The Physical Web is a speed issueVelocity - October 2015@scottjenson

scottj@google.com

Thank you

Did any of you see this tweet from Scott Jehl last May? It got quite a bit of traction for something near and dear to this conference: test your site speed

5137

I only have a modest little WP site but I try. My theme is responsive, Ive created a child theme to simplify the layout to make it clean and simple. Im doing so little right? My speed index should be.. 5100????? I was devastated. How could I ever have coffee with Steve Souders again?

So rolled up my sleeves, brought to Chrome Dev Tools and found out that WP is kind of stupid when it comes to thumbnail images. So I rolled up my sleeves, fixed a few things, made my pages static (I dont blog often) and

I was able to get my speed index down to 2354!!! I was pretty excited. If a UX designer can do this, I think most folks could.

But what does Speed actually mean?

But even though page render is a CRITICAL issue, is it the only one facing us as a community? What does SPEED actually mean? Those of you that have been around for awhile know that UX designers used to be called UI designers. We switched because we didnt want to focus just on the Interface but the entire Xperience. What is the speed not of the page, the interface, but the entire experience? For example, how do someone GET to my page?

But what does Speed actually mean?

Most likely they got it from a search, or possible a social site linking to it

And that page was linked from another page. And it keeps going: ITS TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN. Were living in a virtual world of pages and as long as we never leave, JUST worrying about page speed is fine. If everyone does their part, well b fine

But where ARE people when they load web pages?

Its easy to answer this as a desktop vs mobile but thats the device question, Im curious as to WHERE?

Are they home? At a retail store? Can the store itself become a link?really, WHERE are they when they are getting to your site?We usually dont even imagine what a website could be if it could be invoked from a physical location

Its slowly dawning on all of us that the web isnt just a virtual world. Were not sitting in the dark flitting from one network node to the next. We all exist the the real, physical world. And the web web could have huge potential here. There have even been some misguided attempts to bring the web into our world. And people seem understand, at some level, the potential value, but they just cant get past the ham fisted nature of these attempts

Have you all seen this tumbler? Its been around for 3 years and as you can see,

its pretty active

But all can feel the value the web could bring to physical objects. But its not possible. We all see this with new smart devices, the cant use the web, each and every one of them has their own native app. Some on on one platform, some on another, but rarely both for the simple reason that the costs are two high to port it.

But how does this scale. We can come now but if we believe in Moores Law at all, it will be 3 this year 9 the next and 30 the following year.

There are many things that native apps are great at, but keeping up the the exponential explosion of smart hardware isnt one of them.

The super power of the web is that anything is just a tap, a click, a selection away. Its interaction on demand. This seems like a pretty useful thing to have for smart devices. Why cant the web be of use here?

Magic goes here

The web, and its standards bodies, usually focuses on the DOM, the white rectangle where all of the content goes. This rectangle is indeed amazing, and getting better all the time.

C:\>But this place is BORING...

But what about that address bar at the top? Has it really changed all that much in the last 25 years? Weve done a bit with auto complete but we are still asking users to type to go anywhere. Whats wrong with this picture? We have taken the most amazing rendering engine on the planet and strapped a damn command line UI on top of it! Every other mobile app today is taking advantage of the sensors in mobile phones, why cant the browser do that as well?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysxB_PXFImE

Why cant we have something like this? Here is an example of how this could work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysxB_PXFImE

The Physical webWeb pageWalk up and useNo appsNo buzzingBridge web & physical devices

The solution is The Physical Web a way to bridge physical devices and the web. At its core, its a simple means for devices, like a zip car, to broadcast a URL so any web enabled device can detect that URL and use it. Everything gains a web page. This unlocks the super power of the web and makes instant interaction possible. You completely remove the need to manage apps and most importantly, its so simple and light weight that it encourages new riskers products that wouldnt have been considered before.

URL

WebProxy

Question 1: QRCode?Question 2: Spam?

The flow is from the device to the phone to the cloud. Its just the web, were trying to get users there as quickly as possible. But I get the same two questions every time: Whats the difference from a QRCode and what about SPAM?

UIDURL

UIDURL

StandardProprietary

In a sense were trying to create two clouds of things. The first is a cloud of standard devices that broadcast urls the exact way. Weve started talking to the W3C about standardizing this packet so everything broadcasts URLs in exactly the same way.

However, the devices that listen can be broad and varied, just like browsers are today. They can try different ways of ranking, compete on that difference even. There can be wild variability there, as longs as all of the devices are broadcasting the same way.

Physical Web

The Web!

But lets be clear: the Physical Web is JUST getting the URL to the phone, all of the hard work is done in the cloud and using web sockets to talk to the device.

Now its true that this scenario requires connectivity through the cloud. This leads to my next question: isnt that too complex/expensive? What most people dont appreciate is the plummeting size/cost of GSM modems. This allows devices to arrive fully configured and on a private network, with no configuration by the user.

In a world where each device has its own connectively, the Physical Web makes it easy to discover each other and connect.

As the web gets better we get better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0GDk-53fTo

But by being built on the web, we just get better as the web gets better. Here is an example using ServiceWorker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0GDk-53fTo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwK3ccOJ6EY

and WebBluetooth in Javascript

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwK3ccOJ6EY

10 years

our time horizon for innovation has become weeks not decades, we forget that the delta between netscape and Gmail was 10 years. It takes time for systems to build and mature.

The Physical Web started off, like many Chrome projects as and open source experiment. Weve been amazed by the response, we are one of the top github repos at Google.

Were very happy that both Opera and FirefoxOS are showing interest.

BTW, we are in Chrome for iOS right now! If you turn on the Chrome TodayView widget, you can be using the Physical Web right now. We hope to be shipping on Android in the near future.

CouponsTracking

CouponsTracking

We started off wanting to use the Physical Web for controlling complex devices but realized that smaller use cases were more interesting. This gets ever more interesting for personal uses: broadcasting your slides, finding your dog, or having more information in a For Sale sign.

Custom

SquareSpace

Walgreens

But just as the web got better and better tools to express yourself (HTML pages to Blogger to Twitter) We expect the same things to happen with the Physical Web

The Long Tail of InteractionThe Long Tail of Content

Native apps are great, theyll always have a role. Much like the long tail of the web, we see the same thing applying to devices. Each of these uses cases are moderately useful but taken together, they imply a long tail of interaction, where any user can walk up to any device and interact with it. This opens up a huge new interactive ability that products can use.

Goal: Reduce frictionUser first: no push notificationsOpen source AND no central controlAs web improves so does Physical WebUnlocks simple more functionality

Thank you@scottjenson

scottj@google.com