Let’s not quibble about the ultimate goals of human activity! Perhaps my invocation of ends and means suggested that I’m interested in the metaphysics of motivation, following Kant. I assure you: I am humbler than that. A little. My point is relevant in the realm of ordinary life.

Games are better when their graphics are better. If a company wants to rule the market in video games, I would argue that its most important problem is graphics. Story lines are important, as are game dynamics, but I suspect that life-like murders are the main driver of sales. (I’m horribly, derisively bad at video games, btw, and have been for the better part of two decades, roughly since Contra.)

But news is still mostly text. Twitter didn’t blow up as the central distribution system for news because it looks better than email or google reader. Radically simple text files distributed across asymmetric graphs built from the stuff users care about––people, topics, locations, events––own the news today, hands down, and will for very many tomorrows (imho). Do we also want a few pictures? Sure, we’ll take ‘em; they’re beautiful and can complete the job that text starts. But if we want to fundamentally improve the user’s news experience of news, we’ve got to make that graph easier to explore and manipulate. Dead-simple visualization can make those graphs user-friendly––as long as there’s never, ever any obnoxious public reference to “asymmetric” anything.

You throw silobreaker in with the rest, but I think they (network search specifically) are a good example of the type of visualization that could actually be useful. I agree that it’s not user friendly. But they’re certainly in the means category rather than the ends. And something like that, done right, has the potential to add a nice new dimension to news browsing.

2. You’re wrong. The point of video games isn’t the graphics. Nobody just sits there and looks at the images. The point is the game: winning, losing, having fun.

3. You’re kind of right. Flash isn’t the end of graphics technology. There will be LOTS of great new platforms as connectivity continues to improve. But very very few non-Flash graphics stuff is currently working. Do you want to spend your time building a news site, or proving a new graphics standard?