As technology continues to accelerate forward, it's become even more critical to mask away the complexities of how things work and to just make them work. Period. Thanks to the likes of Apple, user experience isn't "something we should think about" anymore. It's a key differentiator. A better-designed anything will win.

A hallmark of strong experience design is to take things away. To only reveal – almost magically – what the user really needs at a given point in time. Taking this to its end, an odd sort of irony emerges. To build a great experience, you in fact take control of things. The net result is less freedom, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. While it's ok to interact sometimes, a great experience feels a bit like you're on a sort of pre-scripted ride. You almost feel like you're gliding along.

Now let's really take this to its end. What is the greatest user experience possible? How does it feel to be shrunken down to 1/100th your size and dropped into a world built by the greatest designers around? What if the experience appealed to not only our intuition but our aesthetic sensibilities? What if it seemed to present a world that magically seemed one step ahead of us? What would that world look like?

Well, it would probably look something like this: 

The above is the town (or fictional town) featured in The Truman Show, Peter Weir's beautifully realized world where Truman (Jim Carrey) is thrown in from birth into the ultimate reality show where everything is perfectly constructed (or "designed" if you will) for Truman. The film documents Truman's struggle with this perfectly situated place where nothing out of the ordinary happens. Throughout the film, Truman can't bear all this sterile perfection around him. He longs for more. He finds himself suffocating underneath all that pristine predictability and longs to escape into anywhere else.

See here's the thing: human beings have a problem with perfection. We all think we want it. We sort of strive for it. But when we get it, we sort of die a little. We stop moving. We grow restless. We get depressed. We tried this already. It's called the 1950's. The outcome of our weak little attempt at a Utopian vision was…well…the 1960's. We ran towards chaos and mayhem and drugs and rock & roll and creativity and disorder.

The Human Web

Humanity began casting its reflection about twenty years ago and it is the World Wide Web. It's messy, beautiful, disgusting, inspiring, offensive and glorious all at once. It was conceived without limitation or boundary and the whole of the world poured itself into it. There's a lot of crap on the Web, but from that mayhem incredible things have emerged. Amazing voices, images, tools, applications. Twitter. Facebook. Basecamp. Google! Google rose out of that swamp.

Apple's Evil Ways (Or Not)

I'm not going to sit here and deride Apple for offering us a .5 inch thick version of suburbia. Apple is a commercial entity that realizes that the Web is a big, bad, confusing and sometimes dangerous place. A place littered with filth and scams and all sorts of mayhem. To the detractors that bitch that the iPad is "closed," all I'd say is: "I hear you. Don't buy one. Go build your Ubuntu box or whatever else you want to toy around with."

The iPad is a beautiful, inviting piece of engineering. To use Apple's words, it's "intimate" and "magical." It's…I dunno…comforting in a twisted sort of way. Seeing Steve Jobs settle into a lounge chair and cradle it sent signals of casual submission. This thing is about passive consumption, not exploration.

Side Streets

Growing up in New York, I was always dumbfounded at the big Red Lobster and Olive Garden in Times Square. I would ask myself: why would you travel to the greatest restaurant city on earth and go back to Red Lobster? Eventually, I came to understand that most people aren't explorers. Most people just want what's familiar.

But thank God for the explorers. The amazing achievements we have in technology today – including Apple's – are built atop the discoveries that arose out of those swirls of chaos. The iPad isn't for the explorers. It's for everyone else. Thankfully, there are many places to go to scratch that itch. You can take a cab downtown away from Times Square and find yourself at a dive that serves the best Indian food in town. Thankfully, the more adventurous among us have options.

What is a bit disheartening is that Apple is evolving into more of a leaf of the ecosystem rather than a node. It represents this pinnacle in design and engineering but is laser-focused on it's own sustenance and growth. Google, for all its faults, buys into the ecosystem and feeds back to it. Apple doesn't. Again, this isn't meant as a judgment towards Apple. As a commercial entity, they can do whatever the hell they please. They're filling a very real need out there. They built a beautiful and relatively safe place for people to go.

We should all take Apple's lead in caring about and building great experiences for users. Apple is not evil. They build great experiences. They built a beautiful place for people to go. What the world needs isn't less Apple but more Apples. More enriching experiences. More options. More beautiful places to go. The Web is capable of anything…including hosting beautiful places to go. Apple isn't scary. Having only one Apple is scary.

The iPad will undoubtedly be a world class product. Nobody doubts that. Still, after a few hours of a pristinely designed experience, we'll hit that Web browser. Thank God for the side streets leading out of Times Square. Because in the end, we will venture out. We always do.

It's a powerful phrase. It's one of those rare quotes that itself is illustrative of what it's trying to say. If we decompress it, we're really saying something like "If you show less, then each thing you show carries more weight."

Taking the thought a bit further, I'd assert that less isn't only more, "less" is often essential to success. Conversely, "more" often leads to failure. When we release a product, we often want to talk about its power and versatility. Truth is, nobody else wants to hear about that. They want to know – in as simple a manner as possible – why something should matter to them.

It's a beautifully produced concept of how a magazine of the future could take shape. What intrigued me isn't what it does. We're fairly close, technically, to pulling off what Bonnier is envisioning. I was more interested in what it didn't propose to do. It isn't:

• A Netbook tablet
• A portable computer
• A Google OS
• A Wifi/3G/Wimax/4G/whatever-enabled device

It's not any of those things. It's purpose is singular and simple to digest: it's a modern form of the magazine. It embodies the casual experience around interacting with a magazine and nothing more.

Many would suggest that this needs to be a browser that can do anything that a Web browser of today could do, but that would actually harm the narrative around the product. Yes, it's a narrow in scope, but that's the power of it.

Rewind back ten years. There were phones out there that were handling email. Some had slide-out keyboards. The Palm Treo was taking hold. If I had proposed to you that I had an idea for a small phone that would effectively become synonymous with portable email, you would've laughed me out of the room. The Blackberry didn't do more than other phones at the time. Instead, it became synonymous with a single basic task: interacting with email on your phone.

Rewind back again. What if I had an idea for a portable device that focused on one single task: recording video. Again, you would've trampled on the idea. "Just about every digital camera lets you record video. Hell, many phones have video!" Again, it would've been tough to stomach the idea of a device that does just one thing. Yet both the Blackberry and Flip Video stories are important lessons.

They teach us not only that less is more, but also that more is an impediment to adoption. People don't want to figure out what to do with your product. They want you to draw a straight line between your product and a simple, digestible purpose. The more "powerful, flexible and versatile" your product is, the more alien it's going to appear to the great majority of people that may take a glance at it.

Ultimately, it's about the "Sentence Test." If you can't convey what your product does in a simple, single sentence, then you've already cast off a huge swath of your potential audience. There's one other wrinkle to this. Lean on what people know and build on that. Everyone knows about the "magazine experience." The Bonnier video resonates because we can make that leap from "today" to their vision of the future.

You may think you have something so mind-blowing that nobody's going to understand it. Their lies the wrinkle. To blow minds, you first have to get inside of them. And to get inside, less isn't only more, it's essential.

The Web today is understood to be "free" in the broadest sense. Here's the general stereotype around the Web today:

Don't put toll booths all over the Web. Let me go where I please and don't charge me money to see anything I want. It's ok to advertise because I understand you need to make money somehow, but don't charge me for content.

The above is buttressed by the loftier, more romantic notions around freedom (of both choice and information) and the general notion that the Web is the great democratizer of today. Anyone can publish, distribute and consume content on the Web today with very little cost or effort.

Welcome to the Junkyard

With such preconceived notions firmly in place, the people that create and deliver quality content on the Web (and by "quality" I don't mean your sister-in-law's blog) have created what amounts to an experience akin to wading through a junkyard. Ads on top, on the side, sliding down, peeling off, exploding. It's an awful experience.

It's so awful, in fact, that I believe that people will pay good money to experience a different kind of Web. This isn't just about delivering an "ad free" version of the New York Times. It's about creating an experience that is engaging, elegant and worthy of distinction.

We make this distinction all the time in the real world. VIP areas in clubs. First class and business class in airlines. Higher-end versions of all sorts of products from cars to coats to dog food. People have shown they're willing to pay for a better experience. In fact, a better experience is the primary differentiator. The extra $2.50 you pay into your Starbucks coffee isn't about the coffee. It's about the place, the quality of the cup and lid and yes – it's a bit about the coffee too.

Shun the Web at Your Own Peril

A few months ago, the New York Times released a product called the NY Times Reader. It's a desktop application that presents a cleaner, less-cluttered experience around reading the Times. They charge money for it (it's free to the paper's subscribes). It's a nice little app but my guess is the Times isn't seeing much traction on the Reader (I don't know this for certain, but my guess it's a niche market for such a tool).

So if people are willing to pay for that elevated experience, why didn't the Times Reader take off? It didn't take off is that it isn't the Web. It's this whole other thing that the world didn't really need. The Times feared the stereotype of the Web described above. They could've created a first class experience right in your Web browser, but they feared repercussions of putting a wall up on the Web.

Why?

Why not keep on delivering the same'ol NY Times with flying Apple ads to the masses for free and also deliver a World Class version of the Times that really takes it to another level in my browser? Would people pay for it? I think they would. As Readability has shown, people are crying out for a better reading experience inside their Web browser. While all the love for Readability has done wonders for Arc90's collective self-esteem, let's not kid ourselves. It's not that people love Readability, it's that they hate what the Web has become.

The thought shift that needs to occur isn't around charging money to see content. It's about charging money for a better experience. I want the equivalent of an Admiral's Club at the airport. I want to sip my wine and read the Wall Street Journal while the masses stumble over their bags trying to get through security.

The hurdle the NY Times and others need to get past is the overwhelming fear around messing with our view of what the "free Web" is today. App stores charge money for mobile "apps" and nobody flinches because they're not viewed as part of the Web. Desktop software enjoys the same general perception.

Eventually, someone's going to plant a stake in the ground and have a go at it. And eventually, something is going to stick. Content on the Web today reminds me of how music was littered all over Napster's scrap yard years ago. Yes, it was free, but it was one big stinkin' mess. "Yes, it was messy, but would people every pay for music?" I think that question's already been answered.

We need the iTunes experience for today's Web content.

And this isn’t only about the cumulative short attention span at Arc90. A handful of friends have told me that they hardly ever play their Wii’s anymore. The narrative is fairly similar across the board: “we bought it, played bowling and stuff like crazy and then we just sort of…stopped.”

Beyond my circle of acquaintances, Nintendo is reporting that sales of the Wii are slowing considerably. They cite a few different reasons, but it’s all a fairly strange turn for a product that I and many others were gushing over as a great example of innovative, forward-thinking design. We lauded the approachability of such a simple and intuitive platform. It attracted such an incredibly broad audience beyond the hardcore gamers. From the elderly in retirement homes to little kids barely past first grade, everyone loved their Wii’s (at least for a while).

So what happened?

Before trying to figure out what happened, it’s worth mentioning that the Wii is still, by just about any measure, a resounding success. With less impressive, but more innovative hardware, Nintendo rose from the ashes to become a major player yet again in the console market.

That said, it could be argued that one of Nintendo’s brilliant strokes: to appeal to a much broader, less technically savvy market, actually ended up putting an expiration date on the appeal of the Wii. By winning over the unwashed masses and not just the “gamer” demographic, the Wii’s appeal declined almost as quickly as it rose. In other words, the Wii became a fad.

Merriam Webster defines a fad as “a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal.” (emphasis added). Oddly for the Wii, one of the reasons it became a fad are the very reasons it was so wildly successful in the first place. It was easy to pick up and play. The initial batch of games lacked any perceivable depth or complexity and it was just plain fun to wave around a controller. It was a novel experience that nearly everyone could relate to.

As the next round of game releases started to hit the Wii, that same audience had no interest in them. The novelty of waving around a controller wore off and newer titles that were more complex or required more of an up-front time investment weren’t appealing to the population that had found the Wii so compelling in the first place.

And what of the hardcore gamers? They never bothered to come over to the Wii in the first place. It was the gift you bought grandma. You still needed your Xbox 360 to play Grand Theft Auto.

One of the design lessons that can be learned from the Wii’s story to date is to think long and hard about how we can create things that are both welcoming and captivating but also have an eye towards longevity. It’s one thing to initially capture someone’s interest. It’s a whole other matter to have a longstanding, evolving relationship with its user.

In all fairness, the Wii did about as much as it could to succeed with the demographic it won over. While my grandma may love bowling and think it’s an absolute blast, she will never, I repeat never go to Gamestop and pick up a few new Wii games. In fact, she doesn’t even know that games are on DVD’s in the first place. She just turns it on and bowls. That may well be the crux of the issue. The Wii made such a powerful first impression that it narrowly defined itself. It became novelty, no different than the Rubik’s Cube or Beanie Babies.

So be warned product designers, be novel, but be careful. People love to stereotype, and once they do, it’s pretty hard to break out of it.

Basement.org has often been pegged as a bitch-and-rant blog that just does a whole lot of complaining and not much doing. That’s probably true to some extent. I like to think basement.org is for bitching, while Arc90 is for doing.

Still, I’m kind of proud of some (by all means not all) of the stuff that’s made it onto this blog. It’s still a young, fumbling kindergartner today. Hopefully it’ll pay attention at school, eat its vegetables and have a generally well-adjusted childhood.

Above all else, I hope I can keep the curiosity and desire to look forward in place. In many ways, this blog is about daydreaming, as corny as that sounds. The real world gets plenty of press these days. It’s more fun to daydream.

Note: If you’d like to check out some of the more popular posts, here’s a list from 2007.

Beyond the technology that seemed to be materializing, a new philosophy was taking hold. This new movement was demystifying and knocking down the walls that had surrounded software building since software building began. Technology was no longer the sole domain of engineers and computer scientists. It was now capable of being exposed to good strategic thinking and thoughtful design. The walls were coming down.

Back in 2004, as I paced around my apartment in Atlanta all giddy with optimism, my cousin, an MBA student at the time, decided to sober me up and demanded I write down my thoughts of what I thought this so-called company represents. At first I was agitated that he didn’t want to just join the celebration. Eventually, I begrudgingly agreed to do a bit of homework.

He asked me to draft a vision document. I’ve actually been able to dig it up. Here is Arc90’s mission statement from five years ago :

Arc90 is a consulting firm that provides strategic and tactical talent that is trained and skilled in learning and understanding business domains and the challenges business face. Once domain knowledge is obtained, a unique problem-solving methodology is applied that welds together a strong grasp of technology trends and sound design methodologies to deliver tangible, compelling solutions to businesses.

Not bad. That vision has actually held up pretty well. Beyond that definition of “consulting firm” we’ve ventured out into product as well with Kindling, our idea management tool for companies. We’ve also been fortunate enough to have partnered with forward-looking clients that were in tune with our vision and had faith in our ability to deliver.

Looking back, it’s been an incredible five years. All the while, we went to great lengths to share our ideas and occasional experiment on our lab, and talked about all sorts of topics on our blog, but we never really bothered to tell the world who we really are…until now. Our new Web presence has just launched and it’s incredibly exciting to finally share a bit about ourselves and what we do with the rest of the world.

If you peel back all the marketing buzz and catchphrases, Arc90 is the sum total of a great group of people that share a passion for creating awesome, game-changing technology products. It’s this talented group that has made that vision a reality…and then some. This team is Arc90.

While it’s great to look back and share some of our achievements, we are all about looking forward and peeking around the bend. It’s part of our DNA. Whether for a particular client or in the halls of our lab, it’s this innovative forward-looking approach to design and development that has allowed us to thrive over the years.

I can’t wait to see what we come up with next…

This is solid evidence that Google has lost its collective mind. The Internet is about links and connecting content to content. I felt slightly stupid when I clicked on what looked like a search box in one of the snapshots only to find out it’s not a search box but an image of one.

Is there research out there that supports the theory that people want visual artifacts (in the form of snapshots, thumbnails and the like) vs. the actual content? Searchme, a cover flow-style search engine, tried to fulfill a similar phantom need. They raised a ton of venture capital to deliver this visual browse search engine. Nobody cared and now they’re gone.

What’s interesting about this tool is that it’s the anti-Readability. Instead of helping us get rid of the junk around what we’re trying to read, Google fossilized the layout - junk and all - in images.

Bizarre.

But alas, there are patterns out there. Here are some familiar and fairly common user experiences:

• You visit a restaurant Website. Some lounge music kicks in while a Flash movie loads in that pans across a dimly lit interior. You fish around for some links and find the menu. In a bizarre marriage of technologies that we’ve grown to accept, the menu gets handed to you in PDF format.
• A friend points you to a band that is supposedly worth checking out. You type the band name into Google and the Myspace link is predictably within the first three results. You click on it and rummage through somewhere between 400 and 1,000 pixels of garbage to get to that familiar Myspace audio player.
• You visit Facebook and glance down your social stream of activity.
• You visit Twitter and glance at all the chatter coming from the people you follow.
• You click through a Youtube link and end up on Youtube and just watch stuff.
• Your run-of-the-mill corporate site navigation (sing it with me): Home – Products – Services – About Us – Contact Us (with some variation).
• The familiar information flow of any Wikipedia page.

Even though the Web is generally an ungodly mess, we find ourselves – as users – seeking out patterns around how certain information is displayed. In fact, while we all can appreciate some creativity and out-of-the-proverbial-box thinking, we really, really appreciate consistency. As users, we love it when templates are used on the Web. Despite how shitty restaurant sites are (and yes, they’re all shitty), we’ve hard-wired how they work and grown to understand their common characteristics, warts and all.

One of the reasons Arc90’s Readability resonated with so many people is that it empowered users of the Web to impose consistency around nearly any article-based content on the Web. It’s helpful that the tool removed a lot of clutter, but it’s #1 feature, in my opinion, is the application of a consistent representation of content.

It may come across as a bit of depraved soul-sucking to suggest that we all start to appreciate the common patterns on the Web rather than try to be unique or original. This isn’t about the shiny top-coating of the Web. It’s about the skeletal pieces that make up how things are structured. You can design a car a million different ways, but stick to what people know: steering wheel, pedals and stick shift.

Put differently, your users are building an expertise – an expertise on how to get around on the Web - that you should lean on and respect. The trick is to bring your own character, style and inviting elements of surprise while still relying upon and rewarding that expertise.

There is always news. Regardless of how newsworthy particular information is, newspapers have to put out the morning paper. No matter how little or no news there is, we’re still going to get “the news” every day.

Every so often, the newspapers resort to banal gossip pieces for the front cover (if they’re the New York Post) or featured investigative reporting that isn’t necessarily timely (if they’re the New York Times). This happens when there really isn’t anything major to report.

Take a look at these old Techmeme headlines. It’s a page full of news from May 2009, but really it isn’t news. It’s just what’s being talked about at any given time in the constant 24-hour information stock exchange that is the Internet.

An often-cited reason for the looming downfall of newspapers goes something like this: “the Internet blew away the Old Media’s monopoly on information.” Yes, we can get news instantly, all the time and from an endless array of sources. But the Internet did something else to the news. By putting everyone on a 120MPH highway, it left very little room for value judgment and discretion around what is or isn’t worth talking about. Take a look at any highly successful blog or new media source and you’ll find 50-100 posts per day. If Samsung comes out with a higher capacity battery for one of their mobile phones, Gizmodo is going to write about it.

The collateral damage isn’t so obvious but it’s undoubtedly there. Amidst my 400 unread Boing Boing links are probably ten or fifteen that are probably real gems. But I’ll never know and Boing Boing sure as hell isn’t going to help me out. The strange irony here is that the end result isn’t more information, it’s less. Instead of wading through the 400 posts, I simply ignore them all. I just try convince myself: “the good stories will somehow find me.”

These days, they’re finding me less and less. Someone needs to package it up for me on a daily basis. Maybe deliver it in a nice readable form every morning…

Konigi recently posted an entry entitled Realizations of Rounded Rectangles, where he points to a bit of Mac history (folklore?) on UI&us. It’s an interesting tale of how Steve Jobs demanded roundedness in everything on the interface. Still, the most illuminating thought comes from Professor Jürg Nänni, a scholar on visual cognition:

A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort than for example an ellipse of the same size. Our “fovea-eye” is even faster in recording a circle. Edges involve additional neuronal image tools. The process is therefore slowed down.”

Professor Nänni is saying that rounded rectangles are literally easier on the eye. Put another way, compared to square-edged rectangles, rounded rectangles are more computationally efficient for the human brain. To me, this is a revelation. An idea that at the very least demands more investigation.

Looking back, the original rationale I threw out wasn’t too far off. It’s a fascinating puzzle and speaks to the intersection between visual aesthetics and interaction design.

I’m sure this isn’t the end of the debate. Nevertheless…progress!

I wish I could just click a button and remove the pressure. I like Boing Boing, but I don’t like Boing Boing enough to wade through 634 posts. Then again, it would have never reached that number had I liked them more.

Hmmm, maybe I don’t like Boing Boing after all. Unsubscribe?

The more attractive something (or someone) is, the more we’re willing to tolerate its flaws.

When something is beautiful, we’ll work with it just a bit more, despite its inadequacies. We do this because we want to be associated with beautiful things. We want to build relationships with beautiful things (same for beautiful people). We want to evangelize them. We want to become a part of them.

When one becomes obsessed with a beautiful object, it isn’t because we want that object to come into our own personal world. It’s in fact the reverse. We want to enter its world. Of course, that thing that we found to be so beautiful at first glance may actually have some awful flaws. Really expensive yet excruciatingly uncomfortable shoes come to mind. We want it to work out so badly.

Here is my theory in a beautifully elegant visual form (also known as “data visualization.”):

So what’s the moral of this blog post? When you’re building stuff, make it usable but also make it attractive. I mean, we should all be aiming for both, but not everything can be Brad Pitt.

The music industry is in turmoil due to an amalgamation of factors:

• The Internet has arrived. Distribution of just about anything that can exist in digital form will change forever. Your big box retailer of compact discs instantly looks like a relic.
• People have found ways to compress audio into a manageable size without sacrificing very much in audio quality. Not only has the distribution piping been laid down, but the packages are light and easy to transport.
• Napster and its brethren come into existence. Decentralized peer-to-peer farmer’s markets crop up everywhere, compounding the nightmare for the music industry.

The music industry does what any industry would do when their precious commodity – in this case music – is suddenly as available as paper towels at your local YMCA restroom. It’s a scary place to find yourself. The natural reaction is to wrap your arms around that content and hold on for dear life. After all, it is your bread and butter.

As a result, the music industry lights a ring of fire around its content and fires on sight at anyone that tries to steal it. All of their energy and focus is spent to somehow contain the damage and retaining the perceived value of their content.

Because content is where all the value lies right? Wrong.

Throughout this siege, another player showed up that virtually hijacked the entire industry based on one very basic tenet: build a best-of-breed experience around these newly found conveniences. Apple doesn’t come from a content-worshipping culture. They build and sell hardware and software. They understood that if they built a great experience around the content, they would win.

And win they did. Who would’ve guessed that a closed ecosystem that spans hardware and software that charges money would beat out tools that let you get at the content for free. While the content owners were fretting about their content, they failed to realize what really mattered in the eyes of their customers: new conveniences, stylish easy-to-use products and reasonable pricing.

It wasn’t about getting stuff for free. The iPod/iTunes ecosystem is testament to the fact that people are willing to pay for a quality experience, even if there are fringe alternatives out there for free. The mistake the content owners made was that they believed their content had value in a vacuum. It doesn’t. Content is part of the experience.

The funny thing is we’re seeing this play out all over again, and it looks like it’s headed towards the same ending. Newspapers, magazine publishers and book publishers are the new music industry; worrying and fretting and battling to protect their content. Meanwhile, Amazon is investing in building a great user experience for people that like to read. The perusal, purchasing and reading of content is what they’re focusing on. Since they don’t have any content to worship (like Apple) they’re just thinking about delivering a great experience. Attract the masses, gain mindshare and then go back to the content owners with a platform.

I suppose it only makes sense that such innovations continue to come from somewhere else. It’s hard to let go of how you value your stuff. Some content creators are trying. The New York Times recently came out with a refresh of their New York Times Reader. It’s an elegant, clean way to read the New York Times content. It’s a better user experience. Still, it’s only the New York Times content. Imagine EMI records coming out with their own flavor of iTunes. Makes sense from a business perspective, nonsensical from a user perspective.

Content owners need to come to a few realizations:

• Nobody cares about carrying over the physical constraints of content into the digital realm. In fact, it’s a nuisance. They want granular control and they want to pick and choose their stuff.
• Consumers are willing to pay for a great user experience and if it’s an incredible user experience, will pay a premium (see Apple).
• Your content is transient (to varying degrees, depending on the content). It may spike in value then dissipate quickly or it may last a few months.

iTunes, Hulu and recently the Kindle (to a smaller extent..so far) are winning these markets by building a new way to interact with and experience content. They all come from cultures where they understand that the meaning of “content ownership” is changing and that people will still spend money if it’s wrapped in a great experience.

When we released Readability a few months ago, the response was astounding. This seemingly innocuous little tool that cleans up Web pages to make it easier for you to read clearly hit a nerve. People hated the reading experience on the Web. They love the content and want the content, but they despise the experience around it. This pain is less about needing a reading device and more about an utterly lousy experience on the Web. Would people pay for that experience? Is there a way to handle advertising in a less obnoxious (read: more effective) way? I think so. The history of technology is littered with good intentions, false starts and great successes that take those false starts and simply wrap them in good design.

Content owners are praying to the wrong God. In this new world, their content is valuable only in the right contextual experiences. While they worship, someone else will build that experience and invite them to sit at the table later.

And reluctantly, they will come. They always do.