minor jive

Who of us can forget the angst and labor of creating mix tapes. They’re are a brilliant, Rube Goldberg-style example of a workaround for an organizing principle. The music industry used the concept of albums as the organizing principle for music – but the model began to break down as new technologies were introduced and the the ways that people wanted to use music changed. We wanted to do more than buy and consume music. We wanted to create our own soundtracks so we cobbled the technology together to create our own albums. Most importantly, we broke the organizing principle from album to song. While the legacy of the album organizing principle still exists, I suspect digital music will make it obsolete within the next ten years.

Similarly, I think that delivering great Internet experiences on mobile devices will be less about “mobilizing” web sites and web pages and more about dismantling the page-based organizing principle into a more flexible one. It will be about breaking apart boulder-like web-pages into pebbles of content that can be configured and combined in ways that make sense in mobile contexts. It will be about privileging XML over HTML and focusing on lightweight applications and presentation layers like widgets. Most importantly, it will have to be based on a deep understanding of how people want to use Internet content in mobile contexts.