Monthly Archives: May 2005

Space: the API

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My car’s check engine light came on. Being both modern and a cheapskate I found the online community where Passat owners hang out. My old car there had a secret pattern of key turns and button pushes that would cause the car reveal engine’s fault. I was hoping for something similar.

But car makers love to keep things secret. German car maker are more secretive than Japanese makers. So it is verboten for Passat owners to know what lies behind their check engine lights. My fellow owners showed me a way. Autozone will read out your check engine codes for free. Autozone has solidarity with those who to fix their own cars.

The man at Autozone climbed under my steering wheel and plugged in. He and I copied the codes down onto a peice of paper. He then placed his finger just under a large yellow button on the read out device. He held it up, away from his body, toward me. He turned and gazing away into the distance. My eyes followed, a large warehouse sat on the far side of the parking lot. He said speaking into the empty car. “If it’s still under warrenty we can’t press the big yellow button. That clears the codes.” He paused, gazing more closely at the warehouse. “I” “Can’t push the yellow button.”

The inside of Autozone is full of gadgets to hack your car. An entire asle of things that plug into the cigarette lighter. A wall of steering wheel covers. Two racks of things to hang from the rear view mirror. Devices that clip to the air vents on the dash board.

I once built a store front. A place where developers could sell their wares. The developer products all plugged into an existing product. Our product. We called it the developer’s market place, it was a way for the developers to reach our customers, our product’s users.

As mentioned car makers like to horde their options. They like to sell you the radio rather than relinquish that option to some random 3rd party. So generally auto makers are not very big on open APIs. I suspect they grumble about that cigarette lighter.

But standing looking at the Hawain shirt steering wheel covers at Autozone I had an epiphany. How little it takes to create an API. How small an affordance. The convex shape of the steering wheel, the latent hook on the rear view mirror, the trickle of electricity in the cigarette lighter.

A few days later I was listening to a talk by one of the dudes who have been hacking on the Prius. He throws up a slide showing the floor under the hatchback. There’s a panel. The panel is removed in his next slide and there is a small shallow space. Just a few inches deep. Useless really.

But, immediately I knew. That empty space! Full of latent energy. Waiting for their hack. Drawing them in. “Fill me!”

What happened? Why did Toyota leave that space? Did they actually know what they were doing. Did they know that empty space is an open API for developers? It’s not as hard to create open APIs as you might think.

A Culture of First Drafts

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Nope, this is not a posting about blogging. This is a posting about IPR and DRM.

At lunch today a friend was related stories about various really horrible 50s science fiction he had read as a child. In one of these stories the high IQ crowd buds off from the rest of the population and then convinces them all to board a ship for Venus. This plot device, of course, reappears in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Which illustrates that strong digital rights management is really a plan to assure we live in a culture of first drafts.

Ships in the Night

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There is a delightful pattern in collaborative design I usually label “ships in the night.”

Two designers posit different solutions to the problem. Mr. A advocates plan A, and Mr B advocates plan B. They debate the merits of their respective plans and then adjorn.

During the night Mr. A thinks about the merits of plan B. Mr. B thinks about the merits of plan A. They both begin to come around to the other guys position. They think how noble it would be to give in.

They also puzzle a bit on the cost of their plan. Mr. A begins to think about how hard his plan really is. Mr. B thinks about his plan’s complexity. They both begin to become a bit fearful of their plan. They think what a burden it would be to own the plan, particularly one that was in dispute.

The next morning they return to the discussion to discover they have switched sides. Ships in the night.

Pay to Play

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The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meets three times a year in various cities across the Americas to discuss such dry but important issues as telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations. But for this week’s meeting in Guatemala City, politics has barged onto the agenda. At least four of the two dozen or so U.S. delegates selected for the meeting, sources tell TIME, have been bumped by the White House because they supported John Kerry’s 2004 campaign. The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants. Only after the start of Bush’s second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.

   — Mostly behind the garden wall at Time

Brand Religiosity

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There a lot of fun “statically improbable phrases” in this paper (sadly hidden behind a garden wall) about religiosity in brand communities. It’s about the Newton community, which like the Lisp community, can be described as “operating in a threatened state.”

Like all communities these brand communities have rituals, including stories. And when the community is threatened then you can look for these kinds of stories: “(1) tails of persecution, (2) tales of faith rewarded, (3) survival tales, (4) tales of miraculous recovery, and (5) tales of resurrection.”

I particularly liked the idea of “highly visible stigma symbol.” The damn back lite apple on my powerbook for example. Until recently I could use the word closure as a stigma symbol but it apparently it’s making a comeback. The stigma symbol attracts persecution. Communities have what salesmen call objection handling techniques for responding to those. In this paper we get the wonderful phrase “taming the facts.”

Of course Brand communities have product at their center, often technological products. Technology is magical. That leads to the wonderful phrase “technopagan magic.” The best heroic fantasy tales deal with persecution with a burst of tecnopagan magic.

But the real reason I needed to write this posting was this marvalous signature line used by somebody in the Newton community:

“Would the last person to leave the platform, please turn off the backlight.”