The death of languages

I was reading this BBC article about the Death of Language. The heading reads: “An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?”

The most interesting part for me was:
"What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people," says Mr Hagege.
"It's also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express."

I could not help wondering if it is the same thing with programming languages. They are definitely a product of their time and a specific culture/idea for which they were developed. They have been evolving over time like any other language. I wonder what we would loose if for instance COBOL was to disappear or maybe something like Prolog.

To some extend, a programming language is there to help solving a specific problem. If there is another programming language which helps you do the same thing better and faster, surely you do not loose much. In a sense, a human language is not that different, it tries to address the communication problem.

Which ever way I turn the ideas around, I think it is both a shame and no big deal if we loose such thing. It is something more tangible than a nostalgia for a world/historical passage of our world. Languages try to address the way we see the world at a point in time. When we loose that language, we loose maybe a dimension of the world we look at. Every language is a compromise to express something. It reflects the choices we make and our priorities. When we have a new language, we may or may not carry this dimension with us and maybe we now are looking at the world only in a certain way and completely missing this other dimension which could have made a big difference in our perception of it.

Of course it is highly impractical to keep all of them and to some extend if everyone was speaking the same language it would be a lot easier. Being a foreigner and all, I cannot help thinking wouldn’t it be a lot easier if everyone would speak English? Or technically I don’t really care which one it is. But then I am fearful of a world limited to only English words. Maybe there is something equivalent to poetry for programming languages, that is an interesting idea. I wonder what that would look like. We know programming can produce visual and audio art. I wonder what poetry could look like. Maybe a requirement for any application should also include artistic element to it.

Yahoo not in search anymore?

I was reading this article.

The most sticking comment were from a Yahoo search expert who came from Microsoft:

“Maarek came to Yahoo from Google, where she was instrumental in the development of front-end presentation enhancements such as Google Suggest. In her view, the last decade brought a revolution in the way Web pages are crawled, indexed, and presented to the user: a revolution that saw Google come out a clear winner.”

If Bing is now replacing the Yahoo search engine, Microsoft now owns the data displayed by Yahoo. O’Reilly has been saying for a while I believe that it is all about the data. Does not really matter how much Yahoo claims it is about presentation, I can’t believe this can be correct. Presentation is just so easily copied, that can’t possibly be the only hedge.

With my limited wisdom I believe that what they are really after is another kind of data, the user habits data. If they can collect and harness that data, they can provide the kind of results I have been blogging about targeted to you. If they can achieve that I suppose that might give them the edge.

I can’t help being suspicious, if they do not own the data, they now become dependent on it. Microsoft is not known for his competitors’ friendly tactics. They might require Yahoo to give them a way to gather the same type of data. Or, knowing that Bing powers the search, why would any new user go through Yahoo instead of Bing directly? That can only mean one thing, a slowly decreasing number of users. They are going to have to find the kind of applications that will make users want to stay, some kind of integrated portal to access most of services people would want to access on-line.

If that is the case, Yahoo is becoming the provide of Software as a Service. There is a fierce competition out there with so many areas to be addressed. Who would be able to know which ones to start with and which ones they will focus on first. If I am right, which would be a small miracle, we should see more applications coming at of Yahoo starting with a better email/IM (oh wait, I think they have already done that).

The positive geek

Not everything in the techie world is doom and gloom. Of course there is lots of it:

• With information being so available, attention is fragmented and being are getting less productive.
• There is no privacy left and companies will be able to buy all the information you have been accumulating on-line for the last 5 years
• Google is becoming the new Microsoft, enough said.
• The internet is not really helping in education and students are copying their work on-line. Are we actually becoming less educated?
• There is so much information out there that you just cannot find anything
• Newspapers are dying and we will forever talk about the non-relevant last big mistake from the most famous because that is all we gossip about on-line and that all the information we have time/money for anyway
• The power of social networks may actually bring about the tyranny of crowds to the entire world.

But there are still a few of us who think there is a lot of good being achieved using technology and the best might still be coming. After all, it could be argued the Internet is still in its infancy.

• There is now greater transparency of information. Even though sometimes it might look bad, it is a good thing. Democracy can only move forward with open access to all the information about how the system is run.
• We have creative ways of using the information using mash-ups. Maps of crime, Google earth/sky/stars.
• There is still so much that can be done and yes, there have been really good use of Twitter in natural disaster cases. Sometimes that was the only mode of communication. Same with Facebook during the Iranian elections.
• Information is accessible from so many different places and smartphones are supposed to be replacing PCs sometime in the near future.
• In poor countries, people use cell phones to transfer money, sell and buy new products.
• I am not the only one saying it. This might be the most convincing argument of course.
• My biggest hope is that there is still so much we have not seen and that is yet to come.

Facebook being active

There is a lot of activity around Facebook those days.

• They are trying to position themselves of value for businesses. Probably positioning themselves for making more money.
• They are still bringing new features using the FriendFeed acquisition and bringing voice to your contacts.

I am a bit curious about the voice thing. EBay tried it with Skype but it seems people were happy staying anonymous (kind of). Of course if you are chatting to your friends, it might be a different story.

I suppose it seems to be more and more about all the social sites merging into one set of functionality and when the dust settles, who know will be left standing. I am siding with Facebook still being there but I am not an expert. I tried to explain why in this blog entry but who knows.

At the moment it seems to be all about bringing real time information. or at least as quickly as possible. I am not sure I agree entirely with the trend for individuals, but of course I already talked about the marketing benefits for this. As an individual, the site is great for me to catch up on the things I have been missing while being busy somewhere else. It is not really about trying to talk to them right here and there. I have IM for that.

I am not sure I am part of the average person using the site. A few of my colleagues have an iPhone and you have to fight for their un-interrupted attention. I hate the feeling that the day might have passed by and I was not paying attention to it. The more I know, the more I try to get my attention back and try to look at the present moment. Seems to be more and more difficult. Anyway, one way to achieve that is by having asynchronous communications with my social members. And yes, I still have lots of improvements to make to make sure I have quality communications with them…

First time I read it it just sounded silly

I thought social media was a way to escape your real life and connect on a different level to all your friends. Or also the gloomy version of pretending to be something you are not and being someone else.

Well, you are not as safe there as you ever thought. Well you were never that safe before, but at least you could pretend. A court order was going to be served over Twitter. Is nothing safe?

I suppose it was the kind of guy pretending to be some one else. But how do you know he actually got it? How do you know the username is not shared across multiple people? How do you know when he got the message?

The article said you can server court orders over email and the like. I suppose the technology is not that different. Just the idea of an electronic transaction being used as an official way to contact you feels a little wrong. Either they don’t know you and so, what kind of weight does an injunction have? Either they know you, I am sure they have plenty of ways of finding out, why would they use anything like Twitter to send an injunction?

Anyway, it did not not seem silly anymore, just a little disturbing…

More marketing use of Twitter

Here is another way for us to parse the data in twitter. The more data we enter, the more it will be analyzed, processed, etc.

In a sense it is great. I can’t help wondering about what other data we would need for us to decide whether the data is actually relevant.

There was a study saying at least 40% of information in Twitter is not really useful like I am having a coffee, at the bar, etc. The next question is whether the remaining population is actually a representative sample. Or I suppose what type of population would it be representative of. If possible, it would be nice to dice the data using that information.

I can’t help but be reminded of the time where we had wars and lots of major things happening in the world and all the news were talking about was Britney Spears. It was cheaper and potentially more popular to provide celebrity news rather than world wide news.

I am a little curious though to see how much the top tweets would be influenced by the media. Let’s pick something that is potentially old news, or off the radar. Start using the regular media to talk about that and see how quickly or if this bottles up in Twitter (or any other social media).

Facebook vs Twitter

It is always fascinating to see the difference between the two. I have a preference for Facebook myself, at least you have the option to enter as much content as you see fit, or as little.

Facebook is a programming platform, although I do have some concerns about privacy and about how much each application has access to but let’s put that aside for a moment.

Facebook is making some steps to become more than it already is. This article details as Facebook is buying FriendFeed and will now (hopefully) be able to improve its real time search capability. This is one of Twitter’s strength, being able to view trends based on current activity.

The article seems to indicate that Facebook might be competing with Google but I am not sure that is the point. I suspect the gap is being reduced between the 2. You can upload pictures, videos for both of them.

The open architecture/api provided by Facebook does make me bet on them. You can also provide an open account (company and others) where it is not necessary for you to be confirmed to become a friend. I believe Facebook has a toned down interface which apparently looks more like Twitter for those who think the regular one is a bit daunting (I am one of them I suppose).

In the end, I believe those services will converge into a social platform (as opposed to a social product) where you can pick and choose the functionality you like. There will probably be specific platform for specific environments, business (Linked In), private (Facebook) and others I cannot really think of.

Twitter, the good

I have been posting so much about what I did not understand about Twitter, I suppose it was time to post about the good. As much as I find hard to get most of it, I think there are really good things coming out of it. It is just I think we could improve the current blogging/social solutions so that similar good things could emerge from those solutions. In the end, if people favor twitter more than the other solutions, it will not matter so much. In the end I believe all those solutions will meet in the middle, as it should be, driven by the user’s needs.

I suppose the biggest difference for most people between something like Facebook is the way you can follow someone without their approval. People who are already famous (and companies I suppose) can’t really validate all their followers on by one. Witness Ashton Kutcher’s challenge to CNN for a million followers.
The other cool feature is the open API which has been embraced by so many applications and devices. It makes it so easy to update Twitter any place, any time.

Even though I am still not sure why people would Twitter, not enough space for information and all, this any place, any time has some really cool applications in case of disaster (either political or ecological). I have not played with it but I believe you can directly upload pictures and movies now. That definitely will help with the lack of information that can be attached to it.

The best part is that while twitter represents the pulse of its members, you can get so much out of the chatter. Here is SalesForce.com trying to use the information from multiple social web sites including twitter.

I cannot help wondering if the social sites or blogs allow public/private profiles, with maybe a more granular level of privacy, and a cool public API, I am not sure if twitter will have much to stand one. On the other hand Twitter is looking more and more like a blog or the other web sites. Somehow I suppose they will all meet in the middle.

After I wrote this, a lot of things happened. Facebook acquired FriendFeed. Facebook has a Lite feature which apparently looks like Twitter. I suspect in the end, the one which will stay will be the one who manages to make money without offending its users. MySpace does not seem to be much in the news those days. Could it be that it was based on giving a music/performer’s platform. The music industry has been a bit in shambles with iTunes and the music industry not really knowing what to do. I have not heard of a platform dominating the market which is centered around music distribution aside of MySpace. Then again I am not really looking that much into it.

Web application or Client application

Just wanted to put what I thought down on paper (so to speak). I figure it would help trying to sort it out. The typical answer 5 years ago would have been a web application allows for quick deployment, avoids the dll hell but would have limited interface capability. Not sure any of this still applies.

On the client side, you can use java web start or the .NET equivalent. They can be downloaded and kept updated every time you launch it.

I suppose Applets, Silverlight and Adobe Flash take it to another level but you sill need to have a runtime engine installed. At least it would not change as often, the code gets updated on the fly and cached I believe if you do not need to change it. The size of the runtime is important, but I suppose not essential for me to figure out some more.

The web applications those days are fantastic, to the point where desktop applications try to look more like them. The boundaries are constantly being pushed. I am still amazed we can have a work processor and a spreadsheet with just html code (and JavaScript of course). Not always up to par but getting closer and closer. Not sure where Flash and Silverlight fit in, they can of course interact with the web pages. But they are not necessarilly part of the page. I am on the fence here as to where they belong. If they serve the page as opposed to be the page, I would be tempted to make part of the web technology.

However I have come across a few screens that I don’t believe would be possible in a web page. I am not one of those who think web applications are not user friendly, although I have found quite a few of those. The choice, as always, is it depends. What the requirements are should be the main driver. For complex screens, use Flash, and applet or Silverlight (no preference really). I think it should be the preferred solution and should only be rejected if notthing else can be done about it.

One of the greatest benefit I can see all applications benefited from the merge of those options is a greater freedom for designing the interface. We are not longer bound by what Microsoft thinks it should look like (the visual basic look I like to call it) or the not so good java look and feel. Every product should have a graphic designer, no matter how small the product.

A Culture of Communication

I had to present to my list of peers a list of initiatives  we had been taking in our group to facilitate communication and sharing of information. I felt some of the things we were doing would have been easily applicable to us. For a while I have been frustrated of the lack of communication within our group. We have so much in common:
- same job title
- same process to follow
- very similar challenges
- same base technology
In short we are all development managers within the same company, the only true difference was that we were working on different products.
We had no real communication or shared experiences. It was hard to feel we were working for the same company or worse, individual developers could not imagine being assigned to a different team.

So, I did the presentation, asked for feedback and nothing. I was a bit disappointed but then I thought about it. All the things we were doing within our group had been implemented over time and that it required quite a lot of work on my part to get people on board. It was not something we worked hard at until people saw the benefits and then we moved on to the next one. It was first thought as extra work that needed to be done in addition to anything else. It was a way to loose what made them special, the information they were holding onto.

Then I realized I was facing 2 things:
- resistance to change
- failure to understand that you grow by sharing information a lot more than by hanging on to it.
I remember trying to explain my manager 10 years ago we should have an intranet and him asking ‘why should we bother?’. Not everyone sees the benefit of creating a repository of the company’s IP.

What I probably need is getting support for their management so I can get them started on communicating and then hope that by doing they will understand the benefit of sharing. As we do it more and it then becomes a habit, the less of a chore it is and the more we benefit from it. I think it is one of those skills that you can develop by making it a habit. The more we communicate, the better we are at it and the easier it is. It dawns on me that we might not all be born communicators but it is something we can learn by doing. That is something worth thinking about.