hyalineskies

During the dot-com era, it seemed that people were finding ways to use computers and the Internet to do absolutely everything - clothing, grocery shopping, vacuuming, lawn mowing, you name it - and people quickly jumped on the e-commerce bandwagon. Most of these cool tech ideas failed because people realised that it was simply more efficient (or at the very least, cheaper) to walk down the street and get their own groceries or do their laundry at the laundromat. In that most obvious way, the “tech lifestyle” for everything has since died, but it seems that there are still plenty of startup companies doing the same thing, only using trendy technology upon trendy technology instead of making a way for one to do something as absurd as use the bathroom over the Internet.

Some people at work are in constant negotiations to bring podcasting to the site with little knowledge of what the technology’s actually good for - that’s a separate issue altogether - but while doing so, I came across this golden quote in my Inbox by the podcasting company’s chief technical officer:

I’ll add that we plan to offer BitTorrent feeds of the content, but we don’t want to depend on it–iTunes doesn’t support it, and probably won’t for a long time, if ever. (There is a way around this shortcoming, but, again, I’d rather not depend on it.)

This is what happened to the “tech for everything” bandwagon; once the general populace wouldn’t accept the innovations of the technologists, they assumed that the technologists themselves would.

Personally, I think podcasting is an odd trend, and since I get any content I need from my Treo on the go, I never really bought into the whole craze merging the trendy RSS with the aging-yet-now-mainstream MP3.

Don’t get me wrong - I think syndicated audio content has valid uses - but I have no interest in things that podcasts are generally useful for. I can understand podcasting, but i don’t see any necessity in doing what the CTO said, combining XML/RSS, MP3, and torrents. I replied to the CTO with my gut reaction:

Also, why would we want to use torrents for feeds? It seems like needless use of trendy technology, considering very few people would seed them for very long at all.

After all, it made valid sense. Sure, some geeks would love the idea and pounce on it, but it serves no practical purpose in an age where companies use content delivery services like Akamai. He replied to my question with a rather fierce rebuttal:

In fact, I see this as a nearly ideal application of a technology that just happens to be trendy. It doesn’t matter how long people seed them; it just matters that a file currently in demand (a particular day’s podcast) is covered by lots of peers.

Our situation is made even better because most of our clients will be on the same high-speed network, so it makes a lot of sense for them to be downloading from each other rather than hitting the origin server. In effect, the effect of using BitTorrent is a lot like using Akamai–you get a high-speed cache close to the clients, only without the high cost.

Many existing podcasters are using BitTorrent to great success–and many of them are finding themselves in a pickle from all the non-Torrent traffic Apple’s sending them.

It was at this point that I honestly figured out what the problem with the bandwagon nouveau was, and why so many other tech startups failed in 1998-2000: technologists, developers, and technology-industry creatives totally miss the target demographic.

It’s a rather obviously fatal vulnerability to startups: one cannot assume that either everybody’s a geek or those who aren’t will quickly adopt multiple layers of trendy technology and make it sufficiently, truly mainstream outside of the niche of the technology enthusiast. You must survey the demographic before throwing them into the technological recipe to drown in acronyms. It’s not the kind of thing that most geeks seem to understand when most of their own lives revolve around equally geeky friends and early adoption of the great new thing®. It’s a business and marketing thing. It’s a social thing. Sadly, it’s also somewhat of a UX (user experience) thing.

The non-technical management (I’m the lead of Internet design and technology at my work, so I guess I’m the only technical management) wants to create podcasted content so those detached from print circulation and the website can access our content. It’s an entirely valid point. What my colleagues have failed to examine, though, is not only what that demographic has interest in, but, most importantly for the purpose of this article, not what the demographic is technologically capable of, but rather what they feel is technologically comfortable.

Podcasting in itself is a stretch for the common non-webmonkey; fot that matter, podcasting is a feature that is probably rarely used at all by the majority of those who own iPods and have the capability already built-in to their software and devices on a basic level. The digital audio revolution took years to saturate the mainstream, and people assume that podcasting will saturate the mainstream essentially overnight?

With more and more technology becoming mainstream, however, it may very well be possible to teach the mainstream how to use podcasts in a simple tutorial (assuming that they already have iPods,) but few will take the time or waste their brainpower when the opportunity cost of using print or screen media instead is negligible and almost mathematically zero given their already-learned familiarity with the usage of print (the target demographic is literate) and screen (the target demographic can use Firefox Internet Explorer.)

On top of that technological hurdle, it is ludicrous to believe that you will teach people how to use a BitTorrent client. I’ve been working on computers since age six and coding since age ten, and BitTorrent even slightly confused me for half an hour or so when I first used it. When the average user is sent a .torrent file in an RSS newsfeed to their RSS reader and Windows asks what kind of program opens that extension - and offers something entirely useless “automatically” - what are these users going to do? They won’t even get that far. I doubt most of them have RSS newsreaders let alone want to deal with a torrented podcast that isn’t directly supported by iTunes, if they even have iTunes. It is at this point that the common technologist fails to recognise that they have avalanched into a UX nightmare for the end user, and very few people - even the geeks - care enough to bother, regardless of content or projected “convenience”, since the initial act of retrieving and synchronising the podcast takes more time than walking slightly out of your way to grab a print copy or just using a web browser to read screen content. Even now, I’m still holding the downfalls of the actual print-to-podcast content negligible. It just gets to a point where the layers of technological obscurity lose a user’s interest. This is exactly what the geeks don’t get, and they lose a lot of their possible audience (and venture capital) in the trendiness of technological progress.