Computing Attention

It’s interesting to see life play out. It’s also interesting how some things seem critically important in one paradigm but completely inconsequential in another. Priorities shift in life, plain and simple. Things that are essential are able to become so completely not a concern that we forget to notice them.

For me, that shift has been multi-pronged. For years I did everything I could to stay up on the latest developments in .Net now I’m aware of them but I don’t practice them. My greatest concern was that I would dinosaur myself as a programmer by missing new features and versions of .Net.

I am now on more of an alert basis with pretty much all programming languages, even ones I’ve never worked with. My radar has shifted from a laser focus on Microsoft Technologies to a broad focus on any new technologies. My greatest concern now is to catch the newest technological development and study it enough to determine if it is something one of our companies needs to know about or if we need to capitalize on it somehow.

Another shift that has occurred is that in the past there have been times when I REALLY wanted to get in front of VCs to be able to pitch them on something I was working on, I was never very successful at pulling that off. Now, I’ve had VCs contact me out of the blue wanting to meet with me because they’ve heard of some of the things we’re working on. In the last month I’ve been contacted by or met with several VCs, it’s becoming a regular part of my world.

I’ve also recently had reporters contact me out of the blue wanting to get my views on certain things, I don’t recall ever being interviewed in my previous life.

So, why am I writing this? Here’s what I’ve been thinking about: humans are able to shift focus and completely re-adapt themselves as needed. We have an inherent ‘radar’ system that picks up immediately on the things that are important to us. When something changes – something new is important or something that was important becomes inconsequential – our radar adapts to that automatically. To put it into Web 2.0 terms, our Attention adjusts automatically.

So, how do we reflect that in computers? In my last post about Social Fiefdoms, I was exploring how to make computers adapt priority based on the topic of conversation or interest, now I would like to explore how to make computers 1) know what changes have occurred to your Attention and 2) be able to adapt to those changes. There are lots of areas that this could apply to, I’ll address one of them – Blog Reading.

Most people reading this have an aggregator that is subscribed to my blog, for whatever reason. It may be because this blog is focused on technology and so are you, it may be that we’re friends or acquaintances, it may be that it was recommended to you. But what if one of those things changes? Maybe I don’t blog about technology very often anymore or we have a falling out or you decide these long posts about computational theory are boring. Your Attention to my blog would diminish, you wouldn’t read my posts anymore, maybe you would manually delete my feed from your aggregator. But your computer wouldn’t automatically know that and do it for you.

Clearly your computer can’t read your mind (yet) but it can pay attention to what you pay Attention to. It could notice that you no longer click on my posts or that you spend less time than is required to read my posts (ok, on that one your computer would need to be monitoring and creating averages for how long it takes you to read X words and store it) essentially figuring out that you are ignoring me. It could then do a couple things, it could maybe relegate my feed to a lower priority, or it could position my feed in a ‘less frequently read’ folder, or it could ask you if you still want to subscribe to that feed (not with a popup however, there would need to be a maintenance bar or something that would list all the feeds you may not be interested in anymore).

This may not be that great of an example, but it should apply to nearly everyone reading this.

In order to make something like this work, computers will need to start paying a lot more attention to what the user is doing. Microsoft has taken some steps in this direction with ‘Most recently used Programs’, Documents and Menus (I hate the menu feature though, I want to always see all the menus whether I’ve used them before or not, I turn that feature off). Another place this is seen is in web history and recently visited sites. Amazon does it with my recent purchases and searches, they probably come the closest to what I’m looking for.

I want to see the computer, and my entire digital environment change and adapt to what I’m paying attention to. It can’t read my mind, but it sure can read my actions. If every piece of software running on my machine, especially the OS, were paying attention and gathering statistics on what I was paying Attention to, my productivity would skyrocket. If it noticed that I ALWAYS read anything that Paul Allen (my boss) writes, it could scour the internet for me and bring that to me. Instead, I have to setup manual systems like Google Alerts, specialized search RSS feeds, a specific folder for his posts, etc in order to make sure that anything he writes or is written about him comes to my attention. If it noticed that every single day I open my email and read certain things, it could prioritize those things for me. And so on and so on.

So there are some pieces of my digital environment that pay attention to what I’m paying Attention to, but there is no all-encompassing solution out there. I would really like to see the OS zero in on my Attention and I think Windows Vista is taking some very big steps towards this, but it’s not there yet.

If someone were to write an OS from the ground up that was designed to focus on the user, that was built on taking metrics and adapting itself based on what the user did the most I think they could take over the OS market. I don’t think this is something that can be patched in very well. You could take huge leaps patching it in, but in order for it to flow seamlessly; I think it has to be built into the OS.

So, anyone up for developing a new OS???

Or, more realistically, has anyone seen any great tools that will help do this? Is there something huge I’ve missed out there?