foe romeo

Overplayed

"We've spoken with a health-care specialist who believes that the intensity of your research efforts is unhealthy."

OK, so Sharkrunners has issued me with a health warning, and I was up until 3am last night scrabbing in Facebook with Australians. In my defence, I was deliberately staying up late to get a good view of the Perseids meteor shower. And, anyway, neither Sharkrunners nor Facebook Scrabble can be played with any real intensity. In Scrabble, you're kept in check by the turn-taking (why do all of my opponents take so bloody long to make a move?) and in Sharkrunners you're waiting to be alerted to an encounter. According to area/code, the developers of Sharkrunners, ships in the game move in real-time towards sharks that are representations of real-world white sharks with GPS units attached to their fins.

So it's intermittent play and in that sense reminds me of Twitchr, Matt's mobile play prototype. In Twitchr, digital birds visit your mobile phone and you have a short, intense moment in which to snap them. I like these playful interruptions.

In other (non)news, I also like Wii bowling. Because I win.

No chance of overplaying that one, my arms couldn't take it.

LIFT06: Stefana Broadbent, 'SMS is to tell you I miss you'

Stefana leads the User Observatory at Swisscom. She presented findings from her team's ethnographic research into different communication channels. It was a great talk - and probably useful to many - so I'm posting my rapidly-jotted notes...

People are extremely sophisticated in their communication choices, and usually choose the best channel for each situation.

Fixed phone - collective channel
Mobile voice - micro coordination channel
SMS - intimate channel
Email - administrative channel
IM (and, increasingly, VOIP) - continuous channel with a few people
Blogging - networking channel

Fixed phone - collective channel
Most fixed phone conversations are done in public - 75% from public space in home, only 25% from bedroom or study. The exchanges that are done on fixed phones have relevance for all members of the household. It's economical to be overheard, so not so much about privacy.

Mobile voice - personal, micro coordination channel
80% of exchanges are with just 4 people. Regular communication with the most intimate sphere of friends and family. Content analysis - micro coordination accounts for more than 50% of exchanges.

SMS - intimate channel
Emotion, efficiency. Only the most intimate sphere of friends and family. 'Grooming' messages - thank you, endearments... - keep relationships alive. A form of communication that has found its realisation in SMS. Over 50% of grooming communications happen through SMS.

Email - administrative channel
(Studied residential usage, not business.) Support to online activities - travel and shopping preparation. Coordination with extended social group (clubs, friends, services). Main channel for sending content (attachments) - mostly pictures and jokes - within close social network. Collective communication - sending message to multiple recipients. People are mostly communicating with acquaintances and service providers. Impersonal relationships are maintained with email.

IM (and, increasingly, VOIP) - continuous channel with a few people
Open a communication channel for the day and then just step in and out of a conversation. IM allows people to keep an open channel in the background while they do other activities (multi-tasking). People aren't talking with everyone on Skype. And not just because their social network isn't on Skype but because it supports certain kinds of communications, very similar to instant messaging. Completely different from short and instantaneous type of communication in other channels.

Blogging - networking channel
Focus on users of Myspace and cyworld, rather than blogs. Here, people have one-to-many conversations. Form of communication that allows (mostly young) people to hugely extend the number of communication partners. People use it as a hub of communication. Movement away from email and towards these blogs because they provide a space to chat that doesn't have the admin characteristics of email.

Important to note that new forms - SMS, IM, VOIP, blogging - not substitutional. There is a constant evolution. Each new channel that appears slowly redefines the uses of older media. IM redefines use of SMS, blogging redefines the use of email, VOIP changes some uses of fixed phones. Maybe the longer conversations that fixed phone has been for will go on VOIP channel.

A pattern of communication emerges slowly, stabilises for a period and then changes again when new communication channels are introduced.

Need to stress how sophisticated people are in their choices and how subtle these things are. Find exactly the strengths and limitations of each channel. E.g. SMS character limitation - so you use it with people you know very well. When I finish this talk I'll send my husband a message ('went well') and he will know the context. That's what makes it such an intimate space.

Responses to questions:
- Not all about cost, that's just one factor. People using mobile phones at home, for example.
- Main users of fixed phones are women, because they're the ones who mostly handle social organisational activities.

Methodology
Map position of technology in home.
Record timelines and schedules (TV, PC, Judo, etc).
Communication diaries - annotate every exchange they have, e.g. voice call, email (who, where, content).
Relatively small, ethnographic study but validated by others. (100 people kept a diary for 4-5 days, 3,000 interactions.)

Skype status on YubNub

YubNub is a little piece of social software that allows people to create and share web service commands. Install one of the many YubNub plugins (e.g. for Firefox or Quicksilver) or download the Dashboard widget, and you have a handy command line interface to the web.

Some of the most used commands are google search, wiki search, currency conversion, current time and Flickr photo search...

It all seemed very straightforward when I was playing with it again this weekend, so I decided to create a command: Skype status search.

SkypeWeb is a new (beta) feature of Skype that allows people to display their Skype status via a webpage, blog, email signature, or any other Internet-enabled application.

To query someone's status, simply type their Skype Name.

Example: skype foeromeo

You'll see a Skype button with their status: Skype Me!, I'm awaaaay, I'm online, Do not disturb...

N.b. The web status will only be returned for people who have chosen to share it via their privacy options in Skype. (SkypeWeb is still in beta so the option to enable web status is limited to testers right now.)

Command

Result

I'm not quite sure if/how this is useful yet. It might be nice to access from your mobile phone when you want to know if it's too early/late to call someone.

Update: Matt tried this out on his mobile and it looks pretty good once you get past the operator's child content controls. (It seems that Vodaphone classifies Skype as unmoderated chat.)

Update II: Someone's created another YubNub command for Skype. 'sky' uses the Skype call link to launch Skype and make a call. E.g. You type 'sky foeromeo' to call me in Skype.

Presence update: Back in London, working at Skype

I'm back in London and working at Skype. Today's announcement is one of the reasons I'm excited to be here. Skype will be opening its platform to anyone who wants to integrate Skype's presence and instant messaging into their website or application. Think blogs, communities, online gaming, social media...

Level 60 del.icio.us player

I might not be that hot in AIM Fight terms, but I'm no. 175 of the 'Top 500 Taggers' at Collaborative Rank. This is a nice follow up to my inclusion in HubLog's Gatherers of the Month. I must, like Matt suggested last night, be a 'level 60 del.icio.us player'.

Collaborative Rank (via Smart Mobs) is a del.icio.us search engine:

Users on del.icio.us who give meaningful tags to helpful/timely URLs (as evidenced by others subsequently doing the same) will be rewarded with higher CollaborativeRank, which means that their tagging will have greater influence on this search engine's rankings.

Along with 'socialsoftware', 'games', 'puzzles', 'rss' and 'women', one of my key areas of expertise is 'toread'...

See also: A draft paper by the developer, Amir Michail of the University of New South Wales, CollaborativeRank -- Motivating People to Give Helpful and Timely Ranking Suggestions (pdf).

AIM Fight

It's interesting to see AIM getting in on the popularity game being played with their software elsewhere (e.g. at BuddyZoo).

Why Fight?
What can fighting really prove? Using a complicated algorithm, AIM Fight crawls through the depths of the Internet to answer the all-important question that plagues us all: How popular am I right this second?

How do I win?
Your score is the sum of the current number of people online who have you listed as a buddy, out to three degrees. This means the score is constantly changing, and the winner of the battle will constantly change with it.

How can I increase my score?
You can’t! You need to get people to add you to their Buddy List window, and have more people add those people to their Buddy List windows, and have even more people add those people to their Buddy List windows. Your own Buddy List window doesn’t matter in the score.

What’s AIM Rank?
If your score happens to be in the top 5% of all AIM users online, we’ll show you where you rank in comparison to the others in the top 5%.

If you don’t see your rank, it means you’re not in the top 5%. Remember, not ranking doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It just means that people who have you listed as a buddy might not be online.

(Via Waxy links, aka 'infocombot'.)

They've done a good job of making something fun without entering the murkily obsessive world of IMChaos and IMWatching. And it's smart that the outcome is in constant flux.

See also: Friendster Pachinko

Update: According to this article in the Washington Post, AOL just increased the number of people allowed to be on a user's buddy list from 200 to 450. This all ties together very nicely for them.

Girlguiding as a serious game

While researching around playful knowledge networks for teens, I discovered that Girlguiding describes itself as a serious game these days:

What is Guiding?

Guiding is a game - with a purpose. It provides opportunities for girls and young women to be challenged by new adventures and experiences and achieve a sense of pride in accomplishment and teaches them to understand and learn about the world, its people and cultures.

Makes sense. There are lots of basic game design patterns evident in Girlguiding: from learning by doing, to levelling up, trading, socialising, and collecting...

Pictures pilfered from here.

Girlguiding UK is also piloting a piece of safer social software: a moderated discussion forum carefully limited to Girl Guides and Girlguiding staff.

It can't be long before they get into alternative reality gaming - it's a perfect fit. (Ditto for the Scouts and Duke of Edinburgh Award.)

IM and the future of language

Handy notes from Pasta & Vinegar on IM and the future of language:

Adolescents have long been a source of linguistic and behavioral novelty. Teens often use spoken language to express small-group identity. It is hardly surprising to find many of them experimenting with a new linguistic medium (such as IM) to complement the identity construction they achieve through speech, clothing, or hair style. (…) Our research suggests that IM conversations serve largely pragmatic information-sharing and social-communication functions rather than providing contexts for establishing or maintaining group identity. Moreover, college students often eschew brevity. Our data contains few abbreviations or acronyms (…) IM conversations are not always instant. (…) The most important effect of IM on language turns out to be not stylized vocabulary or grammar but the control seasoned users feel they have over their communication networks.

Full paper by Naomi Baron, Viewpoint: Instant messaging and the future of language, Communications of the ACM, Volume 48 ,  Issue 7  (July 2005).

Speed tagging

Recommended tags seems to cross reference popular tags for that URL with tags you've used previously. Suggested tags is predictive typing based on tags you've used previously.

Just click to add.

I've been too busy to tag lately but this should make it much faster.

The first social bookmarks service: Post-It Notes

Thanks to their material simplicity, they seem more closely related to workplace antiquities like the stapler and the hole-punch than integrated chips. Instead, they’re an exemplary product of their time. Foreshadowing the web, they offered an easy way to link one piece of information to another in a precisely contextual way. Foreshadowing email, they made informal, asynchronous communication with your co-workers a major part of modern office life...

Indeed, as workers tried to keep pace with all the new technologies invading offices in the early 1980s... Post-it Notes were a useful tool to manage such information overload. Not only could you highlight the material that was most important, you could also document, via a quick little note to yourself, why you thought it was worth highlighting...

But the Post-it Note was more than just a practical tool—it was also a psychological one. Compared to the clunky machines of the 1980s that generated all those documents, it was a vision of high-tech minimalism. Its edges were sharp and square, with no ugly binding, no perforations, no metal rings. Its color, a subtle but attention-getting yellow, was somehow like the color of thought itself, a lightbulb going off in your head. Devoid of any other graphic elements, it had the effect of a clean, calming, blank screen. And, yet, for all its streamlined efficiency, it was playful and user-friendly, a simple embodiment of the same values that would inform the development of Apple’s Macintosh...

Post-it Notes... were dynamic, customizable, business casual. They inspired spontaneity, rapid ideation, free association. You could link one seemingly unrelated idea to another without worrying about any logical cohesion of ideas; that’s what the glue was for.

Greg Beato's Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes, in The Rake (via Kottke), is a fascinating tale of product development. It even foreshadows the insidiousness of comment and trackback spam:

Over time, these devious ads have remained consistently effective. In 2004, a pair of university researchers conducted a series of “Letter from J.” mailings, then wrote about their experiment in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Amongst their findings: “Attaching the Post-it Note resulted in 5.6 percent of the people asking for a free sample, whereas only three percent asked for a sample when they received the ad without the attached Post-it Note.”

Social software, Agent Provocateur style

The latest newsletter from Agent Provocateur has introduced me to the concept of 'pleasurecards': a saucy set of 100 personalised and 'hand-finished' cards, complete with name, email address and/or mobile number. Each set of cards has a unique 'PEP' number to allow recipients to access the card-giver's online profile, which can include photos and bookmarks. pleasurecards is going for an exclusive feel, by restricting access to people who've been invited or given someone else's PEP.

Do they strike anyone else as upmarket vice cards, and therefore a peculiarly British approach to sex and dating?

Flickr Squared Photo Collaborative Poster project

  phyllo_rings_licensed_3145_1k 
  Originally uploaded by jbum.

This would have to be the loveliest and most persuasive information visualisation I've ever come across. jbum, a member of the always-delightful squared circle group on Flickr has created a series of mosaics from the images sent to the group's photo pool.

The image above was made by "compositing 2600 photographs and arranging them in a fibonacci spiral, a form commonly seen in plants, such as sunflowers and pinecones" and then overlaying the current licensing status of each image: "The red band indicates unlicensed photos. The purple band indicates photos which are licensed, but have a 'No Derivatives' clause. The photos in the center are useable."

jbum wants to produce a poster of his mosaic but first needs the contributors of the original images to re-license their work. Here's his call to action.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

And wow.

(Via Paul Key on Pixelbox, who introduced it thus: "Insanity squared on a flickr tip. Prepare eyes for infinity.")

Update: Apparently they've gone from 1437 to 1894 licensed photos in less than a week.

July 2005 Update: The Flickr Collaborative Posters are now available to order. Choose from Flickrverse, Day In the Life Of..., Squared Circle Peach and Squared Circle Phyllotaxy.

Who's responsible for Technorati's tag results?

(Technorati has responded to these concerns - see my update at the end of this post.)

Rebecca Blood has discovered a significant problem with the new Technorati tag aggregator: Technorati doesn't moderate its pictures in any way, i.e. it doesn't check whether Flickr users have flagged pictures with '"Might be offensive", or provide any of its own reporting tools.

When Rebecca contacted Technorati to alert them to a particularly offensive result for Martin Luther King, she got the distinct impression that they "couldn't be bothered" doing anything about it:

I called Technorati to register a protest, but was informed that Technorati had no mechanism available for removing the photo other than turning off the entire Flickr feed. Worse, I was met with polite protestations that Technorati is not in the business of editing the Web, just delivering it. I was also given some vague heebee-jeebee about "community standards" and how "the community would decide".

Well, I'm here to tell you that community standards vary wildly, and in the case of an aggregator mean nothing at all... Furthermore, "community standards" do not, indeed, can not defend against abuse of the system--only design can do that.

...Similar situations will come up in the future. It's certain that some people will try to game the system, deliberately tagging their photos to misdirect people, make a political statement, or otherwise promote their own interests. It seemed to me that Technorati would want to start thinking about that now: to Design for Evil, as Bruce Sterling has said.

It really worries me that Technorati wasn't interested in Rebecca's feedback, especially when it wasn't just an easy rant. Rebecca is sensitive to the limits of Technorati's responsibility and also has great suggestions for improvement.

I would go further than Rebecca and say that Technorati has entered the editorial business, whether they intended to or not. There are a couple of factors that make the Technorati service significantly different from Google:

• They have selected the feeds they include, i.e. they have made an editorial decision to include del.icio.us, Flickr and weblog results. This is a very partial view of the web, when you compare it to Google's mission to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'. 
• The design of the page is not neutral - it accords more weight to some items than others (e.g. the newest picture is singled out at the top of the page and much larger than the others). People have been trained to read that design decision in a particular way - if it's prominent, it's important. And there is no other obvious alternative explanation of the hierarchy, e.g. 'new!' or 'latest' flags
• The most recent (and therefore prominent) weblog posts are aligned with the picture. Again, this is suggestive; this time it implies a relationship between the text and picture. It creates a story.

I would also argue that Technorati has entered the community business. They near-enough acknowledged this when they brushed Rebecca off with their 'the community will decide' line. All of the content that Technorati returns in its results is personal, or conversational content. This doesn't only have implications in terms of context and appropriateness (Rebecca's thoughts on this are particularly astute) but also in terms of Technorati's responsibility to the creators of that content.

A simple example should suffice to make this point. The results for the 'teens' tag ("This page shows all kinds of goodies from the web about teens") follow:

Here you have a depressing selection of links to teen pornography (aka images of child abuse), illustrated with a cool snapshot from a teenage road trip. I very much doubt that the contributor of this image would be at all happy with Technorati's re-presentation of it.

So, how would Technorati handle their call? Suggest they remove their picture from Flickr, or restrict its Flickr permissions to family and friends only?

That's not good enough. Firstly, the problem wasn't created within or by Flickr. Secondly, as Anil Dash says, "I want to participate in the loosely-connected information ecosystem. I just want to know that people building platforms on this stuff are thinking about the cultural implications of the choices they make."

Anyway, as I said before, I'm really enjoying Technorati's tag search (my new favourites are all of the craft tags - craft, knitting, softies, collage - and toys) and a lot of what appeals to me is the lovely, editorial, design of the pages. But Technorati has entered the editorial/community business and needs to acknowledge its new responsibilities. The problems seem solvable through design and some limited community support services.

Tags: tags, technorati, flickr, del.icio.us, teens

UPDATE: David Sifry was very quick to respond to the concerns raised about Technorati's tag aggregation, acknowledging that he had failed to anticipate some of the issues. As someone who works in product development, I can empathise. Now, Kevin Marks has advised me that Technorati has:

1. Confirmed that Flickr's external feeds don't include pictures flagged as potentially offensive (they don't - yay for those clever folks at Flickr!); and
2. Removed the 'teen porn' blog from their database.

He also says that: "We are still feeling our way here, and adding community moderation is one possibility."

This will be important, as checking for an offensive flag probably isn't enough. Photos that are inoffensive in the Flickr context might be otherwise inappropriate in a Technorati tag profile. And there is still the wider question of whether Technorati wants to be a neutral aggregator of tagged items or an editorial service.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how Technorati's tag aggregation develops... but for now, not only does Technorati deserve kudos for getting such an interesting product out there, they get a second round of applause for dealing with some of its unintended consequences so quickly.

tag:sleep

shhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Originally uploaded by Pink Sushi

I am very keen on Technorati's much discussed introduction of tag search, especially the sleep tag, which not only calls in a beautiful set of pictures from Flickr but also manages to highlight the wonderful new blog dedicated to the science of sleep, Circadiana (at least in the del.icio.us links, anyway).

As anyone who has ever lived with me will know, I have a great interest in sleep, and the first post on Circadiana is a manifesto for the stuff:

As Robert Anston Heinlein said:

Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered
a capital crime. For a first offense, that is.

One thing I noticed upon arriving to the States is that nobody here seems to have any notion of "sleep manners"...

First, individual rights are assumed to mean that you can do whatever you want as long as that does not hurt another person in some way. Waking someone up is harassment - of course it hurts someone. Second, there is no such thing as inappropriate time. If you can, you sleep whenever you can. There is no appropriate or inappropriate time... Third, what is this about sleeping being a sign of laziness... If you are asleep, this means you need it. If you are rested enough you cannot physically remain asleep or go back to sleep again. You are wide awake. Thus, when you see someone asleep, it is because that person needs sleep right there and then...

Sleeping, whether with someone or alone, is a basic human need, thus a basic human right.

Given that the author expects an audience of night owls and insomniacs, perhaps he could provide a nice public service by including a prominent link to the Flickr sleep slideshow, which I discovered via Imran and find much more effective than counting sheep.

See also:

Are you tired? (via Slate)

The people on 43 Things who want to get more sleep

Technorati Tags: sleep, tags, flickr, del.icio.us, ethics (brought to you by Oddiophile's Technorati Tags Bookmarklet)

Posted at 10:48 AM in Sleep, Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

07 January 2005

Wikipedia as a media literacy challenge

Proposal for 'History Flow' sparkline graphics for Wikipedia 
  Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Matt Jones has sketched a fantastic visualisation that develops Clay Shirky's page history suggestion for Wikipedia ("I wrote a little script that fetches both a Wikipedia page and grabs 4 relevant facts from that page's history: number of edits, number of editors, and the first edited and most recently edited dates, and put that info just below the page title, like so.")

I've been following the Wikipedia vs Encyclopaedia slap down on Many-to-Many with great interest but I'm pleased to see the discussion move on from a rather academic debate about authority and edge towards a consideration of the real issue here: media literacy, i.e. the ability of regular folks, including but not limited to students, to "access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts."

Making meta data like Clay's "trust profile" immediately visible and understandable to readers of Wikipedia - through good information design - should make the information on Wikipedia easier to evaluate and use appropriately.

Posted at 11:51 AM in Media Literacy, Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

12 May 2004

Very different end games

Why study Rome when you can build it?: Henry Jenkins on 'serious games' in education. See also the Water Cooler Games wrap up of the Education Arcade at E3.

The tug of newfangled slot machines: Slot machine manufacturers design games primarily for women over 55 with lots of time and disposable income, and draw them in with a cynical mix of multiple small payouts, the near miss, 'smart sounds', celebrity-led nostalgia and the pleasures of not thinking. "Unlike table games, which are played in groups, slots are played in isolation, and therefore they lack the same safeguards social situations provide."

Posted at 04:05 PM in Children and teens, Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

15 April 2004

'Are you my friend - yes or no?'

There are some contexts in which this awkward-for-some question makes sense:

"Cooperative" identification programs... are systems that allow a shooter to, in effect, ask his target whether he is a friend or not and enable the target to reply instantly.

That's a friend request I wouldn't dally over.

Posted at 12:20 PM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

06 April 2004

They're breeding

I am now a pupa and can't move for ten hours. Stewart fornicated with Mary Beth (as I understand it) to produce the egg that released me. Well, he might have had other things on his mind but I'm grateful for the hatching nonetheless.

So, Stewart is my father.

Well, he's not really but you knew that already, didn't you? He's no more my dad than some of my Friendsters are my friends. But you knew that too and it really doesn't matter because it's all stuff and nonsense - in a good way.

I am hoping to fornicate some time soon. Let me know if you'd like one of my eggs.

Posted at 04:39 PM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Ridiculously easy group blog forming

Tom Coates has had a Kinja epiphany: "that's the playlist-making, that's the mix-tape, that's the place where self-defining groups can make their home."

I edited out a lot of what's in my RSS reader for my Kinja, trying to shape a good read rather than a full digest of 'what I currently want to know'. Tom suggests that Kinja allow its users to create multiple digests; representing their existing groups or interest areas more closely.

Re-presentation of weblog posts (or their titles at least) around topics is happening more and more: on del.icio.us at the web level, at k-collector, and via Funchain's 'friend blogging' (collaborative journals written by friends are connected through their similar interests).

Kinja could do this really, really well. One of the things that I most like about their design is the way some of the originating site's character is pulled through with the content. By allowing users to winnow their 'playlists' further, around an existing affiliation (perhaps even at the weblog-topic rather than weblog-proper level), they'd strengthen the personality of the digest.

Posted at 09:50 AM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

31 March 2004

Neta, not junk

Caterina has written a nice defence of what she calls 'Raw Personal Content':

Many people seem to worry about this. They think that standards are declining, that we as a culture are becoming increasingly trivial, that the internet is becoming what Rem Koolhas, in reference to American strip malls, calls Junkspace. They watch daytime talk shows with horror. They read online diaries with alarm. But I've always seen this as a good thing, not a bad thing. As I've argued before, all this RPC is Not Meant For You.

and points to a redemptive article in the an article in the Japan Media Review about the way this RPG is shared:

Within the broader ecology of personal record-keeping, archiving and communication technologies, camera phones occupy a unique niche. In comparison to the traditional camera, which gets trotted out for special excursions and events -- noteworthy moments bracketed off from the mundane -- camera phones capture the more fleeting and unexpected moments of surprise, beauty and adoration in the everyday. They also invite sharing that is more immediate, ad hoc and ongoing, such as a dad e-mailing a baby photo to a mom or a teenager showing a picture of her current crush to a friend in a fast food restaurant. Most photos are not e-mailed to others, much less moblogged to the Net, but are shared in more lightweight and opportunistic ways...

In Japanese, "material" for news and stories is called "neta." The term has strong journalistic associations, but also gets used to describe material that can become the topic of conversation among friends or family: a new store seen on the way to work; a cousin who just dropped out of high school; a funny story heard on the radio. Camera phones provide a new tool for making these everyday neta not just verbally but also visually shareable.

We don't call status messages ('I'm tired, 'I'm on the bus') or happy snaps from friends 'junk'. Junk mail is sent indiscriminately in large quantities, without the permission of the recipients. RPG is the direct opposite of junk.

Caterina's post reminded me of two talks at ETech 2004 that I particularly enjoyed: Mimi Ito's contribution to the Untethering the social network panel, and John Poisson from Sony's How I learned to stop worrying and love the cameraphone. The presentations aren't available on the conference site, and I can't find detailed notes for them online, so I've finally put my own notes up.

John Poisson: How I learned to stop worrying and love the cameraphone

Cameraphones today: packet charges high and networks slow but these things go away. It's about the applications. In Japan most ketai contain 1 or more cameras. The newest models are 1 to 2 megapixel; network access at up to 2.4mb/s; flatrate data plans are emerging.

The carriers' pitch is 'take a picture of something cute and send it to a friend'; one to one, MMS. The tool providers' perspective is one to everyone, via moblogging and photo albums. There's a whole world in between those 2 positions. Most people are not interested in sharing intimate storties about their life with everyone.

So it's about one to some; a close circle, full-time intimate community. Constant, rich, asynchronous communication. It's about the pictures you have in a shoebox at home.

Not moblogging (even through the process and technology are the same). Nor is it about creating art in the main (but it can be).

About Sony's research
They gave cameraphones and publishing and browsing tools to:

An internal peer group

Japanese schoolgirls (they can be great predictors of trends but in some ways are completely different)

Family and friend groups

The goal was to allow them to instantly publish from mobile devices. Plus automatic and explicit metadata capture; commenting; content filtering and access control; and access from any platform.

What they saw
Remote participation and the almost-live effect. Concept of telepresence - participate in an event they can't attend, especially through commenting.

People taking pics more frequently. Always have it with you; people don't leave home without it or leave home with it and turn it off. Sometimes 'I haven't taken a picture in a while' so snap.

People entering and exiting the event (participating before they arrive and after they leave.

Mind-link - the ongoing stream of pictures and comments, means a higher bandwidth conversation and more context. Gives out pictures and locations, which means those accessing the channel can understand a lot of what's going in. (Which is why it's scary when it's open to the whole world.)

People mostly used it to document their lives - where I was, what I did, who I did it with, what I ate. People really like to document what they eat. They don't document what they're drinking or wearing, just food.

They're snapshots that are only meaningful for people who were there or know the people who were there. They're digital pictures but disposable; not meant to last a lifetime, not high-fidelity records. Similiar to polaroids; not permananet, they fade.

There were some cases of people using photos to address questions to a couple of people: 'Do you like my hair?', 'Which one should I buy?'. Looking for a response.

Also some people posted pictures of pills, saying 'I'm sick'. They didn't have to call in to work, or let their friends know they couldn't join them. Understood, implicit. And doesn't need a reply.

Also used to express - in a good mood so post a picture to show that, or to cheer up friends. 'Giant emoticons' but lots more expressive.

Pictures to teach? Not explicitly. Cases where documenting how they did something so other people could repeat it. It did happen once for directions.

A good way for people who aren't comfortable in text- or blog- mode to communicate. But it's communication between people who know each other - only close friends understand what it means.

What they didn't see
Personal journalism: people weren't reporting generally significant events. Instead, an ongoing chronicle of their lives.

Narrative storytelling (posting a sequence of pictures or videos to make stories). They were always documentaries, not movies. If there was a sequence, it was constructed in time and based on what's actually happening; never premeditated. People didn't seem motivated to do that spontaneously so it's not a driver.

Upshots, buttshots, pornography (n.b. not anonymous plus a study)

Other results
Sspecific to Japanese choolgirls: obsessed with commenting (thread of 30 or 40 comments per pic. Hesitate to take another pic and disturb conversation. In Japan, they walk down the street typing). Very careful not to intrude in their friends' spaces (don't see each others bedrooms but if put in place where people can get it, it's very non-intrusive). Found new opportunities for self-expression (can take pics of my room and share with you). Can be closer with my friends with this than I can in real life. Feel like you can be more free even though you know the people.

Now trying to make more of the commenting feature.

Privacy is paramount.

Opportunities: reliving and sharing an experience, playing (start getting into narrative, collages), aggregating (4 of us at dinner took pics; perhaps recogonise faces and aggregate), organising (potentially also mining that data). Disposable media but personal memory database is a rich and interesting area.

Mimi Ito: Untethering the social network

Ethnographic detail of how kids in Japan using mobile phones in everyday lives. Using relatively simple toolset to do interesting things. Mobile email and picture messaging. Full-time intimate community being built through mobile phones. Kids have over 100 addresess in their address book but by far most commuication happens in intimate group. Pervasive form of social contact. Different scale - focuses on personal intimate communication.

Presence in variety of physical locations. Managed to enlist intimate company in what would have otherwise been solitary movement through anonymous space. Text messaging can accommodate communication where voice is not appropriate. Can accommodate pauses. It inhabits other physical spaces. Chat-like sequences. Presence and state messages, e.g. 'I'm tired'. Not messages that require a reply. It's about entering virtual peripheral vision. Knock before entering, check availability before call.

Kids using picture messaging to construct intimate, small-scale conversaions among small groups of friends. information that's newsworthy among intimate group. A moment of everyday life, 'we miss you', about being in touch. Common genre is the new haircut shot. Everyday moment with significance. Sent to closest girlfriend or boyfriend. Low profile, small scale model of communication and networking.

Very different from connection in PC space. Not immersive presence. Social networking and information access pervading mundane moments in urban space. Use very simple technologies to construct new social technologies. Very user driven: emerges from users' rich social practices with simple tools; also shows restrictions of current toolset.

Posted at 08:32 AM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

28 March 2004

There's Island of Women

According to Terra Nova, There will launch a Paradise Island of iVillage women on 30 March. Betsy Book wonders:

iVillage is a text-based community of women whose bonding often takes place specifically around members' relationships to their RL bodies in the form of pregnancy, dieting, health, and beauty tips. While there may be the rare case of role-playing and gender-bending in the iVillage web community (ie. men posing as women), most participants' online identities are extensions of their RL (female) selves. Will this direct tie between offline/online identity carry over into a virtual world? Or will iVillage women use There to role play, whether that means creating an avatar that looks radically different from their RL body, or even choose a male avatar?

I worked on the UK localisation of Flirtboat for Freeserve's women's channel a few years ago, and suspect the findings of this project (pdf) can help us make some predictions about what will happen on There's Paradise Island.

In Flirtboat users select their agent from a number of characters and define its personality, emotional disposition and interests by answering an initial multiple-choice questionnaire and then further in-game questions posed by other characters. The agents are autonomous after creation by the user; the user may influence the agents by giving them advice, which the agents may or may not take into account.

Interestingly those with male avatars were less likely to answer the in-game questions, which were mostly about their RL personality, lifestyle or flirting behaviour. (Another gender-based finding was that those with women avatars were far more likely to be of the Jungian 'feeling' type.)

This suggests to me that the iVillage players in There will carry their RL-derived iVillage identities over into the game. If they can have multiple identities they will, and some of these will be used for gender play, but I believe they will invest most in an identity that is an aspirational representation of their RL self.

Another finding from the UK Flirtboat was that while women were still underrepresented in Flirtboat (with the exception of the 13-19 age group), this was far less pronounced than it is in dating sites or even chat, suggesting that the narrative structure of Flirtboat, and the 'autonomous agents', liberated women users to flirt.

(Incidentally, Flirtboat also had branded areas, e.g. a Lastminute.com sundeck, where the branding was casually integrated into the sun loungers.)

Posted at 01:16 PM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

23 March 2004

A starting point for relationships

Finally, a new - and somewhat corrective - perspective on social networks, from Ideas Bazaar (found via Anne Galloway), written in response to Clay Shirky's dismissal of the RELATIONSHIP vocabulary:

friendOf, acquaintanceOf, parentOf, siblingOf, childOf, grandchildOf, spouseOf, enemyOf, antagonistOf, ambivalentOf, lostContactWith, knowsOf, wouldLikeToKnow, knowsInPassing, knowsByReputation, closeFriendOf, hasMet, worksWith, colleagueOf, collaboratesWith, employerOf, employedBy, mentorOf, apprenticeTo, livesWith, neighborOf, grandparentOf, lifePartnerOf, engagedTo, ancestorOf, descendantOf

Sounds like kinship terminology to me...

Most of these social software devices like Friendster could do with a kinship terminology that helps people understand the real nature of the relationships which they are encouraged to build up. Most of these appear to be about creating a quantity of relations... More specifically, they appear to do little in the way of helping people qualify their relationships beyond simplistic, 2nd degree, 3rd degree etc.

Anthropologists understand that kinship operates at three levels: terminology, rules and practice, and the inter-relationship between the three of these. This means at the categorical, jural and practical level: how are people related, what terminology is used to describe their relatedness, what behaviour is 'meant' to obtain between them (joking / avoidance?), and what behaviour does obtain in practice. Shirky seems to confuse the existence of a terminology with static relationships and fixed behaviours obtaining between people in this relationship. Anthropologists understand that a dynamic interplay exists across these 3 levels.

So I think we can lighten up a bit. No, we can't sensitively describe human relationships in machine-readable language but nor do we need to. Profiles and relationship definitions in social networks are really just there to start conversations, and most of those conversations will take place outside of the social networking service - in IM, via email, or in real life with friends clustered around a screen. This has become obvious to me since a group of single girlfriends started using Friendster for dating purposes, and I've been drawn into the extra-Friendster conversations.

And the kind of fun that both Clay and his commenters have with their own relationship definitions - "kindOfInLovewith, thinkingOfSeveringTiesWith, thisCloseToScreamingAt" - shows that even the process of defining can be playful, too.

Posted at 04:27 PM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Making the internet safer

Instead of displaying what track you're listening to, or what meeting you're currently at/excuse you have for not doing real work, why not get iChat/AIM/MSM to display the URL someone is currently looking at?

Anti-anti-social software stuck on the back of social software...

Genius (but not entirely serious) thinking from Blatant Optimism. Hmmm, perhaps I should rest The Transparent Society for a bit...

Posted at 12:19 PM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

18 March 2004

Personal but not private

The results of Fernanda Viégas' blog survey are now available. Some headlines:

The great majority of bloggers identify themselves on their sites: 55% of respondents provide their real names on their blogs; another 20% provide some variant of the real name (first name only, first name and initial of surname, a pseudonym friends would know, etc.)

76% of bloggers do not limit access (i.e. readership) to their entries in any way

When blogging about people they know personally: 66% of respondents almost never asked permission to do so; whereas, only 9% said they never blogged about people they knew personally

83% of respondents characterized their entries as personal ramblings

There is no correlation between how often a blogger writes about highly personal things and how concerned they are about the persistence of their entries

I'd be really interested to know if/how these results vary according to the age of the respondent.

A very different survey is in underway on the LiveJournal blog_sociology group page:

What is it that makes some people so popular on Livejournal? ana & un_popular & being_homeless are a few examples of people who have more than 700 people on their "friend of" list. But why are they so popular? Is it because of their writing, or their pictures, or that they somehow became "famous"?

Apparently being a member of a clique ("it was this interesting little world where they made the rules... and somehow that made them famous on a small level...") and posting nude photos helps.

Posted at 09:40 PM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

04 March 2004

Social networks become collecting games

AJ Kim on Many-to-Many expands most usefully on the competitive aspect of social networks.

The drive to accumulate points and track accomplishments is so powerful that people will often 'make up' a game when one doesn't explicity exist. For example, social networks show you the number of friends you have, and the number of connections you've 'earned' by having those friends. This simple feedback mechanism encourages some people to think of a social network as a 'game' with the goal of 'collect the most friends with the greatest number of connections.' As with the Amazon top reviewers system, adding statistical lists of Top-Performers to a social network reinforces the sense that this is a game to be won, a 'skill to be mastered.'

Read it in full. (Plus AJ Kim's follow ups: Rules and rankings in social systems and Exploration and discovery in networked social spaces.)

A much lighter outlet for our need to compete is offered by Buzznet's My Pet Is Cuter Than Yours! (found via dog-poor Matt and dog-rich Caterina). Is this the unspoken dynamic at play in Dogster?

Posted at 12:08 PM in Collecting, Social software | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Bloggers as 'friendly knowledge animals'

When people work, they leave knowledge traces by doing things, writing things and saying things. People may either intentionally ('smell flags') or unintentionally ('foot prints') leave strong and clear (i.e. precise place) traces or weak and vague (i.e. place and is not completely clear like boundaries of territory) traces. People may intentionally or unintentionally leave as little traces as possible or try to remove their traces. Strong and clear traces inform other people about someone's knowledge territory, weak and vague traces leave other people in the dark about one's knowledge territory. In other words, people either hide their knowledge territory or show-off with their knowledge territory by the strength and clearness of the traces they leave.

Janine Swaak quoted by Lilia on Mathemagenic in a post that also links to an interesting soup of ideas about apprenticeship, craft and stolen knowledge (see also Matt's discussion of stolen knowledge).

Meanwhile, danah boyd has posted a wishlist for more efficient trace tracking tools in RSS. She wants to be able to choose to follow either a person, a topic or a post - rather than an entire blog - and allow friendly knowledge animals to deliver interesting morsels directly to her feed.

I do think that we need to routinely start going into more depth on posts - not just what they say, but who has linked to it, what's going on the comments... Matt is inadvertently hosting a le Parkour community on one of his posts, and I'm always terribly impressed by Sébastien Paquet's posts that surface the very interesting conversations going on in comments.

Posted at 11:24 AM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

16 February 2004

ETech: Social software for children

My talk focused on the findings of the BBC identity group’s qualitative research and usability testing with children and teens. I shared insights into Jessica and Jake's approaches to identity management, friendship and group membership, with the view to inform actual product development work in this area.

While the purpose of my talk was to stimulate interest in the question: How can we ensure children’s safety while letting them have expressive identities in social software?, I also gave some of my own opinions about the appropriateness - or not - of existing social software, and speculated about some positive future directions that wikis and weblogs could take (e.g. using RSS syndication to involve parents in the moderation of social spaces for children). I then very briefly presented my work-in-progress on a site for children who collect things (design-only so far) - WikiWorm. Thanks to Matt for his design work and Deborah for her delightfully wriggly worm logo.

My motivation is to ensure that children continue to have the right to be present in public; to enjoy the benefits of social software and the good social capital it can generate, and to have a public voice. Digital spaces are particularly important given the social context in the UK, where a child playing freely outside is less common and teens don’t feel welcome in public space.

My presentation (with additional notes) is now available for download - sorry for the delay. Many other ETech 2004 presentations are available on the O'Reilly conference site and session notes are on their wiki. There is also talk of a ConConUK, which I'll definitely make it to if it's on the 23rd.

I hope to share some of my emerging thoughts about this year's conference here, as soon as they've emerged ;-)

Posted at 11:57 AM in Children and teens, Identity, Social software | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

03 February 2004

LiveJournal unpicks 'friends'

One of our big goals for February is to split up the overloaded concept of "friends", turning it into separate categories relating to who you read on your friends page, who you trust to read your entries, who you know in real life, etc.

From LiveJournal's News Journal, via a conversation about Serial Adders on Sociology of Online Journals

Posted at 08:01 AM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

29 January 2004

Too much/not enough

Cory would like social software developers to support opt outs:

"I'm sorry, but Cory isn't on this service because he: found it socially awkward to reject strangers who wanted to be his friends. Your invitation will not be sent."

And Kottke is 'advertising' for a personal social coordinator:

Your primary responsibility will be managing my accounts with various online social networking sites including, but not limited to, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, Everyones Connected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark.

Meanwhile, Caterina retains her enthusiasm - especially for Dogster:

Now Dos Pesos has his own online identity too, and I've been enjoying getting to know caterina.net readers through their dogs.

I wish I had a dog.

Is it wrong to have a fakedogster? Probably. According to David Attenborough "telling the story of an animal identified as an individual but using shots of several is now impermissible" (for BBC documentary makers, at least...).

Posted at 07:40 PM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

27 January 2004

FOAF plus Amazon Associates

Just to surface something Imran commented over on Matt's Amazonster post:

What if you coupled a FOAF network with Amazon Associates, so that your purchases could be linked to the Associates accounts of your buddies? Every time you buy, someone from your network benefits fiscally from the transaction.

A bunch of us at Carbon Imagineering setup a very quick thumbnail of how this might work.

We've been tracking each Associate account for a while to see how people choose to 'reward' each other; should it be anonymous, explicit, rotating? How would your non-rewarded friends feel if one member of your network was perennially the fiscal beneficiary?

Nice work, Imran. While everyone else is wondering how YASNS is going to make a profit, you're busy working out how social networks can generate benefits for their members.

Every time I sign in to Amazon, I'm reminded that I could 'make £224.34' but I don't want to sell my past purchases, I want to BookCross them. How much could I have contributed to my mates if I'd been part of this scheme? And how much better I would have felt about my purchases, too... Imran's AA is a place I'd want to take my Friendster/Tribe/Orkut network to.

I want in! If you do too, let Imran know.

Posted at 07:12 AM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

26 January 2004

My social network ideal

In my utopia, all social network services would generate, import and export FOAF (as per TypePad but on request rather than automatically and invisibly).

Other, useful, services like Amazon or the BBC's audio player, could import and use FOAF to enhance their recommendations, etc. (Tom Steinberg and Dan Hill talk some more about this in their comments on Matt Jones' Amazonster post.)

Google would not create its own closed social network, Orkut, but would instead make FOAF one of its quick searches, so that FOAF:Fiona Romeo would return my FOAF file as the primary search result, with friend and location filtering options. (Content about Fiona Romeo would also be returned but would be differentiated.)

Perhaps Google could add value by introducing a sense of authentication to FOAF, by indicating reciprocal links between FOAF files. I know that this result for Fiona Romeo is the correct one because her friends link to it. Oh, and I know that Matt Jones is really a friend of Fiona Romeo, because he says so too. (Plink, a FOAF search tool, gets this bit right.)

Sites like Friendster and Tribe would acknowledge that the real attraction for most people is what Clay describes as the dollhouse pleasures of setting things up, and start thinking about how they can facilitate gracious exits.

My thoughts? If a member of your service has decided they want to leave, let them. And make it even simpler than creating or updating their account was. But don't leave them with nothing. If they built up a profile within your service, accumulating interests and friends, let them take that with them. The identity is theirs. The friendships are theirs. And they'll only cut and paste it anyway. So let them export their profile as FOAF, which they can then either host independently or take to the next service (e.g. Amazon, BookCrossing, UpMyStreet, or even YASNS).

And give them party favours, like stylish visualisations of their network (as was) and leaderboard-style badges that they can place on their site: I was the 1969th member of Friendster. When I left on 1 December 2003, I was connected to 280,105 people in my personal network, through 59 friends.

This badge would be a memento of their experience, a celebration of what the real value was for most members - and free marketing for the originating service as well. It would work like the quiz results that countless teens post to LiveJournal.

What's your ideal?

Posted at 09:25 AM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack

05 January 2004

Playing with status

StatusPlay is an experiment in adding sociability into the seemingly limited display characteristics of the status line in Apple's iChat instant messenger client. The StatusPlay suite of AppleScripts attempts to uncover how creating dynamic inputs into the status can affect relationships with other users of the chat client. So far there are four distinct scripts/systems including ChatPerson: displaying the name of the person you are chatting with, LiveSearch Status: displaying live search terms from the Internet, Public Status: including an online form where people can input any text as your status, and ClipBoard Status: displaying the contents of the clipboard as the status.

A new project from Jonah Brucker-Cohen, who is also responsible for BumpList.

If only I could play with iChat.

See also: iChatStatus

Posted at 04:36 PM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Light touch

There's something so compelling about the brief, anonymous contributions on group hug // confessions. Even more than the confessions, though, I enjoy the rules:

the following is an incomplete list of things that will probably not make it through our crack team of confession-readers:

* gratuitous vulgarity (more than is necessary to communicate your message)
* known urban myths
* all capitals
* obnoxious use of non-alpha characters (such as smiley faces)
* creative spacing and line-breaks
* obvious lies
* bragging
* confessions about this site
* confessions that are not about you
* responses to other confessions
* names
* phone numbers
* addresses
* email addresses
* web site addresses

the type of confession that will nearly always be included is the type where you simply place your cursor in the little box and type a note about a fault of your own, something you did or thought about and are not proud of.

Clear, minimalist, just enough.

See also: Audiobored and In Passing

Posted at 04:26 PM in Social software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

04 January 2004

<