Our choice of communication channels reflects our social webs

However much companies like MySpace, Friendster and Twitter think it's about them, it's not. It's about us, using their products to develop channels of communication.

The more these guys let us mix and match these channels, the more likely they'll still be around when the music stops.

Take a small recent event: Facebook's launch of an update for their application which runs on the BlackBerry.

Importantly, they dropped the button that lets you digitally poke people - my, did that idea get old quickly.

But they also did something clever. Now, users found that their Facebook messages also appeared in their email program.

This wasn't that unusual, since instant messages on services like Google Talk also appeared there.

But this Facebook thing was a bit of a first. And a bit of a historic moment, I suspect, in the evolution of all this web stuff.

First a bit of history. We all started out with email. That was how we communicated online.

We had work email. And home email.

Then instant messaging.

Then SMS or texting came along.

Then Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, orkut, twitter, Skype etc etc etc.

Now we have dozens of what we could call channels that we use to communicate with our friends, colleagues, relatives and enemies.

In the classes I teach, some students have about a dozen different windows open at the same time. And they have a couple of phones on the go too.

It looks messy, but actually it makes perfect sense to these people.

Email is obviously where most of us over the age of 25 do most of our communicating online.

Facebook is where a lot of people under the age do it.

Both are sorts of "clearing houses" for all our communicating.

People over the age of 25 use Facebook for communicating with intimate friends in a different way.

Or different people in an intimate way.

I've noticed Facebook users - at least in my sector - share information that is the sort of things they'd share in postcards, or at cocktail parties, or in once-a-year letters.

Facebook for them is less a clearing house than a posting house.

But then there's all the other channels.

Instant messaging is for stuff that can't wait - either because it's important or it's too inane to waste an email on.

Texting is usually for geographically specific stuff - just landed, home in an hour. Buy broccoli.

SMS cuts through all the clutter.

But the point is this: We have quickly adapted these channels to our needs, and those needs may vary, but for us they're specific, and they each have their own purpose.

There are some people I'd never SMS. And some people I'd message on Facebook that I'd never email. Some people I'd Skype but I'd never actually call.

Sounds bizarre, maybe, but it's just a reflection of the complex social webs we weave.

Which brings me back to Facebook on a Blackberry.

It might seem daft to have so many different channels, if actually they all are controlled from our email.

But the origin of each message is clearly marked. Our channels align but don't merge.

In other words, we keep all the channels we want, to reflect the complexity of our world and the kind of communications we have in it.

But if any company is going to be successful in the long term in this world, they'll have to allow those channels to be merged.

We want to keep our separate channels, but we don't want to have fiddle with them. For example, I may prefer to communicate with some people via Facebook - casual updates, a birthday wish, a picture that makes me realize they've just had twins - but not establish a long email exchange.

Twitter is an obvious reflection of this.

Some report suggested that people are signing up for it, but not twittering themselves.

So Twitter isn't a success?

No. It is. It's just a different form of communication.

Just like I might hold forth at a party and have everyone rapt by my tale-telling - it has happened, really - so do people follow the interesting, the outgoing, the prolific, on Twitter.

That they're passive in that doesn't matter. They're there.

It's another channel.

Twitter is a news channel for some people, an update channel for others, a lifeline for others, a distraction for others. The more channels we have, the more we'll find ways of using them.

The companies that get this and make it easy for us to use them in the myriad ways we haven't even dreamed of yet, will still be around to pick up the big bucks that, one day, will start to fall. 

40 years later, moon still giant leap for mankind

The measure of what humanity can accomplish is a size 9 1/2 bootprint.

It belongs to Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. It will stay on the moon for millions of years with nothing to wipe it away, serving as an almost eternal testament to a can-do mankind.

Apollo 11 is the glimmering success that failures of society are contrasted against: "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we ..."

What put man on the moon 40 years ago was an audacious and public effort that the world hasn't seen before or since. It required rocketry that hadn't been built, or even designed, in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy declared the challenge. It needed an advance in computerization that had not happened yet. NASA would have to learn how to dock separate spaceships, how to teach astronauts to walk in space, even how to keep them alive in space - all tasks so difficult experts weren't sure they were possible.

Forty years later, the moon landing is talked about as a generic human achievement, not an American one. But Apollo at the time was more about U.S. commitment and ingenuity.

Historian Douglas Brinkley called the Apollo program "the exemplary moment of America's we-can-do-anything attitude." After the moon landing, America got soft, he said, looking for the quick payoff of a lottery ticket instead of the sweat-equity of buckling down and doing something hard.

In years since, when America faces a challenge, leaders often look to the Apollo program for inspiration. In 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared a war on cancer, his staffers called it "a moon shot for cancer." Last year, then-candidate Barack Obama and former Vice President Al Gore proposed a massive effort to fight global warming, comparing it to Apollo 11. An environmentalists' project to tackle climate change and promote renewable energy took the name "Apollo Alliance."

Those still-unfinished efforts recall May 25, 1961, when President Kennedy, fresh from a disastrous Bay of Pig invasion of Cuba, announced that America would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade and return him safely home.

"I thought he was crazy," said Chris Kraft, when he heard Kennedy's speech about landing on the moon.

Kraft was head of Mission Control. He was the man responsible for guiding astronauts to orbit (which hadn't been done yet) and eventually to the moon. Kraft first heard about a mission to the moon when Kennedy made the speech.

"We saw that as Buck Rogers stuff, rather than reality that would be carried out in any time period that we were dealing with," Kraft recently told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Houston.

Less than three months later, Kraft was in the White House explaining to the president just how landing on the moon would be done. Kraft still didn't believe it would work.

"Too many unknowns," he said.

It was the Cold War and Russian Yuri Gagarin had just become the first man in space. Kennedy chose landing a man on the moon because experts told him it was the one space goal that was so distant and complicated at the time that the United States could catch up and pass the Soviet Union, Kennedy adviser Ted Sorensen said.

The idea in a world where American capitalism was pitted against Soviet communism on a daily basis was "to prove to the world which system was best, which one was the future," Sorensen said.

"It's not just the fact that the president wanted it done," Sorensen recalled. "It was the fact that we had a specific goal and a specific timetable."

In another speech, Kennedy famously said America would go to the moon and try other tasks "not because they were easy, but because they were hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."

They weren't just skills with rockets and slide rules. Bringing together countless aerospace companies, engineers, scientists, technicians, politicians and several NASA centers around the nation was a management challenge even more impressive than building the right type of rockets, said Smithsonian Institution space scholar Roger Launius.

And it cost money. The United States spent $25.4 billion on the Apollo program, which translates to nearly $150 billion in current dollars - less than the U.S. spent in both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007.

Yet, in the view of those heavily involved in the challenge, what made Apollo work was two tragedies: the assassination of Kennedy in 1963 and the fatal Apollo 1 fire in 1967.

The assassination of Kennedy made the Apollo program and its budget politically nearly untouchable. The moon-landing goal - which Kennedy later talked about modifying and even including the Soviets on - became a symbol of the martyred president. NASA's launch center was renamed from Cape Canaveral to Kennedy.

The Apollo fire, which occurred during ground testing, killed three astronauts, including Armstrong's neighbor. The main problem was that there was 100 percent oxygen in the capsule, which made fire spread rapidly.

Kraft, in a July interview said he is convinced that NASA couldn't have reached Kennedy's target were it not for the Apollo 1 fire and the way it made the space agency rethink everything: "We were building inferior hardware at that point in time.

"The whole program turned around, both from a hardware and management point of view," Kraft said. "You really learn from failure."

So NASA drilled astronauts and flight controllers ceaselessly with simulations. Failures kept being thrown at the astronauts and the controllers, some just plain unsolvable.

One of the last failures simulated before Apollo 11's launch was an alarm on the lunar lander that signaled the computer was overloaded. During the simulation, Mission Control in Houston aborted the landing. But controllers were later told it was just an "indication" signal and that if they had thought about it, the computer really was working fine. Controllers thought the test was unfair, according to an account in the new book, "Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon" by Craig Nelson.

But during the real mission, as the Eagle lunar lander approached the moon, that test-run computer signal appeared. This time controllers knew everything was OK. They didn't abort the moon landing.

Still, there were more hurdles to come. In another example, experience and nerves paid off. As Eagle neared the landing area in the spot called Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong saw too many boulders and craters to come down safely. So he kept flying horizontally, 100 feet (30 meters) off the ground, scouring the moonscape for a smooth place.

Eagle's fuel tank neared empty. Alarms went off. Mission controllers in Houston fretted.

"We still needed to get down," recalled Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. "I'm not telling Neil, 'Hey Neil, hurry up, get on the ground.' I'm sort of conveying this with body English."

There were only 17 seconds worth of fuel left.

Finally, the radio at Mission Control crackled with Armstrong's voice: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

Two hours later, humans walked on a place other than Earth, a place truly foreign.

"This is a very desolate place," recalled Aldrin, second to step on the moon. "It's just boring. It's all one color that varies depending on the sun angle. But the sky is black, it's all black except the one object there, the Earth, and the object behind us, the sun."

The world watched on television as the first two men walked on the moon. But one person close to the action couldn't. He was the third crew member of Apollo 11, command module pilot Michael Collins, who was orbiting the moon alone. He didn't get to see what was happening. But he could hear Neil Armstrong say his famous first words.

Decades later, Armstrong called his first words on the moon "a pretty simple statement, talking about stepping off something."

But Armstrong wasn't merely talking about that small step of his. What came next was the big deal. It was, as he said on the moon 40 years ago, "a giant leap for mankind."

It still is.

Multimedia journalist Kevin Vineys in Washington and television producer Sara Gillesby in New York contributed to this report. 

Life without a backspace key: Thing you could manage it?

Here's an idea. A word processor that doesn't process words.

You type. The words appear on the screen. That's it.

No delete key.

No backspace key.

No overwrite key.

Just you, the keyboard and a piece of paper (well, a screen, but it might as well be a piece of paper because you can't do anything to it once you've put a letter on it.)

You can't erase anything. You can't scroll back and remove stuff, or move stuff around.

Sort of like a typewriter. On your computer.

Now this might sound like a backward step.

Some of you may be thinking that you've paid good money - or your boss has - for a fancy computer that can do more or less anything you want it to, and so the idea of turning it into a typewriter seems a bit, well, silly.

Fair enough. But that hasn't stopped folk from developing the software to do it. And for people to download the software and use it.

First off, a few weeks back, there was a photographer and filmmaker called Joey Daoud who came across a quote from a novelist called Will Self, who does all his writing on a typewriter.

"Writing on a manual *typewriter* makes you slower in a good way, I think," Self told The Guardian newspaper in an interview last year. "You don't revise as much, you just think more, because you know you're going to have to retype the entire *expletive* thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it."

Inspired, Daoud hunted around for a programmer who could put together some software that mimicked a typewriter as much as possible.

Now there are actually plenty of distraction-free text editors around - ones that blank out the rest of the screen of distractions, pretty much. (Check out my list of such software here: http://is.gd/TdI0)

But Daoud's Typewriter is ascetic in the extreme: "All you can do is type in one direction," he writes on his blog. "You can't delete, you can't copy, you can't paste. You can save and print. And you can switch between black text on white and green on black; full screen and window."

He seems to have started something.

A similar program has just been released called Momentum Writer (you can find it on the list above).

Its author, software programmer and writer Jesse Wall, writes that it "forces you to write, to move forward, to add new words. It halts the temptation to linger, revise, and correct. Momentum Writer is a typewriter for your PC."

This all might sound daft or, at best, fodder for self-absorbed authors, but hang on a minute. I think they might be on to something.

When Wall posted his creation to a mailing list related to his primary creative writing software, Liquid Story Binder XE (which is excellent, by the way), he received nearly 40 responses.

They started out somewhat confused; most asked for a backspace key - typewriters have a backspace key, after all, don't they? (answer: yes, but it doesn't delete anything).

One railed against the effrontery of being asked to "to completely learn how to type all over again to use this tool otherwise. I'm not willing to lose precious writing time to changing the way I type when I rather like the way I type."

(Sheesh! You'd think she'd been asked to pay for the dang thing.)

Eventually sanity prevailed, and some wise words with it: "It's not about you relearning how to type," one poster wrote. "It's about forcing yourself to WRITE, and stop worrying about error correction, which can be a big barrier for some people."

Comments on Daoud's blog echoed this theme. Some seem to feel as if they'd just been asked to shoot themselves; others tap a nostalgic vein, when the clickety clack of the typewriter offered company, when putting something on the page implied a commitment that was hard to go back on.

As you might expect, I'm all for this.

I believe that technology has been really, really good to us, but we shouldn't be afraid of putting it in a cupboard once in a while.

Of course, when typewriters first came along writers looked down their noses at them, and writers like Bruce Chatwin said they could spot a book written on a word processor a mile off.

I started my career off on a manual BBC typewriter and I remember the looks I got in Bush House when I brought in my own electronic Canon Typestar one day, which allowed me to write a whole line onto a tiny LCD display the width of a thumbnail before committing it to the page.

Unsurprisingly, I didn't last long there.

But the point is that we - and I'm not just talking writers here, but anyone who has to sit down and write something at some point during the day - could all benefit from a bit of focus.

We shouldn't blame technology for bombarding us with stuff all the time, on our laptop, our cell phone, on the screens etched into the back of taxi seats.

But we could acknowledge the notion that technology, too, can be mobilized to force a simpler process on us: freeing us from distraction and forcing us to commit to what we do, one indelible letter at a time.

(c) 2009 Loose Wire Pte Ltd