Comment by ricardobeat
16 hours ago
Waayy back in 2009 we had Bump [1], which allowed transfer between devices and later web apps as well – by banging your phone against the spacebar. It worked 98% of the time and was faster than AirDrop is today, even though we only had 3G.
Google acquired it and immediately killed it.
Bump didn't use direct device-to-device communication. A central server correlated the two bumping phones, based on geolocation and accelerometer data, then swapped the data via the server. At least that's how it worked in the early days. (Wiki page confirms)
Since it's relying on your internet connection, skeptical it'd be faster than AirDrop for a large amount of data like photos. But for swapping contacts I bet it was faster since it didn't have to spend time establishing a new direct connection.
That's true, I should have mentioned it did not use device-to-device communication. It was the best possible experience for the time though, BT was not viable and wifi direct did not exist. 3G averaged at maybe 10Mbps, and photos were 2 megapixels (if you had a camera at all), more than enough speed. We were mostly sharing URLs and contacts.
By faster I mean the initial connection, it was instant despite the server-based pairing, which made it feel even more magical. With AirDrop you sometimes experience quite a bit of signal hunting.
A comparable experience would be when you touch phones to share a contact with NFC, it was in that ballpark of responsiveness.
Waaay back when in Japan, sekigaisen (infrared) was a verb meaning to transfer contact details or photos or whatever between phones via infrared. It was amazing how fast the iPhone took over Japan and killed off their quirky phone ecosystem.
Edit: want to emphasize that it was totally ubiquitous. Every phone has it
I wonder if this was driven by the Palm Pilots in the early 2000s. We beamed contacts, calendar entries, whole apps via IR. At trade shows exhibitors had terminals that would constantly send out contact informations via OBEX (?).
yes, "beaming" in the us was also used for quite a while. as in IR beam
japanese phones were buggy, feature packed monstrosities. a bunch of companies fighting to check as many boxes as they could. it's not a surprise that they got wiped out by an attempt to make a holistic internet communicator.
but for a while, there was nothing like them and their ability to get information on the internet
Microsoft Zune had the ability to send music wirelessly to other Zunes, it was called squirting
That's appalling. "Yo let me squirt you"
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In the US (edit: and elsewhere!), "beaming" worked great between Apple Newton devices, including the pretty cool eMate 300 (an early Jony Ive creation, I just found on Wikipedia).
In 1993.
And in Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal on GameBoy Color you could send Mystery gifts via IR!
Someone even ported it to an emulator! https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art11.html
I remember being blown away by the Gameboy Colour IR link. You could use it to trade Pokemon. That makes a bit more sense now if sekigaisen was already a popular ecosystem.
My friends in school would send ringtones, wallpapers, and other small files through Bluetooth. It normally worked pretty well no matter the device.
When I was pretty early in my career, I inherited a legacy project from the CTO who didn't want to maintain it anymore. We decided as a team that I'd just recreate the project with a modern tool chain.
A few weeks later, the CTO looked at my work and asked why it was missing xyz features from his legacy project, saying that if I'm gonna take a project and rewrite it, it better be at least as good as the old project.
It was a pretty good lesson for me to get early in my career, and I've carried it with me ever since. Don't break or rewrite that which already works.
It's evident that no one at Google ever got that lesson.
NB: I know Google definitely has other reasons for acquiring and killing off Bump — they were probably building a competing technology that was shitty and bump was doing it better and sooner than them so better to buy and kill than to make their own product better. But I think my the lesson from my anecdote still stands from a purely product point of view, and I feel like it should make business sense but apparently you can make bad micro business decisions as long as you can convince shareholders they were good macro business decisions.
I changed my thoughts on rewriting after reading this:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
PS: I just realized this article is older than some of the people here.
I would rewrite if the alternative is maintaining bad code for a long time. But yeah, it’s best to be pessimistic. And be really careful about changes. There are books written about the methods to use.
The lesson I retain from a similar endeavor is that you should document all the usecase of a module or a project before rewriting them. And that task can be as exhausting as formally verifying the module.
I do wonder how many great little user-friendly bits of software got destroyed in aquishutdowns. Incredible way to deploy capital to delete software, but that's the big internet world for you.
If I am not mistaken, Bump still required a connection to the Internet. WiFi Aware does not, because the phones create an ad-hoc link on the spot.
The connection can be very fast. In this example, a 280 MB file is transferred in less than 10 seconds:
https://vimeo.com/418946837
What's sad is what largely replaced device to device transfers was just messaging apps. But messaging apps compress media horribly. iMessage isn't so bad, but send a photo through almost anything else and all meta data is stripped, and the image resolution and bitrate are the absolute bare minimum to look ok on a phone. But try to print it and it will be horrible.
Stripping the metadata on a photo is probably a feature though. For privacy reasons the default should most likely be that location, device info etc are taken out of photos that might go viral or be shared beyond what the original user intended.
> iMessage isn't so bad
iMessage is very bad in certain circumstances, think if the recipient is on 3G or 4G it really compresses videos. It's not obvious and doesn't tell the recipient or offer an option so if you're working in video you keep being told "Can you make it higher res" when this happens
There could probably be a niche market (until platforms implement the functionality) for enhancing the metadata of Whatsapp pictures from family & friends and guess it from the context. i.e. your auntie sending you now a picture of yourself 30 years ago which will show up as dated 2025 by default, which totally sucks.
Very cool, didn't know such app had existed, thank you! Wanted to use a similar approach to connect people in a smaller friends-only social network.
Bump was like magic.
The only app I have ever truly thought “this is the future”
I can almost guarantee it wasn’t faster than airdrop (when it works) is today. I remember using bump on wifi, and it was limited to (shocking) wifi speeds at the time. I have as recently as last week transferred 1GB video files in under 20 seconds using airdrop. That simply was not possible in 2009.
airdrop uses wifi direct... so