I’ve said it elsewhere on the Internet, but it’s time I codified it in text. The glow will be off the rose of Google Glass, and possibly even the idea of ubiquitous wearable computing, as soon as someone gets hit by a car because they were too busy checking Facebook or Twitter on their HUD. Plenty of people have probably been hit by cars because they were checking their smartphones, but it’s easier to blame the user because they could just keep it in their pocket. When you have an omni-present interruption device in your constant vision, all bets are off.

There’s a key word I want to point out in the above paragraph: “ubiquitous”. Google Glass is the first modern attempt to put wearable computing in the hands of ordinary users. Until now, the wearable computer has been the provenance of übernerds like Steve Mann, or advertising for technology companies. [1] Outside of that world, the closest most of us ever got to a wearable computer was the calculator watch. I’ll skip over the “smartwatch” in this essay, except to note that it’s too early to tell how well the category will catch on.

The problem with Google Glass is that it’s solving the wrong problem. As we live more and more in the digital world, we want more and more to have our data and our tools with us. Now we do, in the smartphone. Smartphones have their flaws: they can get dropped and broken, lost or stolen, and if you’re away from anywhere with cellular reception, it loses half it’s utility. Fortunately, it’s looking like areas without cell phone reception are becoming rarer and rarer. What we need isn’t data in our face. What we need is more reliable and faster access to data, and that will come in time as we develop faster wireless communication and longer-lasting batteries. The only advantage of Google Glass over the smartphone is that it’s less likely to get lost, broken, or stolen off your face.

Though let’s not jump to conclusions. Anyone who looks at Google Glass and brushes it off as a useless piece of technology is missing the point. There’s plenty of applications for wearable computing. I wouldn’t be surprised if down the line, Google Glass, or a derivative technology finds itself strapped to the heads of police officers, the Armed Forces, Air Traffic Controllers, or anyone whose job actually requires having constant access to data. Precious few of us in the normal world, no matter how geeky we are, need to be that in touch. Even IBM’s stock trading guy wouldn’t need to constantly hover over a spreadsheet monitoring prices now. He’s got algorithms to do that for him now.

Some people have compared Google Glass with the Segway. It makes sense: Glass is also a high-priced gadget of questionable utility, lusted after by nerds who won’t be using it for its intended purpose. I think it’s more likely to the next Bluetooth earpiece, a garish symbol of the need to be constantly in touch, accessible, and connected, outside world be damned. For a while, you saw them everywhere, stuck in the ears of high-powered businessmen and schmucks who wanted to seem important, alike. [2] Glass and wearable computing will likely follow the same trajectory: a quick adoption, once prices become affordable, a few years of Glassholes annoying the world, followed by a quick drop off.

Two years ago, you may recall a bit of hubbub from a group of people convinced that the end of the world was at hand, and that it would happen May 21st, 2011. There were enough believers to generate human interest news stories, particularly about the followers of this apocalyptic belief who took it to heart, quit their jobs, sold or gave away their possessions, and went out to spread the message of impending doom. In a way, you can’t blame them. If the world really was going to end, and soon, what’s the point in keeping up the rut? It’s a bit liberating to know that all the things keeping you from doing what you really want to do are going to go away, along with everything else. It frees you from responsibilities.

It seems that there are two ways of dealing with an apocalyptic threat. One is resignation, and one is panic, which can turn into resignation once the adrenaline runs out. I speak in absolutes here, because an apocalypse is an absolute concept. It is the end. Few things in life are truly apocalyptic in scope, but our minds can twist something that is happening, or may happen, into a problem of apocalyptic proportions beyond which there is nothing. At least, nothing worth thinking about. If you’re saying that this is not true, you’re not the sort who views things in the apocalyptic mindset, and perhaps this essay isn’t for you.

Apocalyptic thinking can permeate our lives. Any time something has even the potential to change, drastically, people can—and will—pull the Chicken Little routine, and claim the sky is falling. In the technology world, we see this any time a beloved app or service is bought out. [1] Mac power users scream when the idea of integrating elements of iOS with the Mac is brought up. Certain technology pundits have built a career out of this stuff. Some of this is grounded in reality. If you’re a dedicated user of Astrid, for example, the sky is actually falling. But, it’s not like you can’t actually do anything about it. There’s no shortage of other services and tools we can switch to, including some that aren’t going to just disappear or be abandoned.

That’s the real problem with apocalyptic thinking: it prevents action. As long as you’re stuck in the apocalyptic mindset that it’s the end, and it’s too big for you to deal with… well, it won’t be dealt with. In many cases, once the threat has passed, we can see it for what it is with only a bruise to our ego to mark the damage. So many of our tiny apocalypses aren’t worth the mental stress and strain we give them. It takes a forced shift of perspective to make this clear. Whatever apocalypse is on your radar, whatever you see that will bring the end, chances are it’s not as far out of your control as you think.

Online, we all live in a social bubble. Our bubble is permeable, but only to a certain extent. We allow in those things that please us, in one form or another. [1] Whatever it is you don’t want to see, there’s a tool to keep it out of your bubble, from keyword filters for your Twitter client, to ad blocking extensions for your browser. All it takes is a few minutes, and a few clicks, and your bubble is complete. I’ve written before about how easy it is to get trapped in an echo chamber of social media and news. When everything is on demand, there’s no incentive for us to demand the things that we don’t like. Our bubble is the echo chamber.

Amplifying this problem are the tools and algorithms that many services use to provide “custom” and “curated” content. Every social network scours the connections of you and your friends so that it suggests you follow people who are similar to what and who you follow already. Amazon.com knows the movies, music, and books you like, and will suggest other media that covers those same areas. These algorithms are constantly being honed and improved to provide you with stuff you’re more likely to want, which makes it all the more unlikely it will offer you something that exists outside of the bubble of your tastes and preferences. Statistically, you’re less likely to consume something that isn’t like something you’re already into, so there’s no incentive to provide anything else.

If you’re viewing this from a supply side perspective, wherein it’s your job to exchange goods for money, there’s no problem here. You’re merely filling demand, faster and more effectively than you would have otherwise. Reducing a person’s interests and tastes down to a few keywords that can be cross-referenced in a database search is just good business. If you’re viewing this from a demand perspective, it’s easy to see this as a boon as well. “Amazon, or Netflix knows me so well, that it knows I’ll be interested in Japanese Kaiju movies, stoner comedies, and albums by 90s alt-rock bands. [2] It’s so much easier for me to find something now.” It’s a system by which our own laziness causes us to be denied opportunity to explore something outside of our comfort zone, because of our reliance on algorithms that decide for us. It’s not the algorithm’s fault. It can only work with the data we give it.

Fortunately, we’re not locked into what the algorithms supply us. As long as we’re interacting with other people, whether face-to-face or from behind keyboards, there’s the possibility of being exposed to something outside of that comfort zone. We’ll always have friends, family, co-workers, and casual acquaintances with their own tastes and preferences that differ from our own. Loathe as I am to use “organic” to describe it, as it’s become a buzzword, it’s an accurate way of describing how we get exposed to new ideas. We allow these into our bubble because they come from a trusted source, someone we’ve connected with despite our own bubbles–a new voice to break up the echo chamber. We’ll always be more than keywords in a database.

Within a few years, a self-identifying group of people called webloggers realized the power of that “What’s New” page, especially through the lens of a personal POV… Those weblogs were idiosyncratic, about a little bit of everything, and sent people away to keep them coming back — a stark contrast to the late-’90s portal strategy of “stickiness.”

Jason Kottke on the Nature of Blogs and Writing Your Own World Book Encyclopedia

My first exposure to blogging as a concept came around in the days of what were termed “E/N sites,” which was an abbreviation for “Everything / Nothing”—an apt description of the content. It’s a concept that lives on, most prominently on Tumblr, but it’s moved into the social network space. The blog, as I came to know it in the late 90s and early 2000s was a public journal, a place to put your thoughts in front of what you hoped would be a sympathetic audience. Nothing exemplified this more than LiveJournal. A microcosmic Internet in its prime, LiveJournal made its bones as being a place where you could write your deepest, darkest thoughts and share them with either the world, or just a small circle of friends. [1]

It may be a function of the innate writer in me, but I rarely shared links in the way a lot of the early bloggers did (and still do). I’d rather sit and bang out five hundred words or more about how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking than just link to something. [2] And I rarely can think about one thing for very long. Neither, it seems, can Jason. “Funny to say that about new media, but if you look at other blogs… they cover narrow beats… By contrast, kottke.org is still written mostly in first person by me and ranges from essays on human extinction to videos of competitive wood planing in Japan.” When I registered this domain over a decade ago, the name was chosen with the mindset that I wouldn’t have a narrow focus. [3]

Kottke notes that the blogs that cover narrow beats “are amenable to advertising,” which may explain the proliferation thereof. Still, when I think of blogging with more focus, my mind goes towards John Gruber and Merlin Mann’s famous SXSW talk on blogging. Four years later, Obsession + Topic + Voice is still a winning formula—in as much as succeeding at anything can be reduced to a formula—for creating a successful blog. Though this, of course, depends on your definition of success. There’s never a one-size-fits-all strategy for doing anything, anywhere. I hope I’m not putting words in Kottke’s mouth when I say that I doubt he blogs for money. He blogs to share his obsessions. I do too, just opting to share a smaller subset thereof.

We share cool stuff with our friends, and we share banal stuff with our friends. For most people, however, that sharing has moved from personal blogs to a space that is both more and less public. These are spaces like Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter where, with the default settings, anyone can see what you’re sharing, but you know there’s a built-in, and defined audience of people you know and care about. It’s a space where feedback is immediate, if a bit less shallow than back in the old, golden days. What works for us may not work for them. Certainly, the barrier to entry is a lot lower now.

There’s always going to be a place for people who want to write and share their voice. There’s always going to be a place for people who want to create, as Jason says, “their own World Book Encyclopedia.” These places will overlap, though maybe not quite as much as they used to when this whole thing was getting started. Everyone has a voice, and everyone wants to be heard by someone. Now, they can, and we’re all the better for it.

There are no standard iOS apps in my phone’s dock. It’s dedicated, instead, to apps I need to access no matter what home screen I causally left myself on when I last locked my phone. This includes GV Mobile+, which replaces the built in iOS phone and messages apps, my task manager Things, Launch Center Pro which I wrote about yesterday, and Drafts. Drafts seems to confuse people—it certainly confused me when I first heard about it. It came out alongside another app, Pop. The idea behind the apps was to provide a scratchpad for iOS, an app you can quickly launch and type some stuff into to forget about/deal with later, typically via iOS copy and paste. [1]

Later versions of Drafts added URL scheme support, allowing text to be sent from Drafts into any app that supported it. That’s when things got interesting. Nearly every piece of text I write on iOS begin life in Drafts. If I write on the subway where there’s no cell signal, it goes in Drafts. If I’m on my iPad at home, and want to work on a blog post, I start it in Drafts. When I’m on the go and need to send an email, I write it up in Drafts. Someone tells me something cool to check out online, I type it in Drafts. It’s the fastest, most painless, and—now that it includes Source Code Pro as a font choice—prettiest scratchpad app on iOS, bar none.

In January, Drafts 2.5 for iPhone and Drafts 1.5 for iPad dropped with a new feature that made it nigh indispensable for me: custom Dropbox actions. Previous versions of Drafts supported Dropbox, but only in a limited way. It could only write to files in an Apps/Drafts/ folder in Dropbox, which limited the interaction you could do with a Dropbox enabled text editor on Mac or iOS. To get around this limitation, I would type text in Drafts, and export it to Byword where I would save it to the Notational Data folder in my Dropbox—a cumbersome extra step. Now, anything I want to save from Drafts into Notational Data takes two taps, creating a file named with the date, time, and “snipx”—a file naming convention I got from Merlin Mann.

Drafts also includes actions that allow you to append and prepend to selected file in Dropbox. I recently started to keep a spark file for ideas and things to think about when I write. All I have to do when something hits me is launch Drafts, start typing, hit the “send to” button and tape “Append to Sparks File”. That’s all. The next time I look at my spark file, I’ll see what I added, complete with a date and time stamp. I’m planning to set up similar actions for other running lists I keep, like stuff to buy, books to read, music to listen to…

What makes Drafts so useful is that it’s fast. Drafts doesn’t have to synchronize a huge folder of notes before I can do anything. Launching it just puts me in front of a blank screen with a blinking cursor and a keyboard. From there, what I type can go anywhere I want, be it my boss’s email inbox, or this very website, in just a couple of taps. If you spend any time handling text on your iOS device, Drafts is for you. Just set up a couple of actions that suit your workflow, and get typing. It’s not for managing a folder of notes, [2] there’s other apps for that. It’s just for getting text down fast, and putting it somewhere else faster.

Like Launch Center Pro, I know I’m only scratching the surface of what I can do with Drafts. Drafts 3.0 now supports expanding TextExpander snippets when launching actions, which opens up all sorts of possibilities. Also as with Launch Center Pro, Federico Viticci has come up with integrations that blow my mind. This includes a redonkulous bit of JavaScript that tales stuff from Safari, to Drafts, to Dropbox, to Due, and back to Safari. It’s mind-blowing, and an app that will change your game.