Why manners are important, why over-politeness is always a bad thing, and how to make applications less like bellboys.
These days, much of the online landscape is made up of products and services that offer myriad ways to create and process information. Like creepy bellboys, these products constantly demand our attention, continually offer to solve problems that don't need solving, and in return for our attention, crave tips in the form of further usage.
A hotel - an entity constructed entirely out of services - isn't a good model for the read/write web. We should be building toolboxes and workshops, rather than hotels and restaurants - self-explanatory devices to be utilised, broken, and hacked, and combined to make great things, rather than distinct services that talk to each other at arm's length.
To do this, we need to re-examine the notion of manners on the web, and how we teach our software to be appropriate - but never too-polite. What manners should we be teaching our digital offspring? How do we turn them from these uncanny valets, constantly at beck and call, constantly seeking to satisfy, into something more subtle, more passive, and ultimately more useful?
