the tweney review

Can I hear you say RAMEN?

My friend You Mon Tsang is finally taking the covers off of Boxxet, his third startup since I first met him a decade ago. It looks very promising. Boxxet takes aim at one of the problems I targeted in the livable web manifesto: that the World Wide Web as viewed through Google is just too big, too filled with spam and garbage, and too hard for most people to manage.

Or, as You Mon puts it, the web is filled with “rants layered on opinions layered on analysis layered on rumors.” There’s a ton of good information out there, but how do you find the good stuff? One way is by creating sites that collect only high-quality information on narrow topics.

Boxxet uses a “bionic” combination of human intelligence and computer-based textual analysis to create focused fan sites, or “boxxets.” (”Box sets” — get it? Domain names must have been hard to come up with.) Each boxxet contains lots of useful, prefiltered information on a specific topic. For instance, the boxxet for Madonna has news about her ridiculous African adoption, pictures of Madonna, and Madonna forums. There’s a list of the top blogs and top bookmarks about the star. Naturally there’s a tab to buy Madonna-related merchandise.

Similar collections exist for big-league sports teams, TV shows, Disneyland, and even some technology topics like Web 2.0. The textual analysis isn’t perfect, but it’s surprisingly good, and if you’re a fan of one of the topics covered by Boxxet, this could be a very easy way to stay in the loop.

Of course each Boxxet has its own RSS feed, so you can drop it right into your favorite newsreader.

Boxxet’s biggest shortcoming right now is the limited number of topics it covers. You Mon tells me they’re deliberately limiting the topics because of the large amount of processing power it takes to create and maintain a boxxet. But over time, the site will need to expand its topic coverage massively in order to succeed.

I’d also like to see more opportunities for individual tuning of Boxxets, so I could create variants on my favorite topics or even combine boxxets (San Francisco Giants AND Oakland A’s, Johnny Depp OR Keanu Reeves).

Boxxet is superficially similar to About.com or Squidoo, in that it collects a bunch of micro-sites that guide you through the thickets of the web in a (relatively) trustworthy way. But About and Squidoo are highly dependent on the quality of their individual editors, however, and a bad or lazy editor can make a topic useless — with no opportunity for any recourse or second opinions.

With Boxxet, the topic is not in the hands of a single capricious individual, which should help things: Instead, computer algorithms (continually enhanced by occasional human ratings) do the filtering, which may ensure a more consistent quality for Boxxet’s topics. I hope so.

Check it out: I think Boxxet has a lot of potential to make the web easier to navigate on a topic-by-topic basis. It will be interesting to see how it develops. And in the meantime, there’s a killer collection of Scarlett Johanssen news and photos I have to go check out.

The Web has outgrown the ability of most people to use it effectively. Trying to find useful information via Google requires search savvy that most people don’t have.

Even if you know what you’re looking for, there are problems with spam, advertising, and context (for example, “haiku” gives you results pertaining to poetry, operating system programming, error messages, the encryption system used on DVDs, and knitting).

Personalized home pages like My Yahoo and broad-interest portals like MSN only help so much. The scope of possible interests and the universe of available information are both so vast that it’s extremely difficult to find an intersection between the two that will be relevant to more than a tiny minority of viewers. Thus, the vast number of stories on diets, mortgages, and Britney Spears that these sites’ home pages carry — these are easy base hits: low-brow, pop-culture, mass-media topics. Then there’s the sheer number of links that portals sport. Looking at Yahoo’s home page, it’s easy to be overwhelmed with options.

Even Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us can’t help much — the bigger they get, the more they contribute to the information overload they’re designed to filter.

The fact is, the web as viewed through Google or Yahoo or Digg is just too big, too unfriendly, and too filled with data smog. What most people need is less information, not more.

I’m not proposing that we restrict access to the web through dumbed-down walled gardens, like those that most cell phone providers give to their customers with web-capable phones.

Instead, people need communities of information just like we need communities of people. We need livable webs — information spaces that not only filter data and give us what we’re interested in, but are also small enough and well-designed enough that we are comfortable in them, we can find our way around them, use them, and make connections within them.

In short, these spaces would be livable in the same way that a well-designed house is livable. The Google web is not livable in the same way that the middle of Times Square is not a tenable place to set up camp.

Now, people are already carving out their own livable webs as a matter of survival online. Some ways in which I’ve been creating livable webs are through my own blog, with Bloglines, with My Yahoo, with email lists, and in online groups.

But we can do better. We need:

• prefab, quality-controlled information spaces dedicated to specific interests, like what Boxxet provides, but on a wider range of topics and more customizability
• utopian info-communities like Wikipedia, but with better governance and fact-checking
• contextual search engines like Clusty, but with more fine-grained ability to make our own connections and track new information
• communities of content like MyBlogLog but with more robust collaborative tools

If we can build more livable webs for ourselves — “small webs” instead of the all-encompassing World Wide Web, human-scaled webs instead of the galactic scale Web — we can inhabit these online spaces comfortably, and use them for work and play. They will be jumping-off points for wider research into the unlimited expanses of the big-W Web.

Instead of suffocating data smog, with multiple channels of input (email! RSS feeds! IM! SMS!) we will be able to calmly survey the universe of information that matters to us and of people whom we care about, interacting with them as we want to, and going outside our individual webs when we need more.

What do you think — is this too much to ask? And how can we build such things? Because I am definitely feeling a bit overwhelmed by the size and number of the data channels available to me, and I don’t believe the answer is simply to unplug. I think that better, more livable information architecture is both necessary and possible. Let me know your thoughts.

Violet Blue: “the city is filthy with user-friendly Mac ass” - hilarious: How to Seduce a Mac Geek / A Macworld Sex Guide

If you ever have arguments with people of the opposite sex, the following may be the most valuable advice you will receive all year.

In humans, strong emotion starts with physiological changes in your body, not with an awareness of the emotion in your brain. So when somebody pisses you off, your heart rate increases, your adrenaline surges, and your muscles tighten up even before you realize that you’re angry. Or, as William James wrote, “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,” not the other way around.

According to neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, men and women are about the same in the speed with which their physiology gets engaged in strong emotions. However, in women, the nervous system takes a bit longer to “settle down” and return to normal than it does in men.

What this means is that as an argument winds down, a man will start feeling calmer relatively quickly — while a woman’s body remains in an agitated state even after the apparent resolution of the argument. Because everyone’s brain takes cues from the body, her brain realizes it’s still angry. So it starts casting about for other things to be angry about. Bam: Suddenly the argument flares up again, about a new subject.

Sound familiar? Fortunately, once you know about this, it’s not too hard to figure out how to handle it, whether you’re male or female. If you’re a man arguing with a woman, once the argument seems to be winding up, it’s time to say something funny, switch the subject to a completely different (non-controversial) topic, or do something nice for her. If you’re a woman, you need to remind yourself to go chill out, step into a different room, or do something to calm down before you reignite the argument.

Or, as Sapolsky and his wife do, you can just remind each other, “Honey, don’t forget what the half-life is on the autonomic nervous system!”

All this, and even more fascinating neurobiology, can be found in this highly entertaining episode of WNYC’s Radio Lab: Where Am I? The explanation of emotion and physiology is in the first segment, “Phantom Limbs.” Some of the best science radio ever.

Apparently babies have five distinguishable cries, each with a different meaning. Here’s the decoder: Why is my newborn baby crying?

After telling George Bush to go to hell, Hugo Chavez is doing the same thing to Bill Gates: Technology Review: Linux for the People

My very idiosyncratic list:

Scariest product: Security Spy Direct was demonstrating a combination flashlight/taser. As the brochure says: “Your opponent’s eyes will literally POP OUT OF HIS HEAD when you send 500,000 volts of stunning electrical power into his body with our stun guns.” Then you can have the satisfaction of stepping on his eyeballs and listening to them squish.

Most humiliating booth babe duty: The woman who was demonstrating a toilet with an extendable probe that sprays water up your ass. She didn’t have to sit on it, but she did have to talk about it — in a chirpy voice — while it sprayed water against the underside of a Saran wrap dam stretched over the bowl.

Most outrageous hotel room: John Chambers’ massive 4,000-square-foot suite at the top of the Venetian. (Think wood paneling. Multiple bars. Linen wallpaper. Piano. Japanese screens. Huge plasma TVs in every room.) Cisco hosted an event there Monday night. Obscenely nice.

Biggest coup: Brian Lam’s lunch date with Bill Gates. Together with Scoble, Ryan from Engadget, and a couple others. The bloggers have arrived.

Oddest product: Atech’s iCarta: A toilet paper roll / iPod dock. OK, it’s not that new. But I’d never seen it before, and I laughed.

Most significant product: Apple’s iPhone. Oops, that wasn’t at CES.

Pete Mortensen is right — if Apple’s phone is to succeed, it will be on the strength of its ability to sync easily with your computer: Cult of Mac

It’s a new year, and it’s time for pundits — even part-time pundits like me — to make their predictions. For someone who loves tech products, it’s an even more titillating time, because CES will bring an avalanche of them. So here are 7 key tech trends for 2007, and a measurable index (my prediction) for each one.

Simplicity. People are getting tired of a storm of buttons, menus, and options, and industrial designers are starting to notice. The Apple phone, if one comes out this year, will not have a keypad. Keypads are inelegant, and Jobs hates that shit. If Apple can convince consumers to buy an MP3 player with no screen, it can get us to buy phones without keypads (it’s just possible that an Apple phone will have a hidden, slide-out keypad, but I doubt it). Many other cellphone makers will follow suit.
STATUS 1/9/2007: Nailed it. The iPhone does not have a keypad.
UPDATE 2/20/2007:  A WSJ story on the  iPhone says “Mr. Jobs was adamant from the start that the centerpiece should be a touch-sensitive screen. He deplored the keyboards on portable email devices like Research in Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry and Palm Inc.’s Treo….”

Interconnectivity. Applications will continue to get hooked up, linked up, and mashed up. Web service vendors that don’t offer a way for users to create mashups with other web services will be increasingly marginalized. However, as 2007 ends you will realize you’ve never used one of these mashups more than once or twice.

Mobility. Everything is getting smaller, more portable, and more wirelessly connected. This will continue. There will be several PCs this year with folding keyboards and small screens, enabling them to fold up into the size of a CD jewel case or a pack of index cards. One of them might even be usable.
UPDATE 1/10/07: Check out the OQO Model 02. Not small enough, but surprisingly usable.

Interactivity. Sites and services that offer interaction via real-time chats and interactive audio/video conferences will zoom in popularity as they get easier to use, and as people look for meaningful human connections online. Someone will combine the expandability of a wiki with the real-time WYSIWYG multimedia-ness of a shared whiteboard to create something completely new. A wikiboard?

Half-asseditivity. Wikipedia will continue to grow — and, spurred by its ability to mobilize thousands of unpaid, under-qualified volunteers, dozens of other sites will try to imitate its example. The result will be even more half-assed, incorrect, unchecked text, audio, and video, with a few gems lurking in the trashheap. Wiki backlash will peak when the authors of Wikinomics are forced to take down their own wiki (or else restrict editing to a small cadre of trusted individuals).

Advertisitivity. The massive cash spigot that is Google AdSense will continue to attract individuals and companies who want to scoop out just a tiny bit of that flow. As a result, sites that are not buried in ads will become increasingly rare. The ad-content ratio on several major publishing sites (as measured by pixel area on the home page) will surpass 50%.

Greenitivity. Being green (using less power, producing fewer greenhouse gases, and consuming fewer resources) will become increasingly important to consumers. Companies will adopt real, substantive reforms initially as marketing stunts — and then will expand these reforms as they discover being green can save them money. At least one major tech product in 2007 will be touted as completely recyclable/reusable and low-power.
Status 1/9/2007: At CES, the Consumer Electronics Association is unveiling MyGreenElectronics, a site devoted to promoting low-power, low-resources products.

Gigantivity. Yahoo is already taking heat for its seeming inability to make coherent sense out of its zillions of products. Google is starting to stumble, with a botched Blogger upgrade, decreasing quality of search results, and even server slowdowns. Microsoft is launching an extremely risky upgrade to Office. At least one of these companies will apologize in 2007 for having made a serious product design mistake.