AN ONLINE SERVICE FOR THE FUTURE

Brian Hammerstein, Microsoft’s former senior multimedia evangelist, provides consulting services to media companies interested in CD-ROM, online and Inter-net publishing. He can be reached at Hammerstei@aol.com.

It is time for a fundamental shift in the way we communicate and navigate online. Today, a person using an electronic online service must go through a laborious process of manual navigation, involving a hodgepodge of hierarchies, keywords and brands, in order to find desired information.

THEY KNOW WHO YOU ARE

Contrast this with the following scenario, which for now has more in common with a science fiction novel than reality, although several major software and publishing companies as well as existing online providers claim to be working toward this goal. (For more on future online services, see p. 13 and 18.)

Upon my first use of what I will call a next-generation online service, a friendly cartoon character appears on screen and presents me with a scripted questionnaire. Appearing as an innocent group of 20 questions or so that one might ask or answer in pleasant social conversation, it ascertains my interests in detail. The service saves the information in a profile stored on the service and uses it to bring me — without my asking — relevant information when I am online. In short, the service “knows” who I am.

Hostess with the mostest. In addition to bringing me articles and information I might wish to read, the service could — using the information supplied in the subscriber profiles — facilitate introductions to people I might wish to meet. A dialog box or balloon above a drawn character could suggest, “You really must meet so-and-so, because she has the same interests you do.” Both myself and the other person would receive a similar message from the automatic host. Both of us would have to click “OK” to meet each other online, thereby giving each individual the choice of whether or not they wish to socialize.

BORROWING FROM EXISTING MEDIA

Immersive visual interfaces inspired by popular games combined with scripted and animated anthropomorphic guides (agents) could bring the magic of format to an online service. Certainly, this is not a revolutionary idea. Mass media have legions of examples of content compendiums lent cohesion by a single editor or host: MTV, “magazine-style” TV news programs such as 60 Minutes and printed magazines, including Vanity Fair.

In addition, we know from today’s successful media, a human host derives appeal from a combination of the predictable and the surprising. As media junkies, we aim to view for the kind of comments we have come to expect, but not for exact repetitions. In a next-generation online service, we could re-create this model through the use of some clever scripting. Imagine a service where electronic characters randomly drop in clever commentary while you are online. It would pique member interest and potentially encourage repeated visits.

Professional writers could create the “personalities” for these electronic characters. In return they would receive a percentage of the fees members pay to view the character. An online service could experiment with different characters and writers to find those that members prefer — just as we do with existing TV programming. For further likelihood of appeal, a service could target characters to different groups of subscribers, based on the profile questionnaire completed prior to a member’s first entry into a service. Each character could have its own profile in a format similar to members’ profiles, allowing the same mechanism that matches a member to content or another member to perform the match to a given host character.

MANAGING DATA FROM SERVERS TO DESKTOPS

An online service should feature the tens of thousands of available MIDI files with descriptions and member-contributed reviews, turning a connected PC into a huge digital music jukebox. Since MIDI files consist of compact musical notation rather than actual digitized waveforms, conventional modems have the speed to download and play back these files in real time.

A self-cleaning PC? Every piece of text, MIDI, sound, graphic or image a service sends to our PC should go into a buffer of arbitrary size on a first-in, first-purged basis. Some items, such as mail messages, information the member wants to save permanently or information the service has deleted permanently from the host, could have special flags to prevent their deletion from the buffer. Items downloaded with a surcharge would have maximum persistence in the buffer, perhaps complete permanence.

The service would help the member choose the size of the buffer based upon available disk space. Prior to transmitting an item, the service would transmit a unique numeric tag that the client software would use to confirm whether the member PC’s disk buffer already contained the item. If the item already appeared in the buffer, the service would not transmit the item, saving transmission time and downloading charges. When the member PC’s disk buffer reached the specified maximum, it would start to delete old items to make room for new ones.

By using this scheme rather than requiring an explicit request to download a given file from the service, the member’s PC and the online service merge into one, creating a seamless, huge collection of information. The member need not keep track of which files reside on the service or on his PC.

Such an arrangement makes particular sense for news items. A member wants to save news items for later perusal, but has a limited capacity for these on his PC. The automatic disk buffer lets the online service take the responsibility of managing the archiving of this information on the PC. While disconnected from the host, the online service PC software would allow the same keyword search through the local buffer that it allows throughout the entire service while connected.

SERVICES PROVIDE ‘LOCAL FLAVOR’

A famous politician once remarked “all politics is local.” One can say the same of much valuable information. Once a connection is made to the service, the service could use the address connected to a given account to display local weather and any other relevant local news. Local municipal agencies should not need much encouragement to provide such important news as road conditions and school closings or even lunch menus. Local maps licensed from existing providers and downloaded once to the person’s PC by the service could show this information cartographically.

Local businesses, especially local entertainment establishments with highly variable schedules, could reach their potential patrons over the service. A person could select a favorite movie from a menu and receive the showings arranged in chronological order of the film at all local theaters or display all movies showing at local theaters at a given time. The user interface for entering such information should have ease sufficient to allow any movie ticket taker to turn to her PC, log on and enter the theater’s schedule via modem without intervention from the online service staff.

Doing business online. Many individuals, myself included, prefer to enter orders and peruse product information on a personal computer rather than to speak over the phone with an operator. Direct marketing organizations, from large catalogs to corner stores, could benefit immensely by allowing their customers to inquire and order through an online service. One large direct marketing organization placed the cost of live operators and 800 service at 5 percent of sales — a significant number. An online service could perform this function at a profit while charging marketers substantially less than they currently pay to receive orders by phone. An online service must market itself to businesses for this purpose as effectively as the large phone companies sell 800 services.

Billing should consist of a combination of connect time and fees for each item transmitted from the service to the member’s PC. Services that charge a flat per-hour fee regardless of transmission speed or content do their members and suppliers a cruel disservice. They usually cannot afford to supply full throughput to their high-speed lines, causing 9600-baud lines to yield only 4800 baud, and suppliers with information more valuable than their share of the hourly rate have no incentive to offer their products.

Bringing entrepreneurs online. Allowing members the option of paying more for some items, coupled with an open information platform available to any and all entrepreneurs, would spur a new group of one-person shops dedicated to all manner of information and entertainment supply. (Will Wright, the designer of the SIM City genre of games, has said publicly he would prefer to sit at home and create new worlds for others to use over an online service that paid him a royalty. Individuals could control the expenditure for themselves or other members of their households by setting per-item or per-hour cost limits for a given account.)

An online service that takes the initiative to bring information to the consumer, creates excitement without effort in the manner of television, adds colorful graphics, provides a royalty structure for information entrepreneurs, incorporates new multimedia such as MIDI, targets personal and professional organizations, allows hyperlinks between member-contributed and branded content, and provides automatic download management with local searching can create a sum of value irresistible to the majority of personal computer owners in the market today.

Of all of these, I consider allowing all individuals to contribute and create information for sale over a service as the most important. Complicated approval procedures, while ensuring high-quality content, limit potential breadth.

Editorially, a service should decide what to feature rather than what to include, just as a bookstore might place a fraction of its inventory in the front display window. Traffic on the Internet, completely lacking any sort of central editorial control, continues to increase at 15 percent per month. Online service providers seeking similar growth should consider offering similar freedom.

Brian Hammerstein