patterns of interaction

Twitter, blogs, wikis, facebook, google docs. It is all just text on a screen with maybe a picture of video thrown in. What makes it all interesting and each one unique? Patterns of interaction. The Web 2.0 startup world was one huge experiment with new patterns of interaction. The old ones from print media no longer applied, so what then? It was in a way a grab. Grab each pattern of interaction you could find. Tweak a successful one slightly to see if you could create a more successful one. There was no way to predict what would work. I am reminded of the story of how Edison had a team that experimented with thousands of different materials until they found one that would work as a long-lasting lightbulb filament. Twitter sounded stupid to most people when it started. Maybe there was something there. But what was it? No one one knew.

Now twitter is in the process of reshaping how people communicate electronically. It is a service that is the basis of a revolution of instant notifications.

Really, all we need to do is perhaps reshape and redirect the way the text flows on a page, and we have a new pattern of interaction. Possibly the next step in an evolution or revolution of communication.

All this is to say to myself: Keep iterating on the communication services (e.g. blogs@psu) that I am working on. Keep offering different configurations of how pages are published. As we get more and more of the basic structure of the service settled, we can move to supporting more varied patterns of interaction.