And only now, at the end of December 2009, Firefox 3.5 — the latest release of the software open sourced twelve years ago — has at long last eked out ahead of any single version of rival Internet Explorer.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Version Market Share

It’s been a long road, Mozilla; congratulations on this hard-earned milestone.

From the NYT article:

The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics…. Drafts of scientific papers … were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

To say the least, the leak contains some juicy fodder for skeptics of human-driven climate change amongst the leaked materials.

Amongst these leaked emails, for example, are conversations which document various difficulties some of the CRU’s climate researchers have encountered over the years in trying to work with the data collected and managed by the organization. The Times article focuses on a discussion thread in which researcher Phil Jones mentions using a “trick” — originally employed by another colleague, Michael Mann — to “hide [a] decline” in temperatures apparently shown in some set of data.

In an interview about the leaked emails, Dr. Mann attempts to defuse the statement as a poor choice of words. Unfortunately, whether he’s being sincere or not, his is frankly a response that’s to be expected.

The article continues:

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

This is also a statement that you’d expect from a climatologist building a career on a body of work disagreeing with the idea of human-driven warming. These emails are naturally material that skeptics of the human-driven climate change argument will latch onto (and, frankly, they certainly should; it’s just how scientific work is tested — through dispute).

The next several days sees a flurry of activity throughout the media and the blogosphere.

Before long, the name “Climategate” (kitschy but concise) gets attached to the discussions about the leaked materials. And since there’s a bit of both data and program source code in the mix, techies from around the world immediately jump into the fray.

One of the most popular files from the leak discussed most heavily in techie circles is called HARRY_READ_ME.txt (copies available in both original format and more structured edition). The story that unfolds in this file reveals the plight of a programmer named Harry who had struggled for three years, attempting to reproduce some research results with a collection of data and the source code for an algorithm created to calculate research conclusions.

Sadly, this man’s three-year effort to reproduce the published results with the given material never succeeded. Here’s an excerpt from the file, for a glimpse at this poor fella’s mounting frustrations along the way:

getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data. so many new stations have been introduced, so many false references.. so many changes that aren’t documented. Every time a cloud forms I’m presented with a bewildering selection of similar-sounding sites, some with references, some with WMO codes, and some with both. And if I look up the station metadata with one of the local references, chances are the WMO code will be wrong (another station will have it) and the lat/lon will be wrong too. I’ve been at it for well over an hour, and I’ve reached the 294th station in the tmin database. Out of over 14,000. Now even accepting that it will get easier (as clouds can only be formed of what’s ahead of you), it is still very daunting. I go on leave for 10 days after tomorrow, and if I leave it running it isn’t likely to be there when I return! As to whether my ‘action dump’ will work (to save repetition).. who knows?

Yay! Two-and-a-half hours into the exercise and I’m in Argentina!

Pfft.. and back to Australia almost immediately :-( .. and then Chile. Getting there.

Unfortunately, after around 160 minutes of uninterrupted decision making, my screen has started to black out for half a second at a time. More video cable problems – but why now?!! The count is up to 1007 though.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that’s the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.

Assuming the original conclusions he was attempting to reproduce were all based on this data (and, there’s frankly no reason not to), it’s impossible to invest much confidence in their validity.

Martin points out that the data and algorithms with which Harry was working were “inherited” from a previous researcher (or researchers), and came in a poorly-organized bundle with poor documentation. And what’s worse, he didn’t have access to anyone who had originally derived the conclusions he was tasked to reproduce.

The real egg in the face of this anecdote is the fact that CRU has clearly done an atrocious job at properly archiving their data, and documenting the work their researchers produce. Naturally this level of disorganization is a serious problem anywhere it may occur, but it’s a particularly glaring issue in the field of scientific research, where the validity of research results lies squarely upon the ability of independent third parties to reliably reproduce those results on their own. Yet here we find that the CRU is demonstrated to have either managed their data so poorly as to prevent its own scientists from being able to reproduce the organization’s own published results (in which case “embarrassing” doesn’t even begin to describe the situation), or to have manipulated the data and produced false results. And the fact is that either story tells a horrible tale about the CRU.

Charlie Martin, in a post to the Pajamas Media blog, writes:

I think there’s a good reason the CRU didn’t want to give their data to people trying to replicate their work.

It’s in such a mess that they can’t replicate their own results.

…

This is not, sadly, all that unusual. Simply put, scientists aren’t software engineers. They don’t keep their code in nice packages and they tend to use whatever language they’re comfortable with. Even if they were taught to keep good research notes in the past, it’s not unusual for things to get sloppy later. But put this in the context of what else we know from the CRU data dump:

1. They didn’t want to release their data or code, and they particularly weren’t interested in releasing any intermediate steps that would help someone else

2. They clearly have some history of massaging the data… to get it to fit their other results….

3. They had successfully managed to restrict peer review to … the small group of true believers they knew could be trusted to say the right things.

As a result, it looks like they found themselves trapped. They had the big research organizations, the big grants — and when they found themselves challenged, they discovered they’d built their conclusions on fine beach sand.

I won’t belabor the discussion of the implications these leaked documents offer; there is no shortage of people writing about exactly that. In case you’re interested in some of the more detailed coverage of the tech community’s review of the leaked data and algorithms, I would point you to the following pieces:

• Climategate: Violating the Social Contract of Science [Pajamas Media]
• Data-leak lessons learned from the ‘Climategate’ hack [Computerworld]
• Climategate: hide the decline – codified ["Watts Up With That" blog]

There’s also some great ongoing coverage at Devil’s Kitchen.

Regardless whether or not there’s any merit to any of the CRU’s climate research, however, this little drama leaves me unable to resist repeating an argument from my last post:

But with all these arguments and assertions about corollaries, trends, and predictions that this number crunching activity will generate, it will become increasingly crucial to have a mechanism by which the results claimed to have been derived from the number-crunching can be accounted for.

…

It must … become incumbent upon anybody publishing findings derived from mining such data to share both the sources and processes used to derive their results or conclusions. In cases of claims rooted in the fruits of data mining endeavors, it is specifically important that results indicate:

1. exactly which data sets it draws from, and

2. precisely which algorithm(s) processed the data in question.

At this point, the specific implications this debacle has for the CRU’s research is irrelevant. For, whether by deceit or incompetence, this leaked data has left their published research about climate change completely unreliable.

Yet developing a confident clarity around the subject of their research remains of critical importance, for climate change is a real challenge that humankind must cope with. Regardless whether or not human industrial activity is a driving factor for climate change, the fact is that the ice at our poles is melting at an accelerating rate. Decades worth of satellite photos and other survey data sufficiently demonstrate this fact. We similarly have data collected over the last several decades by the world’s meteorologists that global mean temperatures seem to be rising, as well as increasing levels of extreme weather (from droughts and famines to floods and more) around the world.

The climate debate isn’t over whether these events are occurring, but instead whether human industrial activity accounts for a relevant piece of it.

Governments around the planet will be forced to take some sort of action to deal with the prospective repercussions of these changes (e.g., rising sea levels, expansion of the Sahara, and the rest). The consideration at stake, therefore, is how each country will individually and collectively direct their efforts and invest their resources in dealing with it.

If human industrial activity has bearing on the matter, we’ll have to make some serious policy changes and invest heavily in developing alternative methods of production, lest we imperil our own (and other) species. But if, on the other hand, our industrial activity is not a determining factor in climate change, our efforts are best spent trying to figure out how we’re going to deal with the realities of a changing climate that we cannot mitigate simply by being more responsible with our emissions.

In any case, everyone needs to make informed decisions about where they’re investing their money and efforts.

And so a number of the world’s governmental and industrial leaders (including US President Barack Obama) are scheduled to meet — along with members of the climate research community — at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December in an attempt to work out policy directions to deal with climate change. I’m hoping the event will focus on methods to improve and reinforce confidence in the remainder of the climate research work being conducted around the world, and that it won’t turn into a political food fight.

Fingers crossed.

I am left hoping that some real good can rise from this mess. And so I call on climate change researchers and institutions around the world to take this opportunity develop the practice of providing full disclosure on the sources of their data sets and the functionality of their algorithms. There will likely be many political, legal, and logistical obstacles to address and overcome in this effort, but failure to do so carries stakes that are simply too high.

One of the most commonly-leveraged contact points has become the email inbox.

Nearly everyone has an email address, and many of us have several – one for work, one personal. I presently have four, for example.

Generally speaking, people have largely become very comfortable communicating over email. It doesn’t carry the “burden” of requiring an immediate response, unlike a phone call, and can be whatever length the author thinks is appropriate for the correspondence.

It’s also easy to share information around the conversation in emails, by including a URL that points to further information on some website, or by attaching photos or other small files. This capability allows promoters to keep their message concise (if they’re clever), and yet provide leads to supplemental information for those with interest in pursuing the deeper details of the message.

Finally, it allows the author to write up a single message that can be delivered to a (theoretically) limitless number of people.

For all these reasons, one of the most common techniques that promoters adopt is the email campaign. They focus efforts on accumulating email addresses of people that could potentially be interested in their product, services, performances, or whatever it is they’re on a mission to promote.

Some years ago, I would share my email address with people and organizations whose news I’d have interest in following: bands, artists, pro-social organizations, and more.

But after a while, I noticed my inbox just blowing up.

The more I gave my email address out, the more emails I’d have to deal with every day.

I’m not really interested in anyone’s ideas on how I can be making millions from home, offers for debt reduction, or substances that promise me the ability to drive nails through wooden boards with my penis (promise me the same for granite, however, and maybe we’ll talk).

Access Gone Awry

It got to the point where the first thing I’d do when I sat down to check in with my email was to scan each new message to determine who sent it; if the sender wasn’t a friend or some other party that I’d considered important to hear from at the moment, I’d just delete the message. Then I’d start actually reading the new messages.

How does one’s email address wind up on those lists? There’s no one answer, but they’re usually “stolen,” either from mailing list databases with lax security, or by malware that manages to infest peoples’ personal computers.

This clandestine and unauthorized collection of email addresses is a huge business. It’s also illegal in most parts of the world.

In the US, there are several laws in place intended to safeguard our email addresses. These laws require anyone conducting email promotions to be forthcoming about any intent to use the addresses they collect for promotional messaging. In fact, everyone collecting email addresses is required to completely disclose how they intend to use peoples’ email addresses, as well as provide a reliable mechanism by which people can “unsubscribe” from promotional email messaging at their sole discretion.

There are even laws that dictate the handling of email addresses.

I work at a major media company, largely doing server-side development on their websites. I occasionally have to request copies of databases from these sites in order to enhance or otherwise alter how the site works with its data; I work on copies to the risk of hosing the live site’s database. Many of our databases include the private email addresses of their users, and we are required by law to take precautions to ensure that their information is reasonably protected from theft. Typically, the user table containing the addresses might be omitted, if possible, or the email addresses may get randomized. What specifically happens depends on the data requirements around what needs to get done.

Compile and Sell

For some sites, user registrations exist for the express purpose of accumulating and selling the database of peoples’ contact information to other organizations. The good news is that it the law requires anyone doing so to completely disclose this intent to each person that provides their email address. The bad news is that not everyone follows such rules, so do be careful with whom you share your email address.

For this reason, many people have an “auxiliary” personal email address (maybe some Yahoo! or GMail account) that they use to sign up for random stuff they just want to check out, only later providing their primary email address after the quality of that membership proves valuable to them.

Theft & Harvesting

More commonly, however, the email addresses are simply stolen by hackers from insecure servers. And more common still is that email addresses are harvested from peoples’ personal computers by malware (like a trojan or virus) that makes it aboard the system, and starts to scour the computer owner’s address books and inboxes for all the email addys its greedy little algorithm can dig up.

Emails with a bazillion addresses in the To or CC fields are fucking gold mines for such malicious software.

This is why law-abiding email promotion campaigns do not disclose the email addresses of members to each other; each email you receive on a mailing list run by a respectable entity (whether company, organization, or professional artist) is either addressed to the promoter’s own email address, a “do not reply” address, or only to the recipient.

This safeguard strategy is nowhere near bullet-proof, but it’s the best the law can presently do. The rest is up to you.

So I’m very discretionary about giving my email address out. I certainly want my friends to have it. I’m even comfortable with the idea of my bank or utility companies having it. The benefits of certain specific people having that contact point outweighs the potential disadvantages of what might happen if it leaks out.

Of course, I consequently expect that anyone with whom I’ve shared the information will treat it respectfully; at some point you just have to take a leap of faith, or three.

Discretion

But I don’t give my email out to, say, bands any more. Nor do I give it out to representatives of charity organizations, or political campaigns, or stores I like to shop at, even if I may be interested in some or all of their promotional messaging.

I prefer to modulate the degree to which I’m messaged by promoters.

Email has become an important communications medium; one that, for better or worse, I have become reliant upon. There are plenty of useful and relevant messages that come into my inbox for me to deal with, from billing statements to travel itinerary confirmations. And at work, I want to see only the email that’s relevant to my job.

In 2009, we have no lack of things and people vying for our attention throughout the day. It’s consequently become increasingly useful to protect the signal-to-noise ratio of the information vying for our attention. People won’t stop competing for it, so it’s each person’s responsibility to safeguard access to their attention to the extent appropriate for the life they want to lead.

Unfortunately, email is not a medium that affords you any control whatsoever over incoming messaging. Anyone with your email address can send you a message (or even flood you with them), and there’s next to nothing you can do to stop them.

And so there’s an implicit trust contract that underlies each decision one makes to share their email address.

Access Modulation

Because my inbox is such an important personal contact point in my life, I have little interest in finding some generic, written-for-everyone-yet-no-one-in-particular messaging when I sit down to review my inbox. Of course, there are exceptions, like a CheapTickets travel deals list I’m on, but I want to keep such exceptions minimal (remember: signal-to-noise ratio).

So I’m stingy with giving out my email address.

Even so, I am still interested in keeping informed about “other stuff,” like upcoming shows of my friends’ bands, news from the White House, public health advisories, and parties at my local pub. I simply prefer to have some control over when I grant this material my attention.

I want to subscribe to their news in a way that allows me to modulate their access. And I’m not alone.

I hear, more and more, people telling stories about their “rediscovery” of a mode of life in which they’re less accessible. This usually comes attached to some story about a camping trip they took to either a national park, a vacation to some island abroad where they were just too far removed from the Internet, and their cell phone service. No phone calls, no text messages, no email. And attached to each such story – without fail – is a realization that there was something about this state of inaccessibility that they had started searching for ways to return to after returning to their “normal” lives.

“Mad As Hell” at the Network

Quite like the classic film Network foretold, I believe that modern society has been approaching a tipping point at which people are increasingly starting to demanding the reclamation of control over their accessibility. Not everybody, but a non-trivial amount, nonetheless.

So what’s a promoter to do?

The good news is that there are loads of ways for promoters to accommodate this. I’ll cover three.

RSS Feeds

Let’s start with adding RSS feeds to the news or announcements you post on your website. RSS isn’t as trendy as some of the other options I’ll cover, but it’s got the lowest barrier of adoption because anyone can access it, without having to register for a user account and remember passwords.

Like email, RSS feeds are unidirectional messaging. People need to come to your website and subscribe to your feeds.

And you have no insight into information about your subscribers, unless you use a service like Feedburner, which can at least give you insight into your total number of subscriptions, how your subscriptions change over time, and their geographic dispersal.

Twitter

Everyone has heard of Twitter. Some love it irrationally, while others hate it irrationally. Both of y’all need to get over this. The fact remains, however, that it’s a medium that gives promoters access to loads of people.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that people aren’t just “listening” on Twitter; they’re also “talking.” You’ve got opportunities to have conversations with your audience. And, just like at a party, you can leverage opportunities to jump in on conversations that are going on, and get your message out. Also, like at a party, you should exercise discretion on how and when you jump into conversations unsolicited; you can still come across as just as much of a douche bag on Twitter as you can in real life.

Twitter feeds are also relatively easy to promote. You uniquely identify yourself to people using @username notation (I, for example, am @prometheas). That’s something super easy to put onto, say a flyer or sticker.

Like RSS, however, you don’t get much information about who is “following” your posts.

Facebook

If you’re not promoting on Facebook, you’re dropping a serious ball. At the time of this writing, it’s got a vast number of members (and the most international members), and the highest rate of growth of any social networking community.

What you want to do is set up a Page; don’t use your personal profile for promotions (I’ll explain in a moment).

Of course, the first step would be to create a personal profile, if you don’t already have one. But personal profiles are designed to be personal, and built with privacy concerns in mind. As such, the social connections between profiles are bi-directional – “friendship” requests must be “approved” before Facebook recognizes them, to allow “sharing” of information and messaging between the parties.

Pages, by contrast, are not designed with privacy in mind. They are designed for the public dissemination of information for promotional purposes.

Connections between users and Pages are therefore uni-directional: a person becomes a “fan” of whatever person, organization, etc has organized a particular Page. It is not necessary for the users maintaining the Page to “accept” anything; the subscribing user immediately has access to all messaging produced by the people maintaining that Page.

The maintainers of a page also have access to anonymous information about the Page’s fans, such as the breakdown of their ages, their geographic dispersal, and access to page views, and more. This is all information that you can then use to run ad campaigns online (both on Facebook and other places), and build an understanding of your audience. Email will never give you this.

Let’s Make a Deal

So, I know you’re not going to stop asking me for my email address. And I know people will continue to willfully hand over their email addresses to promoters; it’s their right to do what they wish with their own information.

While I may well be interested and willing to tune in to your message, you can’t have me any old time you want me.

And so I suggest that you promoters wishing to have access to my attention (and the growing numbers of others like me) make it possible for me to follow your news on my terms, and we can both win.

As you can see, it’s quite simple and straight-forward to use. The tweeters out there will recognize that this feature is modeled directly after Twitter’s “mention” functionality.

Happy tagging.

Let’s revisit:

Are software touchscreen keyboards good for everyone? Certainly not. But this is another aspect of the Apple Way. Apple tries to make things that many people love, not things that all people like. The key is that they’re not afraid of the staunch criticism, and often outright derision, that comes with breaking conventions.

[...]

That the iPhone — or specifically its software touchscreen keyboard — does not appeal to everyone is not a problem. Nothing appeals to everyone. Even if you try to make something that appeals to everyone by adding every single clamored-for feature, you wind up with something like Windows that does not appeal to people with a taste for the elegant and refined.

And so Apple demonstrate mastery of yet another classic showmanship tactic: know your audience.

Although he amusingly paints the behavior of folks annoyed with unmet expectations with absurdity, his insights actually led me down a different path of reflection: the importance of the art of managing expectations.

Nearly any undesirable situation can be dealt with more gracefully, with the application of effective expectation management.

From Walt Mossberg’s review of the Palm Pre:

In fact, during my testing, one of my downloads from the App Catalog caused my Pre to crash disastrously — all my email, contacts and other data were wiped out, and the phone was unable to connect to the Sprint network or Wi-Fi. Palm conceded the catastrophe was due to problems it still has getting the App Catalog to work with the phone’s internal memory, and explained that this is one reason it hasn’t widely distributed the developer tools. [Emphasis added]

Now, in all fairness, the Pre is a brand new device whose software was written afresh, from the ground up. While this makes it very modern, its WebOS software stack has not as yet been run through any ringers, and it is most definitely a very complicated stack of software. As such, stories like this do not surprise me. In fact, I’m actually anticipating a number more to surface in the coming months. I do not say this disparagingly, by the way — it’s simply a very ambitious piece of kit that Palm are putting to market.

My greatest “doomsday scenario” fear for the Pre is that some disastrous bug in its immensely complex Synergy API is found that starts eating up or corrupting people’s address books all throughout the cloud.

O, Palm — my fingers are crossed that you’ll find (and patch!) any Synergy bugs before the rest of the world does.

And, by the way: congratulations!

Then I realized what that something is: a modern re-imagination of Apple’s abandoned OpenDoc component software technology that has been social-enabled and lives in “the cloud.”

For those unfamiliar with the technology, its Wikipedia article explains:

The basic idea of OpenDoc was to create small, reusable components, responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc provided a framework in which these components could run together, and a document format for storing the data created by each component. These documents could then be opened on other machines, where the OpenDoc frameworks would substitute suitable components for each part, even if they were from different vendors.

In this way users could “build up” their documents from parts. Since there was no main application and the only visible interface was the document itself, the system was known as document centered.

The first point worth mentioning is that the OpenDoc software system was designed around a document centric, rather than application centric, model.

Briefly, the big difference of the document centric software model is that rather than opening an application, such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word, you would instead open the New Document template file (located, for example, on your desktop).

Doing so would open a new, new document. This new document was blank, like an empty page, ready for you to start adding material, like text, images, etc.

An OpenDoc page felt a lot like a Web page. It was possible, for example, to add audio clips, or a QuickTime movie into it. You could even embed a Web page (not much different than adding an <iframe> to an HTML document). Although the technology didn’t survive long enough to see many third-party contributions, it was intended that even spreadsheets and charts could embedded into a document.

Images, movies, or other data could be dropped into the document window. Once that happens, the OpenDoc framework would load an appropriate software component, called a part, in order to display the data. This model is not unlike the way Web browser plugins work. Some parts also provided the ability to edit their data in-place. New parts could, naturally, also be created from scratch.

So an OpenDoc document containing a text part and an image part might look like this:

An OpenDoc document

And once the user would start interacting with the image part, OpenDoc would present an interface like this:

An OpenDoc document with an active part editor

For people familiar with iWork or the Microsoft Office suite, adding components into an OpenDoc document was similar to how you can drop a fully-editable spreadsheet right into a word processing file. But only Excel spreadsheets can be embedded into Word documents.

These suites are both designed according to an application-centric software model.

OpenDoc’s component-based document-centric software model, by contrast, aimed to deliver the ability to embed any spreadsheet component into a document. Which would have meant that even if Excel is your favorite spreadsheet, you can use the Nisus Writer component for word processing.

In enabling the end-user to mix and match the precise software components that suited their needs (or tastes) into a compound document, it offered a complete democratization of the Mac software market.

But OpenDoc’s success would have also likely have had a severely balkanizing effect on the Mac software market. Say you’ve drafted up some document using the Nisus Writer text component, two Excel spreadsheet components, an Adobe image component (and possibly many more), and you now have to pass this document to your subcontractor (or lawyer, or the UK office) — you’d have to somehow ensure that everyone that might need to work on or view it has access to these documents composed of data created by a multitude of components.

Oh, and they’d all have to be using Macs… did I mention this was the late 90s?

So another strong reason it was discontinued is a more pragmatic one: it would have been exceedingly difficult share these complex documents with anyone. Even forgetting the Mac-only part, it was the very early days of the Internet, so there weren’t yet even any reliably graceful mechanisms for fetching required components from the network.

Like many Apple technologies of yore, OpenDoc was both way ahead of its time, and completely incongruous with market realities.

But today is a different day, with changed market realities.

As I’d mentioned, Google Wave offers a similar software paradigm, but utterly tramples OpenDoc’s offerings in the most critical matter:

Waves are immensely shareable.

In the Wave lexicon, the software components that allow a Wave document to contain supplemental datatypes are called gadgets, rather than parts. Examples of gadgets can include a YouTube player, a chess or sudoku game, a photo album fed by mRSS, and even a Google Maps object.

Here are screenshots of a few Waves, showing a variety of embedded gadgets:

Wave compound documents, featuring gadgets.

Wave is arriving to a much more mature Internet. It’s being delivered to a society for whom the Web is so ubiquitous, it has long since become an integral part of its pop culture. People have stopped wondering what the Internet can do for them, and started rather asking why can’t the Internet also do x, y, and z while it’s at it?

Basically, Wave has it better because:

• The only software required to use Wave is a modern Web browser — everyone’s got one of those!
• Waves live “in the cloud” (that’s just fancy speak for saying that they live on servers—like message boards—rather than kept on any one person’s computer).
• Because a wave always has network access, adding a new gadget from somewhere else online is quite manageable.

Waves also have a large number of features OpenDoc never had, including the ability to invite multiple people to edit the document concurrently, as well as the inherent ability to “rewind” through the document’s history. And since iGoogle gadgets can be placed into waves, Wave already has vastly more gadgets available for use than OpenDoc ever had parts.

Now, did anyone on the Wave team ever explicitly look to OpenDoc for inspiration during in their design process?

I don’t expect so.

Rather I feel like the document-centric componentized software model itself is a relatively advanced stage of a the fundamental design principle of modularity in software systems.

It was only a matter of time before this model would get pulled off successfully.

Credits on that one go specifically to Stephen King, who wrote the book upon which the movie was based.

I would simply like to add that — apart from predicting the whole “Reality TV” fad of our time 15 years in advance — the very first sentences of the movie’s opening titles happen to read:

By 2017 the world economy has collapsed. Food, natural resources, and oil are in short supply.

One dead-on prediction is enough, thank you.