for a week of travel to the D.C. area, I set an Outlook calendar reminder for Saturday, May 30 to follow-up and purchase some additional miles (which was one of the methods offered to prevent miles from expiring).  I was uncertain if "within the next month" meant "one month from now (i.e., June 13)" or "sometime in June" or possibly even "at the end of this month (i.e., May 31)."  It was a rather fuzzy wording, but in any case, I felt confident that May 30 would be fine.

As it turns out, the AAdvantage e-mail message was very misleading.  By studying the fine print of the e-mail, you can see that the phrase "within the next month" actually meant "in 10 days".

Misleading AAdvantage Notification

On May 30, I logged onto the American Airlines web site (which is also very confusing and difficult to use—e.g., see the recent Fast Company article, American Airlines Web Site: The Product of a Self-Defeating Design Process) to purchase additional miles and found that my existing miles had expired a few days before.

My first thought was this is a mistake, so I called the AAdvantage customer service department.  I spoke to four different people there, including two managers, all of whom told me that the miles were expired and there was no error.  When I pointed to the e-mail notice, they each told me the same thing, "That e-mail notice is sent as a courtesy only.  You should have checked exactly when the miles expired."  One of the agents confided that many people have been similarly confused by the wording but he had no authority to reinstate the miles unless I gave him a credit card to cover a "$100 reinstatement fee."

See for Yourself

Click on the thumbnail of image at the right to view the actual e-mail notice.  I think you'll agree that few recipients would conclude that miles were about to expire in ten days.

But, if you look closely at the fine print, you'll find a line that reads:

*Unused miles will expire 18 months from this date if there is no additional qualifying activity.

The asterisk ties to a footnote indicator on the "Last Activity Date" at the top of the message (above the graphic where it is cleverly hiding in plain sight.)  Sure enough, 18 months after the last activity date is May 23, ten days after the date the e-mail was sent.

DisAAdvantage and a Missed Opportunity

So, in an effort to save a few frequent flyer miles from being redeemed, American Airlines has made a Brand Management 101 error.  They have changed my gut feeling.  Now when I see or hear "AAdvantage", I think "DisAAdvantage".  That same gut feeling that kept me loyal to American Airlines has now changed polarity.

Just think; what if the AAdvantage rep would have said, "Ah, Mr. Seidl, we're sorry our e-mail was unclear.  Your miles actually did expire a few days ago, but if you wish to purchase additional miles today, I'll make sure your previous miles are reinstated along with your newly purchased miles."

In that case, not only would American Airlines have charged my credit card a few hundred bucks, my gut feeling for American would have been enhanced.  I would now have more brand loyalty.  Instead, I now have a brand aversion.

I am still looking forward to a trip to Paris, just not on American Airlines.

Disruptive technology has a way of sneaking up on its victims—even when they see it coming.  This little video, written and produced by L. McDuff, describes how technology is disrupting traditional media.

One thing that's been constant for many decades is that The Times They Are A-Changin'.  It almost seems Bob Dylan could have been thinking about today's media industry and the story of its disruption as told in this video when, back in 1963, he wrote:

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Thanks to Ben Kunz for pointing me to this video.

I did this little exercise in response to one of those (usually annoying) Facebook chain letters (chain notes?) where someone asks you some questions and then asks that you tag a bunch of your friends to do the same.  Here was the specific note I received from Dennis McCarthy (author, brother-in-law, and all around smart guy):

DON'T FEEL OBLIGATED TO RESPOND!
Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends choose.

My first reaction was to not feel obligated to respond.  But while waiting for our baby sitter to arrive this evening, I started one-finger typing titles of some memorable books into my iPhone.  After 5 minutes, I thought I probably had at least fifteen.  Turns out, I had 23 titles.  I started to pare the list to fifteen, but I had a hard time picking because all of these will always stick with me.

So, here's what I came up with (in the order I jotted them down; draw a line after fifteen if you wish):

1. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid – Douglas Hofstadter
2. Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics – Gary Zukav
3. The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
4. The Mind's Eye – Edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett
5. The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins
6. The Fourth Revolt – Dennis McCarthy (yea, the same Dennis; not yet published)
7. I Am A Strange Loop – Douglas Hofstadter
8. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason – Sam Harris
9. The Extended Phenotype – Richard Dawkins
10. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Persig
11. Metamagical Themas: Questing For The Essence Of Mind And Pattern – Douglas Hofstadter
12. The Hobbit / Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien (I know, that's four books but I'm counting them as one story.)
13. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering – Frederick Brooks
14. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers – Geoffrey Moore
15. The Innovator's Dilemma – Clayton Christensen
16. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies – Jim Collins and Jerry Porras
17. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter – Richard Feynman
18. On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
19. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge – E. O. Wilson
20. Gödel's Proof – Ernest Nagel and James Newman
21. Ideas and Opinions – Albert Einstein
22. Einstein's Dreams – Alan Lightman
23. Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting – Daniel Dennett

As I typed in this list, I realized there are so many others that deserve to be on the list (in that they'll always be with me), but Dennis asked for fifteen and I've already overdone it.

It really was a rather fun exercise, Quickly, without too much second guessing, what's your list of fifteen?