I wanted to wait over a week before I brought this up. By now I am sure most people have forgotten their resolutions or just moved on because they were unrealistic. Also because of the massive failure rate in resolutions people become jaded. A friend of mine who shall be nameless (*cough*Eamon*cough*) has gone so far as to say his resolutions is to have no resolutions.

As David Klemke already wrote over on his blog people use New Year Resolutions as dreams. That’s a good way of putting it. The majority of my friends resolutions boil down to the usual few, Cut back on drinking, play less games, lose weight, get fit, etc, etc.

They are great ideas in theory but in practice they are so nebulous that trying to achieve them is nigh impossible. Not only because you don’t have a plan but because you don’t have a goal! Cut back on drinking, as in what? Once a day, a week, an hour? What?

To achieve in a resolution you need a defined goal then you need to construct the required steps to achieve that goal. If it is lose weight, how much? So you are 100kg with 25% body fat, create a target, say 90kg and 17% and then define down how you are to go about achieving it.

New Year’s Resolutions have gone out of fashion and a lot of people make the comment of why bother making them only on New Years? Well it’s a good enough time, you might as well. Set a goal, set what you need to achieve it, track your progress and then get it done.

I tackled this problem myself like a geek. I built a spreadsheet of what I wanted to achieve each day and defined down a point system for this. At a glance I can see what I achieved on any given day and what I should achieve to feel good about myself. I am currently trying to clean it up as a few people have expressed interest in it.

It’s now 12 days after New Years. It’s no longer a New year’s Resolution, it’s a life resolution. Make one, see what happens.

As I foreshadowed in my article Why Game? I got interested in this idea of the Social Surplus.

While I was looking through the numbers for how much time was spent playing games I was shocked to say the least. 10,000 hours is a hell of a lot of time and as Chris pointed out, 10,000 hours would be about right for the required amount of time to become an expert at something. That amount of time though was dwarfed by the amount of time spent watching TV.

I always knew people watched a tremendous amount of TV. When I found some statistics though I must admit I felt slightly ill. The Nielson group released the following figures. In the first quarter of this year the average for people aged 25-30 was 144 hours a month, which spins out to be a shade un 5 hours a day. 5 Hours a day!? Jesus Christ. In the five years between 25-30 we will average 8,500 hours.

As the age bracket creeps up it just gets worse. When we finally hit 65+ we are watching around 7 hours a day. That is such a disgustingly large amount of TV.

Where does my term of Social Surplus come from though? Well that’s exactly what this TV viewing is. I would argue that using that using this time to play games is more, if only slightly in some cases (Looking at MMO’s here), productive. Watching TV is basically a time sink, you get nothing out of it except the fleeting enjoyment that is gone the moment you stand up. It is lost time. Again as with games I understand people need to relax and unwind, but for 5 hours a day?

To put it into numbers that we are able to relate to lets have a look at Wikipedia. We all know it, we all use it, we have an understanding, if shaky, of just how massive an undertaking it was/is. Lets say using their page of what has been done and doing some dodgy numbers we come up with 150million hours of collective human effort. Everything, every article, every edit, every language, we would be talking in the ball park of 150million hours of effort.

Now let’s look at the amount of time that the age bracket of 25-30year olds in America spent watching TV in one year. Call it 22Million people (going on rough data here) at 4.8 hours a day we end up with:

38,544,000,000

That’s for one age group. Each year. Spent wasting time in front of the TV. That is the equivalent of over 250 Wikipedia’s every year. That’s a complete and whole new encyclopedia of all human knowledge every two days! Being pissed away watching American Idol.

Getting people to do any form of work is difficult. The only reason most people have a job is money, not enjoyment. The reason Wikipedia worked is that anyone could spend any amount of time on it they wanted and straight away get something back. It extended itself and said “Look, the tools are here, help yourself”. Anything that can do that will work; we only have to look at something as stupid as, say, lolcats. It extends the idea of “look, if you have a picture of a cat and large Helvetica Font you can participate”. And people did, in droves. It is a meme that has still not totally died.

People no longer expect or even accept media that does not extend itself to them. Whenever I read anything on the internet I now instinctively spin to the bottom and read the comments. The only reason I still read Slashdot is for the comment. Even here I changed over my blog to WordPress because it had easy to use comments.

I believe the next big thing; the next great advancement will somehow involve harnessing this massive amount of social surplus and funneling it into something else. It will require a rethinking of the almost all forms of media. Any form of news story that I cannot comment on? Not interested.

As I said finding a way of channeling this surplus is key. A project like Wikipedia was a great idea but there are hundreds more. How about a relationship mapping chart? You would start from you and input all the family links that you know of. If it got large enough you could travel down those links to see who else you are connected to. As long as it had a simple interface and an inviting look it could work. Or a hyper local news site where you could jump in to your local area and read what is going on or post what you have seen, specials down at the local café, road works on this side street.

The possibilities when you start thinking in these numbers are amazing. What else could be achieved?

Well Time released their list of the top 50 inventions from the year 2009. I glanced through the list; okay number one is the ARES rocket from NASA. Okay I am on board. They really are a phenomenal technical achievement.

Tank bred Tuna? Sure, those pesky fish don’t like breeding in closed tanks are we have managed to eat almost 90% of them, no worries. The LED light bulb and the smart thermostat? Why not? Then we hit it.

Project Natal. The new hands free controller to be released by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 somewhere late 2010 or more likely early 2011. Really? That ranks in at number 5. The untested, unfinished, unreleased motion controller for a home video game console? Sure it looks amazing but it has not done anything yet! The only time it has been shown is in controlled environments. However even if it lives up to its promise and becomes the new way we play games, which I am praying will never happen, but the fact it edged out other inventions. Not stupid inventions like this (or this).

Check out Number 6. Not precisely teleportation but such a fantastic advancement. The ability to so successfully alter the state of atoms. Worse than a hands free controller? Well let’s continue. Number 7 ohh yes the telescope that is going to be used to spot invisible stars from space. It sits at the cusp of Earth and the suns gravity scanning in infrared using the largest mirror ever built for use in space.

Fine, maybe that’s not your thing. Lets just take one more step, lets check out number 8. An AIDS vaccine? An AIDS vaccine is 3 spots worse than the controller that lets you throw yourself about playing games? The vaccine is only ~30% effective, but lets think about that, its 30% effective against one of the greatest killers of the human race ever. This is a massive break through considering we have been trying to destroy this virus for the last 20 years.

Go through the list. Almost everything above it really is a fantastic advancement, an amazing invention. Vertical farming, the $20 Knee and so on. But no Project Natal is apparently better.

When I saw this piece come out I was not expecting much. But I really could not believe what was going on here. Some committee somewhere must have been having the discussion of:

“So… AIDS Vaccine guys…. Hmmmm….. what do you think?

I don’t know… we do have this sweet hands free controller.

Ohh shit yeah I forgot about that one! We missed that whole Wii thing, let’s get on this!”

But then the cynic in me just keeps murmuring…….Microsoft money hat……

What is a wave?

That is the question I was asking myself around 5 months ago when I caught wind of another of Google’s many projects. This one was shown during Google I/O this year. They were doing an hour long demonstration on a project they had called Google Wave. While watching I was intriued but was not blown away.

Fast forward four months and one of my friends dropped me an invititation to the closed Wave beta. Firing up Chrome and logging in I was presented with a very google like interface. Clean, crisp, uncluttered layout.  Down the left is the familair naviagtion panel, Inbox, Spam, Trash etc and continuing down is my contacts list. The rest of the screen is split into two equal windows, the left for all my Waves and the right panel to show the selected Wave.

So again I was left asking what is a Wave? I could have done my usual, go to google to do some searching. However 7 of my friends also got into the beta so straight away we just started playing around with it. trying to found out what it did, how to manipulate it, what are the shortcuts.

A wave is what you get when you take email, instant messaging (IM) roll them together and sprinkle some collaboration tools on top. An incredibly powerful system.

You can open a new wave and invite who you want to participate in it. If you only invite one other person it is more email, IM than anthing else. You can send each other messages (wavelets) within the wave, whole chunks of text, drag and drop pictures, drop in links etc. With more people it gets more interesting, the other tools come more into play. Private responses where you select who can view it, post polls up for everyone to take part in into the wave. Each message can be directly responded to so you can have many nested conversations that are easy to jump in and out of.

One of the more amazing abilities is, say me and three other people are working on a large proect. We have a Wave going, we have been using it for a while so there are nested conversations within conversations. Pictures, updates everywhere. now we add someone new. How can they understand whats going on? Simple, the replay tool. Click replay on a Wave and it runs the Wave for that person from the beginning showing each change in chronological order.

Even with that though it can get very confusing. You can see what everyone is typing while they are typing. You can jump in and edit anyone’s comments (it add’s you to their comment so no stealth comments). You can be typing and adding to a comment while someone is doing the same thing. it is all real time. So there is a real question of ettiqute. As we havent quite yet figured out email ettiqute getting used to Wave will be interesting.

It is still definately in beta though so there is a lot of time to fix and learn. Of course once my friends and I had been using it for an hour it was natural for one of us to open a new Wave entitled “So how do we break this thing?” Apparently posting a million character word breaks the Wave making it unusable for everyone in the Wave.

With all this will it surplant email or IM? The short answer is no. If you just want to fire off a quick question or message, email is still easier. Holding long conversations is still easier via IM (or the phone of course).

What it will do is collaboration. Anything that requires more than two peoples input it really shines. The ability for everyone to have their say, to follow easily what is going on, to track through the converation, to be able to jump in after an abcense and get up to speed straight away, it is perfect for that.