We change, and the world changes around us, but here are certain themes that remain constant. A year ago, I published this post. I still love the image of every step taken actually creating the path. A year ago, I was still in Florida. Yesterday, I was at a trail, among redwoods, creating it with every step. Grateful to be here. Grateful we have been “there”.

There is this song by Joan Manuel Serrat, the Catalonian singer/songwriter. While his musical style wasn’t ever my favorite, I have always been touched by his deep -sometimes jarring- lyrics.

The song I am referring to is “Caminante no hay camino”, which roughly translates to “There is no road, traveler”, and the chorus goes “see hace camino al andar”, or “a path is traced as you walk”.

I love this image, and I think it is more true than ever. The online landscape, just like our physical world in the very early days, lacks roads. There are not many public main roads where you can settle by and hang a shingle out to offer your goods and services. When opening a brick-and-mortar store, the saying used to go “location, location, location”. The more centric, the busier the corner, the more customers you were going to get. There is almost no equivalent to this online. Sure, you can set up an account with Amazon, or publish your messages on Twitter, but you will be competing with anybody else doing the same.

There is an alternative, and it is to build your own road, which in the digital world, doesn’t require heavy machinery, but the really hard task is to get people to transit your road.

There is also another interpretation that I’d like to ponder, and it is that in our quest for happiness or our success, we sometimes get paralyzed evaluating all the options, searching for the right path for us, the one that fits us, the one that will take us to our destination. We don’t realize that for many of us, there is no such path. We are unique, and no pre-established path will ever feel just right.

Instead of searching for a path, sometimes it is best just to start walking. We will trace a path on our journey.

You know that thing that looks like the old version of it? The “radio” app on your smartphone that looks like an old timer radio, with dial and all? Or the eBook reader that turns pages and has a spine and you can see the edges of all the pages? The calculator app that looks like your HP41C? (HP12, if you are more “modern”).

Well, there is a word for it. Skeumorphic.

Skeumorphic design can help ease us into a new technology, or a new way of doing things by means of a metaphor. Something familiar is given to us in order to accept something new.

That’s great, but after some time two things happen. The first one is that they start to get a life of their own. When the first Mac or Windows 1.0 came out, the analogy of the “Desktop” and the Filing Cabinet were key to sell us on the idea of using this little beige box instead of all the stuff we had on our desks. But after a while, the “Desktop” gained a life of its own, it shed all the resemblance with a physical desktop, and we rarely think of the analogy when use it on a daily basis. The “Desktop” is now just this space that we use for quick access or as a temporary place to put things.

The second thing that happens, is that the skeumorphic design becomes limiting for some of the new possibilities that innovation brings. What happens when the feature set no longer fits in the physical analogy? What would have happened if YouTube would have just mimicked a television set with channels, etc. There is no way to fit in all the user-generated content in that design. How about something like music (audio) players? The traditional artist/album/song is getting somewhat limiting when it comes to artist collaborations across different bands, long-form podcasts (BTW, podcast is a “genre”, but then there has “topics”), live stream, audiobooks, all combined.

We are going to see this play over once again, very strongly, in the Metaverse (check out Decentraland). The first applications are going to be a reflection of non-meta, until we feel ok for something new to take its place.

At some point we got to let go and move on, create our own, so the only thing we can be sure of, is that there will be new things to learn.

There is this song by Joan Manuel Serrat, the Catalonian singer/songwriter. While his musical style wasn’t ever my favorite, I have always been touched by his deep -sometimes jarring- lyrics.

The song I am referring to is “Caminante no hay camino”, which roughly translates to “There is no road, traveler”, and the chorus goes “see hace camino al andar”, or “a path is traced as you walk”.

I love this image, and I think it is more true than ever. The online landscape, just like our physical world in the very early days, lacks roads. There are not many public main roads where you can settle by and hang a shingle out to offer your goods and services. When opening a brick-and-mortar store, the saying used to go “location, location, location”. The more centric, the busier the corner, the more customers you were going to get. There is almost no equivalent to this online. Sure, you can set up an account with Amazon, or publish your messages on Twitter, but you will be competing with anybody else doing the same.

There is an alternative, and it is to build your own road, which in the digital world, doesn’t require heavy machinery, but the really hard task is to get people to transit your road.

There is also another interpretation that I’d like to ponder, and it is that in our quest for happiness or our success, we sometimes get paralyzed evaluating all the options, searching for the right path for us, the one that fits us, the one that will take us to our destination. We don’t realize that for many of us, there is no such path. We are unique, and no pre-established path will ever feel just right.

Instead of searching for a path, sometimes it is best just to start walking. We will trace a path on our journey.