Idea IS the format

Remember when you first signed up to Hotmail? Wasn’t it exciting, being able to send email, and get email, and send more email? Emma and I fell in love, in no small measure, through the medium of Hotmail. We’ve kept the messages to this day.

Originally launched as ‘HoTMaiL’ exactly fifteen years ago today, it was acquired by Microsoft little over a year later for a reported $400 million having already accumulated over 8.5 million users.

It went on to surpass 30 million users in just 30 months, driven in part by one of the first examples of ‘viral’ marketing – a short message appearing at the end of every email sent that simply read “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com”.

Seen in the context of how much less widespread Internet access was at the time, Hotmail’s growth stands up as the same kind of cultural phenomenon we’ve become accustomed to in the past few years with the rise of social media.

Hotmail’s imperious rise, putting it on a par with the other major webmail provider, Yahoo! Mail, was such that for several years it was hard to imagine anybody keeping pace, let alone successfully playing catch-up.

And yet, for Emma and I, those first emails are pretty much the only reason either of us would log into our Hotmail accounts today. To revisit those first innocent exchanges back when our love, like the Internet, was still new, and young, and waiting to be discovered.

It was Gmail that changed things. Launched by Google in 2004, this signalled their entry into the webmail space. It’s difficult to remember now exactly why Gmail was so much better than Hotmail. It just was.

First up, they took on spam. Which isn’t to say they got rid of it, they just found a way to deal with it so that you wouldn’t have to. This came around the time millions of Hotmail users were coming to terms with the fact that signing up to all those mailing lists, well, it might have been a mistake.

More broadly, the Gmail ethos was anchored in the simplest of conceits – search don’t sort. Speaking to the single greatest strength of the Google brand as it was then, here was their explicit permission – encouragement even – not to tidy up after ourselves.

Sure, they were creating a platform and audience for their commercial products, but even their advertising bucked the trend, being less garish and condescending than your average common or garden banner ad.

On top of all of which, Gmail’s invite-only mechanic was visionary, making the service deeply aspirational at a time when Hotmail was stagnating, robbed of whatever novelty it might have once had to offer.

I guess that was Gmail’s magic formula, as far as I was concerned anyway: get rid of the clutter; save time and legwork; treat us like customers, even if – as Rushkoff points out – we’re actually the product.

Now take a look at Facebook. Facebook spam – those posts that pop up in your feed promising some titillating treat carefully conceived to appeal to each of our lesser angels – is a particularly hardy variety.

Even when you report it as spam half a dozen times its still seems to come back, like some nasty weed that leaves its root in the ground no matter how many times you yank the head off.

Then there’s the quasi-spam, the stuff you opted in for but that’s built up over time, and now threatens to overwhelm you. Think ‘Pages’. Think ‘Apps’. Think ‘Groups’. Think ‘Friends’.

Not all of them mind. Just the people you ‘friended’ without stopping to ask the question, with whom you’re now trapped in a clumsy binary, tethered together by guilt, curiosity and common courtesy all intertwined.

Finally, ask yourself how Facebook makes you feel. Do you feel like the customer, when you read that facial recognition software is now picking you out in other people’s photographs, without you even being consulted on the matter?

Wouldn’t you rather they were contributing to the debate about the more sinister applications of such technology, showing a little cognisance of the fact that a global social network also has the potential to be used as a global surveillance network.

Nowadays Hotmail is like a garden I neglected over a dozen winters, such that I feel a twinge of fear at the mere thought of venturing back into it. The good news is that moving home’s much easier on the web, playing to our nomadic instincts, giving us room to breathe. We can leave a Hotmail behind, let it be reclaimed by nature, as we move on to pastures new. The same is equally true of Facebook.

Of course, there will be some who are slow to follow, others who settle down. As of August 2009 ComScore was reporting that Windows Live Hotmail was still winning the webmail wars, with 364 million users, with Yahoo second (280 million) and Gmail third (191 million).

That’s only part of the story though, and likely less than half. Gmail has the greatest traction in precisely the same markets where Facebook was recently reported to be faltering – markets where the platform is mature, and users may finally be ready to shop around.

Ready to look for something, well, better?

Working from home today.

Loving that this batch of documents declassified by the NSA a couple of years ago includes an article from the National Enquirer describing a report from the ‘Super-Secret Security Agency’ raising the possibility of ‘a Pearl Harbor-type UFO invasion’. It’s not even like anyone’s scribbled any willies on it. They could almost be taking it seriously. That’s right. The same National Enquirer that brought you…

Almost time. Almost.

Another day, another link to The Guardian, this time to experience the extent of David McCandless and Derek Guo’s ‘Which Fish are Okay to Eat?’ infographic. Behind its reflective surface is a grim picture, just one dimension of the ‘catastrophe’ facing the world’s oceans as foretold by a panel of marine scientists brought together in Oxford earlier in the year.

As we trade Big Tobacco and Big Oil for the age of Big Data, information design has an ever greater part to play reconstituting the facts for ease of consumption. What works for me about this example is that it speaks to the extraordinary otherworldly diversity of the fish species living in our seas while simultaneously conveying the severity with which they have been overfished in recent decades. That being so, I impeach you to pick up your own hi-res PDF for a piffling £1.50 (payable by Paypal), with all the profits going to the Marine Conservation Society.

A hugely promising trailer for the film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has just broken over on The Guardian, in such an obtuse implementation as prevents me from embedding it here.

That being the case, instead you will find below the strangely spell-binding opening of the original – epic – TV adaptation, a 4-cassette VHS edition of which my mum leant me after reading this post about The Wire and the wider idea of long-form cinema.

I could happily spend the rest of today telling you why I rate it so highly, and what I’m hoping for from a big-screen adaptation. The short version is that I’m praying they’ve found a way to marry so much storyline, plot and exposition with precisely what it is that gives the TV version its charm, exemplified by a preparedness to spend two minutes developing character before a word is even spoken…

This postcard by Jenny Holzer feels very current, and straight out of 1984. I don’t recall how the war started between Oceania and Eurasia (or is it Eastasia?). I’m not sure Winston does either. Whatever, the case, I can well imagine it’s a secret. Even if it didn’t used to be.

With the first previews taking place across America as I type, now seems like a good time to post this Drew Struzan-inspired poster for my most anticipated film of the summer, JJ Abrams’ SUPER 8.

Struzan was behind some of the classic movie posters of my youth, not least THE GOONIES (below) – vintage big screen adventures to which SUPER 8 is a love letter of immense charm and eloquence, not to mention a crisp and contemporary summer spectacle in its own right.

It’s no secret that we’re working on the international campaign for the film, with it set to open in Europe and beyond in early August, but it’s also something I’m obliged to disclose in the context of a post like this. It means you don’t have to take my opinion about the movie at face value. As if you ever would.

Seems like I have a hundred and one things to blog, google, write, read and research on this moochy Saturday morning. I’m starting here, with the only festival Emma and I will be making it along to this summer:

This fine film incorporates the enchanting artwork of one Rufus, also featured on the The Insider’s equally splendiferous website, even the most passing perusal of which ought to tell you that this is no ordinary aurally augmented outdoor occasion.

Without knowing precisely who you are, or the exact circumstances by which you come to be reading this, I nonetheless vouchsafe you’d be welcome, if you chose, to wend your way north (or south, east, west, or any combination thereof) the way of The Insider in two weeks time. Unless, that is, you’re those super anti-social mutant biker dudes from the end of Weird Science…

…in which case you probably best stick to Glastonbury.

via @blaese

The first international one-sheet for The Adventures of Tintin has just broken over on Empire. I picked up three dog-eared Tintin books on the fringes of London Fields a couple of weekends ago – The Calculus Affair, The Shooting Star and The Black Island – for the princely sum of three pounds. It’s been a while since I read any Tintin, maybe twenty years, but with a movie version just around the corner it seems like a good time to be revisiting them.

They’re quite different stories in terms of subject matter – the abduction of the inventor of a revolutionary sonic weapon, a race to reach a meteor that has landed in the Atlantic, the pursuit of money forgers from the white cliffs of Dover to a remote Scottish isle – taking in an eclectic mix of colourful characters and exotic locations. What they share is Herge’s considerable talent for blending the farcical with the fantastic, the genuinely sinister with the playfully incidental.

Take The Black Island. Tintin finds himself in the clutches of one Dr J. W. Müller, an adversary of Tintin’s who reappears in Land of Black Gold and The Red Sea Sharks. Müller condemns Tintin to admission to a private mental institution of which he happens to be medical superintendent, one at which “not all my patients are insane when they are admitted”.

Tintin escapes, of course, only to end up unconscious in the heart of Müller’s burning mansion. The local fire station is notified, and there follows an episode extending over several pages involving the theft of the key to the fire station by a magpie, and several grown men’s Dad’s Army-esque efforts to retrieve it.

One of the challenges for the forthcoming film version will be to find this particular balance, evoking a real sense of jeopardy inflected with Herge’s old-fashioned and often peculiar sense of humour. His authorial self-indulgence is well afforded by the page – indeed, it creates the breathing space that allows you to relax into any one of Tintin’s often convoluted adventures – but the cinema screen may be far less forgiving, especially if the film hopes to break out of geek dad audiences and draw a mainstream, family crowd.

The other aspect of the film I’m interested to see evolving is the visual style. I’ve posted everything that’s so far been released below, all of which hints at how Jackson and Spielberg are going about bringing the books to something larger than life.

Looking at these again brings to mind a post I read recently on Fast Company’s very excellent Co.Design blog speculating that the recent closure Disney’s Imagemovers Digital mo-cap production company was a result of the ‘uncanny valley’, so-called because it describes an abrupt slump in empathy experienced by humans when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual humans.

Fortunately for the film-makers the gentle realism and attention to detail characterising Herge’s locations and settings was is accompanied by an exuberant appreciation of the art of caricature.

Professor Cuthbert Calculus, for example (who makes his first appearance in Red Rackham’s Treasure, one of the three books on which the film is based) has a preposterously distended cranium and ridiculous general demeanour (as preposterous and ridiculous, at least, as those of Auguste Piccard, the Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer upon whom he was apparently based). Seeing how characters like Calculus have been interpreted could be one of the real pleasures of finally seeing Spielberg and Jackson’s film.

Interesting to note that they will be, virtually to a man, men. Even the ‘Milanese Nightingale’ herself, Bianca Castafiore, is an Italian opera singer with all the femininity of W.G. Grace. The only female character of note I can recall in all of Tintin’s travels, even she, by her serial enamourment with Captain Haddock, must cause us to reflect on his long career of sailoring in a new light.

[ UPDATE 17/05/2011 ] A teaser trailer just went live. And it’s looking pretty damn good:

Click image for the nerdprint. May the 4th be with you.