Great comments.

“It would be gangbusters to run Newsmap run as a screensaver and then be able to activate it by simply moving my mouse to a certain corner of the screen. Hello Macromedia… are you there? Central? Why aren’t you doing this already?”

So are you saying that we should support some type of screensaver support? I am honestly curious as to what features you would like to see in Central that support this vision of the future that you are talking about here.

By that point I already had taken my wallet out of my pocket and had my credit card in my hand!

Enticing…

There could also be a wi-fi motion sensor to realize when you stood up and walked away so then it would place your phone and IM on away mode.

Thanks for stopping by. I would say that yes, I would love to see screensaver support in Central. But I would also go even further than that in saying that Central’s main implementation should actually be as a screensaver.

I don’t use screensavers right now… it’s all well and good to have pictures of Anna Kournikova fading across my screen when I come back to my computer, but it really offers me no utility other than reminding me that I’m not dating Anna Kournikova.

Here is the scenario I would like to see (and one we’d definitely develop for, were it to materialize):

You install Central as a replacement for whatever screensaver you may be using, if any. The default settings would be pretty basic. Activate after 30 minutes of inactivity, and just show me some common stuff like local weather and possibly headlines. As a user, at this point, I’m already feeling like I’m getting more utility out of it than any other screensaver I’ve used. In other words, I already like Central.

Unlike other screensavers though, Central should not go away when you move your mouse. There should be a clearly labeled “Return to Desktop” button which makes it go away. What this does is let the user interact with it and add features very easily.

Pretty soon, a user may have movie times, RSS feeds, sports scores and all sorts of things displayed with the crispness of Flash and the timeliness of dynamic data feeds. So once I have my Central screen all customized to my liking, then I may want to invoke it without waiting for 30 minutes of inactivity.

This is where you begin to draw the user into making Central part of their daily routine. By offering “hot-corner” functionality where I can just slide my mouse to a corner of the screen and invoke Central, you’d instantly make Central easier to use than a browser. Why force users into this weird paradigm where you have to launch Central from the Dock or the Taskbar only to create another floating environment to deal with? I don’t want to have to worry about another application at this point… just make it my screensaver and I’ll be gently coerced into using it.

A good example for you guys at Macromedia to look at is how Apple does Fast User Switching. With one keystroke, I can completely escape whatever desktop environment I’m in, and move over to another desktop. I’d like to think of Central as another desktop (as I’m sure Macromedia would as well), so just make it easy for me to do so.

We have sent suggestions to Macromedia in the past along these lines and the response has been positive, but someone actually once suggested that we use one of the screensaver wrapper programs like ScreenTime to accomplish this. That is really missing the point. I know you guys would love to own the desktop environment, and I just think the “screensaver agent” is your silver bullet.

One thing that always comes to mind for me is the incredible west of bandwidth and network resources that comes from polling (or pulling even) content from the web – be it RSS feeds or other news sources. Ultimately, one day every news source needs to move to a push model where aggregation services are notified via a ping (which is done in many places already), and these aggregators in turn notify you – or in this case, your agent – of updated news. Then the agent can treat and filter incoming news stories just as it treats and filters incoming instant messages.

The guys over at PubSub are realizing this, and are preparing to do this push delivery via XMPP. Of course, that’s still only one half of the equation.

And then, there is the next step, which I am probably never going to get around to writing (I got another startup to work on): have memigo on your desktop: have the memigo agent rate your news/content sources and re-dice and slice that content for you.

Information overload is a real problem. But instead of whiz-bang software tools we got simple, elegant solutions — news readers, weblogs, good spam filters, email search tools à la Gmail — that tackle individual problems instead of doing it all at once.

People like to anticipate revolutions in the way we use technology, but it’s easy to forget that revolution is happening all around us.

Agents ask people to do what machines are good at (waiting) and machines
to do what people are good at (thinking).

From an article by Clay Shirky, discuss…

I don’t see the up-to-now “failure” of smart agents that Clay sees. I see technology just now getting to the point where it can support such a concept. Don’t forget that Clay’s article was written in June of 1999… before the advent of a lot of the agents we are already starting to see. His opinion back then was probably based on false starts by Microsoft, PointCast, and many other companies who tried to rush things out before smart technology was mature. As I mentioned in the original post, Apple’s junk mail filter and all other filters which act as it does, are already smart agents. I train it to accept or reject mail in the future on my behalf by helping it understand what I consider junk. It comes out of the box “pre-educated” to a certain degree, but it only gets better as it begins to know me. This sort of functionality wasn’t around in 1999 because spam was not even 1/100th of the problem it is now.

Another example of an agent already living on my machine is LaunchBar. If anyone out there is using OS X and hasn’t tried LaunchBar yet, please stop reading this comment and install it. LaunchBar provides keystroke access to every single application, document, MP3, video file, URL, or e-mail address which is stored on my computer. Instead of me traversing through my directories to find a paper I wrote on advertising, I just type in “command-space ADV” and the paper comes up. The word-matching algorithms are impressive, but what makes this program truly smart is that it learns from my behavior. If I have Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator on my machine, I may type in “ADO”, to which LaunchBar will ask which Adobe program I want to launch. After I make my choice, LaunchBar learns and defaults me to that program upon future “ADO” keystrokes. In other words, it intercepts my keystrokes and acts on my behalf, knowing what I’m probably trying to accomplish.

I think Clay is right in that there are certain scenarios where I really don’t want an agent doing my thinking for me. These are typically the types of things I already don’t use the web for: dating women, picking out clothes, etc. There are certain things in life which are so subjective that it is really difficult to take the human element out of them. That said, I’m sure some people wouldn’t mind having their agent set up blind dates for them.

Clay’s other scenario of buying plane tickets actually makes perfect sense to me. Here is the permanent set of rules I’d give my agent for buying tickets:

1. Never book a connecting flight unless absolutely necessary.
2. Never book a departure time before 10am unless necessary.
3. Try and get me an exit row.
4. Use frequent flyer airlines if possible but don’t sacrifice any of the above in the process.

These are all things I currently do manually on the web, and I don’t enjoy doing them. They are also all things which can be expressed programatically and dealt with appropriately by an agent.

So I guess what it comes down to is that I agree with Clay in that I don’t necessarily want an agent to do all of my “thinking” for me… but much of my day is spent not really “thinking” at all but rather performing tasks a computer could easily do.

The more of my time that is freed up for either critical thought or recreational activities, the happier and more productive I will be.

First, your definitions of smart agents differ:

ClayWeb crawling agents as opposed to stored preferences in a databaseMikeSits on your desktop and acts as a mediator between you and the world

With this in mind, it can be seen how both your examples of smart agentry sidestep Clay’s constraints:

1. Agents’ performance degrades with network growth
2. Agents ask people to do what machines are good at (waiting) and machines to do what people are good at (thinking).
3. Agents make the market for information less efficient rather than more

Spam filters mediate between the user and an essentially local resource (their mail) so Clay doesn’t really apply at all.

Newsmap would appear to work by piggy backing off a BFW as described by Clay.

Could buying plane tickets be made to work? Rule 1 probably isn’t too much of an issue, as I think the number of physical flights are not growing that fast. Rules 2 and 3, however, would suggest that the only viable solution is another BFW acting as an aggregator. Who ever runs this service would have to deal with the problems that Clay describes, but at least they can do this from a business context, building up relationships and service levels with the providers. I guess this is already happening to a large extent, there is just no super-aggregator that covers all airlines.

p.s. happier, more productive, a Radiohead fan perchance?

Findory is a personalized newspaper and weblog reader. It learns from your interests, searches thousands of sources, and builds a front page just for you.

In a sea of information, Findory provides focus. It helps you find the news you would otherwise miss.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on it, Mike.

http://news-bot.net/