Google’s a fierce competitor. They’re very good in search, very good in maps. But they don’t have the positioning and reach that we have. We are totally different companies. ……We are a place people come to be informed. Google is a place people go to do search ……We want to be more personal than Google. We are about providing a more integrated experience. We are a different company than Google.

Although it is premature to predict whether Bartz may succeed in restoring Yahoo! to its former glory, I can certainly concur with her view in many points and find that she understands what is wrong with the company. Perhaps launching all-frontal assault in the enemy’s front yard, like Yahoo! trying to catch up Google in the search market, is not an efficient strategy to gain advantage, despite the significance of web search as an everyday service. Yahoo! needs to fight its own war with its own rules. It is about time for it to reflect upon what it is capable of and can do better, or otherwise it shall be rendered insignificant the way its contemporaries AltaVista and Excite ended up.

Identifying one’s key strengths and focusing on those core assets are essential, even if not sufficient, to its success. Even Google, the seemingly-invincible behemoth of the Internet, is incredibly lackluster in areas like social networking; Orkut, Google’s own social networking service, only enjoys success in Brazilian and Indian markets; its microblog Jaiku (acquired in 2007) has been completely eclipsed by the Twitter boom; furthermore, it shut down the mobile service Dodgeball (acquired in 2005) this March. As pathetic as these cases may appear, Google may have ended up a short-lived wonder had it been obsessed with winning in those markets which it could find little strength. It is the sheer attention Google pays to its core services that keeps it ahead of the competition.

A similar principle may apply to Yahoo! as well. Not only does it need to understand its own abilities, it is also required to comprehend what others have in their arsenal. As Sun Tzu professed in The Art of War, “[i]f you know both yourself and your enemy, you can come out of hundreds of battles without danger.”

What made Apple’s position in this dispute was twofold: first, Kama Sutra could be accessed through other ebook reader software on the App Store like Stanza ,or even Apple’s own Safari web browser, so only blocking Eucalyptus would appear unfair at the very least; second, even if Eucalyptus were the only app that provided access to Kama Sutra, then Apple would trigger a potential chain of imposing censorship to other literary works as well. Should Apple be eligible to also cut off apps which offer access to, say, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or The Catcher in the Rye because they contain “offensive materials (of any kind!)”? The list of “inappropriate” works could go on and on unless there are clearer, more valid rules to identify the extent to which apps would render inappropriate contents.

As for the sake of Eucalyptus, fortunately, Apple caved in to the criticism and pressure from many external parties and altered its stance, accepting the app to its App Store once again. This kind of incident is bound to reemerge, however, because as I have mentioned in a post earlier this month, Apple has very limited experience to rate and select software that melds with contents. It should accept that catering to professional graphics or video editing software on Macs is a very different game from rating thousands of (sometimes useless) apps on iPhones. Hopefully, parental controls in the next version of iPhone OS would alleviate some of these quirks, but the criteria on rating the apps themselves would likely remain a controversy. Let us just hope that Apple’s inconsistent, often stupid, policies on apps do not further as to alienate the developers.

Update: I have overlooked another real-time search engine named Scoopler, which not only provides true real-time search results as Collecta does, but also grants a search service (though in beta yet) to any queries. Collecta currently has, by contrast, sample pages on only two popular topics (“Obama” and “swine flu”) so far.

The real-time search may not be the most significant goal right now, but even the big-daddy-of-search Google eyes on it as one of its unsolved problems. Although relevance and accuracy are usually higher regarded goals in search tools, recency is also an important objective, especially considering the nature of information on the web, constantly accelerating and expanding in scope. Even now automated scripts, or “search bots” scour through the web every few hours, if not minutes, collecting every bit of information as far as they can and storing them onto search indexes. The more recent the last search was conducted on a particular item, the less difference there would be between the search result recorded on the index and the actual target. One of the ultimate ambitions of a search engine, therefore, is to minimize the time difference between what is (or is not) on the cache and the actual objects on the Internet. The solution would be to fetch the results for the user, on real-time.

On the other hand, however, keeping search results up-to-date does not always equate to better search results. As TechCrunch points out, an undisputable majority of search results through real-time search queries return from Twitter posts; those 140-character pieces on the microblog are usually unlikely to include meaningful information on the intended subject. Return to Collecta’s real-time search results on Obama and you might see what could be problematic with it. Second after second, you may see a lot of Tweets churning out the door, which either posts links to news articles mentioning Obama or displays some random complaints on the man. The results are aligned chronologically, without any regards to relevance or whatsoever, as expected. Would a search tool like this, other than introducing us to the latest snapshots of what is posted online, contribute to further knowledge of what is on the web? So far, I am pretty much uncertain.

Also, even from the eyes of a computer layman, collecting search results on real-time would be much more resource-consuming than retrieving information on a periodical basis. Querying on a conventional search engine would only stress a one-time return from what has been indexed. The search result would be static, and unless the user decides to reload or retry the search, the job is over for the search engine. A real-time search, however, would require a constantly running process on the search engine, continuously exploring and loading information from the web until the user quits or shuts down the search entirely. Multiply this burden by millions, and it could be hypothesized that this may not be as scalable as the current search model. Correct me if I am thinking wrong, but if a real-time search yields no significant information return than a lagged search performed hourly or two but the former costs and needs many times the resources than the latter, I do not see a reason to favor the former, let alone embrace it as the next big thing, at all.

Since I am aware of the details surrounding the legal dispute between Danger Mouse and EMI, I am not at capacity to discuss whose claim would be more valid. Yet the peculiarity of Dark Night Of The Soul, in which the physical album would be sold without actual contents whereas the music itself is likely to be shared across the web, on one hand reveals the frail and dubious state of music as a tangible commodity these days, while on the other hand also exposes a systematic incapability to resolve conflicts surrounding protection of copyrights and creation of derivative artworks. It is certainly not a desirable situation, but no matter you sell CDs with or without contents, a lot of people would nevertheless access your music through even illegitimate means. It would therefore be of little difference if you just put out a blank recordable CD with a cover; the underlying message would be just to download and burn the music onto it, and technically you are listening to the same music, same quality. A music album without the music–who would have thought of it, like, a couple of years ago?

As absurd as an idea might sound, there is another competitive front that spans across seemingly dissimilar markets. Only a couple of years ago, only a few would have foreseen that Apple would be a viable competitor to Nintendo; Microsoft and Sony were, apparently, but why would a computer and music player maker be any threat to the gaming console giant? Now we know, although both companies come from different backgrounds and hence divergent approaches to mobile gaming, but they do collide in the mobile gaming market more fiercely than ever.

Likewise, we would not know for sure, for now, whether web services like Facebook and web browser software like Mozilla Firefox may turn into direct competitors each seeking user participation instead of seperate products accommodating users in different levels. In a world in which PC manufacturer and mobile phone firm, movie studio and videogame publisher, or online service provider and productivity software developer become adversaries, competition heats up across various devices and platforms. Our implicit categories of products and services in these fields should be constantly revised, even fluidly reconnected to foster our own understanding of the development of such things.

DNF had been under development for so many years (it was first announced on April 28, 1997) that it reigned the top spot on the Vaporware of the Year list written by Wired.com at the end of every year. They already gave it “the Lifetime Achievement Award” and retired it from the list in 2003, but brought it back on in 2005. Oh sure, even three or four years are like eternity in game development cycles. Yet, twelve years? Twelve years ago, we were still counting processor speeds somewhere along 233~300 MHz and did not even have a standard 56k modem (it was drafted in the following year), let alone any broadband Internet connection. Yes, DNF was the project born in those archaic times, but never done. We will never see it finished and shipped now.

There is a web site named The Duke Nukem Forever List that enumerates other videogame titles and movies released as well as major world events, scientific endeavors, sensations in pop cultures happened during the development years of DNF. Some notable facts include: more than 75 games based on the Megaman, and more than 50 games based on the Star Wars franchise have been released; Google and eBay did not exist at the time of DNF announcement; Stephen King has written sixteen novels; and even the Duke Nukem series itself has released ten “side projects” in between. It is an interesting list to go through, because we are not likely to see a videogame project drawing somewhat negative yet humorous attention in this form. Are we ever going to see another game that takes twelve years before having its own development studio shut down? I am skeptical.

If we look at the positive legacies of 3D Realms, we may notice that back in the 1990s, Apogee Software (the old name 3D Realms was known as back then) managed to establish the shareware business model, in which Apogee would distribute a portion of the videogame for free and ask the customer to pay for the full version if he or she liked it. It also nurtured some prominent videogame developers such as id Software and Remedy Entertainment in their early days, publishing some of their older games like Wolfenstein 3D and Death Rally. In spite of all the scorn it had received because of DNF, it still deserves to be remembered for its place in the history of gaming.

So, 3D Realms and its stillborn DNF is no more. Unless Take Two makes use of the Duke Nukem franchise in some form, it is very unlikely that we will ever see any sequel to Duke Nukem 3D. Probably, as indicated in the title, the promise of a sequel were not going to be fulfilled forever, after all. Rest in peace, 3D Realms.

Update: GOG.com posted a special editorial reflecting on 3D Realms’ place in the history of videogames. It is definitely worth a read.

Another update: 3D Realms issued a press release stating that it has neither closed its doors nor let go its ownership of the Duke Nukem franchise.

Now, “The Downward Spiral” the album is not available anywhere in the iPhone app. The song “The Downward Spiral” I believe is in a podcast that can be streamed to the app.

Thanks Apple for the clear description of the problem – as in, what do you want us to change to get past your stupid fucking standards?

And while we’re at it, I’ll voice the same issue I had with Wal-Mart years ago, which is a matter of consistency and hypocrisy. Wal-Mart went on a rampage years ago insisting all music they carry be censored of all profanity and “clean” versions be made for them to carry. Bands (including Nirvana) tripped over themselves editing out words, changing album art, etc to meet Wal-Mart’s standards of decency – because Wal-Mart sells a lot of records. NIN refused, and you’ll notice a pretty empty NIN section at any Wal-Mart. My reasoning was this: I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any “indecent” material for sale – but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film “Scarface” completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes. How does that make sense?

You can buy The Downward Fucking Spiral on iTunes, but you can’t allow an iPhone app that may have a song with a bad word somewhere in it. Geez, what if someone in the forum in our app says FUCK or CUNT? I suppose that also falls into indecent material. Hey Apple, I just got some SPAM about fucking hot asian teens THROUGH YOUR MAIL PROGRAM. I just saw two guys having explicit anal sex right there in Safari! On my iPhone!

Come on Apple, think your policies through and for fuck’s sake get your app approval scenario together.

Whew, it is a long citation indeed. It will not be necessary to repeat why Reznor was pissed off. Apple runs a music store for iPhone/iPod Touch which sells a digital copy of “The Downward Spiral” yet blocks an app for the same devices which streams the same song. It would be roughly equivalent to some governmental policy allowing sales of music with offensive content but prohibiting movies for mature audiences. The approval process administered by Apple, fortunately, is not yet established as a censorship system, largely because Apple’s mobile phones only occupy a portion of the market. You can always choose a different mobile phone should you be discontent with, say, Apple’s choice of “appropriate” apps on their products. Yet, for the overwhelming proportion of developers and consumers of mobile applications on iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple’s stringent yet inconsistent policy can function as if it is a censorship, after all. 

The Nine Inch Nails app rejection looks a bit more awkward because the streamed song is, allegedly, not even an integral part of the application. A similar situation, as noted by the Engadget article, has happened back in March, when Apple blocked Tweetie app on iPhone for showing offensive language on Twitter. In other words, if an application allows the user to even accidentally encounter some inappropriate content on the Internet, the application will be eradicated altogether. Oh, please. Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), a non-profit, self-regulatory body founded in 1994 to provide content ratings on videogames, actually set a prominent precedent in this area. If you have taken a look at or run a videogame lately, you may notice a descriptor which says, “Game Experience May Change During Online Play,” which stands for that content created by players of the game has not been rated by the ESRB. This means that ESRB has not rated and cannot rate all the possible speeches and contents that you and other humans may generate during your online interactions. Lewzr of Destructoid offers an even more “mature” translation of the descriptor (Another warning: potentially offensive language below):

I mean, if the game developers designed a game that was intended for Teen audiences, with Teen content, they shouldn’t be penalized just because a bunch of teens decide to use 4-letter-words when playing online because it makes them feel, you know, like they have a big penis or something.

Yes, and online bulletin boards, fora, blogs, likewise in online games, are filled with 4-letter-words indeed. And how can you penalize or block an application with contents which were not shipped with the application in the first place? That is precisely what has happened to Tweetie and the Nine Inch Nails app, especially when the so-called objectionable content can be accessed through Apple’s own shopping service as well. If these “glitches” or inconsistencies in Apple’s policies are not resolved, it may enfeeble the potentials of iPhones and iPods among the universe of mobile and web software.

If we spare a gaze at the other side, Apple is probably in jeopardy because it has very few precedents when it comes to rating software in overall. Sure, ESRB has been with us since 1994, but in our familiar world, an application was an application and a game was a game. No one felt obliged to, say, give a teen or mature rating to Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, because they are just programs without any significant content to give ratings for. Applications of iPhone/iPod Touch, by contrast, tend to draw very flexible boundaries between applications and entertainment, tools and contents, which warrant very delicate policies to consider and apply. Self-regulation is no evil and quite essential in many situations, but the last thing we need in today’s ecosystem, of all inhibitions, is a censorship.

It reminded me of the time when I read the Korean edition of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (the Korean translation can be found here) by Roberto Calasso a few years ago. What impressed me yet also what I did not completely understand back then was Calasso’s interpretation of ancient Greek mythology as a tree-like system of different versions of stories and anecdotes, rather than a canonical set of legends à la Thomas Bulfinch; there would be a lot of variants in how Zeus kidnapped Europa or how Theseus killed the Minotaure in Crete, yet all those variations are valid in each of themselves (for more detailed information on Calasso’s book, please read Ivar Hagendoorn’s review). This rings somewhat salient of what can be experienced in an online videogame like WoW. Perhaps, in the official, canonical lore which would be later filled in by Blizzard Entertainment (the developer of WoW) the evil monster A had been terminated by a valorous hero named B, but in your own experience, you may have killed A some time last week with a few of your friends, probably during a late weekday night session or a long weekend raid. It is not just you, though; thousands, possibly millions of other players have done the same job in each of their own ways. Maybe you or anyone else’s name will not be credited as the slayer of A next time Blizzard updates the background setting of the game, but it is significant that you have your own version of the story.

I am not stressing that WoW reaches some unprecedented pinnacle of storytelling in videogames, although it is an excellent entertainment title in its own merits. The level of storytelling, in terms of conveying deeper implications and themes through a sophiscated storyline, is better accomplished in more traditional, single-player videogames such as Planescape: Torment, Silent Hill, Grim Fandango, or BioShock. In fact, some single-player videogames like Fallout and Grand Theft Auto espouse an “open-ended gameplay” which allows their players to choose which tasks to do in order to follow the storyline that there may be little difference between those games and WoW.

There are apparent limitations to grant freedom within the in-game world though; even in the likes of Fallout, while the player is at liberty to choose the order of which quests to do, even skip some quests entirely, he or she is still obligated to follow the primary storyline which is fixed overall. You may choose to do a quest or not in WoW, but you cannot change the outcome of each episode; for instance, you cannot convince a villain to repent its wrongdoings or turn it to your own side, other than the given goal of simply killing it. Even midway through a quest, you would be confined to certain settings or availability of resources to do the job, so the rate of variation on a certain lore is kept at bay, likely to be caused less by designers’ intent on controlling the integrity of stories, but instead by the lack of resources to extend the boundaries of the in-game sandbox. However good an open-ended gameplay may deliver to videogame players, it would still be of little merit to enable them to modify even the most crucial elements of the videogame as it may break the basic structure and also be costly and time-consuming (for example, inserting different outcomes in each of the quests in WoW would require an almost infinite amount of budget).

Up to this point, I am thinking of another question that should be addressed in the videogame world, probably not now but some time in the future. As seen in titles such as Planescape: Torment or Silent Hill, the level of narratives in videogames these days was hardly imaginable in the days of Asteroids and Pong. We would witness more and more of storytelling, increasingly sophisticated, in videogames. Yet the notion of assorting a variety of those games, with or without stories, into a single category, a single concept would turn out to be misleading at some point. Strictly narrative-wise, treating Planescape: Torment the same as Pong and Tetris, because they are both “videogames”, would be equivalent to asserting that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series is on the same level with the earliest films of the Lumière brothers, because they are both ”movies.” I am not saying that Tetris or the Lumière films are inferior or of less production values. The history of motion pictures have progressed so far that the oldest films taken by the Lumière brothers, like a train incoming from far away or a group of workers walking out the factory door, would be considered as short “video clips” today rather than “movies.” You may play your favorite movie and your home video on the same DVD player, but usually you do not think that those two are the same, especially in terms of narratives or artistry. A similar notion can be applied to videogames as well. Some videogames have achieved a level of distinction on par with some movies and novels that they may not deserve the same nomenclature as other electronic entertainment titles, aside from the fact that all of them can be played on the same electronic equipment. Probably in near future videogames may start to differentiate themselves from one another, which I consider is necessary for some of them to be recognized as a legitimate medium akin to motion pictures, literature or music.

Input methods on cellular phones and other portable gadgets are meeting a critical stage, because the phonewords standard (which assigns three or four alphabetic letters to a numerical key) is not feasible to yield an ergonomical experience to anyone who wants to do more than sending a few bytes of messages back and forth. Phonewords have been expedient to be used in a string of numbers like 800 toll-free numbers in the U.S. (e.g. 800-NEW-CARS), but meanwhile trying to write more than a sentence or two on phonewords turns out to be cumbersome because it is not an optimal way to input texts, after all. This has never been a problem at all before mobile phones became widespread, because no one needed to type a lot of things on wired telephones sitting at home (even FAX machines do not need a keyboard). If you carry around a mobile gadget that can run a number of applications other than simple voice conversation, however, we have a whole different situation to tackle.

So far the best way to settle this issue is to somehow emulate the computer keyboard on mobile phones, be it a virtual onscreen keyboard as in Apple iPhone, or a mini-sized keyboard as in RIM Blackberry. Although there are obvious differences between the two, the fundamental contribution that the two approaches made to the history of portable devices is that they liberated mobile phones from the legacy of traditional telephones in terms of form factor. Apple and RIM may not be the first to adopt touchscreen or mini-sized keyboard on cellular phones, but it should be acknowledged that they are the ones who made them mainstream. And nowadays, everyone else is mimicking either (or even both) of those two solutions on their smartphones.

Maybe, in a few years, the term smartphone itself may become obsolete, if every mobile phone gains capability to process various types of information akin to some kind of a portable computer. One of the aspects in this direction has been to expand the adoption of sophisticated operating systems onto mobile phones, including Nokia Symbian, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and Google Android. Apart from software, the methods to interact with the device are another key area which requires further innovation on the road.  We may need more intuitive and easy-to-pick-up pathways than small editions of QWERTY keyboards to handle information on mobile phones, like voice control, which needs voice recognition technology with an array of different languages, so it would be very difficult to implement in practice. It is likely that standard telephone keypads will stay, but we may see less and less of it in the coming years. Time may tell.

Whereas in late 1990s Palm’s products such as PalmPilot and Palm III series built almost an impregnable basis in the PDA market (thanks to an abundance of developers supplying a rich pool of applications for its Palm OS, arguably the most robust mobile OS back then), its smartphones like Treo and Centro since the early 2000s, by contrast, only met lukewarm, uneasy reception largely because they failed to stay on par with contemporary competitors. Palm’s golden days were when cellular phones were incredibly rare and managing schedule on non-Internet-connected PDAs was still a cool thing to do. It had been forgotten in the mobile phone world while newer smartphones like RIM Blackberry thrived, in almost the same way that Apple’s custom Mac OS X operating system on iPhone, upon its announcement in January 2007, immediately stole thunder from Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system, which had been in the market for years.

Well, no longer, Palm declared, when it announced Pre and a brand new, Internet-oriented, mobile operating system named WebOS this January on which applications would be built with open, accessible standards and barriers for developers will be radically lowered. What has been rumored so far indicates that Palm will release Pre in June, almost at the same time when Apple is expected to unveil an upgraded edition of iPhone. It seems that Palm has also gained enough confidence to target value phones as well; it is going to extend its WebOS to the lower tier of its product portfolio–apparently a cheaper variant of Pre, named Eos, is upcoming.

Maybe it is overconfident to believe in its own success in reinvigorating itself to be a major player in the mobile devices market. For an average fan of such technological gadgets, however, it is nice to see someone finally stepping up to face Apple in its own turf: providing a convenient, seamless, Internet-capable experience on a mobile phone abounding with more than 25,000 applications available. It is yet unknown how Palm will set up a vibrant ecosystem circulating its Pre and Eos, but a challenger taking on the champion’s strengths is a pleasant news to be heard, at least. Add to that everyone else is jumping on the smartphone wagon, it is truly an exciting time to witness innovation on mobile phones. Let us wait and see if this alleged “iPhone killer” does its job right starting next month.