Do we need a people protocol? Most of the Internet protocols are software orientated, by which I mean that the two entities communicating with each other are software processes dealing with such abstractions as files, folders, messages and so forth.

Should a protocol exist that allows a software abstraction of a real person to communicate with another person as though the software endpoints were in fact people, not inboxes, folders and so on? This makes sense now that social networking is moving towards centre stage in our networked lives, as well as other increasingly important developments, like virtual worlds. Moreover, as far as mobile is concerned, mobile services today are essentially person-to-person in nature.

As multi-modal communications continue to evolve, by which we mean all the ways that we now ‘converse’ using digital technology (e.g. blog comments, Facebook walls, IM, Twitter etc.), the need for an integrated protocol begins to emerge. By this, I don’t mean SIP, which is a means for two end-points to connect and then open a channel for communication, having negotiated first the nature of that channel (i.e. session). The end-points could be anything, although invariably, in applications like VoIP and IM, they are indeed controlled by people. Besides, is conversation and human interaction session based? Perhaps, although this is an abstraction. No one thinks of his or herself conducting a session, do they? A conversation, perhaps - an enquiry, a greeting, a prompt, an exchange of ideas, a liaison, an argument, a debate, a rant, but not a session. [Don't get me wrong - there's nothing 'wrong' with SIP. It operates at a different level to what I'm exploring here.]

As I also discussed in an earlier post about challenges for Mobile 2.0 architectures, the current separation of the ‘content plane’ from the ‘real-time communications plane’ needs addressing if we are going to allow the browser to become the presentation layer for both of these planes, if something like Adobe Air doesn’t get there first. For the time being, or perhaps for the foreseeable future, I believe strongly that the architecture for Mobile 2.0 should be strongly person-centric, as should the UI. I’d love a kind of CoverFlow for people, although I think that a circular UI makes more sense, as in circle of friends - with circles hanging off circles etc. Spin through them using a thumbwheel or some other flow-as-I-touch interface.

In fact, if we consider the world of mobile communications and a good deal of web ‘communications’ (e.g. social networking), then the inner state machine around which we build services could easily be based on people. Essentially, this is what communications boils down to anyway. People go through a series of states in relation to a number of tasks and emotional needs that we wish to fulfil or carry out. More often than not, these states are intimately connected with the states of others. This even appears to work with objects: the personification (’reification’) of real-world objects is something we do naturally - we think of ‘talking’ to the bank, ‘asking’ the bank and so on. The concept of tracking people-states is why I like the lifestreams metaphor - our thoughts, ideas and communications as a continuous stream of events through time. This is a much better model than the unified messaging concept once touted as the future of telecoms.

The unit of exchange in the Web world is the page. The unit of exchange in SIP is really the session, or the message. Human beings do not communicate in terms of pages, sessions or messages. These are merely abstractions and tools that are a hang-over from previous tools and technologies. In the world of software, we can create any type of object we like and use it to model the real world - this was the promise of object-orientated design, and I still remember the excitement of discovering this way of thinking about software. So we can just as easily use software, in theory, to model a conversation, idea or thought as an object as we can a message, a call, a page or a note.

For me, this is where the innovation should have been in ‘next-generation’ mobile communications these past ten years - evolving our key communications tools (i.e. mobile phones) from voice-connecting devices to social-connecting devices. I advocated this as part of the Zingo portal I invented for Lucent back in 1998 before we had social networks on the web. Instead, telephony has remained largely static and lots of time and energy has been spent grafting a non-optimal mobile computing feature onto the side. What we need is the ultimate social-connectivity device.

Throw out the rule book and re-invent the mobile network and device from the ground up around the social networking paradigm and I think we end up with something totally different to what we have today - a new loci for mobile innovation.

People have states - emotional states, connectivity states, activity states and many more. I have almost never seen this consideration in mobile application and service design, except for the crude representation of presence within the IMPS standard for IM. Instead, we act as though we think that the world actually consists of objects called ‘phone calls’ and ‘texts’. This is why operators have for so long considered themselves as solving a ‘phone call’ problem, which they have done so brilliantly. (We often overlook the fantastic levels of innovation that have made the mobile voice call possible.) However, once the problem had been solved, then, like so many other businesses, the attention was shifted to a ‘branding’ problem - how best to influence the customer that using your particular brand of voice call and texting is better than anyone else’s, whilst they are actually the same. We didn’t look deeper at what the underlying and associated communication and interaction needs were, except for a very crude distinction categorisation of business and consumer needs.

With this mindset still prevalent, we are evolving legacy networks to IP networks (i.e. SIP) by simply re-creating the same network in an IP flavour. We shouldn’t knock this, as it does have the potential to deliver a vast range of new services, except that it won’t whilst we still think we are solving a phone call problem, now elevated to the loftier - and admittedly more useful - ‘rich-communications problem’ (which, by the way, isn’t what most Web 2.0 architects mean by rich communications). In essence, the new all-IP networks abstract the world as made of communications circuits (now called sessions), not made up of people and relationships, both of which have very different attributes to connections. This is an ongoing reverberation of the fact that we once built physical connections (i.e. telegraph wires) to communicate. Connections are also a strong metaphors in mathematics, especially in graph theory. No surprise that a lot of people these days talk about social graphs.

In a people world, we have the concept of friends, associates, close friends, family, peers, and other people states. Historically, telco connections know nothing of these states. Operators only superimpose such notions onto connection when devising services like friends and family calling plans.

More importantly, we are entering an age in which it is possible to capture and understand the context of our interaction. We can record all of this data - lifestreams - and search it, mine it and share it. It is now possible to record every phone call I ever make, who I made it to, where I was when I made it, and so much other contextual information. Only in a software world made up of people, do I get a more meaningful and useful world in which to capture, model and process context. For example, how was I feeling when I wrote this blog post, made a call; what I was intending, and so on. As we increasingly become aware of such ideas as emotional intelligence, we begin to understand that we need ways to substantially incorporate these new tools into our lives. What better way than to use software to assist us? A person-centric model of the world can incorporate such ideas. A communication-link centric view of the world cannot.

Whilst working for Motorola, I led the architecture for an innovative MVNO client, a leading youth brand in Europe with a refreshing take on the mobile world. Our vision for the service was to revolve everything around people, with an extended IM buddy list as the foundation. There wasn’t any service in the portfolio where sharing, interacting and carrying out some task with another person, or group, wasn’t immediately accessible with a click or two. However, there were a number of significant technical obstacles to making this happen. I couldn’t help thinking that we were trying to do with mobile platforms was what they should have been designed to do in the first place - allowing people to connect, interact and share, not just to talk.

Related topics of interest:

Technorati Tags: people protocol, Mobile 2.0, CoverFlow, lifestreams, social networking, social graphs, emotional intelligence, Micro Formats

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