Michael is one of Australia’s few living national treasures and at the height of the dot com boom he published a cartoon in the Melbourne Age entitled: Information Superhighway Carrier Pigeon Extravaganza!
The message was very simple. A revolution in communications was upon us. Soon every home would have a pigeon coop and we’d all be connected to the world by pigeons. Paying bills, doing our shopping and banking by pigeon. Working from home all thanks to the pigeon… Pigeons will change everything.
The punch line? What will we say when we talk to the world via pigeon? Umm… We’ll say things like hello and have a nice day.
Now how Facebook and Twitter was that?
Another piece that I enjoyed reading today was Read Write Web’s Study: Rumors of Written-Word Death Greatly Exaggerated
“Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet,”
The reality is the only reason words are the overwhelmingly preferred way of communicating on the internet is because HTML (the language of the Internet) is a primitive text mark up language that has evolved very little from its origins in the word processing software of the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Like it or not, if your Grandmother was a PA or Secretary using a computer back in the 1970’s and 80’s then she was also typing <b></b> and <p></p>.
The internet is what it was always designed to be: A very primitive electronic document publishing and distribution platform.
Which brings me to the question of eReaders and Tablets.
This Christmas has seen a lot of excitement about the future of eReaders. We have the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony eReader, the Apple iTable/iSlate and even calls for a Google Slate.
The question is, after so many false starts, are we finally seeing the break through moment for the eReader?
The main reason I suspect the eReaders and Tablets have failed in the past is because they have failed to deliver a compelling user experience.
The simple assumption that putting a book, or even the internet, on an electronic pad is a compelling user experience is fundamentally wrong.
For the eReader to succeed it needs to deliver a user experience that is significantly more empowering than just reading a book or a magazine. It needs to do more than just bring HTML or PDFs or any other electronic document format you can think of to screen. It needs to be a new medium that offers a new user experience that is very different from any other media it can be compared to.
So no, the revolutionary eReader will not be an eText Pad (e.g Paper, Tablet Computer or PDA), nor a portable internet device (e.g. Netbook/iPhone), nor a portable TV (e.g iPhone), nor a portable games platform (e.g iPhone), nor will it be a portable communicator (e.g iPhone).
What will it be? I guess we’ll know that when somebody finally succeeds in bringing it to market.
Posted on December 31, 2009
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