Jonathan Miller - Leaving AOL

I've historically never quite seen eye to eye with AOL; I was no fan of the walled garden Web model, though I can see the point in the simplicity and handholding that this allow the novice user, and lets not even get into the early stages of the Time-Warner deal.

However, recently I had started to think they were at last getting it right. The embracing of Web 2.0 and their complete about face from walled garden to bastion of openness seemed to me to smack of an organisation with renewed vigour and vision. Thus, it is with some surprise that I read of the departure of CEO Jonathan Miller.
It is partly the fact that I've seen Miller speak twice recently (MIT Technology Review Emerging Technology conference and the Web 2.0 Summit) and been impressed by his approach that had given me such a good feeling about AOL's future.

I'll never understand this business!

Comments

Winter Wonderland

The first snow of the season fell here yesterday afternoon. So, I know I'm a 'grown up', but I can't help but get excited by such things. My Dad always said that people loose the wonder and excitement of snow fall once they have to start commuting to work. I'm lucky, if I look at the window and the roads are impassable, I don't have to bother heading off to the office. Thanks to the technology of my trade home working is habitual anyway. Is technology responsible for allowing me to keep a sense of wonder, and enjoy the vagaries of mother nature for what she is, rather than seeing her meteorological mood swings only in terms the effect of my daily grind. Maybe, or maybe I'm just an entry level weather geek! Whatever, come lunchtime I'm off to take Monty the dog out to play in the snow!

Digital Will

A conversation with a bunch of colleagues yesterday got me to thinking. We were in our usual free form Socratic Dialogue mode and were discussing the drive to digitisation of personal media and what concept, if any, the general public had of the longevity or persistence of their data. With the human weakness in our inability to empathise with our future selves and the short term focus that a fast moving society engenders, have we really thought things through sufficiently. When I upload my photos to Flickr , I’m just assuming they are going to be there forever or more accurately I don’t perceive of any time at which they won’t be there. If I think about it a little longer I suppose I assume that the Flickr system will ensure a roll with the times and that my pictures will be retrievable and trans-codable into whatever system makes sense as the years go by. The Urban myth would have us believe that the data which ran the ‘69 Moon landing is no longer readable and we’ve forgotten the for...

The Art of the state

A few weeks back I was working with the dev team at WGC on some interface design for our product prototype. We came across a point at which we have to give the user the ability to indicate their desire to save a current state. As we discussed the various ways in which we could visually indicate a 'save' action button, I realized that as a whole the industry has settled on the image of a 'floppy disc' such as this: Now in this day and age the floppy disk is an anachronism - have any of the myspace generation even ever seen one? It is certainly a few years since the average family PC came with a floppy drive as standard equipment and an online life requires little in the way of tangible media. - and yet the iconography persists. The more I thought about this however, the more I came to think that if we needed to provide a user action which is exemplified by an outmoded concept, then maybe we should rethink our interface and indeed application architecture at a deeper lev...

Techiedog-blog

Search This Blog