So I'm well into the second term of the Master's now. Last term was mostly things I'd done before: modules on Advanced Software Engineering, HCI and Business and Project Management (the last covering large-scale portfolio management: connecting projects back to overall strategy and issues relating to large organisations). A fourth module, Topics in Computer Science, exposed us to the pet topics of various lecturers: TCP congestion management, Scala, interaction nets, super-optimisation, networks, and more. I was pleasantly surprised by how current the syllabus is: we were using git, Android, EC2 and TDD during software engineering and the HCI course was very hands-on and practical. (On which topic: I have a write-up of my Alarm Clock project to go here soon).

This term is the exact opposite: pretty well everything is brand new. I'm taking modules in Adaptive Systems, Pervasive Computing, Limits of Computation, and Web Applications and Services - the latter being a rebranded Distributed Computing course, so we're knee-deep in RPC and RMI, with a promise of big-scale J2EE down the line. I'm also sitting in on, and trying to keep up with the labs for, Language Engineering.

Thus far it's Pervasive Computing and Language Engineering which are sitting at that sweet spot between "I think I can cope with this" and "this stuff is fun". They're both quite hands-on: for the former we're playing with Phidgets and learning about the practicalities of using sensors in the real world, something I've talked about recently but haven't done much with. Adaptive Systems is enjoyable, but quite deliberately vague - like Cybernetics, it's applicable in all sorts of situations but I'm finding it jelly-like, in the pinning-to-the-wall sense. Limits of Computation I have mentally prepared for a struggle with: it's mathematical, and maths is not my strong point (when taken beyond numeracy); and the Web Applications module is so far quite familiar, though I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into a project.

I can't emphasis how much fun this is. It's been years since I've been exposed to so much new stuff, and joining some of the dots between these areas is going to be interesting. That said I've still no idea what I'll be doing for my project in the third term; the idea of doing something Pervasive appeals strongly, but I'm waiting for inspiration to strike. If that doesn't happen I might return to superoptimisation and see if I can carve off a dissertation-sized chunk to look into, perhaps something around applying it to Java byte code…

If you follow me on Twitter then every so often you'll see a tweet crowing about some figure or other behind the Guardian Anywhere news-reading application we launched at FP. For instance, last month we distributed our 5 millionth copy of the Guardian.

The Guardian Anywhere has been available for well over 2 years now, and we've depended on the goodwill of the Guardian in allowing us to use their RSS feeds, their Open Platform and even some branding in our product. Even though they've launched their own official Android app, we haven't been quietly asked to remove ours - which is to their credit, given that there's no contract or other agreement covering this between Future Platforms and them.

Over the last few years there have been a few cases of third parties building on top of a platform, only for the platform provider themselves to launch a competing product or start restricting third-party provision of interfaces; Twitter is an obvious example.

There are compelling reasons for platform providers to do this, both commercial (keeping control of revenue opportunities) and customer-focused (ensuring that the end-user experience of your platform is one you're happy with). At FP we picked up a couple of projects for very large businesses that were unhappy with third parties owning the experience of their product, and wanted to do it themselves (OK, with our help).

So I thought it might be interesting to show the impact of the Guardian launching their official Android product on the stats for the Guardian Anywhere. Here's a nice graph showing our sync traffic over the last couple of years (a sync being a device connecting in to download a copy of the newspaper; most users do this once a day):

You can clearly see our traffic peak when the official product launched, but I'm surprised the subsequent decline wasn't greater. At the time I expected us to see the majority of our traffic drop off in a few months. Of course, it looks better than it is, because we would expect traffic to grow during this period. If you consider that (and take a mid-point projection of growth, at a rate somewhere between the huge take-up May-August 2010 and the average growth over the last 2 years), then it looks like so far we've lost somewhere between a half and a third of our traffic:

So it's slow decline, rather than immediate shut-down. I wonder if this is a familiar pattern to other folks who've found themselves competing with the platform they built atop?

A couple of weeks back, I started writing about a design project I'm doing as part of my MSc coursework. In the course of thinking about what makes mobile interfaces emotionally engaging, I came up with a half-baked theory that for evolutionary reasons long, languid gestures like strokes are more emotionally satisfying than the stabbing, poking motions we often use when, say, clicking buttons on touch-screens: "stroking, not poking".

I reached out to a few friends on Facebook to see if anyone could help me find some justification for this, and had a great response. A couple of publications stand out; firstly, from The Role of Gesture Types and Spatial Feedback in Haptic Communication by Rantala et al. (which Mat Helsby pointed me at):

"…support can be found for the view that interaction with haptic communication devices should resemble nonmediated interpersonal touch. Squeezing and stroking are closer to this ideal as the object of touch (i.e., the haptic device) can be understood to represent the other person and particularly his/her hand. To put it simply, stroking and squeezing the hand of another person are more common behaviours than moving (or shaking or pointing with)it."

and

"Preference for squeezing and stroking can be attributed to several reasons. Both methods were based on active touch interaction with the device whereas moving used an alternative approach of free-form gestures. Profound differences can be identified between these input types. Moving supported mainly a use strategy where one pointed or poked with the device, as studied by Heikkinen et al. Conversely, when squeezing and stroking, the device could be understood to be a metaphor of the recipient. This could have affected the participants’ subjective ratings as the metaphor strategy was closer to unmediated haptic communication. Furthermore, when rotating or shaking a passive object, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive information from limb movements is dominant. It could be argued that because stroking and squeezing an object stimulates one’s tactile senses (e.g., vibration caused by stroking with one’s fingertip), these two manipulation types were preferred also with active vibro-tactile feedback."

Mat also pointed me at The Handbook of Touch, which has a few choice quotes including this one:

"In addition to the decoded findings, extensive behavioural coding of the U.S. sample identified specific tactile behaviours associated with each of the emotions. For example, sympathy was associated with stroking and patting, anger was associated with hitting and squeezing, disgust was associated with a pushing motion…"

So, here's another one of them end-of-year posts. 2011 was fun. Lots of fun: a couple of weeks travelling around Japan with Kate, furry tendencies indulged at Playgroup Festival, LoveBox and Sonar Festival followed by a few days lounging in Valencia all stand out.

Leisure-wise I did just about enough running (barely keeping a 100km/month average) but Not Enough Aikido (once a week with a trip to Edinburgh to see two old masters: Sugawara Shihan and Bryan Rieger). I slacked off a little when it came to writing, too, with just a Summer workshop with Wendy and a few trips to Flash Fiction favourite Not For The Faint Hearted. 6 or so weekends were merrily spent airsofting at UCAP Virus, before their incredible hospital site was shut for demolition in December. I also manage to get up to London to see quite a few talks this year: Sherry Turkle by herself and with Aleks Krotoski, a couple of School of Life events, Richard Dawkins presenting The Magic of Reality, Guy Kawasaki, and the incredible show that is War Horse. Oh, and Robin Dunbar came to Shoreham in February.

Work gave me a welcome excuse for travel once again: I spoke at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, briefly at LIFT11, introduced Kirin at Mobile 2.0 Europe and had a lot of fun at UXCampEurope in Berlin and the Quantified Self event in Amsterdam. In the UK I blathered on at the Online Information Conference, Mobile Monday, UX Brighton, the Future of Mobile, Telco 2.0, and a BBC internal day for their UX & Design team. And I had an amazing weekend at OverTheAir in Bletchley Park, and got to attend a few of the expertly organised Rewired State Hack Days.

FP shipped a succession of products to be proud of this year: Davos Pulse for CNBC, the Radio 1 Big Weekend, Glastonbury Festival, AA Breakdown & Traffic, TheTicketApp and Hotels on WebOS for LastMinute.com, and the Viz Profanisaurus for Nokia devices, to name a few. Our Guardian Anywhere app for Android went past 100,000 installs and is about to shift its 5 millionth copy of the Guardian, and we open-sourced Kirin, our approach to blending web apps and native code. Just before Christmas I popped into FPHQ for a sneak peek of a few projects that'll ship early next year, and they're looking good.

And big changes in October, when I sold Future Platforms to Vexed Digital and started on a Master's at Sussex University, which I'm really enjoying. All of which brings me to what's next…

At the end of this year my involvement with FP is ending, beyond contributing to the Vexed newsletter for a little bit, and popping up in public on their behalf very occasionally. And whilst I'll be at Sussex until August/September working on my dissertation, I'm already starting to think about what I want to do next. It's going to be something like this:

• Products, not service: I've spent my whole career so far building software to order for other people. That's been great for giving me variety (I've launched over 250 products), but I'd like to be involved both before the decision to build is made, and after launch. So next time I want to be in a product company;
• Consumer-facing: I'm interested in making things for real people to use in their everyday lives. I get a little dopamine rush when I meet someone who's used things I helped ship;
• Mobile or internet: I've spent my life working in one or the other, and every day they get closer. I still find them both incredibly exciting places to be working: we've still a great deal of work to do in (un)wiring our species together;
• Working in a cross-disciplinary team: over the last 5 years I developed an interest in the overall process of Getting Stuff Launched, and I still enjoy the variety of working with a range of smart folks with different skills, backgrounds and languages: designers, developers, testers, marketers, biz dev people, whatever;
• Big jobs: Flirtomatic is probably the most-used product I've worked on, with 5 million users. I don't think it too many; in future I'd like to go bigger;
• Elsewhere; I've enviously watched a few friends heading towards StartupChile, and have a hankering to try being somewhere else for a bit.

I think 2012 is going to be fun :)

• Ben Evans on Facebook and their 300m app users: "70% of mobile users and 30% of all users used apps to access Facebook". Completely in line with the figures we heard from Simon at Comscore in a Mobile Monday talk in July: UK web traffic to Facebook was growing slowly and app traffic to Facebook much faster. Projecting forward at the time it looked like apps would overtake web in September 2011;
• Retail has problems this year, can't say I think that coupons, virtual currencies, and shopper heat maps alone will be enough to save the high street. I found this concept from PayPal beautiful though: use shop windows even when the shops are shut. Helen has a nice thread going about this over at her blog. I think we'll see some really interesting work done here over the next few years as retail is caught between technology advances and economic troubles and has to adapt;
• I hope Project Spartan launches this year. It was due to launch "in the next few weeks" back in July, then in September, and it'd be nice to have the (mostly baseless) speculation of how it's going to change everything laid to rest;
• There's lots of talk of how lack of OS updates is a flaw in the Android ecosystem, I prefer the explanation that it's down to economic incentives: once they've sold you a handset, networks or device manufacturers have no ongoing revenue from you, so find it hard to justify ongoing effort on your device. Apple aside, device manufacturers don't tend to do a great job of services which provide this kind of ongoing revenue - Ovi is the most successful I can think of - so I like the idea of end-users paying for upgrades: a few pounds for a significant update to your phone doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
• A beautiful set of criticisms of Android 4.0 UI, in ICS paper cuts. Much more constructive than the "Google don't get design!" drivel;
• The web may not prevail, a post from Nick Brisbourne building on What the web is and is not from Joe Hewitt: "even though the open web is better, it won’t necessarily prevail". I wonder how long it will take for the traditional net.infrastructure to be sidelined - not long if you believe this post: "The Classic Web is beginning to look like a kludge. Mostly because it was"
• Nice to see a couple of deeply constrained social networks pop up to handle social networks of two: Between and Cupple are both for intimate 2-person sharing. Lovely use case (though I've yet to see Between actually work), and I wonder if buddy-systems might be useful in other situations: could we usefully deploy 2-person social networks for folks trying to give up smoking, lose weight, or otherwise improve their behaviour not in public, but with the support of a friend?