Brough Turner, founder of Netblazr which he describes as "a radically new form of wireless ISP." 358: Brough Turner of Netblazr by VoIP Users Conference

• The iPad continues its impressive climb.
• The iPhone continues to progress, but slower than the iPad.In fact, in Sept, iPhone lost a few.
• Android has begun to move up.
• BlackBerry keeps falling.
• Symbian is barely perceptible

Methodology

Only logged in members of the site are counted. The user_agent for the above device families are counted and regardless of the number of pages viewed, each member device is counted only once. Next step would be to count how many pages each device is looking at. Stay tuned.

Demographics

The sample site is used by people mostly over 45 years of age with a strong discretionary budget. This is particularly interesting in light of the iPad's dramatic progression and the BlackBerry's steady fall. Let's see what happens with BlackBerry's new and exciting models in the next few months.

 

Measured on a subscription site (not IP-based, individual user-based).
iPad is the fastest growing device. Still some iPhone growth.
BlackBerry stagnating.
Symbian and Android still minimal.

I think for me it happened around 1977. I was living in L.A. at that time, and since I had been interested in amateur radio as a kid, I found out there was a whole social network out there on VHF and UHF repeaters in the L.A. Basin, mountains and valleys. People used to check in all day, just like Twitter or Facebook, and meet up in person all over the area. In fact, I met a few women back in the day. One of them went on to become a radio operator on an Arco ship. I wonder if she's still working for an oil company? Her passport said, "Occupaton: Seaman", which made her (and us) laugh.

Speaking of L.A. reminds me of a moment down there in 1993. I was down in Orange County somewhere, we were recording What Kind of World with Larry Taylor who was playing with Tom Waits at the time, and the drummer from Waits' band whose name escapes me for the moment. Larry and I were staying in a motel, on the PCH, I think and there was some slow traffic going by even in the middle of the night. Then came a van with a 1,000 watt boom box system playing at 11. What's funny is, it was playing opera music. Only in L.A. would you get this!

Twenty years after my first experience with L.A. social networking, in 1987, I was using a tool at the office daily that I didn't understand at all, called the Internet. You typed some commands on a Unix console and were copying or fetching files between France and the USA at a rate so slow it took all day for source code archives, which is all text.

In 2006, I heard about this crazy new thing called Twitter, which mostly did what my Chez DiDi site was doing ten years before, a kind of chat on  a regular HTML web site. In those days (only 4 years ago!) you could call the guys from Twitter on their cells, so I did that early in 2007 and Jack was nice enough to put our Kiva Talkathon on the front page of Twitter for a week before it happened. Yes, we were  a trending topic! But how many people were on Twitter 3 years ago? A hundred thousand? Maybe less?

In 2007 I joined Facebook, although I also left it in 2007. At that time you got the "you can come back anytime" and the answer to how to delete an account was "you can't". That's right, I had to argue via email for two weeks with someone over there until they promised to delete my account and all associated data. Not that there was much of that, since I didn't post much. I don't use Facebook except on behalf of other people, and every time I get on the site I marvel at how bad it is as a web site. Searching is confused and works poorly, finding hard info on dealing with various problems is hard.

A lot has happened since 1997, but the basic concepts of social networks haven't changed and probably never will. Note that because radio waves travel at the speed of light, communication on those social networks was faster in 1997 than it is now.

 

Mobile usage on membership site, February-June 2010

Each member has an identifiable tag in the log, so if he/she is using an iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android or Symbian device, we count that member ONCE. What jumps out right away is the hockey stick relatively steep rise of the iPad. Next, the BlackBerry lacks growth. Symbian is marginal and Android is growing, although on this site, not many are using it.

Note, I first published a porrly skewed verision of the graph using a type I didn't understand. The above graph gives the proper proportions.

It will be interesting to see if the iPhone rises again with the release of the new generation.

The web is changing, often for the better, sometimes, not so much. I'm weary of the use of "because I can" technology. Not just Flash, but Ajax and the increased bandwidth we enjoy today are changing the web experience and too frequently getting in the way of it.

A few years ago, I had the priviledge of working with Paul Pontalier and the team at Château Margaux. Everyone I met at Margaux was charming, generous and intelligent and I was delighted to spend time there talking to them about their site, which was based on Flash and .NET technologies at that time. At the time we made a few small adjustments and they eventually moved to a less edgy design.  I am recalling this now because of one particular discussion I had there with Paul and Corinne and I think my point is still valid today.

The Guided Tour

When you go visit Margaux or most other properties, you are on a guided tour. The vast majority of visitors to a web site do not go there for a guided tour. In fact, isn't the whole point of today's web to personalize the experience? It's great to have a large gallery of high-definition photos and videos. Do you want to wait while they load, or would you like to find what you came for without a musical spectacle? I like to have a door that I can go in if I want to look at those. But what if I've already been there and I just want to know how the 1999 is doing? Or maybe someone from the press is writing an article and wants to know who the second winemaker is or some detail such as how to spell a name? Every sexy design feature I have ever found on any web site could just as easily have had an entry and an exit. By the way, since bookmarks don't work, they should be built in to the navigation so that you can save them on the site.

There is such a thing as too sexy

I think we're losing this battle to the overly cosmetic designs. I don't really want to see sites that bat their eyes at me, which is the equivalent of those idiotic menus that move when you try to click something. Sure, elegance and a sense of mystery is needed for the luxury wines, but is this any reason to have the practical information is less obvious places? That's like pretending elegant ladies don't ever go to the bathroom. These menus are also problematic because while they work fine on the designer's screen, many of them do not track the mouse properly resulting in having to keep racing around to keep the text or icon from hiding behind some cute facade. Designers also always have large screens and some sites when viewed on some screens lost the bottom lin of navigation! "No matter, we're not aiming at people who don't have a big screen."

At least once a year, someone in the wine business trots out: "Look at Petrus. They don't even have a site!" I don't see that as something to brag about, but then I'm certainly not the target audience of such a wine. When I read these lines I think to myself, "I must be an old curmudgeon!" until I remember that every survey of opinion I have seen on forums about web sites, not just wine but any sites has the majority of votes "better without Flash" and "prefer not to see opening autostart music and animation". I can only add that it shouldn't be so hard to make a user-friendly Flash or Ajax site but I think few people, whether designers or their customers, have followed the best advice ever given: "Put yourself in the shoes of a visitor, the kind of visitor you are building the site for."  Over the past 15 years, I've never changed my philosophy: the site you (think you) want is not necessarily the site you need.

I've always been envious of people who knew how to build houses, a skill that will never go out of fashion. Likewise, those who can repair cars or fix plumbing. When I was a kid, we built things like computers that could count to 111 in binary, which is pretty useless, although it did nurture my love of geeky technology all these years.

My most ambitious project was a vidicon TV camera,constructed from plans in a magazine. I went to the store and bought an aluminum chassis, tube and sockets, resistors, capacitors, coils, wire, solder and lots of screws, nuts and washers. The article was published in three parts so it took at least three months to build the camera, but it actually worked, giving a fuzzy, flickering black and white image. Of course this was yet another way to lure girls over to my mom's house where I lived in the basement.

My friends and I pointed the camera at the girls and and messed around with posing and pretending we were the Tonight Show. That show was hosted by Steve Allen, a guy who was a songwriter and musician as well as being very funny with improvisation. Anyway, all this was a lot of fun but it rarely got us anywhere with the girls. It took being in a band to jump that hurdle, and every one of us was in a band, eventually. Funny how my pals were ostracized something like the guys in "Weird Science" and every one of us went on to play some role for famous artists as important as Prince. We also all went to California to accomplish this, and I'll bet we got more than the atheletes who laughed at us in dodgeball games. Ah, sweet revenge. By the way, what does dodgeball in gym class say about the human race?

I followed electronic technology all these years and continued building projects first with transistors, such as an FM transmitter to be a pretend disc jockey in a 300 meter area, and then integrated circuits. From the day I build that TV camera (there was no VCR technology yet) to today where a Flip Video Mino can record an hour of HD in color, only about 44 years have passed. Not very much time compared to the progress of the first 1900 years on our calendar.

Humanity has made a hockey stick-like curve towards finer and better technologies in every field, particularly computing and video, but also in medicine and biology, yet we have not been able to do anything at all about our violent and warlike nature. I recall a sci-fi story I read years ago where the various nations, seeing what a waste war was, found a "better" way to deal with it: they just ran a permanent war of computer simulated strikes and killed the number of people on each side predicted as the outcome!

We live in an age where mankind has more reach than ever before. Our workplace tools have become toys and entertainment centers. We can broadcast live video from our cellphones, we can buy and sell anything on the Internet. My discovery of the Kiva.org web site was a revelation. It made me see how easy it is to pay forward some of this great potential by investing in human dignity. I have had hundreds of thousands of hours of pleasure via the Internet and now I'm able to make a difference in people's lives from half way across the planet by sending a $25 payment through the Kiva site to a group of hard-working business owners in the third world.

I think the things most valuable that we can build are mutual respect, empathy and human dignity.