Let’s Get Physical

Last week, I got to go to sunny(!?) Cardiff for The Web Is - A celebration of the web’s 25th birthday.

What I wanted to do was to write a big blog post about the whole event - A run down of the key takeaways from each of the talks. However, when I started condensing my notes down, it became abundantly clear that some of the talks were too darn interesting to shrink down to a synopsis. So, I decided to highlight some of them specifically in their own blog posts.

One such talk was Scott Jenson’s talk, entitled “The Web Is Like Water”.

“You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.”

- Bruce Lee

Scott’s talk was about The Physical Web, and he made a strong case for it. His argument is based on the idea that the Web, he says, is like water - It flows into any cup (device) and fills it. 

So far so good, right? He began by telling us about the dangers of standardising things on the web too early - For example, will we really want ‘pull to refresh’ to be a standard forever? Or will something better come along?

To illustrate his point, he gave us some information about the history of the Steering Wheel. Yes, the steering wheel.

It’s worth covering a bit because I thought the underlying truth he was getting at was interesting - When cars first came along they had tillers (Like a boat) instead of the wheel which we now use today. To us, this seems stupid. But they didn’t use tillers because they didn’t have steering wheels - They actually had invented (And hated!) them. It was because the technology wasn’t there yet to make steering wheels viable - Specifically the ability to separate the steering wheel’s movement from the direct alignment of the car wheels (Say, when you hit a pothole - This is called irreversible steering).

In many ways, our industry still has these 'tillers’ - Things which in the future will seem insane, but work better for us right now. And them being the standard isn’t necessarily the right thing, because a steering wheel-esque solution may be just around the corner, if we can develop the right technology to support it.

The Web Standards Elitists of the world would have us decide everything now and it be settled, all of us subscribing to the agreed formula for all future time, when in reality it only takes one game changer to make us need to re-think what we should be doing. They would be quite happy using a tiller to drive their cars forever, because it was agreed upon before steering wheels became viable. Take the iPhone as another example - It changed our idea of what web standards should be, and now we have new ones emerging. The idea of hundreds of smart devices living in our world around us is another potential game changer, and the standards we’ve got used to may not necessarily apply again.

From that he moved on to telling us about The Physical Web specifically, which is a fascinating idea about how smart devices should work in the future. Web agency clients often have what Scott calls 'App Myopia’, the desire for an app which is unnecessary, and so far the world of BLE Smart Devices has the same problem. Your smart thermostat has an app, every smart vending machine has it’s own app, smart parking meters empty your wallet with unique custom apps, your local smart bus stop has one too.

The future of interacting with smart devices cannot be app based, because we would have too many apps (Most of them would also be terrible) - Apps for smart devices are a linear solution to an exponential problem because the number of smart devices we have personally is going to explode but the amount of apps we want to have on our phone isn’t.

Instead, we need to develop an open, web-based standard, where smart devices broadcast URLs and the user can interact with them if they’re nearby without any additional apps. This would presumably be built into the operating system, a web browser, or there would be a few apps to choose from to cover this entire purpose (Much like a 'browser’ app covers the web today)

Scott told us about the three levels of the physical web:

• Coordination - The Jetsons-style holy grail where all your devices talk to each other in a 'cascade of awesomeness’
• Control - You get to control your stuff using the internet. Neat.
• Discovery - You get information and context from the devices around you. The simplest of the three. 

This physical web needs a sort of 'proximity-based’ DNS for discovery and ranking, which can lead to those interactions.

So what can the Physical Web actually do? How would it work in our everyday lives? When people talk about iBeacons they tend to talk about coupons in a shopping center, but there’s so much more it could do.

The simplest implementation of the physical web is what Scott calls the bus stop model - A user stands at a bus stop, which is broadcasting a URL. The user visits the URL to fetch some information about bus times. Coupons for nearby shops would work in a similar way.

The second (more exciting) implementation is the vending machine model - A user stands near a vending machine, which broadcasts a URL. The user visits the URL to choose some food. So far this is an identical process, but then the website server contacts the vending machine to say “Hey, this guy wants a Mars Bar. Drop it!”.

The third (and sadly kind of impossible - For now!) implementation is that the user connects directly with the smart devices around them using JS-based APIs which do not yet exist, removing the need for the external web service (or The Cloud) powering things from above.

My mind boggles at the possibilities, and with the rise of wearable tech even people walking down the street could be broadcasting themselves (or, the bits of themselves they’re comfortable with) over the Physical Web to people they meet. It’s a lot cooler than a business card, though it has obvious privacy issues to overcome.

All of this stuff, exciting as it is (He gave us a free physical web beacon thing! Eeeh!) it’s going to take a long time to get there. Privacy concerns are one massive issue, and there will undoubtedly be others to overcome.

Scott doesn’t see this as an insurmountable problem, and crucially, doesn’t see this as a Google project - It’s for everyone. He argues that there are two types of idea: Truck ideas, and road ideas. The road ideas are infrastructure whereas the trucks are more immediate ideas based on existing infrastructure - Roads take a long time to make, but trucks need them to run on!

In many ways the Physical Web is the long term idea. The idea that a rising tide floats all boats is true here, because this is one idea on which many other ideas will one day exist, from a variety of benefiting companies - But we will have to work on it to get there. So let’s all start digging and laying down tarmac - The road to the future is ready to begin construction.

- Adam