HyperCard

Continuing the theme of self indulgent reminiscing, I have fond memories of spending days as a child consumed by the multimedia authoring tool HyperCard and its spiritual successor (read: clone) HyperStudio. These environments were built upon the index card catalogue metaphor augmented with hyperlinks, multimedia, rudimentary database features and scripting to fill in the gaps (HyperTalk and HyperLogo respectively).

Talking to my friend Jarrod, a fellow CS grad, highlighted a common history with these tools. I wonder how many professionals today owe their beginnings to these humble environments. ^[1]

Then again, perhaps they were not so humble?

These environments saw rise incredible creativity and enabled leveraging of the contemporary multimedia capabilities of computers at the time. HyperStudio in addition provided platform independent development (providing your platforms were Macintosh and Windows). Commercial examples such as Myst serve as a testament to the full power of these tools.

A mixture of nostalgia and need has often led me to wish for a resurgence of these environments and so I was pleased to hear about TileStack: a spiritual successor (read: clone) of HyperCard deployed on the web. It can even import existing HyperCard stacks. Around this time the elusive obvious finally dawned on me: forget TileStack, we already have a crowned successor. Sir Tim Berners-Lee extended the card catalogue idea with networking components and the World Wide Web was born. (I speak colloquially and from my own timeline of exposure to these technologies that does not necessarily represent the true timeline of events.)

Unfortunately, this is not completely true. Undoubtedly one of the web’s key focuses was on ease of publishing. The advent of HTML popularised human-readable markup. Discussion forums and blogging software subsequently lowered the barrier of entry further. Collaborative authoring and social graphs were grafted on this base with the rise of Wikis and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook respectively.

We’re not there yet.

Micro-blogging has received a disproportionate amount of media coverage lately, but it too focuses on lowering the bar to publishing. Discover and discuss your favourite celebrity’s choice of breakfast cereal from your mobile phone, PDA or abacus. ^[2] The publish/subscribe paradigm has never been so glamorous. The unique differentiation of Twitter that often goes unnoticed by the mainstream media is its support for directed social graphs or asymmetric relationships. This allows for four distinct kinds of association between social nodes (users).

I am curious to see how these relationships play out as Twitter reaches critical mass. ^[3] Will these associations lead to the development of unique and complex forms of relationship or will it become a social faux pas to not reciprocate when someone follows you? Perhaps Twitter should trial disabling of email notification on acquisition of a new follower.

But I digress.

This perpetual focus on ease of publishing has stifled development of one crucial aspect of the old HyperCard model: ease of control. As trivial as it is to leave a wall post on Facebook, writing the application that accepts and manages the post sure isn’t. Unlike HyperCard, this control is isolated from the hands of the average user. Control of logic is a one (or few) to many relationship akin to traditional media’s (i.e. newspaper, radio and television) monopoly on content production. Facebook’s application development framework is surprisingly simple to use for those with prior experience developing dynamic websites, but that remains a minority.

The outstanding question is difficult to answer: does anybody care?

I’m not sure. There are indicators that a subset of the population does: the mashup culture, Yahoo Pipes (Unix pipes for the web) and game modding communities to name a few. Social games that crop up on discussion forums and MMORPGs are another example of informal, intangible and extremely flexible exertions of control. ^[4] The recent backlash over Facebook’s Terms of Service change highlights the sense of ownership a wider than expected subset of the population have over their content and the vested interest they have in how it is used. It shall be interesting to test how extensible this desire for control is.

_{[1] In truth, the Commodore Amiga was my first love. It’s a shame Commodore was incapable of running a business.
[2] Is there an abacus application for iPhone? If not, there really should be. Edit: There is!
[3] I’m reminded of spending last Friday night with my friend Julia frequenting my local Newtown haunts. She remarked, dejectedly, that Newtown was slowly starting to go downhill as the outsiders move in. The irony that she is an outsider was completely lost on her.
[4] Following the adage that creativity comes from constraints, perhaps these informal rules are simple enough. Or perhaps not?}