Trough of disillusionment for microblogging and social software?

The IT research firm Gartner has recently published another of its technology reports for 2009: Gartner's Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009. This report is another in a long line of similar Gartner reports which do exactly what they say on the tin. That is, they provide a technology 'hype cycle' for 2009! Did you see that coming?! The technology hype cycle was a topic that Johnny Read recently discussed at an ISG research reading group, so I thought it was worth commenting on.

According to Gartner - who I believe introduced the concept of the technology hype cycle - the expectations of new or emerging technology grows far more quickly that the technology itself. This is obviously problematic since user expectations get inflated only to be deflated later as the true value of the technology slowly becomes recognised. This true value is normally reached when the technology experiences mainstream use (i.e. plateau of productivity). The figure below illustrates the basic principles behind the hype cycle model.

The latest Gartner hype cycle (below) is interesting - and interesting is really as far as you can go with this because it's unclear how the hype cycles are compiled and whether they can be used for forecasting or as a true indicator of technology trends. Nevertheless, according to the hype cycle 2009, microblogging and social networking are on the decent into the trough of disillusionment.

From a purely personal view this is indeed good news as it might mean I don't have to read about Twitter in virtually every technology newspaper, blog and website for much longer, or be exposed to a woeful interview of the Twitter CEO on Newsnight. But I suppose it is easy to anticipate the plateau of productivity for these technologies. Social software has been around for a while now, and my own experiences would suggest that many people are starting to withdraw from it; the novelty has worn off. And remember, it's not just users that perpetuate the hype cycle, those wishing to harness the social graph for directed advertising, marketing, etc. are probably sliding down the trough of disillisionment too as the promise of a captive audience has not been financially fulfilled.

It's worth perusing the Gartner report itself - interesting. The above summary hype cycle figure doesn't seem to be available at the report, so I've linked to the version available at the BBC dot.life blog which also discusses the report.

Text is the new GUI?

We've got a software student ( from another University) working on his final year project at my day job. He is busy adding a 'speech' interface to our Laboratory tracking system. The idea is that while the scientist has their hands in the fume cupboard they don't want to be messing with a mouse or a keyboard why not engage with the computer by voice. This is after all how they did it in the old future in the movies.

Alas the student has got a bit sidetracked into the excitement of speech recognition and synthesis, in an attempt to get him to some sort of conclusion of his project I have suggested that most of the academic benefit of the project could be got by just having a text input and output (although useless in the fume cupboard). Once you go there it starts you thinking about how we interact with systems by voice. We are of course now used to listening to SatNav and some folk order their phones to phone the wife.

While pondering this and Georges earlier post of Twitter Library fees, I was thinking about an article about how fans have put together Twitter accounts of their favourite T.V. characters so that we can see when they are having a sandwich during the week. It made me wonder whether we might soon be engaging with various systems through the power of text rather than super 3D graphical interfaces.

This will be a shame as much of the design thought in web design and business application design has been about mice and windows more or less. In Liverpool this has led to some success for the hybrid 'programmer/graphic designer', perhaps if we are going to deal in a flow of text it will be the Hybrid 'programmer/DJ' or at least 'programmer/Linguist' who lead the way.

We surround ourselves in an increasing sense of a flow of consciousness through Twitter/Facebook etc. Surely this is going to include a Twitter from machines.

"Your fridge is enjoying a quiet day."
"Your car is worrying that it's service is due this week."
"Your door notes that fido is standing at it and wants to go out."

This will lead us to a wish to push application outputs into twitter like streams for our apps to respond to our own twitters. Text (or speech) may be the new GUI. Of course we will have to know a lot more about parsing and extracting meaning and identity from these streams of conciousness.