So it’s comforting to see that the visionary Ray Kurzweil (whose The Age of Spiritual Machines I heartily recommend) has, in effect, completely endorsed my idea of multi technology. Here’s what he says in an interview with GOOD Magazine:

By the late 2020s, nanobots in our brain (that will get there noninvasively, through the capillaries) will create full-immersion virtual-reality environments from within the nervous system. So if you want to go into virtual reality the nanobots shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were actually in the virtual environment. So this will provide full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses. You will have a body in these virtual-reality environments that you can control just like your real body, but it does not need to be the same body that you have in real reality. We’ll be able to interact with people in any way in these virtual-reality environments. That will replace most travel, but we’ll also have new travel technologies for our real bodies using nanotechnology.

Contrast that with how I describe the multi network in the appendices for Infoquake:

A multi projection is a virtual body that “exists” in real space. While the multied body is only an illusion created by neural manipulation, it can interact with real (“meat”) bodies in a way almost indistinguishable from physical human interaction…. The multi network depends on two key components: (1) the trillions of microscopic bots that process and relay sensory information to the network, and (2) neural OCHREs that manipulate the mind into “seeing” the sights, “hearing” the sounds, and “feeling” the sensations of the network. Similarly, those who interact with multi projections allow neural manipulation to trick the mind into believing the virtual bodies are present.

The big difference between good ol’ Ray and me is that a) he actually knows what he’s talking about, and b) I didn’t figure we’d get this working for another few hundred years. Kurzweil thinks we’ll be sending multi projections around the globe about the same time that Malia Obama gets her Masters degree. I think many of Kurzweil’s predictions are a tad on the optimistic side — he thinks the singularity will happen, oh, any day now — but basically sound.

(Thanks to Richard Strayer for pointing out the interview.)

A lot has changed since then. But sometimes I wonder if the computing industry — all of it, from software to hardware to web services — really has the right priorities in mind. So here’s my list of the things that I hope to hell are working flawlessly by 2018. The frustrating thing is that every single one of these things can be done with today’s technology (except possibly for #7).

1. Automatic file syncing. It’s astounding how badly computers do this. Every operating system on every computer sucks at syncing files; it’s only a matter of degree. I should be able to turn on any device I own and access any file I own, and it should all happen transparently. I don’t want to have to think about where I put a particular file, or whether I can access it from my iPhone. My calendar events should automatically sync between my Blackberry, my desktop, my Google Calendar, and my websites. Perhaps the key is to have everything save to “the cloud” and sync locally for offline access; I don’t know. I just want it to work.
2. Automatic configuration syncing. The younger, hotter sister of automatic file syncing. Now that we’re all starting to use web applications for everything instead of sending files around, these web applications all need to be able to talk to each other. My bookmarks should follow me from machine to machine, and from browser to browser. Every time I configure my Firefox or my Windows Media Player just the way I like it, I shouldn’t have to go through the same painstaking customization process on every machine I touch.
3. Automatic backups. Macs now do this as a matter of course with Time Machine software. But Windows doesn’t. Well, let me qualify that — Windows will back up important system files as a matter of course, and create confusing “shadow copies” of documents in the background that you can roll back to. But it’s confusing as hell and inefficient to boot. What’s more, I want my computer to back up to an online storage facility, not some clunky piece of crap that’s hogging space on my desk.
4. Automatic upgrades. I’m not just talking about the operating system software here — I’m talking about every piece of software and hardware should automatically check for upgrades on a regular basis from a single, unified interface. And then give me the option to install or not install. Linux does this, and Microsoft has made efforts towards this with their Windows Update facility. But right now I have separate programs on my desktop working in the background to check for updates from Java, Logitech, Apple, Adobe, ESET, Mozilla, and Dell. And that doesn’t include all of the programs that check for updates when you fire them up.
5. Integrated security. This whole system of remembering a million different passwords in a million different places is unworkable. Not only that, but it’s not secure, because everyone on Earth except for Bruce Schneier either a) has their passwords written down on a Post-It note, b) uses ridiculously insecure passwords like their dog’s name, or c) has a handful of relatively secure passwords that they use over and over again, because we can only remember so many garbled strings of letters and numbers. I’m not a security expert, but it seems to me that biometric security would be a step up from where we are today.
6. Centralized identity management. Why do I have to constantly retype the same address information, the same email address, the same websites? Why is it that when I update my official bio to reflect a new book release, I have to log in to 4000 different websites and manually change my bios one by one? I understand the need to respect privacy — but if I want to share my information with a particular website, application, or company, shouldn’t I be able to do that with a click or two? We need trusted, universal services that can verify your identity wherever you are online.
7. Useful battery life. I am sick to death of power cords. If I never saw another power cord in my life, it would be too soon. But I could deal with power cords if they only led to docking stations that charged up my appliances enough to make them usable for an entire day. But right now, my laptop barely survives three or four hours untethered; my Blackberry struggles to get through the day with the WiFi switched on all the time. Fer the love o’ Christ, people, I need at least a day’s worth of juice for every machine I own. Please.
8. Everything wireless. I’ve got connecting cables for my BlackBerry and my iPod. The printer’s wired to the desktop, as are the quad speakers and the subwoofer. The keyboard and mouse aren’t wired anymore — but the wireless transmitter for the keyboard and mouse is wired. I want, at most, one power cable snaking from the back of my computer to the wall. Apple is leading the way on this one, as usual. But with Bluetooth moving onto more and more devices, we’re getting close to achieving this one on all platforms.
9. True, modular upgrades. For years, I’ve had the dream of having a single system that could be upgraded in a modular fashion. I’ll snap in the newest processor every couple of years. I’ll beef up my sound card on alternate years. I’ll upgrade the video card as circumstances warrant. But it seems that no matter how hard I try, I have to scrap everything and start from scratch after a few seasons. Is it really that difficult to future-proof hardware so I can upgrade my systems one piece at a time?
10. True plug and play. Let’s say it together: every piece of equipment I buy should be able to interface with every other piece of equipment I own. I should never be in the position of having to struggle to get photographs from the camera to the printer, or having to figure out whether the DVDs I burned on one computer can be read on another — much less have trouble networking my Linux, Mac, and Windows boxes together.

Agree? Disagree? And what have I missed?

I thought: I’ve got my website running WordPress 2.5.1. I’ve got an Eclipse/Aptana installation that works well for code editing. Photoshop CS3 for image noodling. A Sony VAIO laptop running Vista Home Premium that automatically updates itself. I’ve got Windows FolderShare set up to mirror all of my important files so I don’t need to worry about manual backups.

All I need to do from now on is just keep updating the software, and I never, ever, ever need to configure anything again. Windows will update itself. WordPress will evolve incrementally. New virus definitions will arrive. Oh, I might need to swap out hardware a few times, but otherwise I’ve got everything in my computer setup exactly the way I want it. I’m done! I’m set! No more tinkering, no more Googling for solutions.

Well, I’m almost set. I still need to fix the meta tags on WordPress. I’ve got to try to find a better FTP module for Eclipse, because the built-in one sucks rocks. I need to upgrade to Vista Ultimate so I can get Windows Remote Desktop and stop paying $20 every month to GoToMyPC. I need to find a way to have FolderShare mirror my Firefox profiles without making me close my browser five times a session…

It’s not over. It’s never over, and it never will be.

Somehow they’ve managed to do it. Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Sony, IBM, Google — all the dozens of companies large and small who make the hardware and software products I use — they’ve managed to put me in a state of permanent technological dissatisfaction. I’m not satisfied with my computing environment. I’m not satisfied with my website. I’m not satisfied with the tools I use. I need to upgrade something, I need to fix something, I need to improve something. I’m going to sit there on my deathbed bummed out as hell because, well, sure I’m about to die, but I’m about to die and I still haven’t gotten my Firefox profiles to sync properly.

Some lefties would have you believe that this dissatisfaction is just a product of corporate lust. See, I fell into the trap myself in the last paragraph. As if we would all live peaceful, communal, nonacquisitive existences if Coke and Pepsi would stop shoving their advertising in our collective face.

But it ain’t true. This is the human condition. That’s the hand we’ve been dealt. We’re permanently dissatisfied.

We Americans are accustomed to thinking about our history as one continual struggle for improvement (however misguided it may be at times). We pride ourselves on the fact that every generation of American citizens has had more luxuries, amenities, and opportunities than the one before it, and the next generation will have it even better than us. The reason you’re sitting on a cushy hypoallergenic stainproof La-Z-Boy recliner is because your grandpa wasn’t satisfied with his wooden rocking chair. You’re not totally satisfied with your La-Z-Boy either — there’s always something you can do to improve it — and that’s why your great-grandkids are going to be floating on inflatable programmable portable instantly customizable space lounge chairs. And they’re going to have problems with those too…

This technological restlessness didn’t start with America; not remotely. How far back does it go? The late, great Arthur C. Clarke nailed it in his late, great novel 2001. Early on in the book, we follow a group of primitive apemen led by one Moonwatcher. They’re starving, they’re dwindling, they’re skateboarding on the precipice of Total Extinction without a helmet or kneepads. That’s when the unnamed alien species delivers the Monolith — you know, that tall black slab you remember from the movie. As Clarke describes it, the Monolith is essentially a Machine That Pisses You Off. Suddenly Moonwatcher’s got these visions in his head of a group of primitive apemen lying around all sleek, fat, and comfortable. And he thinks: why don’t I have that? What am I doing wrong? What do I need to do to get that?

Now here I am, a million years later. I’m sleek and fat and comfortable. I sit in a cushy chair all day with a little metal machine on my lap that lets me communicate with anyone in the world. I’ve got cabinets stuffed full of food, I’ve got a security system that keeps the bad guys out, I’ve got a house so insulated from the weather that I rode out last nights’ thunderstorms without a hitch. And yet I am irritated as fucking hell that I can’t get my Firefox profiles to sync.

Lo, my children’s children, I promise you this: we’ll get those Firefox profiles to sync before you arrive. By the time you get here, you’ll be set, and you’ll never, ever, ever have to tinker with anything again. Really. Cross my heart.

I’m unclear why this has happened. The URLs for the feeds should still be in the same place. All of the articles that were in the old feed are still in the new feed. I did mess around in the database and fix a number of GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers, for those non-geeks in the audience) that were pointing to a temporary address. But that should only have affected your feed reader’s ability to mark the entry as read or not read.

At least you can delete and re-add the RSS feed to your feed reader. The syndication for my Amazon blog broke altogether several months ago, and my message to the Amazon technical support staff seems to have fallen into a crack in the Earth somewhere. Now I’m stuck adding new entries to my Amazon blog by hand.

Why is so much technology so goddamn fragile?

I joke about this all the time with my web programming customers. Chances are that if you see something drastically wrong with the website I’m managing — layout all fucked up, images floating all over the place, everything completely unreadable — it’s the fault of a single misplaced comma somewhere. Other industries don’t have this problem. I mean, if you’ve got a single board nailed crooked in your house, the whole thing doesn’t fall to pieces.

This fragility is one of the whole reasons why it makes sense to move websites to CMS’s like WordPress or Drupal, or application frameworks like Ruby on Rails. Setting up a framework takes the gruntwork and repetition out of web programming, and it insulates you from fucking up the whole website by sticking a comma in the wrong place. Mostly.

The reality of the matter is that web technology is still on a very low rung of the evolutionary ladder. We’ve got application skeletons and frameworks galore, but you don’t see a lot of application musculatures or nervous systems. Most software can’t repair itself — and even when it can do rudimentary repair work, like replacing accidentally deleted files or Windows Registry entries, it’s not smart enough to know when it needs repairing. My Firefox browser is now smart enough to automatically restore all of my tabs when it crashes, most of the time — but about 20% of the time, the browser still isn’t even smart enough to know that it’s crashed, and I have to open the Windows Task Manager and manually kill the process that’s not responding.

And so I find working on web technology really fucking frustrating because it’s fucking broken so much of the fucking time. The web is full of dead links because the mechanisms for propagating electronic changes of address are sucky. Pages break on different browsers and operating systems because nobody — not even Mozilla — implements all the W3C standards correctly, and it’s quite difficult to make a website degrade gracefully.

I get a little melancholy when I start to think about these things, because I realize that I’m not going to live long enough to see the really cool stuff. None of us are. Technology can be maddening and frustrating today, and it’s going to remain maddening and frustrating for a long time to come.

Kludges usually come about in programming when you either don’t have the time or the budget to deal with a certain problem. A basic example: you build a website that works just fine in all the modern versions of Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Flock, Safari, Netscape, Konqueror, etc. And then you get a call from an account rep in a different department asking in a strident tone of voice why the website is causing sparks to fly out of his client’s ancient WebTV box.

If Jesus Christ were your webmaster, he would clap his hands and come up with an elegant and elaborate piece of code that accounts for every browser on the market. This piece of programming legerdemain would not only deal with every WebTV and Mosaic 1.0 and Lynx browser still out there, but it would do so in a systematic way that would ensure compatibility with future unknown browsers and web services too. But you’re not Jesus Christ. Not only that, but you’ve got a million other pressing issues on your plate that are much more important than this.

On the other hand, this particular WebTV user happens to be the sister of the uncle of the CEO, and it’s worth spending ten or fifteen minutes to keep the CEO happy. So you grumble a little bit, fire up your text editor, and insert code that looks something like this:

<For all normal users...>
<Do this.>
<If the user is on a WebTV browser AND it's a Tuesday AND there's a full moon...>
<Do that.>
<Unless it's a Thursday and "Heroes" is still winning its timeslot, in which case...>
<Do something else entirely.>
<Now back to the normal code.>


Voila! You’ve created a kludge. It’s of no use to 99.9% of the world and it will slow down your application for everyone by some small fraction of a second — but on the other hand, it’s only taken you two minutes to write and the client’s happy.

Here’s a dirty little secret that the programmers don’t always tell you: all computer programs are full of kludges. Nobody ever intends to use them. Everyone’s application starts with the best of intentions and the cleanest of architectures. This is going to be the slickest widget ever! People will still be using it every day in 2035! Then life and the marketplace intervene, and the application wanders off track. You start to add kludges.

If Microsoft let you dig in to the source code for their operating systems, you’d see bazillions of kludges. Microsoft in particular is notorious for preserving backwards compatibility at all costs. Which means that in 20 years, when the only person left in the world using Lotus 1-2-3 is an old man with Alzheimer’s in Patagonia, the Windows Vista 20-Year Anniversary Edition (Now with Sherlock!) will still be able to run it.

But it’s not just computer programs that are full of kludges. Our lawbooks are full of kludges. I see from a page called Looney Laws that, in Michigan, a woman’s hair legally belongs to her husband; in Newport, Rhode Island, it’s illegal to smoke a pipe after sunset; and in Logan County, Colorado, it’s illegal for a man to kiss a woman while asleep. (Whether the same holds true if a woman kisses a sleeping man, the page does not say. In fact, it would be nice if the page would cite some references somewhere, but I won’t hold my breath.)

Every time you drive up to an ATM and wonder why the hell there’s Braille on the keypad, you’re experiencing a kludge of sorts. If you ever find yourself locked in the trunk of your car, you can thank the Patron Saint of Kludges for that lever that lets you open it from the inside. Whenever you tear open your kid’s LEGO set and find a 15-page booklet telling you that LEGO is not liable if your child chooses to set the blocks on fire and wedge them down his sister’s throat, you’re seeing the results of a kludge.

But here’s the problem: the world is shrinking. Products and laws and programs that were once created with tens of thousands of relatively homogeneous white people in Middle America are now being exported all around the world.

It’s all well and good to translate your web application into Spanish and French. But are you going to translate it into Dutch, Farsi, Cantonese, Hawaiian, and Shoshone? What happens when you get an influx of web traffic from Pakistan? Are you going to rush out and create a kludge for every linguistic, cultural, geographic, religious, and political special circumstance out there? Of course not. You don’t have the time, and you don’t have the money.

The problem with kludges is that they get progressively more expensive as they pile up. It seemed like a simple thing to write a few lines of code to deal with that one WebTV user. But when it comes time to redo the website, you’re going to see a big mess of kludges for these one-off circumstances. Some of them will conflict with one another. What happens when you’ve got a WebTV user who’s also a Spanish speaker and color blind? You need to make more contingencies. You have to test each of those contingencies. You have to hire experts, put together beta user groups, deal with all the exceptions that entails.

And make no mistake about it, kludges cost money. LEGO needs to hire lawyers to vet every word of that 15-page booklet, they need to hire desktop publishers to lay it out, and they need to pay printing costs to actually make the damn thing. Then there’s the extra penny or so it’s going to add to the shipping cost, and the extra hard drive they’re going to need in their office to store all four hundred customized versions of these legal booklets included with every different LEGO set.

Microsoft Windows is on close to a billion PCs, and you can bet that there are plenty of colorblind Spanish-speaking WebTV users whose children like to set things on fire and jam them down their sister’s throat. Their new Vista operating system has somewhere north of 50 million SLOC (source lines of code). That’s a lot of kludges to sort through.

This can’t keep going on. We’re going to have to find ways to deal with the kludge problem.

It’s pretty clear to me that pushing people towards standardization will only go so far. There’s a large “English-only” movement in the United States that’s trying to force governments to stop catering to speakers of other languages, Spanish in particular. But you can only force 28 million American Spanish speakers to do so much. Besides which, what happens when English is no longer the lingua franca of business throughout the world? All it takes is a couple of economic shifts, and your kids might be learning Hindi in school and desperately trying to sound like Delhi natives on the phone, instead of the other way around.

No, I think in the long run we’re going to have to start carrying our kludges with us.

What does that mean in practical terms? It means that the burden of adapting to the world is going to shift from large corporations and governments to the individual. It means that rather than the content providers being responsible for translating text into your language, you’re going to take content from abroad and (Babel) fish the language you understand out of it.

Speaking futuristically, it means you’re going to need to find special glasses to compensate for your colorblindness. The city’s going to disclaim responsibility if you can’t tell the difference between the red light and the green one. So you’ll need a device that can continuously broadcast to the world around you that you’re colorblind. It’s probably not going to make the traffic light change colors, but it could certainly cause the ATM display to automatically switch to colorblind mode.

And along with that device, you’re going to be using a ton of middleware to constantly tweak the world to your hardware (whether that hardware be computer, phone, or neural implant). You’ll be translating content on the fly to fit your own time or place or idiom. It means you’ll be Greasemonkeying reality.

Luckily, technology is on the side of the individual. As processing power skyrockets and processor size diminishes, it’ll become easier to carry your personal solutions with you. (Although with the growth in cheap wireless networking, you might not necessarily be carrying anything.)

And this will be a good thing for everyone in the long run. Small businesses won’t have to worry so much about complying with crushing, confusing, and contradictory regulations. Software licensing agreements will shrink so that you don’t have to worry about clicking “Yes” to the fact that this software may be inappropriate for young children, despite the fact that you’re 85 and living in a retirement community. If you’re not allergic to peanuts, you won’t have to read a goddamn warning label about peanut allergies on every single product you buy.

And the sister of the uncle of the CEO will have to fend for herself. Imagine that.

The author then goes on to hold up as a model for the future RealNetworks’ Rhapsody service, which RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser calls “the jukebox in the sky.” It sounds like a great deal: $10 a month for all the streaming music you can listen to. The catch is that you don’t get to own any of it; everything resides on the Rhapsody servers, you’re just checking it out for a few minutes.

Let’s put aside the fact that RealNetworks’ products turned into clunky, adware-laden pieces of crap several years ago with the release of their RealOne player. Let’s also put aside the fact that the company has lost so much ground in recent years to Apple’s iTunes and Microsoft’s Windows Media that they hardly have the clout to revolutionize the music business anymore.

The real (Real) question is this: Do people want a jukebox in the sky?

Kirkpatrick points to the coming ubiquity of wireless broadband networking. Within the next ten years or so, we’ll all be using 3G or WiMax or some as-yet-unchristened technology to access information anytime, anywhere. You won’t need to bring your music with you on little metallic discs — or little plastic iPods — because it will all be available for the taking on the big jukebox in the sky. Why pay to “own” music at all when downloading it is effortless? Just download what you want, when you want.

But here’s the problem with that scenario. Broadband access isn’t the only technology that’s growing by leaps and bounds. Disk storage is exploding too, and getting cheaper by the day.

As I write this, I’m looking at a last-generation iPod sitting on my desk with 30 GB of storage. Not quite enough to store my whole music collection yet — I rip my MP3′s at a full 320 Kbps, as God intended them to be ripped — but the newer 80 GB iPods might do the trick. Within a few years, we’ll be carrying 500 GB iPods. Seagate and Hitachi have 1 terabyte hard drives coming out this year. Flash memory is getting so cheap that you can find piles of thumb drives sitting next to the check-out counter at computer stores.

Guess how much data the entire printed Library of Congress contains? 10 terabytes. Yes, that’s it, 10 terabytes. Assuming we continue along this exponential trend of increased storage, you’ll be blowing your nose with 10-terabyte Kleenex soon enough. What does that mean? That means you’ll be able to carry your entire music, video, and book collection around in your pocket in 20 years. Let’s take it even further: in 40 or 50 years, you’ll be able to carry around every book ever written and every piece of music ever recorded around with you. Give it another 10 years for video.

So would you rather carry your digital media with you in your pocket, or would you rather carry your radio receiver with you and access your media on the great jukebox in the sky?

You’re going to want to carry it in your pocket.

Why? For starters, the great jukebox in the sky is a centralized system. This means that it’s easier for authoritarian elements to control. Courts rule that Negativland has infringed on U2′s copyrights by sampling their music? Easy enough to remedy — the court will just instruct Rhapsody to yank the Negativland tracks out of the jukebox. The surviving Beatles decide that the original George Martin-produced Let It Be album is an abomination and henceforth only Let It Be… Naked shall be heard? No problem — just overwrite the old tracks with the new ones.

Also, let’s not overlook the fact that a centralized system is easier for malicious hackers and pranksters to attack. And it’s much more vulnerable to the kinds of clerical errors that often plague large databases. The Gracenote/CDDB database is full of typos and just plain false information that’s damn near impossible to fix, and it only contains meta information. Imagine the chaos that would ensue when the jukebox in the sky’s files get corrupted. What if they post the wrong mix, or switch tracks by mistake? Good luck getting that fixed.

But probably the most damning factor is what I call the Greasemonkey factor. People want their own individualized, personalized filters on reality, and the tools to create them are becoming easier and cheaper all the time. This is as true of music as it is of anything else. People want to do what bassist Steve McDonald did to the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells album — they want to add their own instrumentation. They want to mix it their way. They want to mash up the Circle Jerks with Tijuana Brass and 50 Cent, and then use it as a soundtrack for the Star Wars Kid’s lightsaber battle. Theoretically there’s nothing preventing you from doing this to music from the jukebox in the sky — you could create Greasemonkey filters that work on streaming music just as easily as they work on locally stored music. But what are the copyright holders going to think of that? Are they going to make the jukebox in the sky Greasemonkey-proof? Are they going to require that you ask their permission every time you want to goof around with your friends in Apple GarageBand?

For me, the clincher of the argument is something I don’t think everyone would agree with: people like owning things. Especially if it’s just as easy, cheap, and convenient to own as it is to rent. Have you stopped buying DVDs now that they’re available on Netflix? Have you stopped buying books because they’re available at the library? Did you sell your Toyota when Zipcar came to town? If you’re like most people, the answers to these questions are no, no, and no.

We can argue about whether the world would be a better place if we didn’t have such an acquisitive mindset. We can argue about whether all cultures on this planet would ultimately share this mindset given an atmosphere of abundance and indulgence like America’s. Right now I side with the philosophy that says people are acquisitive by nature. And opening a big jukebox in the sky isn’t going to change that.

So in short: I’m sorry, but in the long run, RealNetworks’ jukebox in the sky just isn’t going to fly.

I like Google. I have great faith in their ability to bring new technology to the masses in an intuitive, highly functional package. Google Maps quickly supplanted MapQuest as my street directory of choice when it came out. And I’ve got high hopes for Writely, an online word processing application that Google bought earlier this year and promptly rechristened Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

So why is Gmail so irritating?

Gmail should be a slam-dunk for Google. After all, I can build a simple POP3 application on a ColdFusion web server in a couple of hours, and that includes time for me to consult the Macromedia documentation to fix my mangled CFML syntax. I’m not saying that that’s all there is to it, of course. (If you want to see a ColdFusion-based application gone horribly awry, look at all the flaws in MySpace.) But I don’t have some of the world’s best developers and billions of dollars in cash lying around either.

Here are my major problems with Gmail:

• Gmail breaks the browser Back button. To me, this is an absolute cardinal sin. Yes, I understand how difficult it is to make a functioning web application that obeys the Back button in a stateless environment like the web. But certainly Google can do better. I back up into blank, non-functioning pages at least two or three times a day, usually when following links from the Gmail module on my Google home page. And when Google isn’t breaking the Back button, they’re opening up new and unwanted tabs in my browser.
• Gmail breaks the Reload/Refresh button. Try opening an e-mail message, and then hitting your browser’s reload/refresh button. You get taken back to the list of e-mails. I get hung up on this several times a day too.
• The interface is very, very slow. I lose patience very easily with the “Loading” messages that pop up at the top of the screen — there are actually two different messages, one that appears in the top right and one that appears in the top left — and they’re up there a lot.
• No folders. Google assumes that we don’t care for the convention of filing our e-mail into different folders. Therefore Gmail does away with this metaphor altogether in favor of its own Label system, which I can’t seem to get used to. Couldn’t they at least give you the option of using folders, even if it’s not set by default?

• What’s with the Reply textbox? There’s a textbox at the bottom of every message that suddenly expands into a full-fledged e-mail reply once you click on it. It’s very bizarre and counterintuitive, considering the fact that the e-mail reply looks nothing like the textbox.
• Threaded conversations are just confusing. Message replies and forwards are all tacked on to the original e-mail to form one long chain of messages. It sounds like a good idea to have a record of the entire conversation in one place, but in practice things get very cluttered very quickly. When conversations start to branch off into multiple threads, it’s almost impossible to keep track. Furthermore, threaded e-mail conversations cause messages to jump around in chronology. That message that used to be halfway down the page suddenly jumps to the top of the page, rendering any attempts to order your messages useless.
• Why can’t I easily sort? Every other e-mail program in the world — hell, just about every other program period — lets you sort objects. Usually by clicking the header at the top of the column. Gmail doesn’t let you sort messages at all. What if I want to view all messages to or from a specific person? You need to type that person’s name into the Search box. What if you want to view e-mail in reverse chronology? Sorry, can’t.
• Gmail doesn’t play well with POP3 clients like Outlook. Sure, you can easily download messages to Outlook — which is more than you can say for some webmail clients like Microsoft’s own Hotmail — but Google renders some of most effective POP3 management tools null and void. Messages you’ve downloaded into Outlook don’t automatically get marked as read in Gmail. And Gmail doesn’t obey the standard POP3 setting allowing your client to automatically delete webmail messages after x days on the server.
• The “Compose Mail” link is hard to find. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it difficult to remember where the “Compose Mail” link is. Yes, it’s right there in the top left under the Gmail logo, but after using the program for a year, I still hesitate a second or two every time I need to use it. That’s generally a sign that there’s a serious design flaw at work.

There are all kinds of smaller problems too. Why, when you click on the “New window” link, is the new window too narrow to see your entire e-mail message? Why are message threads sometimes collapsed and sometimes not? How come clicking on the paper clip icon doesn’t take you to the message attachment like it does in every other application? In fact, why do you need to scroll all the way to the bottom of the message to download attachments?

The main problem with Gmail is one that I’ve started to see too much at Google: product arrogance. It’s the attitude that Google knows what’s good for you, and they’re going to proceed with their internal logic despite what the usability standards say and what the customers think. It’s the same Achilles’ heel that Apple has suffered from for years. (Why did Steve Jobs wait until 2005 to finally ship a mouse with a right-click button and a scroll wheel?)

There are some things I like about Gmail’s interface — the autosave, the fact that sent mail downloads to your POP3 client, the e-mail RSS feeds — but generally they’re outweighed by the annoyances. Enough that I’m seriously considering switching back to Yahoo! for my webmail. Their new interface is supposed to be very nice.

MySpace is far and away the most popular of these types of services. According to Alexa, MySpace ranks only below Yahoo and Google in terms of popularity on the web. If you’re curious, you can view my page at http://www.myspace.com/davidlouisedelman.

Here’s the problem: MySpace is an abomination. Nothing works. The things that do work are poorly designed and shoddily implemented. Here’s just a small sampling of problems I’ve been having:

• Member search doesn’t work. Try searching for members using multiple criteria, and watch the search go splat. (Then again, Yahoo’s member search has been broken for years and nobody seems eager to fix it.)
• Importing contacts doesn’t work. I tried importing my online address books from Yahoo, GMail, and AIM. MySpace said it sent out a dozen or so invites. It didn’t, and I had to redo the whole thing by hand.
• Instant messaging doesn’t didn’t work. I tried sending a friend a message just to see what it would do, only to receive a very unprofessional-looking error message stating that the instant messaging was out of commission.
• Cross-posting from WordPress doesn’t work. I have managed to get this working with LiveJournal (http://david-l-edelman.livejournal.com if you’re curious) using a nice little plugin I found on the web. There used to be one of these for MySpace, but the plugin developer gave up because MySpace kept mucking with the API.
• Reporting spam doesn’t work. This morning I received friend requests from kinkymonica, flirtymonica, and luvymonica. How do you report these friend requests as the porn spam they so obviously are? You can’t.
• Approving your friends doesn’t work. I’m currently staring at my “approve/deny your friends” queue, which states that I’m looking at “Listing 1-6 of 6.” Only about an inch away, however, there’s another column that says “1 of 1.” And below, there’s nothing listed. Do I have five phantom friends? (Actually, that would explain a lot of things…)

To add to the functional problems, the site is full of the worst kind of design heresy. Boxes float around the page with seemingly no rhyme or reason. The default icons look like rejects from your old Windows 3.1 installation. Navigation seems to float around the screen in illogical places, to the point where the only button I can rely on is the browser’s Back button. Things get even worse when users start mucking with their MySpace designs and adding polls and plug-ins and garish animated GIFs. You get stuck with endless pages that take forever to load and are impossible to read.

The worst sin of all is that MySpace plays multimedia files without asking you first. My first reaction to any page that starts blaring music or video at me is to immediately click the Back button and run like hell. In order to turn off the music at MySpace, you need to quickly scan the screen for the multimedia player — which is in a different place on each page — and click the Stop or Pause button. But even then, your preference doesn’t stick, so if you go to a different site and come back later, the music starts blaring again. (Only this time it starts playing faster because the page is in your browser cache.)

Recently MySpace attempted to ameliorate this by adding a preference you can set to turn off the automatic music. Surprise: it doesn’t always work.

The question that I have is that why hasn’t MySpace made full use of open standards, the most successful example of social networking on the web to date? Take a look at the source code for your MySpace page, and it’s a mess. No DTD at the top, style sheet links embedded in the middle of the body, tables mixed with DIVs mixed with IFRAMEs willy-nilly.

And I’m not just talking about open standards determined by some committee in Switzerland, but web design standards that have won the long, hard Darwinian slog in the marketplace. Navigational sidebars. Underlined links. Fluid layouts that don’t break on different screen resolutions. Different colors for visited links.

The popularity of MySpace is enough for me to reevaluate all of the design credos I hold so dear. If such a horrible website as this can become a cultural phenomenon and literally change the way American teenagers live their lives, then what hope is there for web standards?

My only consolation is that the Firefox AdBlock extension works just fine on MySpace. Not only that, but Userscripts.org has a bevvy of useful Greasemonkey scripts to turn bad MySpace pages into — well, less bad MySpace pages.

But technology isn’t always about giving us more freedom to do things we couldn’t do before. Our lives are stuffed to the gills with choice, and there’s such a thing as too much of it. Sometimes technology can help precisely by taking away our freedoms. Small, inconvenient, and irritating freedoms.

For instance: speed limits.

Most of us have precisely two feelings about speed limits. One, they’re too low; and two, it’s annoying to have to pay attention to them. Oh, we recognize in the back of our minds that speed limits are necessary, that speed limits act as a reminder and a deterrent and in the long run save lives.

But it’s difficult and irritating to pay attention to them. The signs are standardized across the nation so they’re easily recognizable, but you’re never quite sure when you’re going to see one. When you travel to another state, you never know what the interstate speed limit is. As a result, most of the speeding tickets we get — most of the ones I’ve gotten at least — are a result of ignorance, not disobedience. We want to obey the law, we really do. It’s just not easy enough.

So here’s a perfect opportunity to use the power of information technology to put our insignificant freedoms on pause.

What if the Department of Transportation created a national database of speed limit information tied to GPS coordinates? And what if every car was equipped with a specialized GPS unit that could tap into this database and therefore tell you what the proper speed limit was at all times?

Your car would then be able to sense when you were approaching or breaking the speed limit. Perhaps the dashboard could signal you with a flashing light or an audible chime. Or maybe, like videogame controllers, the car could give “force feedback” to make pressing the accelerator noticably more difficult the faster you’re going. Perhaps ultimately you might choose for the car to simply not let you exceed the speed limit — or to cap you at ten miles an hour over.

The first objection you’re going to raise is that we’d start seeing a new breed of Road Warrior out there hacking cars and telling you the speed limit is 55 in a 25 zone. (William Gibson’s novel Virtual Light begins with a scene of this kind of automotive hacking.) So security would obviously be paramount. I’m willing to bet that we could come up with a relatively hack-proof method of securing car GPS units and speed limit transmissions.

Then, of course, the question arises of what happens when you’re driving through a tunnel or a hurricane and the GPS information isn’t available. Well, there’s a simple solution for that: store a cached copy of the speed limit database locally in the car. (If that’s not a practical solution because of storage limitations, then certainly the car should be able to hold speed limit information within, say, a 200-mile radius.)

And what if the system breaks down altogether? Big deal. It’s not controlling anything. You could still drive as usual.

I think most of the objections you’re going to find to a concept like this don’t have anything to do with the safety aspects; people will simply object to the perceived lack of freedom. It’s only one step from there to having the police automatically issue you a ticket when you’ve broken the speed limit.

Which is why it’s essential that this kind of device be strictly voluntary. Nobody would be forced to obey the law. You’d simply be advised of it. The ultimate choice of whether to obey is up to you. If the Automated Speed Limiter was irritating you, you could always dial it back to a less restrictive setting that just alerts you to, say, speed limit infractions in low-speed areas more likely to be residential neighborhoods. Or you could just flip the sucker off entirely.

I’m betting that people would ultimately flock to a system like this, simply because the speed limit is such a pain in the ass. I’m willing to bet that most people would voluntarily sacrifice that extra five to ten miles an hour just for the added comfort of knowing that they’d never get a speeding ticket. Not to mention that good-citizen feeling of knowing that you’re contributing to saving lives.

Law enforcement would heartily endorse such a system (if it were proven effective) because it would drastically reduce the number of speeders. It might eventually allow cops to focus their efforts on more important matters.

Perhaps the best thing that could result from such a scenario is that local governments would raise speed limits to realistic levels, so we would never have to sit on a wide-open highway at 55 mph again.

(A quick Google before I published this article reveals that a UK government agency called Transport for London is already planning such a system. See this coverage on News.com. See what a prophet I am? Unfortunately, it appears that their system is an all-or-nothing affair: Exceed the speed limit, and the car automatically slows down. A recipe for complaints about Big Brotherism, as per above.)

In a perfect world, how would you deliver content to people? (And don’t tell me neural implants — let’s stick with existing computer hardware.) You would divide your article/opinion/rant/manifesto into a layer for data and a layer for presentation. The data would consist of the actual words, images and multimedia that you’re trying to communicate. The presentation would consist of specific instructions for how to display the data in various different mediums.

Why separate data from presentation? Because we’re constantly thinking of new ways to repurpose existing content, and it’s impossible to foresee every way that someone might want to use your content. People are reading content on cell phones, syndicating content on other peoples’ websites, feeding content into their iPods and through screen readers. And that’s just today. Who’s to say that in five years, movie theaters won’t be broadcasting web content alongside the previews? You don’t want to spend three months updating all of your old content for a new medium every four years.

But even discounting these more esoteric methods of content delivery, you can’t even count on a standardized web browsing experience on a PC. People are browsing with Windows, OS X, Linux, Unix, PalmOS and BeOS. They’re using Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, Netscape and Safari. They’re using large resolutions and small resolutions, TrueType fonts and Postscript fonts and OpenType fonts of all sizes and shapes, 16 million color monitors and monochrome Blackberrys. They’re using services like Babel Fish to translate your website into French, Spanish, Croatian and Farsi.

You want your words to be immortal. If your great-grandkids aren’t reading your words a hundred years from now, it shouldn’t be because their robot butlers can’t figure out how to read your primitive web pages.

Let’s also not forget that the most important “readers” of your content aren’t people at all. They’re Google and Technorati and del.icio.us and other websites and technologies. And while it might be easy for a human to look at web page code and be able to tell what the meat of the page is, it’s not quite so easy for a machine. In an ideal world, you want Google to be able to open your file right up and instantly “know” where to find the meat of the page without having to guess whether your website’s copyright notice is pertinent data or not.

So you need to separate data from presentation. The problem is, HTML doesn’t do that.

Most Net-savvy folks already know that HTML is something of a kludge. Tim Berners-Lee cribbed most of it from the existing SGML. It jumbles data and presentation tags all together in one big random heap. Real programmers look at HTML and shudder. The rules are dreadfully inconsistent and none of the web browsers out there interpret them the same way. Add to this the fact that Microsoft and Netscape started adding their own proprietary tags to the mix during the browser wars of the ’90s, and you have a real headache. (Don’t even get me started on JavaScript and ActiveX.)

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) promised to relieve some of the HTML headache. CSS allows you to assign style rules to almost any element in your HTML — turn all my hyperlinks purple and give them a ridged, dotted, blue border on three sides — thus taking a good bit of the presentation out of the HTML.

CSS2 went one step further by letting you position elements on a page with your style sheets. This was supposed to eliminate the standard way of positioning things on web pages, which basically involves creating lots and lots of nested tables full of transparent GIFs to nudge things into the right place.

The problem? CSS is kind of a mess too. Certain things that were very difficult with the table model are easy in CSS, but the reverse is also true. Run a Google search on “CSS vertical-align” or “CSS footer”, for instance, and you’ll find hundreds of articles from diligent programmers trying to figure out how to create a simple right-hand column. I now program my websites exclusively using the CSS model, but I still need to use clunky workarounds. In order to put a simple footer on every page of your website, for instance, you need to use an updated version of the transparent GIF trick to “prop” the rest of the page up. CSS has no real way to do it natively. Really.

So we’re getting there, albeit very slowly. Now instead of HTML, web programmers are using what’s called XHTML, which is essentially HTML made nice and tidy, HTML as it should have been. We’re using XHTML to present our data and CSS to deliver our presentation.

One can only hope that someday we’ll reach the holy grail. Pure XML files with nothing but data. Pure style sheets in CSS or XSLT or whatever else comes along. Portability. Compartmentalization. Sense.

I predict we’ll get there about ten minutes before the neural implants hit the street.