musings

Why e-books will soon be obsolete (and no, it’s not just because of DRM)

E-books will be obsolete within five years.  Crippled by territorial license restrictions, digital rights management, and single-purpose devices and file formats that are simultaneously immature and already obsolescent, they are at a hopeless competitive disadvantage compared to full-fledged websites and even the humble PDF.

Last year, I bought a laptop in Singapore, and brought it with me to Australia.  It worked fine for reading the Economist online and what passes for journalism in Singapore, but one day I searched for the Sydney Morning Herald, and there were no hits: it’s as if it didn’t exist.  A little poking around revealed that to be able to view Australian sites, I had to register my browser to be in Australia, which also requires a credit card with a billing address there.  What’s more, switching countries like this would delete all my bookmarks, terminate my paid subscription to the Economist and stop me from being able to read even single issue of the Singaporean Straits Jacket.  And needless to say, the laptop is locked to prevent me from installing another browser that would allow me to get around these limits.

Does this sound ridiculous, a perverse fantasy of some balkanized Web of the dystopian future?  Nope: it’s all true, except that my “laptop” is actually an iPad and my “browser” is iTunes/iBooks.  Since my iTunes account has a Singaporean billing address, the Kindle application does not show up in my search results.  If I switch countries, I will lose access to everything I’ve previously downloaded.  And if I do bite the bullet and switch to Australia, a good chunk of apps, music and more on offer will no longer be available on iTunes, iBooks or Amazon, and I’ll pay around 50% extra on what remains.  But I chose not to, and thus didn’t buy 3 or 4 books I wanted to, because their publishers would not sell them to me.

Why?  Because publishers insist on selling e-books the way they sell printed books, and customers simply don’t figure in the equation.

Now, breathtaking stupidity like this is commonly attributed to digital rights management (DRM), and Lord knows there’s plenty of idiocy involved in there as well.  Fortunately, Charlie Stross has already eviscerated that particular sacred cow of the publishing industry (see here and here), so I’ll focus on what’s actually causing my problem: publishing rights.

On the Web, the very idea that the right to read a website would vary from country to country seems patently absurd.  Cyberspace is flat, after all, just computers talking to computers.  You, the reader, do not need to concern yourself with where these electrons on your screen are coming from, and neither do I, their publisher, need to care where they are going.  And when somebody attempts to artificially block those electrons — say, China and its Great Firewall — it’s the kind of the thing that the US Congress and the World Trade Organization get worked up about.

But in the print publishing industry, publishing rights for different countries and languages are both standard practice and a big deal. Printed books have to be moved around on pallets in trucks, and since micromanaging physical distribution in the UK would be hard and expensive for a publisher in the US, it make a lot of sense for the US publisher to cut a deal with a UK counterpart: I give you the right to some content, you print the books and distribute them, and we share the profits.  (As always, it’s actually much more complicated that, and Stross has a readable short primer on that too.)

So when e-books rolled along with the promise to obliterate barriers to distribution, the publishing industry was faced with either changing everything they do, or sticking to what they’ve always done.  Naturally, they opted to circle wagons, stick their fingers in their ears and pretend digital is print.

  • Digital makes copying free.
    • Reaction: Try to block digital copying by imposing DRM.
  • Digital eliminates the constraints of geography from distribution.
    • Reaction: Try to preserve regional publishing monopolies by imposing artificial geographical limits on digital distribution.
  • General-purpose Web browsers change rapidly and allow the user full control.
    • Reaction: Build single-purpose “e-readers” that only allow reading e-books, preferably tightly locked into a monopoly vendor’s authorized distribution channel.
  • Digital formats on the Web are wild, woolly and evolve unpredictably.
    •  Reaction: Try to make e-books resemble physical books by kneecapping them with incompatible “standards” like ePub, created by the publishing industry to serve its own interests.

ePub is an instructive case.  The current de facto standard, version 2, is essentially XHTML 1.1, a W3C standard dating to 2001, with a sprinkle of limited  CSS2 (1998) and layers of proprietary cruft added on top.  This means most e-books are using technology that was cutting edge fourteen years ago, and thus lack even rudimentary features like absolute positioning, which allows making pages look the same on all devices.

Anointed successor ePub 3 was released in late 2011, now encapsulating HTML5 instead, if with a long list of incompatible “extensions, enhancements, deviations and constraints“.  However, nobody’s using it yet, because there are no devices on the market that support it and, e-book readers being single-purpose hardware, you can’t just update them to the latest Firefox to get support.  The only device out there with something like it is Amazon’s Kindle Fire, whose proprietary KF8 format is kinda-sorta-but-not-really in line with ePub 3, so publishers have to repackage everything twice.  Remember the Internet Explorer vs Netscape “browser wars” back in 1995 or so?  That’s where e-book formats are today.

Let’s recap.  Customers today are expected to buy into a format that locks down their content into a silo, limits their purchasing choices based on where their credit card happens to have been registered, is designed to work best on devices that are rapidly becoming obsolete, and support only a tiny subset of the functionality available on any modern website.  Nonetheless, publishers are seeing their e-book sales skyrocket and congratulate themselves on a job well done.  How come?

Because right now, they have no choice.  If I want to read a digital copy of Country Driving today, my options are to either bend over to HarperCollins or to go pound sand.  But once publishers start breaking ranks (as they are already doing) and major authors start to self-publish (as they are already doing), the illusion of e-books being a necessary simulacrum of printed books will start to dissipate.

What will replace them?  The same medium that already killed off the encyclopedia, the telephone directory and the atlas: the Web.  For your regular linear fiction novel, or even readable tomes of non-fiction, a no-frills PDF does the job just fine and Lonely Planet has been selling its travel guidebooks and phrasebooks a chapter at a time, no DRM or other silliness, as PDFs for years now.  For more complicated, interactive, Web-like stuff, throw away the artificial shackles of ePub and embrace the full scope of HTML5, already supported by all major browsers and usable right now by several billion people.   (Check out the Financial Times web app for a sneak preview of what’s already possible.)  Chuck in offline support, an embryonic but increasingly usable core part of HTML5, and you can even read the “book” (website) offline.

The shift will not be instant, and there’s still a good couple of years of life left in the e-book market before the alternatives work out the kinks of presentation, distribution and retailing.  But e-readers will be obsolete in a few years, and once they’re gone, the sole weak advantage an e-book has over its future replacements will be gone.  Any publisher banking on e-books being around 5 years from now is in for a rude surprise.

Designing the Travel Guide of the Future, Augmented Reality Edition

In my previous post on the Travel Guide of the Future, I glibly dismissed the possibility of an augmented reality interface as a form factor, because “we haven’t managed to figure out a decent portable interface for actually controlling the display … it’s looking pretty unlikely until we get around to implanting electrodes in our skulls.”

Two weeks later, word leaked out about what was cooking at Google X, and last week Google officially announced Project Glass.  Oops!  Time to eat my words and revise that assumption in light of the single most exciting announcement in travel tech since, um, ever.

As it happens, augmented reality displays are a topic I have more than a passing familiarity with: for my master’s thesis back in 2001, I built a prototype wearable translation system dubbed the Yak-2, using a heads-up display.  At the time, the MicroOptical CO-7 heads-up display (pictured above) was state-of-the-art military hardware reluctantly lent to researchers for $5000 a pop; it’s almost surprising that, in the ten years that have passed, it’s not much different from what Google is using today, which the smart money seems to think is the Lumus OE-31.

Credentials established?  Let’s talk about what challenges Google face today.

User interface: actually using the darn thing

Hardware

The absolute Achilles heel of wearable computing for me, for Google and for everybody who has ever tried to popularize the darn things and failed is the user interface.  Every mainstream human interface device used for computing devices — keyboards, touchscreens, mice, trackballs, touchpads, you name it — is intended to be operated by hand pressing against a surface, and that’s the one thing you cannot sensibly do while operating a wearable computer.   A lot of research has gone into developing ways around this, but none have gained traction as they all suffer from severe drawbacks: handheld chording keyboards (extremely steep learning curve), gesture recognition (limited scope and looks strange), etc.  My Yak prototypes used a handheld mouse-pointer thingy, which was borderline functional but still intolerably clunky, and speech recognition, which worked tolerably well in lab conditions with a trained user, but fell flat in noisy outdoor environments.

Based on the Glass Project concept video, Google is trying their luck with speech recognition, a tilt sensor for head gestures, plus — apparently — an entirely different interface: eye tracking, so you can just look at an icon for a second to “push” it.  (Or so it seems; the other possibility is that the user is making gestures off-camera, although the bit where he replies to a message while holding a sandwich makes this unlikely.  While easier to implement technically, this would be far inferior as an interface, so for the rest of this post I’m going to optimistically assume they do indeed use eye tracking.)

The radical-seeming concept is actually not new, as eye tracking is a natural fit for a heads-up display.  IBM was studying this back around 2000 and ETH presented a working prototype of the two in combination in 2009, but Google’s prototype looks far more polished and will be the first real-world system deploying the two simultaneously that I’m aware of.  Problem solved?

Software

Not quite.  The biggest of Google’s user interface problems is that they now need to develop the world’s first usable consumer-grade UI for actually using this thing.  As the numerous painfully funny parodies attest, it’s actually very hard to get this right, and Google’s video glosses over many over of the hard decisions that need to made to provide an augmented reality UI that’s always accessible, but never in the way.  How does voice recognition know to differentiate when it’s supposed to be listening for commands, and when you’re just talking to a buddy?  How does the software figure out that moving the head down when stretched should pop up the toolbar, but moving it down to pour coffee should not?  You can only presume there are modes available “full UI”, “notifications only” or “completely off”, but without physical buttons to toggle it’s difficult even to figure out a solid mechanism for switching between these.

And that’s just for user-driven “pull” control of the system.  For “push” notifications, like the subway closure alert, Google has to be able to intelligently parse the user’s location, expected course and a million other things to guess what kinds of things they might be interested in at any given moment — and, yes, resist the temptation to spam them with 5% off coupons for Bob’s Carpet Warehouse.   Fortunately, this kind of massive data number-crunching is the kind of thing Google excels at, and the glasses will presumably come with a limited set of in-built general-use notifications that can be extended by downloading apps.

As a reference point, it’s taken Android ten years to get most of the kinks worked out from something as simple as message notifications on a mobile screen, and even UI gurus Apple didn’t get it right the first time around.  It’s pretty much a given that the first iterations of Project Glass will be very clunky indeed.

Incidentally, while the video might lead you to believe the contrary, one problem Google won’t have is the display blocking the entire field of view: the Lumus display covers only a part of one eye, with your brain helpfully merging it in with what the other eye sees.

Hardware: what Google isn’t showing you

Take a careful look at Google’s five publicity photos.  What’s missing?  Any clue of what lies behind at the other end of the earpieces, artfully concealed with a shock of hair or angled face in every single shot.  Indeed, Lumus’s current displays are all wired to battery packs to serve that energy-hungry display (just like my CO-7 back in 2001), although apparently wireless models with enough capacity to operate for a day are on the horizon and Sergey Brin was “caught” (ha!) wearing one recently.

Display aside, though, the computing power to drive the thing still has to reside somewhere, and even with today’s miracles of miniaturization that somewhere cannot be in inside that thin aluminum frame.  Thus somewhere in your pocket or bag there will be phone-sized lump of silicon that does the heavy lifting and talks to the Internet.  The sensible and obvious thing to do would be to use an actual phone, in which case the glasses just become an accessory.  This kills two birds with one stone: it conveniently cuts down what would otherwise be a steep pricetag of $1000+ into two more manageable chunks of $500 or so each (assuming Google initially sells the Lumus more or less at cost), and it provides extra interfaces in form of a touch screen and microphone that can be used for mode control and speech recognition (eg. press button and hold phone up to mouth to voice commands).

Killer app: travel guide or Babel Fish?

Google is quite clearly thinking about Project Glass as just another way to consume Google services: socialize on Google Plus, find your way with Google Maps, follow your friends with Latitude, etc.  While some of this obviously has the potential to be very handy, and almost all of it certainly qualifies as “cool”, without anything entirely new the device runs the risk of becoming the next generation of Bluetooth headset, a niche accessory worn only by devoted techheads.  The question is thus: what sort of killer apps this device could enable as a platform?  Obviously, my interest lies in travel!

So far, most augmented reality travel apps have assumed that reality + pins = win, but this doesn’t work for augmented reality for precisely the same reason it doesn’t work for web apps:

As a rule, people do not wander down streets randomly, hoping that a magical travel app (or printed guidebook) will reveal that they have serendipitously stumbled into a fascinating sight.  No, they browse through the guide before they leave, or on the plane, or in the hotel room the day before, building up a rough itinerary of where to go, what to see and what to beware of.  A travel guide is thus, first and foremost, a planning tool.

Which is not to say Project Glass won’t have its uses. Even out of the box, turn by turn navigation in an unfamiliar city without having to browse maps or poke around on a phone, is by itself pretty darn close to a killer app for the traveller, and being able to search on the fly for points of interest is also obviously useful.

But probably the single most powerful new concept to explore is what I poked around with in 2001, namely translation.  Word Lens/Google Goggles type translation of written text is obvious, but the real potential and challenges lie in translation of the spoken word.  Using the tethered phone’s microphone and speaker, it should be possible to parse what the user says, have them confirm it on screen, and either have them try to read it out or simply output the translated phrase via the speaker.  Depending on how good the speech recognition is (and this is pushing the limits today), it could even be possible to hand the phone over to the other person, have them speak, and have the glasses translate that instantly.  And if both parties are wearing the glasses, with a microphone and an earphone, could we finally implement the Babel Fish and have unobtrusive simultaneous translation, with the speech of one rendered on the screen of the other?  This may not be science fiction any more!

Conclusion

Project Glass has immense potential, but like most revolutions in technology, people are likely to overestimate the short-term impact and underestimate the long-term impact.  The first iteration is likely to prove a disappointment, but in a few years’ time this or something much like it may indeed finally supplant the printed book as the traveler’s tool of choice on the road, and create a few new billion-dollar markets in the process.

Designing the Travel Guide of the Future

Back in 1979, Douglas Adams wrote up the requirement specification for the Travel Guide of the Future in a few short sentences:

The thing she took out of her bag was battered and travelworn as it had been hurled into prehistoric rivers, baked under the sun that shines so redly on the deserts of Kakrafoon, half-buried in the marbled sands that fringe the heady vapoured oceans of Santraginus V, frozen on the glaciers of the moon of Jaglan Beta, sat on, kicked around spaceships, scuffed and generally abused, and since its makers had thought that these were exactly the sorts of things that might happen to it, they had thoughtfully encased it in a sturdy plastic cover and written on it, in large friendly letters, the words “Don’t Panic”. … The standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom … it was like a small, thin, flexible lap computer. He tapped some buttons till the screen flared with text.

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Yet here we are, 33 years later, and the Travel Guide of the Present remains a leaden tome of dried wood pulp, tightly inked with words and diagrams, its leaves interwoven with cryptic codes.  Many have tried to fix this sad state of affairs, yet all have failed: there is still no killer app for travel.  Why?

I think it comes down to five factors: content, interface, form factor, quality and scope.

Content: The Guide of the Future Is More Than a Reheated Book

Many attempts at the Guide of the Future assume that digital travel guides will be fundamentally like books, only digital. The most obvious form of this is e-books, which are now put out by all major travel publishers.  Yet each and every one of them is an afterthought based purely on a printed book.  Sure, there are some tweaks — hyperlinks instead of page references!  more color pictures!  maybe a bit of video! — but the mindset is still fundamentally limited to books.  And this applies even to some of the newer players: consider Wikitravel, where some articles go to amazing lengths to create city maps, only to lock their content into static images, where you have to laboriously match numbered little icons against a key and have no way of finding it elsewhere in the text.

What if you designed the guide from the ground up to fit the device, instead of shoehorning your book into something that is not one?  It will not be easy, but one of the companies that dares to will win.

Interface: The Guide of the Future Is Not Pins On a Map

Maps on the web used to be copies of printed maps as well, until Google Maps popularized the “slippy map” in 2005, and travel applications have been piggybacking on it ever since. Yet what amazes me is that there are still new startups launching in 2012 (like this and this) whose idea of an interface is still limited to a scattering of pins on a map.  Yes, a pin on a map is very handy for finding that place on a map; but no, a map with a zillion pins on it is completely useless for planning travel in general.  What are you going to do, sit there and click on them all, one by one?  Maybe play with some filters and hope that with luck you can narrow them down to a subset that has a tolerable number of results and that those results are interesting?  And then what?  A guide is more than a list of points of interest.

Form Factor: The Guide of the Future Will Still Be Book-Sized

Most digital travel guides these days, seemingly sensibly enough, target the most common portable technology platform out there: smartphones of the Apple and/or Android persuasion.  None have succeeded for a simple reason: people do not actually use their travel guides on the road.  That’s right: as a rule, people do not wander down streets randomly, hoping that a magical travel app (or printed guidebook) will reveal that they have serendipitously stumbled into a fascinating sight.  No, they browse through the guide before they leave, or on the plane, or in the hotel room the day before, building up a rough itinerary of where to go, what to see and what to beware of.  A travel guide is thus, first and foremost, a planning tool.

Guess what?  Phones, with their small screens and awkward controls, are really bad at this.  Travelers don’t want to pinch and zoom and scroll a postage-stamp-sized window around a read-only map, they want to see the whole darn thing and scribble on it.  They don’t want to read lengthy tracts about a place one sentence at a time, they want to glance through it all and read the bits that catch their eye.  There’s a known good-sized format for this, and it’s the book, or its modern descendant the tablet computer.  Personally, I find iPads a bit too large and clunky to carry around all day, but something Kindle Fire -sized might fit the bill.

And while I’m at it: one trope that comes up regularly in science fiction movies is an augmented reality display, where information is superimposed on what you actually see.  The display bit was pretty much solved ten years ago, the reason nobody is actually using them is that we haven’t managed to figure out a decent portable interface for actually controlling the display.  Assuming somebody does, this would be brilliant for travel, but alas, it’s looking pretty unlikely until we get around to implanting electrodes in our skulls.

Quality: The Guide of the Future Will Be (Mostly) Professionally Written

The home camcorder did not kill Hollywood movies, the home studio did not kill professional music, and the Internet has yet to kill professional writers.  Yet we seem to blithely assume that travel writing as a profession is doomed, because so many would-be Guides of the Future use only unpaid crowd-sourced content or, worse yet, expect your friends to do the job.  And how can paid possibly win against free?

For the same reason we willingly fork out $10 for the latest Hollywood extravaganza instead of enduring Aunt Martha’s free home videos: because it’s simply better.  A guide whose core content is written by professional writers who have been there, who are not paid shills, who know what they are talking about and can write about it engagingly will have an immense leg up on the competition.

Scope: The Guide of the Future Will Cover the World

Browse your favorite app store for “travel” and look at the results.  Aside from the occasional flight or hotel booking app, it’s all about guides to individual places: Paris here, Bangkok there, Las Vegas in this, Taipei in that.  Going to a bunch of places or, worse yet, places not deemed worthy of their own app?  Good luck with that, since there isn’t even a way to find out what any individual app covers, much less which ones cover where you’re going.

There are two reasons for this sorry state of affairs: 1) because that’s how books are packaged (see the first point), and 2) because app publishers think they can make more money this way.   The fact that this is complete brain damage as far as the traveler is concerned has not yet registered.  Once the Guide of the Future covers the entire world in one place, the market will beat a path to its door.

As for how they get in that door, my money is on being able to build a guide compelling enough and unique enough that travelers will willingly pay good money to access it. The lure of “transactions” (that is, shilling hotels, flights, tours and miscellaneous crap to readers) is tempting, but that means that your customer is suddenly not the traveler you’re supposed to be serving, but the companies trying to make money off travelers.  This is why all the major travel publishers make a big deal about being independent and ad-less, and travelers appreciate this enough to willing pay for their products, even though there are glossy tourism brochures full of paid advertising and promotional features free for the taking at any self-respecting tourism office.

Conclusion

Travel publishers once flourished selling guidebooks that had thorough content, logical organization and fact-checked quality, all in a portable package.  The market is still there, and the digital successor to the mantle will be the one that hits the right notes for all of these.

Slicing the fruitcake of atomic content

Atomic content is the buzzword for distilling travel information into its smallest possible units, the atomlike single points of interest (POIs) that stud the pages of a guidebook, in the same way that nuts stud the innards of a rich, rummy fruitcake.  And the premise certainly sounds seductive: once these nuts are liberated from dough tying them together, so the theory goes, then they can be repackaged and recombined into all sorts of new, sexy pastries and confections.  Baklava!  Pistachio ice cream!  Nutty monetized eyeballs!  The sky is the limit!

And from a purely technological point of view, atomic content does make huge amounts of sense.  Tag POIs with geographical coordinates and store them in a database, and all sorts of neat things that you can’t do with a printed guidebook suddenly become easy: you can create a dynamic map that can pan and zoom, you can serve them up in a car navigator, you can get a list of all restaurants within 100 meters of a point.  Whee!

Yet the fallout of decomposing a fruitcake into its constituent parts is insidious and dangerous.

People rarely count the number of nuts in a slice of fruitcake, but if the price is the same, any shopper will take the 1 kg bag of nuts over the 500g bag of nuts.

Atomic content emphasizes quantity over quality.  A guidebook lists only the best 10 restaurants for a town, not all 500, but any feed consumer will prefer the feed of 500 POIs to a feed of just ten.  This pervesely incentivizes lowering the bar and keeping around old and even actively harmful information simply to inflate the POI count.

The only perceptible difference between the various brands of peanuts at your local supermarket is price.

Atomic content is commoditized.  There are a handful of sources out there for local POI information, all offering the same basic bits and bobs of information: name, address, coordinates, perhaps a telephone number, web address or opening hours.  The only differentiating factors are quantity (see previous point) and, as distant second and third, accurary and recentness, resulting in a race to the bottom that only the largest can win.  The quality of the review doesn’t really figure as far as Google is concerned, which means that user-written reviews, even if they’re crap or spam, can easily trump professionally authored reviews.

If I pick an almond from a bag of mixed nuts and eat it, there is nothing stopping me from eating a macadamia or cashew next.

Atomic content is not sticky.  If I Google “how do I get from Narita airport to central Tokyo“, Google will return 140,000 pages all advising me to take the train, not a taxi.  Having gleaned that atom of information off the page — and the way the Internet works, it’s the page most whole-heartedly devoted to answering that question and only that question that will bubble to the top — I have no incentive whatsoever to stay on the page, and odds are extremely high that the next question I ask, whatever it may be, will take me somewhere else entirely.

It’s the dough that makes or breaks the cake.

Ever heard somebody praise the quality of the raisins in a fruitcake?  Me neither.  Atomic content lacks the core of good travel information: the prose that binds it all together.  A sentence or two telling me where to find cheap late-night eats and where to go for romantic haute cuisine dinners is a far more useful starting point than an alphabetically organized phonebook of restaurants.

People value a slice of good nutty cake far more highly that a bag of nuts.

But the biggest morsel to take away is this: travel itself is not atomic.  Yes, there are occasions when I want to find an atom of information like “a good Chinese restaurant open for lunch in Northbridge”, but the true value of a guidebook is when it can help you with Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns“: the things I should know about a destination, but do not know to ask about.  I will not Google “gem scams in Bangkok” if I have never heard of the Thai capital’s shifty diamond dealers; I will not take a 30-km detour to an awesome museum in a neighbouring town unless someone tells me it exists.

The way to compete against atomic content is thus not to play the atomic content game, at least not to the extent of letting it corrupt your core cake-baking skills.  Bake cakes that are dense, filling, rich and nutty, which taste good from the first bite and leave the traveler hungry for more.

The chimera of social travel

Ever since Facebook set dollar signs spinning in venture capitalists’ eyes, the concept of social travel has been bandied about as the Next Big Thing in travel technology.

First came a wave of “Facebook for travel” sites that tried to build their own social networks, only with a travel focus. Crushed by the weight of the network effect, these all sank without a trace, with the qualified exception of TripIt, which survives more through its slick itinerary-building capabilities than through social networking.

Next Foursquare hit the scene, gaining critical mass through Facebook check-in notifications and proving that there was a market for “social-local-mobile” apps.  The inevitable wave of “social-travel-mobile” copycats followed, all of which seemed primarily designed to lure you in with the promise of useful travel info while actually spamming the hell out of your Facebook, Twitter etc streams to entice more marks into their Ponzi scheme.  A trendily spelling-impaired startup called Tripl has even come up with a pretty yet remarkably vapid infographic to justify its claims of “social travel revolution”, which can be summarized à la South Park as thus:

  • Travel is increasing.
  • Social networking is increasing.
  • Travelers use social networks.
  • ???
  • Profit!

But the question I want to ask is: does social travel actually work?  Let’s consider a simple thought experiment and find out.

So.  I’m going to Milan for the first time and I want to know where to stay, what to see and what to eat.  Will social travel help me?  There are three possibilities.

Case 1: My social network has no people familiar with Milan. 

If I know nobody in Milan, even on a “sat next to them on a flight once, exchanged business cards and added them on Facebook” level, then my social network can have no information about Milan.  And when you think about it, this is actually a very, very common situation: you usually meet people from Milan when visiting Milan, not before.  And even if you have already been to Disneyland, do you know anybody living there?  Or even in Orlando?

Case 2: My social network has a good friend living in Milan.

Let’s say I do know somebody from Milan; maybe we met at university and have known each other for years, or maybe they visited my town on business and I took them around the sights.  So when I visit Milan, gracious host that they are, they will return the favor and take me around in person.  No social travel network needed.

Case 3: My social network has a friend who knows Milan well, but doesn’t actually live there.

My friend Svetlana has been to Milan at least ten times and would love to tell me all her favorite places, like the five-star hotel with a fabulous spa she stays at, all the chic handbag boutiques she visits, plus a wonderful cramped little restaurant in a cellar that serves divine pizza by candlelight.  Kind and generous soul that she is, she’s even taken the time to type all these up on a social travel site, complete with accurate addresses and opening hours.  Surely this is a social travel match made in heaven?

Alas, no.  My budget extends to three stars tops, so her hotel is out; I’m a guy, so I have a distinctly limited need for designer fashion accessories with four-figure pricetags; and we’re bringing along the baby, so late dinners are out and we choose lunch restaurants based on availability of highchairs and staff that won’t throw a hissy fit when Jr. smears pureed broccoli all over the table.  So I can’t actually use any of her recommendations.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, incompatible travel profiles like this are pretty much the rule rather than the exception.  Think back to your last casual conversation with somebody who had recently been to a place you were going to.  How much genuinely useful travel information did you manage to glean from them?  If you were lucky, maybe a burger joint or microbrewery worth checking out, but would it be enough to replace your guidebook?

(The reverse of this explains why local sites that operate where you live and have lots of friends do work: while most of your local friends probably do not share your interest in Japanese food or the perfect cappuccino, enough of them do that they will share interesting new places on a regular basis.  Also, since you’re living there instead of traveling, you’re not pressed for time: if I live in Milan and my local friend recommends a Mexican place, I’ll probably go check it out at some point, but if I’m there only for a weekend, I’ll stick to Italian.)

The final nail in the coffin is that while sharing your favorite spots at a dinner party with someone you know is effortless and fun, it’s fairly tedious to type them up in a social networking site at a usable level of detail.  While on a fully open travel site like Wikitravel you can at least bask in the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that your handiwork will be read by thousands, on a social network that restricts visibility to people who know you, the odds of anybody actually ever seeing or caring what you write is low indeed.

And that’s it: the inescapable conclusion is that your social network is very likely to be useless for actual travel.  Not a few startups have realized this problem, and have tried to figure out ways to lower the bar.  Maybe they can find you an in-person guide by being a de facto dating service like Tripl and any number of “X with a local” sites tries to do, or maybe they can show everybody everybody’s contributions and hope you can make some sense of it (I’m looking at you, TripAdvisor), or maybe they can sprinkle in lots of content from experts like Lonely Planet and Frommers (hi there, Wenzani!).  But each of these actually involves going outside your social network, and thus loses the main point of social networking: that these recommendations come from people you know and trust, not random strangers.

This is not to say that social networks don’t have their place in a traveler’s repertoire: Facebook is great for keeping touch with acquaintances around around the globe, and any local site can give me good recommendations in places new to me if I can just be specific enough about what I want and where.  There’s also plenty of room for improvement, since most user-generated travel sites out there do a really bad job of using user reputation and nth-degree connections to sort out the bacon from the spam, and I’m mildly amazed that none of the major networks have taken a leaf from Dopplr‘s book and implemented a notification service that lets you know when visitors are heading your way.  But social travel alone is not going to be the killer app for travel.

User-generated content: what went wrong and why it still matters

The buzzword user-generated content (UGC), aka “crowdsourcing”, is starting to sound a little 2007, with the cool kids having moved on to hype social travel, itself a subject worthy of a future post.  So what was the original promise, why didn’t it pan out as expected, and is there still a future for it?

The Promise

I’ll lay my own bias on the line up front: I’ve been contributing to wiki-style “user-generated” sites like Everything2, Wikipedia and Wikitravel for over ten years now, and was sufficiently impressed by the last of these to throw away a steady job and take a stab at spinning off Wikitravel Press as a commercial publishing business.  Coming from a software development background and thus familiar with the battle between open source software created from the bottom-up vs closed, commercial software decreed from the top down (see Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar for a primer), it seemed obvious that the traditional cathedral model of guidebook publishers deciding what to sell, toiling away behind high walls to package it up, and selling the end result at a stiff markup was doomed to eventually lose to the raucous bazaar of travellers swapping free tips online, with the cream percolating to the top in the spirit of same happy collaborative anarchy that created Wikipedia.

My initial experiences at Lonely Planet only served to reinforce my belief.  Until recently, the company has revolved entirely around a well-oiled machine for turning authors’ raw manuscripts into polished guidebooks, with tight focus and strict quality control, and this model has served them well over the 38 years that they were competing against other guidebook publishers trying to do the same.  But now that the competition can get their content for free from countless contributors around the globe and distribute it at virtually zero cost, how can they possibly afford to keep paying not just the writers themselves, but editors, proofreaders, cartographers etc as well?

The Reality

Funny thing is, it turns out that crowdsourced content in general (and travel content in particular) isn’t quite the panacea people expected to be.  A few user-generated travel sites have certainly prospered, most notably TripAdvisor, which takes the hands-off approach of letting anybody post anything about everything and leaving it to the reader to sort out the wheat from the chaff, providing only a taxonomy of places and points of interest for navigating through it all.  This works great if you already have a hotel or two in mind, want to read about them in detail, and have your bullshit detector fine-tuned well enough to filter out the reviews by touts and fruitcakes; alas, it’s next to useless if you’re trying to, say, find a nice winery inn to stay in Melbourne’s Yarra Valley, since information about regions is hopelessly scattered, or even a nice, affordable hotel in Tokyo, since you’re given a list of 640 and made to sort through them yourself, with no way to figure out if you should be basing yourself in Shibuya or Shinjuku.

Wikitravel set out to address this by taking a leaf from Wikipedia’s book and allowing users to edit as well as write, with the explicit goal of creating a readable end-to-end travel guide, instead of just a scattershot collection of factoids and opinions.  Now eight years old, the site is still trundling along and even slowly increasing its Alexa rank as of late, but it has never quite achieved the mass-market impact of Wikipedia.  The reasons why are varied and complex, and being taken over in 2006 by a used-car company and frozen in time interface-wise probably didn’t help, but at the end of the day the problem may boil down to a series of fundamental tensions between the open-to-all wiki model and the intention of a travel guide:

  • Wikitravel is meant to serve travellers, but it’s business owners that benefit the most from a good review.  Thus, while each traveller has a weak individual interest in ensuring that each entry is accurate and realistic, the business owner of that entry has a very strong incentive to ensure that it does not.  This is much less so at Wikipedia, where articles are rarely used by consumers to make purchasing decisions.
  • Wikipedia has an explicit goal of creating a neutral encyclopedia and a raft of policies that work towards this end: points of view, citations, references, etc.  Wikitravel has to rely on the subjective opinions of anonymous travellers, and when they are in conflict, it is not possible to say who is “right” and who is “wrong”: the only possible route is to strip out anything disputable and leave behind bland trivia.  This is not helped by the steady stream of Wikipedians coming in under the misconception that, as in Wikipedia, dull, unopinionated writing is a good thing.
  • If writing a neutral review is hard enough, then curating a neutral list of top attractions, best places to eat etc is even harder, especially for country or region-level articles.  These tend to be constantly subject to edit wars, with residents and business owners pitching for their own places and surreptitiously trying to remove others.

None of these forces are insurmountable, and those articles on Wikitravel that are watched like hawks by benevolent neutral caretakers can shine like finely polished jewels, but they do explain why the quality of Wikitravel articles varies so widely, why there are less truly usable Wikitravel articles than there are informative Wikipedia articles, and why none of the many companies out there trying to create automated guidebooks purely out of Wikitravel or other user-generated travel content have really pulled it off.  Other travel wikis, like TripAdvisor’s Inside, lack Wikitravel’s sense of community and thus fare even worse on all counts, the odd quality contribution drowned in a sea of spam.

Nevertheless, Wikitravel content is still used even by shiny new startups like Triposo, simply because there is nothing better out there.  The traveller, however, is not thus constrained, and that’s why they still willingly pay a premium to the traditional guidebook publishers for guaranteed quality, coverage and cohesiveness.

The Future

What then?  In the PC industry, the epic battle between open-source Linux and closed-source Windows fizzled out when Apple came out of the left field with OS X, which married open-source internals (Darwin) with a closed-source user interface (Aqua) smoothing out all the warts.  OS X now runs not only in Macs, but (disguised as iOS) in iPhones and iPads.  Apple pulled ahead of Microsoft in stock market valuation last year.

Likewise, I suspect the winner of the travel sweepstakes will be neither “UGC” nor “experts” alone, but the first travel company that manages to harness together a solid base of open content to build on, the raw power of a million travelers contributing and correcting, the iron fist of editors and curators pummelling it into shape, and the slick usability of a professionally designed and laid-out travel guide.  The pain point is money: pulling this together will not come cheap and the days of people paying $50 for a travel guide are almost over, yet in order to take off, the content must be deep, open to the world and not plastered with blinking banner ads.  Who will dare to take on the challenge?