stevenberlinjohnson.com

Multitouch Everywhere!

Jay Haynes pointed me to a wild piece on Ars about the future of Pro Tools, citing the latest batch of Apple rumors. The piece is mostly focused on Apple's plans for its music creation software, but boy does it bury the lede:

Basically the rumor is this: There will be no Logic 8. The successor to Logic 7 will have a new name. The unnamed application will be 10.5 only and will work with a new line of touch sensitive Apple displays. Also, it will be an OMG PROTOOLS KILLER!@!!

I read this and I thought: touch sensitive Apple Displays?!? That explains everything! This might be crazy, or might already be conventional wisdom somewhere, but hear me out. Think about the common denominator behind:

• The missing killer features in the Leopard preview
• The lack of iLife updates in Jan 07
• The rollout of the iPhone multitouch interface
• The abnormally long delay in releasing new Apple displays
• A rumor about a ProTools killer that relies on touch displays

I look at all those developments, and say with absolute scientific precision: Apple is going to roll out the multitouch interface across almost its entire product line this spring, integrated into Leopard, new displays, iPhone, iLife, and the successor to Logic.

OMG, did I just become an Apple rumors site?

Our New Investors

For the first five or six months that we were working on outside.in, the assumption had always been that we would not seek out venture capital funding for the company -- at least in its first year of life. We were lucky enough to find ourselves in a hot space at a time when investing in Web startups had once again become fashionable, and we didn't have any capital-intensive needs in terms of staffing or other resources. (Most of outside.in was put together by three of us, and even now we only have eight full-time employees.) After we launched the beta version of the site in October, we had no shortage of interest from angel investors in the company. Why bother going through the due diligence and onerous terms of VCs when you can do it all with individual investors? And besides, we assumed the whole venture model was based on investing much larger sums than we were interested in.

So why are we -- very happily -- announcing a new round of financing today, with THREE venture funds participating? It begins with my friend Ed Goodman, who is one of the partners of a fund called Milestone Venture Partners. Ed had asked me to be on their advisory board last year, in part to help in introducing them to interesting Web. 2.0 startups and entrepreneurs. When I started work on outside.in, Ed asked me to come in to talk about it with his partners. They had some great feedback on the concept, and Ed encouraged me to meet with Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham over at Union Square Ventures.

I had admired Fred and Brad's work from afar for some time, and of course del.icio.us had been an inspiration for us from the beginning (our URL was a bit of an homage, actually.) But I'd never met either of them before. When we sat down for the first time, I was really just blown away by how well they understood the problems we were wrestling with -- from the macro level of where we saw the site's revenue model a year from now, to the micro issues of our tagging architecture. And -- amazingly -- they didn't talk like VCs. They never once mentioned leveraging the incremental end-to-end value chain, or whatever. (Perhaps they did this for my benefit, and resumed picking the low-hanging fruit once I left the room -- either way, it was a good show.) They said they could act much more like angels -- investing smaller amounts than usual, with less restrictive terms -- and as we began negotiating in earnest, they kept good to their word.

And then in the closing days of the deal, my old partner from the FEED/Plastic days, Bo Peabody -- one of the people I most admire in the Web investment world -- asked if his fund Village Ventures could participate as well, so I couldn't say no to that.

We've still got a great list of angels involved as well. Marc Andreessen just wrote in out of the blue to say that he really liked the site, and to ask if he could help out with the financing. Esther Dyson, John Borthwick, George Crowley, and Richard Smith -- it's a fantastic list of people to have behind you. (Along with our other founding investors, John Seely Brown, Mark Bailey, and Andy Karsch.)

The new site that's available today is already showing the positive impact of these minds on outside.in (Fred and Brad starting emailing us feature suggestions before we even had a term-sheet.) But I'm most excited about what we can do from here on out. Stay tuned.

David Brooks, Deconstructed

Some close reading of the breathtakingly superficial David Brooks column today on hipster parents:

Can we finally stop reading about the musical Antoinettes who would get the vapors if their tykes were caught listening to Disney tunes, and who instead force-feed Brian Eno, Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens into their little babies’ iPods?

Somehow I get the sneaking suspicion that Brooks has never listened to Sufjan Stevens. Christian orchestral pop about the fifty states -- why isn't that perfect kid music? I mean, the guy recorded an album of Christmas songs for crissakes.

I mean, don’t today’s much-discussed hipster parents notice that their claims to rebellious individuality are undercut by the fact that they are fascistically turning their children into miniature reproductions of their hipper-than-thou selves?...  It’s been nearly three years since reporters for sociologically attuned publications like The New York Observer began noticing oversophisticated infants in “Anarchy in the Pre-K” shirts. Since then, the trend has exhausted its life cycle.

You have to be seriously tone-deaf as a sociologist if you think that these parents believe they're fighting the man by putting their kids in "Anarchy in the Pre-K" t-shirts. Obviously, obviously they're making a joke.

A witty essay by Adam Sternbergh announced the phenomenon in an April 2006 New York magazine. Sternbergh described 40-year-old men and women with $200 bedhead haircuts and $600 messenger bags, who “look, talk, act and dress like people who are 22 years old,” and dress their infants as if they’re 16. He called these pseudo-adults “Grups,” observing that they smashed any remaining semblance of a generation gap.

A side note: I love how two weeks ago, the very same New York magazine announced that the "myspace generation" gap was the biggest one in fifty years. The gap went from nonexistent to Grand-Canyon-sized in less then a year. Hmmm....

Let me be clear: I’m not against the indie/alternative lifestyle. There is nothing more reassuringly traditionalist than the counterculture. For 30 years, the music, the fashions, the poses and the urban weeklies have all been the same. Everything in this society changes except nonconformity.

This is a case of not being able to see the forest for the t-shirts. Brooks seems to genuinely believe that all the counterculture has produced in the past thirty years is fashion trends. But of course that's nonsense. Think of the environmental movement itself -- which runs through a lot of those Urban Baby and Babble conversations about disposable diapers and organic baby food. Maybe David Brooks thinks that environmentalism is just a bunch of t-shirt slogans too? Are some of those folks into the green, Slow Food lifestyle because it's fashionable? Of course. People are into all sorts of things -- neo-conservatism and suburban PTA meetings -- because they're fashionable in their communities. The question is whether the underlying values and consequences of that lifestyle are better or worse than the alternatives.

Brooks' obsession with the surfaces of hipster parenting ends up blinding him to the real trend here, which is central to almost all the examples he cites: young parents choosing to raise their children in the city, not the suburbs. That is a decision with real consequences, not an empty gesture. It has material effects on children and parents -- and the cities they live in. It's a decision with political and environmental implications, and also one with some surprisingly old-time Americana values. (Brooklyn parents can be cloyingly sentimental about the small town friendliness of their neighborhoods.) It has almost nothing to do with non-conformism, and everything to do with the kind of community -- diverse, sidewalk-based, public, culturally-rich -- we want to raise our children in. It's striking that Brooks doesn't even find that trend worth mentioning in the piece -- much less taking it seriously.  Perhaps he might have picked up on it if he'd spent a little less time obsessing about what the kids are wearing these days.

Little Miss Sunshine

Got to this odd Slate article via kottke:

But since it's comedy we're talking about, the overriding critical question would seem to be: Is Little Miss Sunshine funny? I found it pretty funny, funnier by a long shot by than the vast majority of mainstream comedies, and, at the indie-plex screening I attended, a lot of people laughed. Little Miss Sunshine may not be a great film. The dad character is saved from being a malicious caricature only by Kinnear's marvelous performance, and the dance-party climax is pat and saccharine. But why should anyone be so annoyed by a genial comedy that clearly satisfies the genre-requirement that it be funny?

This whole argument is the polar opposite of my reaction to Little Miss Sunshine. I have a huge weakness for the genre -- Flirting With Disaster is one of my all-time favorite comedies, and I thought Garden State was genuinely funny and sweet as well. Yes, LSM was formulaic in its quirkiness (as all genre comedies are.) My problem with it was that it wasn't actually funny. There were a few little chuckles, but barely anything approaching a genuine laugh. There's a point about thirty minutes into it -- once the whole lineup of crazies has been established -- where you think: ah, now it's going to get hilarious. And then it just fizzles.

This reader email in response to Andrew Sullivan's debate with Sam Harris is the best -- and most moving -- thing I've read in the entire Dawkins/Harris atheism debate:

I would describe my own embrace of science and secular humanism as being motivated by a form of faith that is deeper than Christian faith. I believe that if Jesus lived today, he would be a secular humanist and would reject Christianity, just as he "rejected" Judaism and inspired Christianity. Christianity was once the vehicle for the boldest and most honest thinking about reality, the brotherhood of man, and the human condition. I think in light of the advances in science and our exposure to other religious traditions, it is time again to humanize further our understanding of "God" (or the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty) and come to a more universal understanding of religion.

Worth reading in its entirety.

Gmail Weirdness

I'm getting mail bounced back that I sent from my Gmail account, with this error message:

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 553-mail rejected because your IP is in DUL. See 553 http://www.mail-abuse.com/enduserinfo.html

Forgive my ignorance, but which IP is in trouble here -- my ISP's or Gmail's? And what can I do? Help?

Winter In The City

Today was one of those days that reminds you why winter can be so much fun in NYC. (It's been pretty brutal otherwise the past month or so.) We had our first real snowfall a few days ago, and this morning I took our three-year-old out for a sledding expedition in Prospect Park. The best sledding is on the west side of the Meadow, near the dog beach and ballfields, though today we were pretty much sledding all the way from our house and back. The snow had a consistency that I'd never seen before in Brooklyn: we'd had a warmish snowfall, followed by a few days of frigid weather, with a bit of a thaw today. The result was snow that you could walk (or slide) across without cracking the surface, but at the same time it wasn't slippery underfoot. So there was zero friction for riding (or pulling) the sled, but you didn't feel like you were walking on an ice rink. We ended up at one point lying on the snow, looking up at the sky and talking about the food chain and how the sun indirectly supplies energy for our bodies. It was pretty idyllic all around. Then back home for a lunch of soup and warm bread with the rest of the family. You can't beat that.

Lost Is The New White Album

You gotta love that they're now putting backwards messages into the audio tracks on Lost.

The Atomic Wall

Me, five years ago in Wired:

the advent of small nuclear weapons and dirty bombs — deliverable not by missiles and planes but by trucks and vans — suggests a new kind of urban perimeter defense, an atomic wall. Set up not as an actual barrier but as a vast array of sensors, such a technology would exploit the fact that any radiological or nuclear weapon leaves a footprint. For example, a ring of radiation detection devices deployed along the Beltway could scan every road, alley, and rail line that brings people within 14 miles of the White House. If nuclear material crossed the line, sensors would alert emergency response teams, which would intercept the vehicle before it entered the city.

The New York Times, this morning:

... later this year, the federal government plans to begin setting up an elaborate network of radiation alarms at some bridges, tunnels, roadways and waterways into New York, creating a 50-mile circle around the city.

Five Thoughts On The Nintendo Wii

1. Playing Wii Sports Tennis for the first time was the most revelatory, breakthrough gaming experience I've had since I first saw Myst in the mid 90s. It's truly one of those transformations where you immediately think: this whole medium is capable of something radically different from what we've expected of it to date.

2. Others may disagree, but from my perspective, Wii Tennis is so much better than all the other Wii Sports games that part of me wonders whether the controller interface is in fact uniquely suited for tennis games, and will prove to be a disappointment elsewhere. (I'm sure it will be wonderful for golf, actually -- I just have higher expectations for golf sims than the Wii Sports version.) Wii Bowling, to its credit, probably sets some kind of record for being the closest approximation of a real-world sport in the history of games. Other than the weight of the ball itself, there's basically no difference between bowling in real life and bowling on the Wii. Not being a huge fan of bowling personally, I consider this to be both good and bad news.

3. Wii Tennis is the first videogame since the second SimCity that my wife has taken even the slightest interest in playing. This alone leads me to believe that they have a massive, category-changing hit on their hands.

4. Part of the beauty of Wii Tennis is what they left out. It's absolutely crucial to the game that you don't control the players' movements, that they just chase the balls on their own. If you'd added player-controlled movement, the learning curve would have been much more steep. Same goes for letting a single player control both onscreen players in a doubles match without actively switching between them. By removing those variables, they made a game where it's fun to play the second you pick up the controller. (For what it's worth, I still think they should add an "accelerate" button for shots that your onscreen player won't reach on his or her own. If you press the button your onscreen avatar will run just a little faster in whatever direction he or she is running.)

5. Having written so much about the complexity of today's games, it's fascinating to see a platform so heavily promoting its comparative simplicity. But I think the success of the Wii is slightly more complicated than that. Wii Sports trades the onscreen complexity of goals and objectives and puzzles for the physical, haptic complexity of bodily movement. Since the days of Pong, games have been simplifying the intricacies of movement into unified codes of button pressing and joystick manipulation. What strikes you immediately playing Wii Sports -- and particularly Tennis -- is this feeling of fluidity, the feeling that subtle, organic shifts in your body's motion will lead to different results onscreen. My wife has a crosscourt slam she hits at the net that for the life of me I haven't been able to figure out; I have a topspin return of soft serves that I've half-perfected that's unhittable. We both got to those techniques through our own athletic experimentation with various gestures, and I'm not sure I could even fully explain what I'm doing with my killer topspin shot. In a traditional game, I'd know exactly what I was doing: hitting the B button, say, while holding down the right trigger. Instead, my expertise with the shot has evolved through the physical trial-and-error of swinging the controller, experimenting with different gestures and timings. And that's ultimately what's so amazing about the device. Games for years have borrowed the structures and rules -- as well as the imagery -- of athletic competition, but the Wii adds something genuinely new to the mix, something we'd ignored so long we stopped noticing that it was missing: athleticism itself.