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June 14, 2005
Phone Call 2.0
The first phone call went like this: “Come here Watson. I want you.” When Alexander Graham Bell called his assistant, Thomas Watson, on March 6th, 1876 he set in motion a revolution in communication that many argue has changed the world more than any other invention, making his patent, 174,465 possibly the most valuable in history.
BTW, when looking up the historical facts on the patent, I discovered something I hadn’t known before: On February 14, 1876, Elisha Gray got to the patent office only two hours after Bell to file for a provisional patent for a similar invention. Interestingly, Bell’s device used a liquid transmitter similar to one invented previously by Gray and unlike anything in his patent filing and also used a metal diaphragm receiver similar to the one built and demonstrated publicly by Gray months earlier. In any case, a legal fight ensued. Gray lost and Bell was awarded the patent. “First to market” sometimes means “by two hours.”
Think about how little the concept of the phone call has changed in the last 150 years. The definition of a phone call has always been “person to person voice communication.” The first real innovation around the basic product was voicemail and we didn’t see that until 1979. Even after that, the innovations we saw in telephony were built around the concept of person to person voice communication. Caller ID, Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Call Return, Caller Blocking, Priority Ringing and Voicemail are all services built around the core product of connecting two people in a person to person voice communication session. Where I live in California, I can subscribe to Three-Way Calling for an additional $3.23 per month. Wow – Three people. That is the best you can do with the basic interface that is the telephone, and it is the first product that extended the reach of an individual wanting to have a conversation with more than one person. Even today, given the prevalence of conference calling, we still only ever talk to maybe a dozen people at a time. That’s not very scalable reach, and it is simply a limitation of the interface.
Communication Urgency vs. Importance
But think about what communication really is. Simply put, communication is the conveyance of ideas through a medium. In Phone Call 1.0, the medium you use is your voice, and the interface limits you to a relatively small audience. It limits you because it is a real-time environment. You have to assemble your audience and deliver your message. There is no way to timeshift your message so that it can be presented to multiple audiences at various times. You place the call, you transact your ideas using your voice and that is the end of it.
When I think about how many times I have called 411 to get the number of the same damn Domino’s pizza up the street, it drives me crazy. Phone Call 1.0 works well in Urgent situations when you need directions, have to educate your salespeople on a new product innovation or want to order a pizza. It is a limitation of the interface that makes me call back multiple times for the number to Domino’s – that information is Important and can be stored near-line as long as I know where to find it and as such lives in the phone book, where there is a color listing with a picture of a pizza, menu, and the phone number, address and directions for Domino’s. In this way, the information is essentially time-shifted. But I don’t carry the phone book around with me everywhere I go and when I am hungry the value of that phone number switches from Important to Urgent and the thing that I do happen to carry around with me everywhere I go is a Phone Call 1.0 interface that I can use to call someone to read me the number from the directory for Domino’s pizza.
Phone Call 1.0 is a very bad interface for Important things like conveying encyclopedic information, communicating complex ideas perhaps requiring pictures or other multimedia or for marketing applications. In the case of the latter, it is downright annoying. Phone Call 1.0 is very good for conveying short bursts of information in real-time sessions.
Telephones are Urgency Devices and they are colliding with Importance applications. The Mobile Phone is the ultimate Urgent Communication Device because it is always with you. People use it in an urgent manner, too; every time I see someone close a business deal at their kid’s soccer event, give some friends last-minute directions to the restaurant while sitting at the table or answering their phone in a movie theater just to satisfy their neurotic compulsion to answer every self-importance-affirming call, I am further convinced of this simple fact.
Well, your mobile phone is not just a mobile phone anymore. It is a mobile connected Personal Media Device, which means three very important things:
1) it can upload multimedia
2) it can download multimedia
3) it is capable of operating in a combined Urgent/Important mode.
So what does this mean? Think about Phone Call 1.0 again for a moment. Have you ever called a friend for a restaurant recommendation or directions? Yes, I think we all have. And they said what? “Try Oceanaire downtown in the Gaslamp Quarter.” And then you had to look up the number yourself because they didn’t have it, right? This happens with surprising frequency. As I was writing this, a coworker just asked me what cab company I use in San Diego.
Today my friend sent me an IM asking for recommendations on good restaurants and bars in San Diego because she is going to be down for the weekend. I immediately listed Bertrand and the beach bar at the W hotel as good bar options and mentioned Oceanaire, Indigo Grill and Parallel 33 for restaurants. Then from my PC I googled these names and found useful links for her on each and sent those over to her via IM. It took me a little more than five minutes, but I was happy to do it for this good friend. Then a funny thing happened. When I went to close the IM window, I hesitated because I felt that I was throwing away valuable information. What if someone else from out of town asks me for a recommendation on bars or restaurants? I will likely give them the same recommendations because they are among my top favorites in San Diego. Then I will have to re-google the information and spend another five minutes.
Phone Call 2.0
Before closing the IM window, I added all of those places to my Rabble Channel. (Channel Shawn, fyi. I know - very creative.) I have essentially “attached” those places to my channel. When I do this, all of those places are immediately available to anyone on Rabble – they do not have to know my Channel. The Places I put on my channel are available to everyone and they can then attach them to their channel. This is distributed populist media production and sharing. But for people who do know my Channel, there is a reason they know it. Most likely they are friends of mine, and now they can go straight to my channel without having to call me for a recommendation.
Last week Derrick and I were in the bay area for business and I was Rabbling around Berkeley to see what was there. I found a channel called CheeseboardPizza. (I possess an unnatural and undiscriminating love of pizza. When I go to New York, I land and take the cab straight to John’s Pizzeria before checking in to my hotel. I like the one on West 44th, not Bleecker. Please feel free to send me recommendations in any city.) People from the bay area know about the CheeseBoard Pizza Cooperative. First of all, it is phenomenal pizza. Secondly, it is sort of a quirky concept that is hard not to love. Imagine the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld sold pizza. You don’t get to specify your toppings. They make one kind of pizza everyday and that is what you get. There is a menu outside that lists the pizza for the day. A Rabbler in Berkeley apparently walks by this menu every morning and takes a picture of the menu and posts it to his channel. Yesterday it was “corn, onions, red bell peppers, feta, mozzarella, garlic, olive oil and cilantro.” Subscribe to Channel CheeseboardPizza and get the menu every day. If it sounds good to you that day, pizza it is. If not, you saved yourself a walk down to 1512 Shattuck Ave. to see the menu yourself. I love this – not only is it a cool use of technology but it fits our ideal of populist media. By viewing Channel CheeseboardPizza, you can download multimedia to your mobile phone to make an informed decision.
I also like this example because it shows how a very unserious piece of media can be both important and urgent, because it is both “What” and “When” information, e.g., “What do I want to eat for lunch today?”
Look Ma, No Voice
Notice that I haven’t even mentioned using voice. I picked this example specifically because it is the type of information that not long ago we all used to retrieve using our voices as the medium and the telephone as the interface.
Now instead of only being able to call someone, you can send text from your mobile phone. But your mobile phone is also a digital camera. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then why settle for 160 characters of text when you can send a picture instead? And if one person might want to see your picture, why not post it to your blog instead so you can share it with the world? Now add a messaging feedback loop so you can interact with other users to create, collect and share information.
Nonvoice multimedia + conversation with the world = evolved communication.
And that is Phone Call 2.0. It is happening without us even knowing it. Almost all of the pieces are in place. What has been missing is a marketplace to effectively transact this information that combines the usefulness of a near-line directory of Important information, the immediacy of “pick up the phone and call” access to Urgent information and most importantly, the context of personal relationships or commonality to filter both kinds of information to make it more useful. By the way, commonality could be as simple as an apparent unholy appreciation for pizza – now that is someone whose opinion I can trust.
Simply put, our personal communication is evolving to include multimedia. That communication is converging on one device, the mobile phone, which is quickly turning into a Personal Media Device. My children will not understand the concept of Phone Call 1.0 – they will live in a world where the media they create will represent them and act as an active proxy. Their friends will not understand the concept of a “phone number,” the artifact of an analog world long gone, and instead will have their own channel – a two-way location-aware media presence through which they will communicate with the world around them. You already see what your mobile phone has evolved into over just the past few years. What will it look like in another three years? Or ten? Now combine that device with an active media communication infrastructure that connects you with the world around you delivering information, entertainment and personal connectivity seamlessly and intuitively to help you find new content, increase your social capital and generally get through the day. That is the future of communication. Think about how few voice calls you make compared to five years ago and how many text messages you send instead. Think of how much you rely on your mobile phone and the fact that it is turning into a mobile connected camcorder and receiver. Now make the final leap – rather than call the number, surf the net or watch the channel, Be The Channel. (And start now with our 1.0 of Phone Call 2.0, Rabble. ;-)
Posted by Shawn Conahan at June 14, 2005 07:47 PM