First half of the article focuses on the what & how, which is interesting enough, but the second half is more important as it talks about the whys, and the effects that the techniques are having even though they’re quite easy to circumvent. Huge implications for everyone around the world, not just in China.

Article also features Rebecca MacKinnon, a very very smart observer/participant/writer in the middle of things now.

In a weird blast-from-the-past moment, TechCrunch reported yesterday that hot mail startup Xobni has licensed the IP from Zaplet (nee Firedrop, and most recently bought by MetricStream), a company we started from Reactivity nearly 10 years ago. TC has bits and pieces of the story, and gets most of the basics of the history right. Seems like both yesterday and an eternity ago when Mike Hanson and Brian Roddy and I were brainstorming about live HTML in e-mail and when Mike mocked up the first one — as we were searching for names, we started with Zimlet or Zaplet or Zammogram, among many other very bad names. Then Brian Axe took it and started to build a business case, recruited Dave Roberts, got some mad Firedrop namage & logo help from Gentry, and was away to the races. (And IIRC, the Reactivity Austin team of Lynn and Dave and others built the screenshots showing up on TC now.)

Anyway, it’s neat to see that another piece of Reactivity technology is still breathing — and hopefully will be put to good use at Xobni.

on the other hand, something i was pretty worried about turned out to be nothing.

anyway, looking forward to tomorrow being a new day.

[note 2: crossposting to planet because I've mentioned this to many folks at Mozilla, we've got a history of doing projects with the d.school, and it's super-relevant to what we do]

Great conference for folks in Silicon Valley, put on by some of my favorite folks at the d.school, and featuring Huggy Rao (among others), who’s got a very interesting book on the way about market dynamics & how they’re sometimes like political movements. Highly recommended.

great & productive, but fast, trip to tokyo — been raining all day — about to get on the plane from Narita & happy to be heading home.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I was very lucky to be able to see Kohei’s presentation to a room packed with people at the Ginza Apple Store here in Tokyo. And I have to say he did an incredible job. Very comprehensive, entertaining, funny, engaging talk about Firefox 3 and what’s coming next, given to a full house at the Apple Store. Very happy to have been able to seen it live and was blown away by how great it was. (click through if you want to see more pics)

I’ve long been meaning to watch Helvetica, a documentary about fonts, design, and modernism more generally, but also about the specifics of a typeface that many consider a culmination of that line of design thinking, since it so perfectly represents the modernist ideal.

So I finally did, and man, what a beautiful movie. I loved it — couldn’t have been any better in my book. It even had a surprise ending! (No, I’m serious! A movie about modernist type ended by mentioning the new MySpace aesthetic — I was talking about that idea to someone just the other day.)

Among other observations, one is that once you watch this movie, you’ll notice that Helvetica is used for everything around us. I noticed that while I was watching the movie, I was eating food with Helvetica lettering used on the package, the United Airlines material all used it, including the seats, the book next to me was lettered in it on the cover, it’s default for a bunch of my display on my Mac, and of course is all around the UI on my iPhone. It’s just about ubiquitous.

And it’s sort of incredible in its neutrality and versatility — you can use it in almost any context because of that neutrality.

Finally, though, as you watch you just have to appreciate the letterforms themselves. It’s a really monumental piece of work — this typeface that does so much of our hard work in typography but is also so expressive. And I’ve never really looked at the way that the letters in words set in Helvetica bold really, really hold together in an incredibly stable way. It’s hard to imagine a single thing being different about the type.

Beautiful, beautiful movie, and very highly recommended.

[also watched Juno on the flight out, and thought that was a great movie, too, in a completely & utterly different way]

Giant thousand page novel about 14th century England society & the life of a small town — really a continuation of the story Follett started in The Pillars of the Earth, about building a cathedral in the same town about a century prior. I find Follett’s books a little thin in terms of depth of character and long on plot — so sometimes the longer books like this are a bit tedious — I’m ready to be through with them by the time I finish.

Anyway, this was a pretty good book — really just a study in the various aspects of life in England 700 years ago, and that stuff was provocative & interesting — made me think.

But given that this is a thousand page sequel to another thousand page novel, even one that Oprah likes, I’m pretty sure that not too many people will actually read the thing, which seems fine to me.

Great, fun, behavioral economics book along the same lines as Stumbling Upon Happiness (itself a great, fun book). Ariely goes through a bunch of experiments that show that while people very often behave irrationally (relative to economic models of self-interest & such), most of the time they do it in predictable ways, for predictable reasons — and so he’s really arguing that behavioral economics — theorizing about what people will do based not just on rational analysis, but also based on the rational flaws inherent in communities of people — is a powerful way to model real world phenomena.

Here are a few gems from the book:

“…the sensitivity we show to price changes might in fact be largely a result of our memory for the prices we have paid in the past and our desire for coherence with our past decision — not at all a reflection of our true preferences or our level of demand.”

That’s in the part of the book that explains why we pay $3.50 for a cup of coffee.

But more meaningful to me in some of the things I think about lately:

“This experiment illustrates an unfortunate fact: when a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off hte rose — once a social norm is trumped by a market norm — it will rarely return.”

And more succinctly: “Money, as it turns out, is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper, but often more effective as well.”

Great book, lots of great stuff in it.

This was a fine book — but not fantastic for me. Reminds me why I mostly don’t read business books. There are some good things to remember in this book — in particular, that models are always simplifications and there are always better models potentially. Moreover, there are often models which are opposed to each other, but still useful to contemplate both. And that some of the most successful organizations not only don’t oversimplify, but they embrace the messiness of real life without getting overcome by it. That’s one of the lessons that’s relevant for Mozilla — when people ask me to draw an org chart or explain exactly how things work, I always grimace. Not because it’s not doable, but because there’s a lot of complexity and nuance that seems non-determinant and arcane to most folks — but much of that nuance is what really makes things go.

I’ve mentioned Adam before — he & I were in 7th grade together, a million years ago in Las Vegas. We were great friends at particularly itinerant parts of our lives, and the time we spent together in school and outside (playing Enchanter & such) was really meaningful to me.

Anyway, in what is maybe an unsurprising twist of fate, we’re both nerds now, working in technology — and so he was in San Francisco this weekend for some training and was kind enough to come over for dinner.

We had a great time — it’s amazing to us how much in common we have, even after 25 years, and how comfortable it was to sit and visit together again. Really awesome, and I feel very fortunate to be able to connect. Wonderful weekend.

[ps -- decided I was interested in revisiting Enchanter et. al. -- any ideas for the z-files?]

They’re running a funding drive now:

The most interesting observation, I think, is that it’s simultaneously one of my favorite things, and also mostly invisible in my life. I use it every single day for at least 15-30 minutes and some days for considerably more. Since the new year, I’ve read probably 8 books this way, compared with 3 or 4 traditional form books.

A few random observations:

• the industrial design is, as people have noted, sort of ugly — but not ugly enough to really get in the way, and it does tend to disappear when I’m actually using it
• but the forward & backwards buttons are just too big & easy to hit — I do unintentionally flip pages pretty frequently
• the keyboard is fine, and doesn’t particularly get in the way — to the contrary, it gives me a place to keep my thumb when I’m reading
• it’s great great great for reading with one hand — much better than a traditional book
• to my eyes, it is basically like reading paper (although not as contrasty) — but long passages don’t fatigue my eyes the same way that my laptop or iphone do

The most important thing about the Kindle, though, is the content, of course. About 60-70% of the books that I tend to read are available (albeit with DRM) through Amazon, and it hasn’t taken me long to get to my typical state of affairs in the physical world: a backlog of about 10 books that I’ve read the first chapters of. It’s incredibly easy and gratifying to pick up the Kindle, not see anything I want to read, pull up the Amazon store, and buy a new book to read — delivery happens nearly instantaneously — takes under a minute. There are big problems with this type of device/software/service/content lock-in (er, “integration,” I mean), including the tendency to buy/read the things that are available conveniently, instead of what I’m interested in more broadly.

The display works great — the resolution is not quite what I expected, but not bad at all, and is fine for reading even over a long period of time. I think they could have done a better job with the typography, with more tweakability in terms of fonts and layout preferences. I routinely change the type size when I’m reading, depending on how tired I am, etc. Book layout gets screwed up pretty routinely, especially in books that have any images at all. Not totally debilitating, but distracting, certainly.

UI-wise, I think it’s good enough, but not fantastic. The designers were pretty limited by the screen refresh characteristics of eInk — so had to do some decidedly indirect things for many of the interactions. But on the whole, it’s fine. I’ve been highlighting passages in the books I read in order to go back and look at them when I’m done — that’s a really neat feature — but it’s in an embryonic state at the moment. I’d like to be able to access them via the web, not just my Kindle, and would like to have them be more like a database than a text file, which is what they are now. Being able to search in books is theoretically neat, and I’ve used it a couple of times, but not really all that useful so far.

I really thought that I’d miss the physicality of books, but I’ve been surprised that I don’t miss it one bit. I thought I’d miss the feel of the pages, the images on the cover, etc — but I don’t. On reflection, I’ve realized that most of that stuff is marketing — not the intent of the author at all, in general — and as a result, I’ve found myself paying much more attention to the text, and feeling closer to the authors.  Surprising to me. What I think I’ve discovered is that while I thought I loved books, what I actually love is reading.

The weirdest side effect of doing most of my reading through the Kindle is that people don’t know what I’m reading — that’s great on airplanes and in public, but I like it less at home — my wife doesn’t know what I read now, so doesn’t ask as many questions about it. That’s disappointing, since I like talking about the things I read. I still bring up things I’m interested in, but I miss the other direction. Thinking a few years down the road, I’m certain that our son will use some sort of eReader for text books for school — and as parents we’re going to need to know what he’s reading — that’s an opportunity for someone, of course!

The related problem, for me, is that I tend to lose track, visually, of some of the more interesting books I read. I’ve been getting tired of having shelves and shelves of books at home, but I pretty routinely find myself looking down one shelf or another, and noticing books that I read a while back that I want to re-read, or to think about again. WIth the Kindle, you can browse through what you’ve read, but it’s a little bloodless, so it’s making things like Delicious Library seem sort of appealing to me. But I’m not 100% sure that’s the right solution, either.

Sharing is another disappointing aspect - I’ve read a few books the last couple of months that I’d really like to just hand to my friends. There’s no way to do that, and it’s disappointing.

A million other thoughts about the system, ranging from big picture (I wish it were more open and less DRM-ed, for example) to small (the unit seems almost designed to show dirt on the casing; the dictionary — while fantastically useful — could be easier to use) to mostly irrelevant (not a good web browsing experience — IMHO they should have just left the browser out).

But on the whole, while I don’t know that the Kindle will be the device that ultimately wins, I do know that the advantages of electronic, networked books are too significant not to become ubiquitious over time. It’s early days, and this is really just the 2nd generation or so — but for a broad, broad set of uses, it’s obviously the way things are going to go.

But also realized that as cool as the local area is, this morning I’ve been in contact with people who are in France, Denmark, Japan, China, Canada, and other places in the US. The global nature of the Internet is something that I constantly marvel at, and the ability to not only stay in touch with folks, but also work with people around the world from a house in rural Marin, always blows me away.

Well, hmm. Featured on Fake Steve Jobs today — my dad will be so proud. No, seriously, Dad loves Fake Steve. Not sure how to respond to someone who’s wishing you a big dose of crabs — case of crabs? not sure what the word is there — so I’ll just go with “Hey, thanks!”

Anyway, lots and lots of interesting conversations going on about this the past few days — Mozilla is in an unusual position in that we are a mission-driven organization, but also have an actual product in the market that does compete with commercial organizations. Because of that competition, I think much of what we do & say gets viewed through a revenue/marketshare lens, regardless of intent. It’s easy to fall into that line of thinking — the world is geared towards it. And so it’ll continue to be a challenge for us, as Mozilla, to point out practices that are troubling in products that are competitive.

I think that no matter what we say, we’ll get articles and blog posts written about our motivations and whether they’re related to revenue.

But we’ll continue to make decisions and build products based on user experience first and let folks make their own minds up regarding our motives. That’s the way Mozilla has always been, seems to me.

update:  beltzner points out that Zoidberg is really more of a lobster-oid. To quote the good sideways-walking doctor himself: “Now Zoidberg is the popular one!“