Speaking With General Magic’s Jim White

When General Magic introduced its innovative agent-based network architecture almost exactly one year ago, for many it was their first introduction to several concepts including remote programming, electronic surrogates, and electronic marketplaces. Since then, the Internet has virtually exploded with interest, making some of these ideas commonplace enough to be talked about on broadcast television and even Congress.

When we first spoke to Jim White at the time of Telescript’s debut, White spent most of his time explaining what an agent is, and why we need one to help us manage our lives. Today, White still talks about agents but in a much more familiar setting: the blossoming world of the Internet and its graphical portal, the World Wide Web. Now, as General Magic’s vice president of Telescript Technology, White has some definite ideas about where Telescript fits in, along with some of the challenges that his company faces with new and old competitors.

The Open Telescript Initiative

White began by describing the problem that Telescript is working to address: “Let me describe it in terms of the Web because the gist of the Open Telescript Initiative, the premise of it, is that the Internet is clearly the emerging electronic marketplace by virtue of its size, its rate of growth, and therefore the amount of content out there. If you look at the Internet, you see an enormous amount of information, much more than any one person can possibly contemplate.”

“If you look at the Internet, you see an enormous amount of information, much more than any one person can possibly contemplate.”

White continued: “And the question is, how do you benefit from that wealth of information? How do you find things? How do you use it? How do you do this in a time frame that real people will devote to the proposition? And so if you stop and think about what the problem is, you conclude that I have to drag information out of the network. I have to log on to a machine like the one you’re using [pointing at a laptop]. I have to browse, I have to surf, I have to explore, I have to follow hot links, etc., etc.”

“And I get value out of it in proportion to the amount of time I devote to that, how good I am at it, and maybe even to some considerable extent, how lucky I am. And then, when I close the machine and turn it off, I get no further value until I do it all over again at some future date. And that’s the problem that we set out to solve. We didn’t think of it originally in terms of the Internet because the Internet, at that time five years ago, didn’t have a business visibility even though it was huge and had existed for twenty-two years.”

In hindsight, it was almost an innocent time, well before the Internet’s news grabbing appeal and the day of the $170 stock for an unprofitable company. White elaborated: “It just never popped up in Fortune and Business Week and least of all, in the minds of consumers. But we could certainly articulate the issue with regard to commercial online services such as AOL [America Online], Compuserve, etc. The problem is that the network has to have the things dragged out of it and I have to expend effort to do that. The way we describe it is that the network is way too passive. It’s sitting there, you know, just saying ‘explore me.’ But people in real life have limited time to do that.”

Making the Network More Active

White explained: “So what we’re trying to do with Telescript is to make a network, like the Internet, more active so that it doesn’t sit there and wait to be explored. It actually, perhaps as a result of some previous exploration, will begin to do things for me on a proactive basis.

So if I were to browse the Internet to find something that I particularly like, wouldn’t it be nice if I could say that’s what I’m interested in. You, network, if you have more of that either now or in the future, please cough it up.”

“I could then log off with some sense that the network was going to be working for me. You can relate this to an online commercial service for which you pay a monthly fee, and this actually happened to me: I subscribed to AOL, I still do, but my subscription has been turned on and off and on and off as I lost interest and regained interest. And it’s that month when you get your bill and you realize that you didn’t get any value because you didn’t log on.”

White continued: “It’s not that it wasn’t there and it’s not that there wasn’t value to be had, it’s just that you didn’t log on and receive it. So the $9.95 is a reminder of that. What you would really like is for that network to be working for you. So how do you get it working for you? The technology that we developed is all about that. It allows the network to receive these little bits of intelligence that we call agents, so that those agents can represent you while you’re not on the air.”

Better Living Through Agents

White described how this experience could be different using, for example, an agent developed by a third-party. “I install it on my computer and now, it is an additional tool that I have to use in conjunction with the Web. By the way, if you think about it, the idea that you have particular applications that use the Web in different ways is a fairly unusual concept. I suppose at the moment, you think of there being one particular application that you use all the time—that’s your browser.”

“The way I think about it, that’s a very odd situation because you don’t think of there being one tool that you run on your computer, there are several. There are word processing programs and spreadsheets and drawing programs and many more specialized tools if you’re in various areas of work like math or engineering. What I want to be able to do is to buy an application from someone who knows about a particular field of endeavour that’s represented on the Web, and be able to use that application on the Web.”

“What I want to be able to do is to buy an application from someone who knows about a particular field of endeavor that’s represented on the Web, and be able to use that application on the Web.”

White expanded: “As part of that application, I would like to have agents that the application can deposit in the network as appropriate so that I can get work done for me, work that’s tailored to my needs as an individual and typically that would be tailored to some particular application. That’s the idea of agents and it’s a way of dividing the responsibility differently than is conventionally done in networks.”

White described how almost all of the function and feature of information we find on present day networks is shaped by the content provider. He noted: “Networks today, whether it’s the Internet or a commercial online service, work in a way such that the guy that has the content determines the functionality—the way in which the content is accessed. So when I put content up on the Web, I deliver it through the medium offered by a browser. And so another way to describe what we’re trying to do with agents is to provide an open-ended set of alternative access methods that are implemented by the agents.”

White described some of the flavors agents can take: “Some of them are interactive, but many of them are not. So with agents in the hands of third party software developers, we think there’s potential to make the network active, not just passive. Yet another way to describe it is that we think that you can make the network amenable to automated use as suppose to purely interactive use. So that’s what we’re trying to do with agents and with the Open Telescript Initiative.”

The Opening of Telescript

Expanding Telescript’s role to encompass the Internet understandably represents a bit of a change of direction for General Magic. White recalled: “When we set out five years ago to get into this field called personal communication, we were interested in small mobile devices and we had to provide a communication infrastructure. A public utility would do a great job of mediating the communication between users of these devices. And, in the process of developing and designing the infrastructure, we hit upon this idea of mobile agents. This led us to generalize the vision of personal communication to the notion of electronic marketplaces which is now quite a well-understood, very popular and, in fact, real idea.”

“The intent has always been to have a communication technology that is well-understood and well-known with it’s specifications published.”

“At that time, we wondered how to do it and the only way that we could imagine building an infrastructure was to engage the people who build communication utilities like the phone companies. So that’s what we did. We started with AT&T, arguably the premier network operator in the United States, and developed a very close working relationship with them with the objective of building a commercial service that they would deploy and operate under their name.”

White continued: “Then we got around to other countries, which we’re still doing, and did likewise in those regions. We went to Japan and we approached NTT with a similar vision. We went to France and we approached France Telecom. We also approached Fujitsu, which runs a huge online service in Japan. This was the only way that we could imagine to build a public utility for this new category of device.”

In some ways, it is this proprietary nature that General Magic is hoping to expand. White countered: “You describe it as proprietary which I think is an accurate description but it’s not an accurate statement of intent. The intent has always been to have a communication technology that is well-understood and well-known with it’s specifications published. Because you have to do that for any communication technology or you sort of guarantee that it will not succeed. It’s just that we hadn’t actually done that. We hadn’t actually disclosed all, or much of any really, of the technical details.”

Electronic Marketplace a Reality on the Web

White described how, about two years ago or less, the Internet became a commercial reality in terms of people’s awareness of it. He noted: “In particular the World Wide Web, which made the technology or the network accessible to a lot more people than it ever was. It’s sort of like the transition from DOS to Windows on the PC; the transition from command line interfaces on the Internet to the what-you-see-is-what-you-get on the World Wide Web. So that reality has changed the prospects for building electronic marketplaces. It’s very clear now that the Internet will be instrumental in the process of realizing the electronic marketplace.”

“What we’ve done with Telescript is to begin to introduce it into the World Wide Web. The first step is to begin to make the technology available in that venue, in addition to the venue of the phone companies where we still have enormous interest. And indeed, when the Web takes some future next step in terms of level of acceptance, I think we’ll find that there are many potential customers who will want to access the Web through some lens that has an air of stability.”

White was referring to the continued need for experienced commercial service providers, especially as the Internet grows past its cadre of early enthusiasts. He quipped: “I mean, who do you call when you don’t understand how something works? Where’s the customer service for the Internet? Well, it doesn’t have one per se but a PTT [Post, Telephone & Telegraph] company could lend value to the Internet experience in that kind of a way.”

This led White into describing the Open Telescript Initiative in a bit more detail: “The Open Telescript Initiative is the first step to make the technology widely available. Up to this point, if you really wanted to know how the technology worked, if you wanted to read about how agents were programmed by third party developers, you had to be a PTT. Now you don’t.”

When White says “now,” he really means now. He confirmed: “This means Halloween, this past Halloween, as of the [General Magic] Developers Conference. As you know, we handed out CD-ROMs with a lot of code on it and a lot of documentation. And that same code and documentation is, as of that day, accessible through our home page on the Web [http://www.genmagic.com]. So if you want, you can download it to your friendly neighborhood SGI, HP, or Sun workstation and bring it up. You can do that or, if you just want to grab the documentation and understand what the technology does from a developer’s standpoint, you can do that.”

White beamed: “We’ve never made that possible before. We’re making it available through those means in a large measure because we think that’s where the market opportunity exists. That’s where there are people who will look at the technology and make some judgment about it, decide that it’s tremendously valuable or decide they’re not interested.”

The Telescript Development Environment

The obvious question is whether this is the same material that a company like AT&T receives. White replied: “No, it’s not. It’s a subset of what a PTT gets because, for example, AT&T today runs a very substantial Telescript agent-based application called Magic Mail. This is the smart messaging functionality that you see through a device like Sony’s Magic Link. And there are various other software that the PTT would use as well. For example, there’s a lot of network management capabilities along with billing and accounting. There are all kinds of stuff that you would want to have if you were to run a commercial service.”

White continued: “So none of that stuff is on the CD-ROM, nor is it on the Web site. The name that we attached to the stuff we delivered is the Telescript Development Environment (TDE), which leads to the other reason that we are releasing this stuff now. The TDE is a, well, it’s what you’d expect if you were a professional programmer nowadays developing in any of the popular systems programming languages like C or C++. There are graphical tools, source level debugging, project management class browsers and so on and so forth—these are tools that you would need to build agent-based applications in Telescript.”

“Up to this point, if you really wanted to know how the technology worked, if you wanted to read about how agents were programmed by third party developers, you had to be a PTT. Now you don’t.”

White gave an example: “If you are building an application where an agent goes from your client machine to the server, does some stuff there, then goes to some other server and does some stuff there, you can actually debug that agent when you’re developing your application even though it’s moving around. You can set break points in your code and it will catch it over there as well as over there, things like that. These are not tools that we had when we built the PersonaLink service with AT&T.”

White recalled: “We had to do it the hard way and it was pretty time consuming. But we now have these tools to offer people and so we have some expectation that, with a minimum of support, knowledgeable people can use the tools and successfully build Telescript-based applications which we suspect was never true before those tools were available.”

As with any development environment, the most critical question is support. Understandably, General Magic cannot supply free support to any and all developers who download the code and documentation from the Web. White explained: “In general, if you just grab the software and the documentation, you are doing so without explicit support from General Magic—we can’t support with our own resources an unlimited number of people. We will undertake to support some modest number of people out there who take an interest in the technology and propose to develop applications based on it.”

White continued: “It’s what we refer to as the Greenhouse Program, which is simply to say that we’ve encouraged prospective developers who have an electronic marketplace kind of application in mind, to contact us and describe what their ideas are. If it seems like something that’s really exciting, we’ll offer to support that developer with resources of time and energy and perhaps some additional tools as they become available. Also we offer to help them establish business contacts should they want to deploy such a service in, for example, a PTT setting like AT&T PersonaLink or conceivably in some other venue.”

Telescript on the Web

So far so good. But how does this relate to the most popular part of the Internet, namely the World Wide Web. White explained: “The idea of Telescript in the context of the Web is that if you run a Web site with pages that represent value that you contribute to the world, you might like to make that content accessible to agents as well as to browsers. Now where do the agents come from? The agents themselves, based on the version of software that we have today—with the exception of the Telescript capability in Magic Cap—runs on a server. So what you’ll be looking at is an application that would integrate and provide something other than the interactive browsing kind of access to some set of content on the Web.”

“The idea would be that you equip Web sites that contain that content with this Telescript engine software so our agents can go to those sites and effectively use the information. So let me give you an example from your online magazine, mobilis. If I had agent-oriented applications at my disposal as a reader of your magazine I might, if your Web site was Telescript-aware, send an agent to your site to hang around there—assuming you would let me do that—and notice when you were slipping things between the pages and come tell me about it. Rather than me having to rely on every once in a while checking to see if you have changed anything, I can have an agent figure this out automatically.”

“The idea of Telescript in the context of the Web is that if you run a Web site with pages that represent value that you contribute to the world, you might like to make that content accessible to agents as well as to browsers.”

“In the software that we delivered on Halloween, there is what I describe as a low-level Telescript API with which one could integrate Web content with agents, that is, make Web content appear to an agent in a form that it could comprehend. So an agent could detect the presence of Web pages, ask for pages, see what’s on them, and so on. It’s very, very low level—you have to do a significant amount of programming to produce the high level API software that would actually make that convenient.”

White described an additional set of tools that General Magic is working to deliver, something White characterized as “Web tools.” He explained: “We didn’t distribute these on Halloween because we’re not ready. But we did demonstrate them at the [developers] conference. That software is Web-specific, it’s Web-Telescript glue software—that’s the way I think of it. It allows two fairly interesting things to happen, one of which is that a Telescript agent can access any bit of information on any page on the Web, either local Web pages or pages of information on Web sites that don’t have Telescript engines. It does this in the standard way through HTTP [Hypertext Transfer Protocol] although it’s an agent doing the looking, it’s not a human being.”

White described how an agent could programmatically create Web pages enabling agent-based applications to use the Web as a means of interacting with users equipped with only a standard browser. White explained: “You can imagine a collection of Web sites within which agents can freely move physically from one to another. You can imagine agents that move freely in that universe, gathering information, watching for things to happen, integrating things, and then presenting the results of that work to the user either through a browser, or through some other means such as email, for example.”

This type of technology seems ideal for building the much talked-about personal newspaper, which could potentially add new meaning to the phrase up-to-date. White predicted: “It would be fresh since it could be based on what’s happened up to that moment. That’s because you have agents in the background gathering news and updating your personal view of the Web. You can use the software that we distributed on a noncommercial basis without any kind of discussion. However, if you try the software, you like it, and you want to do something commercially, then we encourage you to come talk to us.”

“We don’t have anything that you would describe as a rate sheet. So the best thing at the moment is to invite people to come talk to us. We certainly intend to offer licenses on terms that would be reasonable given the environment of the Web, as opposed to other environments like the ones we’ve been exploring up to this point.”

“The best thing that can happen to any company that had undertaken a Telescript-based service would be to discover that Telescript was taking off in some big way.”

With all this talk about the Internet and the World Wide Web, one has to wonder how AT&T and other commercial service providers that are interested in Telescript technology feel about all this. Also, are there any commercial relationships that limit how broadly this technology can be deployed on the Internet? White responded very clearly: “We have no commercial arrangement with AT&T or any other PTT that’s exclusive in nature. But the question you’re asking is how does AT&T feel about the idea of the Open Telescript Initiative? I’m certainly not in a position to answer that question—you could only reasonably ask AT&T that question.”

“But I can observe that all of the phone companies see the same Internet that everybody else sees, and they see it as a big opportunity. So one would reason, I would imagine, that a company like AT&T who has invested a lot of money in agent-based technology—and has indeed put up the first agent-based commercial service—would consider it to be a good thing as the technology spreads out and becomes more widely available.”

Which brings us to the question of how Telescript is being advanced outside the United States. White enthusiastically described some of these developments: “In Japan, NTT has licensed the technology and has run a very tiny pilot on the order of a few hundred users to see how people like the service as seen through a Sony Magic Link. They got tremendous response to that tiny pilot; they were well oversubscribed. Also in Japan, NTT, Sony, and AT&T announced a few months ago a joint venture which they call FAN.”

White couldn’t recall offhand what FAN stood for, but described it as a company created for the purpose of building and deploying a Telescript-based commercial service in Japan, based on the experience of the earlier pilot. All seems to be well in Japan, but does this open approach lend itself to encouraging other PTTs such as Deutsche Telekom or Bell Canada to join the Telescript family? White believes so. He summarized: “I certainly think it would encourage it. The best thing that can happen to any company that had undertaken a Telescript-based service would be to discover that Telescript was taking off in some big way.”

Steaming Hot Java

While Telescript seems to form a very good fit with the future of the Web, perhaps the hottest topic in these circles right now is Sun Microsystems’ Java programming language. Interest in Java was bolstered recently by the decision of two computing powerhouses—Netscape Communications and Microsoft Corp.—to license the technology and incorporate it into future products. The 64,000 dollar question is: how does Telescript fit into the picture with Java?

White started: “We get asked all the time about Java. The reason we get asked about it is that Java and Telescript are both in the genre of remote programming technologies. But the fundamental difference between Telescript and Java is that Java is a style of programming in which people are running little applications that get downloaded into their work stations to do cool things on the screen, primarily feats of magic in terms of the user interface.”

White described how this can make Web pages appear to be dynamic and quite impressive to most users: “They’re astounded because as far as they knew, it was impossible to have a dynamic Web page. And here is one that they are viewing on their screen. The first time you see the helicopter with the spinning blades—it’s the first Java sample application I saw—on the home page of a fictitious helicopter manufacturing company, you look at that and say, ‘I didn’t know you could do that.'”

Some people like to call this the wow factor, and White is quick to agree. “There is a wow factor there. You can discern instantaneously, if you know a little bit about the Web, that something amazing is going on there. So that’s fundamentally what Java is about, whereas, what we’re up to is something that’s harder to fathom because it’s happening on the back end; it’s happening in the network rather than in the client.”

White expanded: “One way of describing the differences is that Java applets go to the left, and Telescript agents go to the right. That is, applets emanate from the network while Telescript agents enter the network, compute, and wander around. And the things you can do with those two different approaches are completely and utterly different. With agents, for example, you can turn off your computer and, as a result of some application that you previously installed in that computer, have an agent in the network that’s going to send you email every time a Web page changes; if some new article is published on some topic. That’s not what you can do with Java, but you can see really neat things on your screen.”

White has a positive attitude towards Java. He confided: “What they’ve done with Java is very impressive. It’s impressive in two senses, one of which is that it is by all accounts a very beautiful piece of work in the genre of programming languages. It’s also impressive from the standpoint of being beautifully positioned in conjunction with the Web.”

“(Java) applets emanate from the network while Telescript agents enter the network, compute, and wander around.”

The server-based nature of Telescript technology affects the user’s experience in a different way. Since Java-enhanced Web-pages require users to download small applets, it’s essential to have a local environment to host these applets. What this means practically is that the user’s Web browser must be Java-enabled in order for them to take advantage of Java’s features. With Telescript, however, you are free to use your regular browser since you continue to interact with Web servers as usual. It is through a server-based interface that the work of sending Telescript agents off into the network is done.

White agreed: “That’s one of two ways of operating. In fact, it’s the way that we were pursuing initially with our Web tools because it’s the path of least resistance—you don’t have to have a special browser. So you imagine these Web sites where agents can wander around and the question is ‘how close can they get to you, the user?’ One answer to that question is they can get to the nearest server, but they can’t get into your gadget or into your notebook computer.”

White continued: “Another possible answer, which is perhaps more futuristic, is that they can actually get into your device. But we don’t envision that in the nearer term, as I said, primarily because it requires a browser that’s attuned to Telescript, which is similar to what is required for Java systems.”

Another advantage of an emerging Telescript-based network is that a relatively small number of Telescript servers can potentially add a surprising amount of value to the network. White stressed this point by noting that: “The breadth of applications depends in large part on the breadth of the content that the agents have to draw on. So if you have an agent that’s locked in a closet with one Web site, it’s going to have a limited freedom of movement with limited potential.”

“But even with a half a dozen Web sites, you can see in very concrete ways that it would actually delivers value to you now. Again, I return to the content of the network in ways that human beings cannot do sitting at terminals. There’s so much out there today that if it were possible for developers, third-party developers, to conveniently build applications that get at their content, we’d have tremendous value.”

White speculated: “I mean, it would be a qualitatively different experience than it is today using the Web, which is a process that loses its interest after a while—at least in my experience—because it’s too much work when you have to do it manually.”

Adding Intelligence to the Net

Notwithstanding White’s enthusiasm for agent-based technology on the Web, White cautions that there are problems remaining to be solved before the net’s real potential can be fully realized. He explained: “There’s one other thought that is looking out into the future a little bit. It’s an interesting problem that will present itself when agent-based technologies become more popular, and that is the business of determining the semantics of the information that’s on the Web as opposed to just the syntax.”

White explained: “If you bring up a Web page on your computer and some field on the page says ‘War and Peace,’ you know what that is in all likelihood—you know that’s the name of a book. Agents have no clue that that’s the name of a book. None. This illustrates the problem. With many of the applications that one can imagine and that we describe in papers and are beginning to demonstrate, you really want the agent to understand. The agent really has to understand the nature of the information that it’s finding everywhere.”

“An interesting problem that will present itself when agent-based technologies become more popular…is determining the semantics of the information that’s on the Web as opposed to just the syntax.”

White illustrated: “A simple example is the shopping application that we talk about all the time, where you have agents that are looking for bargains. How do you go to a hundred different Web sites and ask if you have product X at price Y or less? How do you do that? Well, the answer is that there’s no way to do that today. The only way you can do that is to have a human being go.”

“But a human being is not going to go to a hundred places. A human being could go to five of them and, being intelligent, can figure out where the product is offered, at what price, and the rest. A human can figure it all out. The agent could never do that. So the lack of that kind of information on the Web is going to be a hindrance, not just to Web-based applications and not just to agent-based applications, but to all categories of applications beyond browsing.”

White concluded: “And so that’s a problem that needs to be attended to one way or another. It’s also related to the problem of building yellow page directories in an automated fashion and, I’m sure, other problems I’m not aware of. So that’s a problem for the future that we’ll have to address.”

Agents are Here to Stay

In the end, White is bullish about the concept of agents. He predicted: “I think that the Web will come to be used in this automated fashion, one way or another. I hope that Telescript agents will have something to do with that, but even if they don’t and some other technology shows up and takes over, I’m completely convinced that agent-based networks will arise. And since the Internet is the network of interest, I’m completely convinced the Internet will become agent-enabled one way or another.”

James E. White
General Magic
Vice President, Telescript Technology
420 North Mary Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
(408) 774-4000
(408) 774-4030 (fax)
[email protected]