Archives for November 2016

The Web is destined for content; Humans are destined for tribalism?

November 23, 2016 Leave a Comment

I was recently talking to a developer who had just read this piece and joked that the destiny of the Web is that it catches up and becomes the right platform for the next job.

I don’t see it that way at all. If anything, I think that natural forces tend to want to put Web technologies into the box of “content format”.

It is easy to understand why that would be the case. The Web was born as a series of documents with small but mighty hyper powers. The same evolutionary forces that have resulted in the platypus as well as the mighty lion allowed the Web to change to be an app platform of sorts, starting with simple interactivity and then growing more and more dynamism and external powers.

As soon as the Web grew those powers and we got to see high scale implementations we had the mobile boon. Thankfully evolution keeps trucking (when you have fantastic engineers with vision and patience) and thus we got to see the mobile web come into being. Fast forward a year and we are seeing the flip of desktop and mobile but we must not misread the situation and forget the importance of desktop.

The evolution continues. There is still a strong role for the Web to play and many players are needed to help. The beauty of evolution on the Web is that there is such diversity to the players, each of whom can add much randomness, a crucial part of trial and error. We have browser vendors pushing the bar, with Microsoft fully back in the game (including the immense amount of effort it takes in creating the new engine and tech backing Edge), and Apple being seen more in public and in deeds.

Framework authors and builders of all sorts of tools are able to participate too. We can all look at how CoffeeScript helped push features in ECMAScript. We can see how Rails had a large effect on Ember and other opinionated frameworks. React has many re-thinking how their structure their systems. And Polymer acts as the Tesla, pushing away at the platform from close by. These are but a few. They also but right up against the practitioners who are trying to get things done and built. These roles overlap, and often some people wear multiple hats, and the system keeps on moving.

But it is hard work. The Web could easily fall back to being mainly a content format if we don’t keep up with the increasing pace of innovation and changes in our lives.

So, since it is thanksgiving I want to say a large thank you to all of you who push to make the larger thing better, even though it can be messy and there are rough edges. It would be a lot easier if we could chop of more of the features on the Web, but that would leave a lot of people behind.

I have been thinking about how we need to have mechanisms to allow for more trial and error on the Web, but I don’t want to do so by leaving people behind, and that post is for another day.

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These days I can’t help by see some parallels in my work ecosystems and the larger ecosystems of the world.

For example, you can study the impulse for humanity to be tribal people. The pieces of wet ware and the system we are in to sometimes fight for a pie, or to feel like we are part of something. I strongly feel like our prime mission is one for all of us. We need to fight for the human race.

Sorry, I just need to push you away

November 21, 2016 Leave a Comment

This is a tale of two pushes. The difference between opt-in and opt-out.

In the blue corner we have push notifications with iOS. Over time I have been trained to say “nope” when an app asks permission to send me notifications unless everything lines up:

I trust them and their brand
I don’t think they will get annoying
There is a clear reason for them to reach out to me vs. spam.

The problem is that there are often many unknowns. I don’t always know before hand if there will be value, nor will I necessarily know if there will be push notification settings that will allow me to tweak the push experience (the better apps tell the story before asking for the permission of course).

The nail in the coffin is that when the messages start coming in, it is a pain to turn them off. I long to be able to act on the message itself. When an annoying message comes in, let me get right into the settings and give me the ability to toggle off the permission itself please!

This leads us to the red corner and Android. Here push notifications can already be opted in, which sounds presumptuous, but it is baked up with the fact that you can long hold the annoying notification to quickly revoke. As an app developer you get the chance to shine and show the value of notifications. If your first one is gratuitous you may be turned away. You should be aware of this and slowly turn up the gas. Since it is so easy to be revoked, the incentives should be there for the developer to keep doing a good job (although in practice you obviously often see abuse).

Not all notifications are equal. I really like apps that allow me to tweak and personalize the notifications that I get, and I hope that we start to see this occur more and more to a point that we start to expect some conventions around it.

Paul Lewis experimented with this via the web push support for Chrome Dev Summit a couple weeks back. The Web doesn’t have conventions here yet, but I hope they start to appear, both in UI within web apps, and within the push notification UI itself.

Push has been critical for re-engagement. It is a way for services to reach your pocket. This connection needs to be respected, and if trust can be garnered the effects are huge. I look forward to seeing how we evolve push and the types of UI we can deliver within push itself.

From the arena to the Summit

November 13, 2016 Leave a Comment

Phew. Chrome Dev Summit 2016 is over, and some of the team decompressed with the ancient art of medi^H^H^H^Hgo karting. You will be happy to know that the emcees of the event, Jake and Paul, ended strong by being winners on the track as well as the stage.

It was one hell of a week. With the turmoil of the US elections as a backdrop I didn’t know how things would go. Would people show up and be willing to talk about technology and the Web with other huge issues on their minds?

With the event being free, you never quite know about the turn out since many sign up and are then not able to make it. When the first day came around I was shocked to see a record turn-out. As I talked to developers many of them told me that they needed to talk to like minded people, or needed distraction, or wanted to focus on something within their control. It was emotional talking to people as they were processing what the future holds. I can’t tell you how often I heard people repeat: “Ok, I need a break and need to talk about something else”, only to end up with a bridge back to what was looming on their minds.

Jake and Paul knew that the show must go on, and they brought great banter to the entire event, which was very much needed. The Big Web Quiz that threaded throughout the event was not only engaging for the crowd, but was also a great example of what a great mobile experience is all about. The fluidity of the desktop and mobile experiences are exactly what you need. The big screen required an expansive layout. The players were mostly on mobile, but plenty were also on desktop. The motion and use of sound made it all come together, and all at the end of a URL. Batteries included.

Darin setup the whole show by showing us how far we have come in the last year and Thao jumped in to tell us about the new PWAs that have launched all over the world, and the impact they are having.

As you read about the new web apps from Lyft, The Weather Channel, Housing.com, Alibaba, Carnival Cruise Lines, Nasa, and more you see patterns:

commerce companies seeing massive conversion gains (e.g. 76% from Alibaba!)
engagement metrics going up (e.g. 42% bump from push for Carnival)
massive drop in size (e.g. Lyft’s PWA is under 1MB compared to their 17MB Android app and 70MB iOS app)
user acquisition costs changing the economics (e.g. Housing.com going from $3.75 to $0.07 per user)

We quickly saw that the Web is getting more capable, predictable and more tooling is becoming available.

Alex Russell has been leading the charge by telling the story of performance on mobile devices and just how poor it is and he stepped up again here.

We collectively need to be doing more, but we are also starting to see more examples of how this is working. We saw talks that gave data, insights, and actionable advice from Sam, Addy, and Seth.

Most of us are two people: the person we are online, and the person we are in flesh and bone. Be a real person. Talk with real people.

— R 'Nearest' Nabors 💙 (@rachelnabors) November 12, 2016

There was some chatter on Twitter about Alex’s talk, and that brings me to the subject of the title of this post. I needed a social media detox from politics so I disengaged. One side effect was I was then present and able to fully engage with the other humans sharing the same physical space with me at the event.

One of the people I got to meet was Rachel, and what she says above really resonates. When we engage in the arena that is Twitter and other online spaces, we can often be different. The medium doesn’t let us express ourselves perfectly and we can’t use communication, eye contact and body language. You may read something from me at a later time with different context. It is far from ideal. There is also other psychological aspects that we may not be fully self conscious of. When you are in the arena others are watching and you know they are. What you say sticks around. Your persona thus ends up being quite different. You can imagine this in politics too. In a quite room a democrat and a republican can sit, discuss, and hopefully compromise. In the public eye though there are ramifications (THEY WANT TO GET REELECTED) so they act a certain way. It sucks.

I loved looking around at a break to see browser vendors, framework authors, and web developers all chatting and learning from each other. We need more summits. We need more opportunities to come together outside of the arena. We need a base of facts that we can agree on and then we can discuss how to interpret them and decide what paths to go down next.

I loved talking to everyone that I got to catch up with at the event. Thanks for taking the time. I know that many were sacrificing by being away from their families, including many of my team mates and I thank you.

OH: "I thought I was building mobile first but this event showed me that I was only doing mobile UI first and that's not enough." #Yay

— Dion Almaer (@dalmaer) November 12, 2016

When I heard that from a developer I smiled. We are getting there together, and with all that has gone on last week we certainly know that the importance of an open, decentralized, and distributed ecosystem has only increased.

I look forward to seeing you at other events, and definitely look forward to seeing you at the next Summit. Please let me know if we can help in any way!