Who cares what it looks like as long as it can do the job? American consumers aren’t put off by humanoid robots; the problem with all humanoid robots is that they are little more than very expensive toys at this point. The humanoid form-factor is really only useful if you’re smart enough to use it (which doesn’t necessarily imply human-level intelligence–just a lot). Until such a time, useful robots will remain tanks and frisbees and all the better because they can actually do labor that way (instead of falling down the stairs).

Todoist deserves awesome props on two counts having to do with its very Taoist inspired design. Is there a design? In a very minimalist, get-out-of-your-way sense there certainly is. And this is a good thing; software design should know its place. Todo lists are (let’s be honest) a dime a dozen. Todoist seems to implicitly acknowledge this by not adding a lot of graphics and fuss. It is, after all, a list.

But do not be fooled by its simple aesthetic! The site makes massive use of AJAX that really dazzles once you get the hang of it. And it integrates with LOTS of other applications. Todoist would seem to have the ultimate API, integrating with every application I could possibly think of. Gmail integration, widgets, iGoogle and on and on. The premium account is $3 a month! That’s the right price for these kinds of web services. The only thing left for me to do now is build WordPress integration plugin. I love it that much!

Possibly one of the most brilliant features (and there are a lot to choose from) is the semantics of the date entry. You don’t say that a todo has a deadline on 3-28-09. You just type “tomorrow” or “Sunday” or “Monday” Brilliant!

I’ve used them all, folks: tadalist, rememberthemilk, and backpack, and todoist just rules them all. They have a nice catchphrase on their site:

>Warning: High usage of Todoist may result in an organized life

You better believe it!

Now that I’ve evangelized this gorgeous piece of software; here’s my one wish: some way to track my todos once they’re done. There is a history and an archive feature and you can see every todo you’ve finished; but given that there is a feature that lets you repeat todos every day or two days or every week, it would be really nice to see a chart of my accomplishments. Hey, Amir, I program–want help!? Did I already say that I love todoist that much?

But anybody can dream up features. Sign up for this service because it will deliver on its tagline: you will become more organized. And for someone like me—in which case that’s a struggle—oh, todoist makes it so easy.

iTunes

I think the runaway winner of this particular concept category—the desktop/cloud hybrid—has got to be iTunes. On the desktop, it is the ultimate organizer for your music (and video) files. It helps you move from atom media (the CD) to new media (digital). And there are several ways for it to interoperate with your home stereo system (and iPod for mobile use). To paraphrase, iTunes has great local functionaliy. And as far as it’s cloud functionality is concerned, it catalogs and names albums and tracks through CDDB. It allows you to listen to steaming music through its radio function or other iTunes users on the local network; as well as download podcasts. And it lets you outright purchase music from the online store, which in itself is a pretty savvy application. So, iTunes also functions exceptionally in your local cloud and the big cloud.

DRM and monopoly arguments aside, part of iTunes’ success is that it is available to you on multiple computers and multiple devices.¹ It’s on the desktop and it’s in the cloud. In fact, it’s more than that. It is local to the computer you are on at the moment, it lets you access your music elsewhere in your private cloud ((your home desktop, work desktop, laptop, ipod, iphone, etc.)) and it operates in the public cloud. And with special regard to the iTunes store, I think it is imperative for software developers to note that iTunes has taken the reverse strategy of many online efforts; that is, rather than move its application to the browser, it has moved the browser into the application.

NetNewsWire

The guys at Newsgator get this too. NetNewsWire (for those that don’t know) is a really nice RSS feed reader for the Mac OS that does a couple of really important things that I’ve already noted here. One, you can set up NetNewsWire on multiple computers (work, home) and they synchronize to each other. To boot, if you’re away from your computers (or in my case, on a PC), you can hit your feeds through any web browser. And it’s interesting to note that NetNewsWire has also moved the browser into its own structure. While you can set up your preferences so that NetNewsWire opens your favorite browser to let you read a full article on a web page, the software will also allow you to open the article’s web page right inside the NetNewsWire display pane. On a large monitor (in my opinion) this is the way to go. It operates locally, letting you read flagged items even if you’re off the net, it operates on your private cloud by synchronizing among your own machines and devices, and it operates in the big cloud.

Email!

Duh. I won’t speak too much to this example accept to point out that unless you’ve switched to the IMAP standard then your email isn’t quite yet the local/cloud hybrid it could be. This is why I primarily think that IMAP is really the standard of the future for email.

Investigating the Gap

Of course, a lot of Web 2.0 applications aren’t things that we need access to all the time.² I love del.icio.us but it’s a fact that if I can’t get to any pages on the web then I likely don’t need to get to the bookmarks for those pages either. I can’t think of a local use (on my own computer, off the net) for something like Facebook either. These more social kinds of Web 2.0 sites don’t seem to gain value from being anything other than a browser dependent app. But I would still bet that the local/cloud hybrid app that did figure out why you need it locally would beat out the cloud-only apps after a while.

It strikes me that productivty apps—specifically where a user is generating a piece of content for their own use—is really where the hybrid model becomes an imperative. The simplest example I can think of is to do lists. For the Mac there’s a beautiful application called Things that lets you track all your tasks—on one computer. It doesn’t synch with other versions of itself over the net on your other machines, and it doesn’t have an alternate web interface. And web sites like Remember the Milk, Tada, and Todoist all have the problem that they can only be accessed throgh the web and can’t operate locally off the net and then “catch up” later.³ Until either of those desktop/cloud applications accomplish that, for all their sorting and priotizing and color-coding capabilities, they just don’t beat a notebook in my pocket.

Google Apps is great and I keep much of my writing there for convenient access on multiple computers and platforms, but at the end of the day, I have to transfer the writing to some kind of program that will give me the format options that I need. It’s not terribly inconvient but it’s not effecient either. The winner, in my book, will be the word processor that can sync with multiple copies of itself on multiple platforms and still make the text available to the user online when no copy of the desktop app is available.⁴

And just off the top of my head, another sure winner in this hybrid category would be a merger of Delicious Monster and Amazon—two great tastes that could taste great together.

Going Forward, and Really Forward

It’s just a simple fact that as any technology development gets more complex, the probability of a malfunction increases as well. The idea of always-on internet connections is flawed significantly in this way. Software and data that exists only in the cloud is going to be completely unavailable some of the time. Software that exists only on the desktop is going to squirrel data away in locations that we can’t get to, or in formats we can’t access elsewhere in the cloud. But software that takes the user into account first will make sure that data is available on or off the net, privately and/or publicly, and in standard formats. Software that takes a user’s point of view first will win (in an open competition).

When you think about a really wild augmented-reality future, where Facebook profiles appear over people’s heads on your personal HUD and Google Maps data is laid out over the real world, the value of hybrid local/cloud software becomes much more obvious.⁵ In the case of a world like that, falling off the network for a moment due to some hiccup in the datastream would result in a literal kind of blindness. It would appear as if half of your visual conception of the world had vanished, and even if it was for only a moment it would have to disconcerting—like losing your real vision for only a second or two would be. Local/cloud synchronization solves this problem.

This kind of data blindness is exactly what results when a user’s personal data doesn’t permeate through the multiple layers of software (and privacy) that an individual user regularly encounters. Users need their content on their computer, on their other computers, on other’s computers, on their platform and on other platforms, on their cell phone, on their iPod, on their TV, and on and on. The idea of cloud computing only partly solves that problem in that there’s only one big cloud. Users really need their own cloud. They need it for senitive data that they need to get on multiple machines. They need it for privacy. And the synchronization of data both locally and in a big cloud backpack ensures the safety of their data. I want my mp3s. But it’s also nice to stream them from my desktop to my laptop or stereo. And a big cloud backup wouldn’t hurt either.

Our content has been moving towards standardization for a while, i.e. mp3s and XML, and the standardization is getting better all the time, but the application interfaces have some catching up to do to really take advantage of that standardization.

I also think the suit is really off the mark because it is utterly beside the point that Facebook has created a social-networking site. Been there, done that. What facebook has managed to do, that no other web site has, is create an intersite applications platform. Even now, as I post this, on my own blog, on my own server, this post is being injected into my Facebook news feed via the awesome Wordbook plugin. It turns out to be a dynamite way to update your friends about your blog. ((I’ve always felt that an email list was just too intrusive)) Perhaps that sounds trivial, but intersite networking through web service APIs is a good chunk of the future of the web. Some folks call it the mashup for short. ((Intersite web service API networking application is such a ridiculous phrase, it would probably net you $100,000 from a VC if you had the balls to say it in front of one.)) The mashup is one thing, establishing a site where regular non-coder folks can essentially create their own mashup page is why you should head over to the Yahoo Buzz Market and buy some Facebook shares. And if they ever go public, they’d be a pretty good real stockmarket bet too.

The Economist article talks a lot about measuring and managing the data, but as Google has shown us all, it’s real value lies in merging all the data. In this sense, quantifying information really has little to do with each piece of information’s “truth-value” — and much more to do with the density of information around some particular fact. There is A LOT of empirical evidence (i.e. information) regarding gravity and that’s one fact people really don’t call into question too much, isn’t it? In this sense, all of the information regarding gravity “piles on” and gets us closer to the truth. And even though there might be articles out there on the web about anti-gravity they would largely get filtered out of a theoretical truth system by all the information about gravity.

Quantifying information and working out its value is going to be one of the great challenges of the next few decades. It even matters financially. Whatever Google’s valuation is, if their databases were to, God forbid, vanish one day, how much would they be worth the next day? Where is this valuation in their financial statements? Nicholas Negroponte had it right back in 1995 when he said that people don’t properly value bits. In his anecdote he talks about a security guard that is somewhat chagrined when Mr. Negroponte tells the guard that his laptop is worth $2 million. And yet, by all rights, Negroponte was totally right because his laptop had his writings, published papers, etc. Think about it: is your laptop really only worth somewhat less than the sticker price? What about all those mp3s? What about all those emails? Do you think you could get an insurance company to refund you that data if you lost it? I don’t either and we should figure out why that is.

The US has been running a trade deficit regularly for 27 years now. This last year it was up to $700 billion. This means that the US regularly imports $700bn more than it exports. And this also means that something called our Net Foreign Assets (NFA) has been increasing negatively every year for the last 27 years. So that our current NFA now stands at -4.5 trillion.

So what? Well, that 4.5 trillion is essentially a credit line from the world. The US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is approximately 12.47 trillion. See a problem here? Is 36% of your yearly budget in credit? I hope not.

Some economists are wishing this amount away. In the aformentioned article The Economist took a look at the Harvard paper by Ricardo Hausmann and Frederico Sturzenegger that claims that this NFA total is “dark matter” and the US is under-reporting its real income because so many of our international corporations report profits overseas to benefit from lower taxes. The US income is also undervalued by the fact that things like knowledge and other intangibles aren’t taken into account.

But the skeptics, like Martin Wolf, won’t have a bit of it and are claiming “The US is now on the comfortable path to ruin.” There’s a bit of sunshine for you.

Which brings us back to “False Dawn” by John Gray. (To find out more, check out my review) In short, he argues that the international market is essentially unregulated and that unregulated markets lead to chaos. In fact, in one frightening (though not one I have triangulated) statement, he says “transactions in foreign exchange markets have now reached the astonishing sum of around $1.2 trillion a day – over fifty times the level of world trade. Around 95 per cent of these transactions are speculative in nature”.

There’s a limit out there somewhere no one knows where it is and in unregulated markets, panics can happen. I won’t go into the gory details, but should something someday trigger a rush to pull out of US investments because of this trade imbalance, things are going to get mighty mighty ugly.

The problem I’ve come to see with all of these P2P companies and distribution networks looking the other way when it comes to piracy is that the form of distribution is never allowed to go mainstream, and that the constant shift from Napster to Grokster to whatever is next hurts artists who want to legitimately distribute their music this way. As soon as they put it up, they’re lost in the deluge of pirated material, poisoned files, viruses and any other kind of crap that anyone can load up.

If just one of these networks (and Apple may be the first to do it with podcasting) would go legitimate and institute some kind of “white list” (only allowing approved material) that network would establish itself as a de facto trustworthy system and could overnight become a lot more interesting of a place. As it is, finding a bitTorrent file is no easy task because they’re up and down and moved here and there, mostly because they are in violation of copyright.

So far, some of the television networks have decided to take a “wait and see” approach toward whether they want to sue people for distributing their shows. Let them wait. And in fact (heresy!) take down their copyright protected content. Stop being their R&D and tell them they can get in or get out.

Having a legitimate distribution network without much content will be a much greater stride than an illegitimate network with a lot of content for a only brief period of time before a visit from the Feds.