Expectation control on deploy or die!

Joi Ito at SIME'08

Somebody pointed me at a piece from Oreilly’s Solid conference. Like most others I would have loved to have gone but to be fair there would have been people I would rather have gone ahead of myself.

Joi ito I have a lot of respect for and I remember meeting him in London over 10 years ago. But I take a little issue with something Joi says

the Media Lab’s emphasis is on projects that go all the way to manufacturing and distributing: moving from “demo or die” to “deploy or die,” as Joi puts it. Projects that deploy can be vastly more impactful than those that just demo — putting thousands of devices into the hands of users rather than just a couple. Plus, the manufacturing process is a crucial source of both constraints and creative possibility. Joi says, “Understanding manufacturing is going to be key to design, just like understanding the Internet has become key to running a company.”

Deploy or die is a nice idea but there’s issues which are associated with deployment. I understand the cost of manufacturing is getting cheaper however you need to be open and honest with the end user. User experience needs to be great otherwise people will simply drop it or kick it to the bin. Whats the point in putting it in peoples hands if they just put it in the bin?

Saying this is a demo, beta or prototype sets the expectation and this is a important stage which you shouldn’t ignore. Its the reason why Gmail had a beta tag for 10 years.

I’m in agreement the prototype shouldn’t be thrown away once you go into production. The prototype should embody as much of the real thing as possible. Its important to remember, someone needs to support the final thing. If you’re a research institute, this is not what you should be doing… This is the kind of thing which gets in the way of progression and researching the next problem/question.

Also I would point out that Joi is mainly talking about physical things which has always had a problem with being open and putting things out there for people to play with. This is something the internet has over the real world… A place to try stuff in the comfort of your own home.

Whats really needed is a safe place where people can play and try new things, which people understand don’t have the complete story or supply chain behind it. That space shouldn’t be a lab tucked away, it should be somewhere neutral like the number of community spaces which are popping up all over the place. In such a space, you can deploy or die to your hearts content. It shouldn’t be a genius bar either, it should be something comfortable and welcoming.

Yes it doesn’t scale too well but I think you will get more qualitative and qualitative feedback as a result

Why do I use Blip.tv? and what is their business model?

I use to upload all my audio and video to the Internet Archive, but the uploading tools and general tools once the file was there, were very poor. So Tom recommended Blip.tv one night at BarCampLondon. I did check it out and really give it a squeeze. But it came out clean, so since then I've been pretty much using that and enjoying it. I think the feature set and general openness to download the actual high quality videos makes a hugh difference

This was pretty much confirmed in my mind today when Miles sent this entry from Joi Ito which links to the entry by Lawerence Lessig where he compares a whole host of video sites to a web 2.0 ethic.

In this context, YouTube is a “cool” poster-child of the Web 2.0 trend, but doesn't meet the basic requirement of allowing the user to download videos from the site. While it is “sharing”, it is what Larry is calling a “fake sharing site”.

Harsh but the truth, its painful to get content out of Youtube, even Google Video is a pain. And all I wanted to do was play it on my big widescreen tv via xbox media centre.

Funny enough, I was talking to Cary Marsh, CEO and Co-founder of a site called Mydeo (meant to be in Tech Crunch this week). Her take on things is that people want to be able to upload video and only show it to a small group of friends and family. They also may not want there wedding videos next to kids racing each other in supermarket trolleys. I see what she means. But what got her was when I started listing off the reasons why I use Blip.tv. She honestly was dumb-founded and wanted to know what there business model was/is. I pointed out that there may be pro version in the future but right now you can.

  • Upload video of any length
  • Download the archived orginal
  • Use there non branded flash player anywhere you like
  • Add a creative commons licence
  • Automaticlly add content to Internet Archive
  • Add advertising to your video (start or end)
  • Add alternative formats of the same clip

And thats just for starters… So to the question of is Youtube really web 2.0? Well I agree with Larry and say nope, its more a 1.75ish type site. Maybe Google will change this in the long run, but my money is certainly at Blip.tv for now. But I do worry that unless they do setup pro accounts soon or start running serious advertising, they won't be substanable and a great video service will go under.

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