When social search gets personal: ChatRoulette, Peerpong, Aardvark

A couple of items in the news this week got me thinking about the social search space. But not from the usual angle. We have all heard about ChatRoulette by now, and of the random acts of human exhibitionism that take place there. Well, apparently some of those random encounters were too good to let go of. And so some visitors have taken to the a new Missed Connections to find people they met on ChatRoulette.

Cue "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." Yeah, by U2. And maybe that should be "I still haven't found who I'm looking for."

This is a great example of unintended social outcomes, and how in openly-designed social systems, users will find ways of addressing what's not handled by the application. Since ChatRoulette is anonymous by design, we can already anticipate that one of its social facets will be identity. Anonymity and privacy get users in, but on some occasions they will want to find each other again. Anonymity is coupled to identity (who). Just as random is coupled to specific (what).

Missed connections may be where users have to go now to try to re-locate people they met on ChatRoulette. Or ChatRoulette could accommodate this need in the future. It would then in effect be providing more than just random encounters — and would be providing a kind of social search.

Another item in the news this week related to social search was PeerPong, which received funding. (Disclosure: I consulted to PeerPong early on.) Described now as Aardvark for twitter, Peerpong matches user questions to twitter users who may be able to answer them. As aardvark uses one's social network to distribute questions and solicit answers, Peerpong uses twitter. (As you probably know, aardvark was just acquired by Google.)

The social search issue here is obviously different from that happening around ChatRoulette's missed connections. But they have one thing in common worth mentioning. It is: what happens when social search gets personal?

Social search tends to suggest traditional search supplemented with search results qualifed by social relevance. Using, say, social algorithms and user input (ratings, votes, etc) to deliver complementary results. Social search as regular search plus long-tail social data mining.

But there's another kind of social search. This kind, of which aardvark, Peerpong, and missed connections are all examples, uses people to solve search problems. We usually call these question/answer services. And in this area, success can be more elusive. Where in algorithmic social search there is one user experience issue, in question/answer services there are two.

Both questioner and answerer must have a satisfactory experience for the service to work. In fact the service really hangs on the experience of the answerer. The questioner has an immediate and present need or interest — not so the answerer. His or her motives for participation have to be incentivized or contextualized by other means.

The possibility that social search gets personal can be a systemically reinforcing and, as a user experience, much more compelling (and human) means of solving "search" issues. (Question/Answer services are much more than "search".) But this potential for the social to get personal is also a barrier to use — put plainly, people can get freaked out.

ChatRoulette's social search problem will be reciprocity and mutuality — solved only if both parties agree to re-find each other. Presumably the experience these users had on webcam was enough to take care of trust issues (which is not to say it's free of risk). For aardvark and peerpong, the challenge is relational.

What commitments or obligations to ongoing social search will a user have to another user in the future? Users don't know each other, even if they may be connected through twitter, through shared topical interests, or by social/peer networks.

Context of use can address some of this. By contextualizing search experiences and answer contributions, services like these can reduce the freak factor, using social context then to de-personalize perceived obligations, expectations, and commitments. Context can help reduce user fears of expected future participation commitments. And context can be used to supply alternative incentives to use — game contexts, expertise ranking, and the like. In short, using social to absorb some of the personal.

One wouldn't have thought ChatRoulette would have anything to do with social search. But the random selection of users is guaranteed to produce its inverse as an effect and byproduct. When people connect, algorithms become unnecessary.

Cue U2.

PeerPong Raises $2.8M for an Aardvark for Twitter
Calling All Romantics: Chatroulette Now Has Its Own Missed Connections
ChatRoulette, hall of mirrors
ChatRoulette, I'm watching you (watching me)
Google's Aardvark acquisition: Questions for Buzz?

50M per day, or pushing the envelope at 600 tweets per second

Twitter is now reporting that 50 million tweets bleep through the grid every single day. It's a staggering number, 600 per second, of which "approximately 83 tweets per second contain product or brand references (20%)" according to coverage in Readwriteweb. Alongside metrics reported for Facebook (60 million status updates per day) and Youtube (1 billion videos per day) I'm inclined to run for cover in anticipation of some great resounding social sonic boom.

No need to do that however as the metricians have yet to find proof that there is a social equivalent of the sound barrier out there to warn us of. Be that as it may, social media giants Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and Google Buzz likely enjoy the race for traffic growth more than they know what they would do if we ever gave them a finish line. Boom! More likely the sound of a starting gun in our case than some barrier up in the sky the other side of which lie demons in waiting. The envelope these guys are pushing is no sound barrier but contains instead the big paycheck (and for the true type-A venture guy, the big payback).

Fifty million tweets a day would knock you on your ass if you were at the receiving end of that firehose. But you are! And so am I. But I, like you, am as likely tweeting myself or if not possibly sitting here like a monkey with my fingers in my ears, hands over my eyes, and then over my mouth. In the time that I've been writing this, and since my last tweet exactly 20 minutes ago, 720,000 tweets have blown by me and I didn't catch a single one of them.

I'm like the guy in the Memorex ad seated in some high-veneered-class black leather and chrome Corbu lounger dressed in Ray Bans and with my tie laid out behind me like a wind sock perched at the back end of some Nasa Ames wind tunnel test of the tweet resistance properties of social media power users.

And the tag-line, or the alt-tag, or the tag cloud reads: "Is it live or is it Realtime?"

If I can be exposed to 50 million tweets per day and still retain my balance at the end of it, if I can withstand the shock and awe of that many messages and I'm not bleeding from the ears eyes and nose, and if I'm not wearing some giant camo protective suit like the guy in Hurt Locker who looks like a cross between a transformer and the michelin man impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator, then there's something behind those numbers worth peeling back.

Fact is there's probably a lot there worth digging into. Here are some hints as to what we might find, if we had the data and the gear to mine it with. This from Socialtimes:

• A large number of inactive twitter accounts, with around 25% users having no followers and 40% users having never sent a single Tweet.
• Around 80% users sending fewer than ten tweets.
• Only 17% of the registered users having sent a tweet since Dec, 2009.
• The number of active users becoming even more engaged.

"The conclusion of RJ Metrics study was that although Twitter grew tremendously in 2009, a bulk of this growth could be attributed to power users."

Yeah so how do you like them numbers? Obviously, twitter usage stats correlate to what is perhaps a shrinking percentage of active users (somebody dig up the historical data on how many had 0 tweets and 0 followers 2 yrs ago) vis-a-vis a rapidly-rising flow of tweetage from a core set of power tweeters.

(And I'm now seeing the mental image of not a classroom but a markedly larger higher-ed environment kind of hall or auditorium far in the high back left of which is a cluster of excited-looking students yet again engaged in frantic hand-waving and displaying loss of upper-body movement described perhaps by means of words like "paroxysms" and "peripatetic." And if I press my fingertips to my temples I'm getting a strong sense that they want my attention.)

Fact is, twitter is an attention machine. And it's not always a smoothly-functioning affair. It works great if you expect little to come back. It's perfect if you just get a kick out of turning it on. Awesome if you enjoy hearing the buzz. And rocks if you like standing around with a bunch of other folks just admiring the damn thing, like a beast of engineering well-oiled and purring and all coiled up and ready to pounce like some high performance V 8 on the track at Altamont.

Thing is that we don't know what kind of machine it really is. Or was, is, and is becoming. We don't exactly know who uses it, why, and for what purpose. If twitter is an engine for buzz in some circles, a motor of growth for others, a speed demon for fast-moving news cycles, a truck loaded up with discounts and offers, or just a limo with its engine on idle parked where the valet should be while you make your important appearance as it sits, a symbol of your status and overall position — numbers like 50 million don't tell us what engines those 50 million messages are spinning.

I've noticed several types of people who use and benefit from twitter. Obviously a small number of the overall population, given twitter's somewhat remedial drop-out rate. I group them into four main types, as Self-oriented, Other-oriented, Relationally-oriented, and media users. This fourth type is new, as it's not really a personality type but works as a media user type.

• Self-oriented types can use twitter to their benefit as a soapbox. Good for punditry, for talking at more than with. Celebrities fit in here also, along with the pundits who would like to be celebrities but are not.
• Other-oriented types, whose communication skills are a bit less self-centered and monological and who are instead more conversational. These types respond and talk to and sometimes with other people. They don't have to talk about what interests them because they often start with what somebody else says.
• Relational types are more difficult to find on twitter, because twitter makes relational activity hard to engage in. There's multiple @replying and @naming, but no multiple DM-ing. Relational stuff, like gossip, back-channeling, mediating and triangulating good social grist rests on communication that includes and excludes members of a self-sustaining group.
• Media-related types are those who use twitter just for broadcast. As a way to push out content like news, links, headlines. Or some micro-social version of the big media forms of these. Not as social, not as conversational, and, really, not as egotistical. Twitter as smart extension and tool or channel. (Yeah marketing types don't go kill twitter now y'hear?)

At 50 million tweets a day, twitter really is humming along. But I would really like to know who's using it and how that's going. It has helped me see the value in twitter, and also preserve my own cranial structural integrity, to sort out differences in what is posted there and in how people use it. For branding themselves, passing around bits of interest, journaling out loud, climbing social ladders, socializing hysterically like a first-timer half hung out of the sunroof of a towncar in Vegas...but with a megaphone, an octave pedal, and some doppler-canceling device whose chief function is to make sure it passes at a steady and un-diminishing pitch and volume.

I'm digging deeper into this, because twitter and its ilk are, really and truly, and for better or reflux-inducing worse, the Great Capitalist System's new mode of production. Both the distribution channel and media preference of choice for millions of new consumers. And even if at 50 million-G-force-inducing-tweets-a-day-but-nobody's-paying-attention this machine is imperfect and recall prone, it is how we many of us communicate and with that how much of our culture surfaces and makes its waves. Relational, communicative, un-coerced and largely free of the police, twitter is just one in a family of now gangly and sometimes awkward adolescent social tools historically inevitably destined to grow up make the social contributions that are their civic duty.

I'd say stick around, watch, learn, and think a bit. But if you're here you probably already made that choice. It's early days, like when television comedies were radio acts with a camera. The talkies are here. Say something interesting. Keep it real. And never be afaid to draw back the curtain ask: So what does this mean?

Related
Slideshow: Finding Signal In the Real-Time Noise by Louis Gray
Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets Per Day; Still Dwarfed by Facebook & YouTube
Twitter Users Sending 50 Million Tweets Each Day

ChatRoulette, I'm watching you (watching me)

Thus at bottom the message already no longer exists; it is the medium that imposes itself in its pure circulation ... the universe of communication ... leaves far behind it those relative analyses of the universe of the commodity. All functions abolished in a single dimension, that of communication. That's the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information. That's obscenity. The hot, sexual obscenity of former times is succeeded by the cold and communicational, contactual and motivational obscenity of today..." — Jean Baudrillard, Ecstasy of Communication

We "are now in a new form of schizophrenia ... The schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world's obscenity ... He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence..." — Jean Baudrillard, Ecstasy of Communication

"Now I think that it would be better to reveal myself" Mr. Ternovskiy, builder of Chatroulette, referring to a less graphic kind of transparency, in Chatroulette's Creator, 17, Introduces Himself, The New York Times


As is generally the case with a new application on the Internet, and with social applications in particular, users are queuing in large numbers for a peek into the random universe of ChatRoulette. The site is a rabbit hole for voyeurs and exhibitionists alike, mutually and symbiotically united in a simulcast trip through the looking glass in the age of social media.

Viewer discretion is advised, and if you are even mildly sensitive to social allergens, you may wish to keep the lens cap on and your eyes behind a good pair of wrap-arounds, for there is indeed a lot of flashing going on in the aptly named "surreal" world of ChatRoulette (@nickbilton).

What explains the proliferation of nudity and exposure in ChatRoulette (and video chat systems like it)? Is there, as Nick Bilton asks in his review of the service, "a nascent desire for anonymity online."

This doesn't add up for me. There is desire, yes, but not for anonymity.

Nick writes, in The Surreal World of Chatroulette: "our lives used to be private by default, yet with the advent of each new social network, privacy has become increasingly difficult to preserve." But were our lives private by default? Have we not, through practices social and cultural, always sought out and crafted arts by means of which to expose and express ourselves on stage, in front of audiences of all kinds?

The point that social networking threatens to undermine privacy is a point taken, but not as an explanation of the social practices that so easily and readily spring sites like ChatRoulette to life. It is much more likely that there is in ChatRoulette's ability to send users "parachuting into someone else's life" a kind of mediated proximity, realtime in that it's live, co-present in that it telescopes a kind of social watching, intimate in its on-screen coupling, and spectacular in how it attracts attention.

Take desire — a force most decidedly at work in ChatRoulette. Desire desires the desire of the other, as French philosopher Lacan put it. Desire would not desire anonymity — but the desiring person may desire to be seen anonymously. And to anonymously share this desire with another anonymous person. Desire is, when mediated in online adult webcam chats, and between consenting users of ChatRoulette, amplified according to its own internal social inclinations. Desire is for the other's desire: it is reciprocating. This is precisely what Chatroulette does: it shows you the Other.

The modality of the medium in this case is visual. And because it involves seeing people, and seeing them live, it will be about watching. This is the social modality by which users will relate, and the activity in this kind of sociality will necessarily involve the kinds of action coordination, synchonrization, mirroring, and other mutually-interesting aspects of watching one another remotely.

Watching, and being watched. Those are the perceptual senses involved, and thus the basis of communication. So if desire is at play, it is at play in getting attention. At play in self disclosure. At play in the thrill and surprise of synchronizing with another user. But by means of seeing and being seen (mutual recognition is being seen), of watching and being watched (anonymity is watched).

This coupling is an example of one very simple answer to asynchronous communication otherwise so common online. We push media for what they bracket out of social experience, and press at the margins to discover where the medium produces its most uncanny, unsettling, and weird effects. Webchats are live, are a kind of realtime streamtime that occurs in time (feedtime?). In time, not asynchronously and out of time, not in separate streams of user messaging flowing alongside one another's times. A live and streaming realtime. Which means co-presence.

Presence online can be established by artifact and extension, which is normally the case when we are present but not really (available but by notification only, and presented by means of re-presentation of text, messages, etc.). This kind of presence, which we have called ambient presence, is sensed but not seen, makes it into one's awareness but is not verified, and may be social without placing immediate demands on participation. One can be present and fake it this way too. One can be present by proxy. But there's no faking it on webcam, no proxy presence when there's immediacy and an intimate proximity.

Presence by cam is not mediated by text or other artifact. It's truly present. And here the co-presence of seeing and being seen, watching and being watched, and the uncanny special effect of closed-circuit mirroring in mediated interactions with which we also see ourselves seeing ourselves being seen, and can watch ourselves watching while being watched, couples us to others, anonymously or not.

This coupling resolves an ontological crack in the conventional online experience of asynchronous participation: the separation and disconnection of online connectedness. With the exception of webcam and VOIP applications, online social media are one-sided. They present us with a one-sided and unilateral view of interaction and communication.

Not on twitter, on Facebook, or any other social platform do we see what the other sees, view what the audience views, read what another is reading. Webcam chat hookups like ChatRoulette unify the experience in a single and shared (although mediated) reality. (Imagine that we might see another person's twitter view in a split pane. How would that change our sense of the social?)

I wrote last week about the possibility of coupling realtime activity streams, as in twitter, Facebook status updates, and the like. I speculated that coupled posts would permit communication to become action, as users would then be able to respond directly to posts across systems. And that action streams might also permit users to use messages to act — such as send or reply to invitations, purchase tickets, and so on.

Chatroulette is an example of coupled realtime streams. But being live feeds, and being webcam feeds, mutually-visible and coupled activities are up to the user's imagination. No meta is required for the transmission of live activity on camera.

Live feeds may be contrasted further still with the temporality of realtime message streams. I've argued that realtime activity streams are still experienced by users in their own time. That streamtime is not a shared experience of time. In webcam chat time is shared, users are in one another's time, creating a stretch of shared time together. This solves a problem that realtime messaging applications suffer from: the ordering of messages delivered in realtime.

Realtime messages are delivered in chronological order. But this order bears no relation to message content or context. It is simply the order in which they arrive. Consequently, the order created by design, and by means of which messages are posted and displayed, adds no value and supplies no narrative or conversational threading to the content itself (or for that matter to its authors). The realtime temporality of message delivery is extrinsic to its meaning.

Which is in part why the medium creates so much noise and redundancy. For in any social medium, attention is the resource with which the engine keeps running.

Attention is focused in webcam experiences fundamentally differently than it is in experiences that use the screen for display and re-presentation. (See yesterday's post.) The screen modality of webcam chat uses "windows" through which we see the other user(s). Obviously, then, our attention is on what we see (including ourselves seen seeing). And because social media are about giving and getting attention, we hold the attention of the other by visual spectacle. In visual media, attention goes to that which is the most compelling, riveting, ridiculous, funny, or obscene. In short the "sociality of the spectacle."

Which brings us, finally, to devolution and the corruption of social media experiences. Communication and attention being the scarce resource in a medium that produces surplus and excess, a seemingly unavoidable systemic process of negentropy often accompanies the rise of noise and redundancy that occurs with system growth. Negentropy is the phenomenon of increasing order, and it appears in uncoordinated social systems as self-reinforcing dynamics emerge around common practices. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, order will generally emerge around the lowest common denominator: the form, content, performance or expression most likely to communicate (get attention).

In Chatroulette, this is already the obscene. Obscenity, like the raunchy and ridiculous, make for compelling viewing and will thus always attract attention. Attention is sought after by the individual, and secured by the sustained engagement of one other viewer (or roomful of viewers, but one view). The spectacle is singularly interesting.

But in realtime streaming services like twitter, attention is sought amidst a massive audience in a constant flow of messages. Thus repetition is the lowest common denominator in twitter: the trending topic or bit of news whose headline and social significance are gaining the attention of the audience at large. A reference to common knowledge and news, including gossip, rumor, and hearsay, secures attention. Not the spectacle of the singularly fascinating sight, but the spectacle of the massively popular hit or trend.

The sociality of twitter thus involves the attention-grabbing awareness of an audience becoming community or populace. Focusing the awareness of all on one unifying theme. The sociality of ChatRoulette involves the attention-getting focus of one, creating the intimacy of a couple for a stretch of time outside the view of the rest.

And so it is, in my view, that the answer to Nick's question is not that in an age of public social networking we desire its opposite, anonymity. But that in any mediated social experience a number of intrinsic transformations of experience that involve our senses, our interest in others, communication and its modes, and the construction of unique mediated realities, together fashion the constraints and opportunities for paying attention in new ways. Hulu would do well to consider a co-viewing option (perhaps initially pre-screened and using community flagging norms) instead of a messaging platform. After all, ChatRoulette shows us that if it's not anonymity we desire, we do desire new experiences with others.

ChatRoulette, hall of mirrors

I told myself that I would refrain from posting today, having perhaps posted too much last week. But sometimes a post simply gets stuck, and like a ditty on spin cycle, begins writing itself. There's naught then to do but wring the thing out.

Alongside buzz on Buzz last week there was also the much less polished but in ways more magnetic attraction of tiny video phenom ChatRoulette. There's little to say about the service itself, for it's really just a couple webcam windows on a page. But it occurred to me this morning that in some ways ChatRoulette is a good illustration of a social interface principle I've been repeating for a couple years.

I like to say that the social interface has three modes: Mirror, Surface, and Window.

The Mirror mode is reflective, and is what is involved in our self-reflection and self-image as constructed or produced online. You can go back to Freud for more on mirroring, or leaf back to the Greeks and the fable of Narcissus. I need say little more, I suspect, on the fact that we get mirroring from our presence and participation online.

The Surface mode corresponds to the surfaces the medium is capable of rendering. All visual media, online included, render content on their surfaces. Films are projected, television is broadcast, print is printed. The interface can handle whatever kind of visual presentation its technologies and designers can muster: applications, images, full-screen video, animations, games, etc. And computer screens are the most flexible of any of our contemporary screens. One reason that this medium presents such an industrial threat to old media.

The Window mode provides for the possibility of seeing others through the screen -- either quite literally (meaning, visually!) as in webcams, or by means of text chat. I consider the window mode to be at work in text chat because the user's focus of attention is another person. The modality of the UI isn't constrained to what's on the screen, but includes the user's interior focus of attention. In either case — seeing another person or thinking about another person — this communicative functionality is enabled by the medium.

These three modes come together brilliantly in ChatRoulette. In fact the simplicity of ChatRoulette makes a good case for the degree to which social interaction design is "off the page" and involves construction and production of socialities.

ChatRoulette is a surface on which both mirror and window are combined. This isn't in itself unique. What is unique is that your audience is selected at random — hence the roulette. The author's origin being Russian, roulette here refers to the Russian version, and not the Vegas version, although there's a "What happens in ChatRoulette stays in ChatRoulette" aspect at work in its appeal.

To further illustrate the point that social interaction design addresses the particular production of sociality, the random selection of audiences, which pairs you up with somebody on a cam, is a button that enacts a socio-logical operation.

This operation creates a sociality of anonymity. Anonymity permits the play of seeing oneself, seeing oneself being seen (face or some other part), performance, intimacy, proximity, and other social effects of a surface that brings these together. And anonymity escapes social normativity of being one among a known audience of peers.

Consider the normative constriction that would immediately take effect if it were hooked up to your twitter followers or social networking friends. There would be much less nudity and self-pleasuring on ChatRoulette. In fact this suggests to me that privacy is not the best concept for understanding social outcomes in social media. For privacy in ChatRoulette is not just a personal or individual right protected by the medium, but is a constraint that enables very public exposure: to wit the fact that some users feel the need to get into and expose their privates.

The intimacy of anonymity on full display on ChatRoulette also demonstrates the normative function at work in social media. Being seen, and knowing by whom, is key to engagement of a normative constraint. Norms of use in ChatRoulette include transgressions of common codes of civility. By means of the absence of a collective or unifying experience (audience of more than two).

A similar kind of behavioral effect occurs when twitter streams are shown on stage during presentations — and differently when the stream is visible to the speaker. The twitter stream that in normal twitter usage is one's own personal and specifically individual view is now a common view — by virtue of the stream being one stream seen by all. And if it is behind the speaker, it is a public backchannel, and tweets will often reflect the audience's awareness that their public commentary is literally behind the back of the speaker. This disrupts the normal speaker-audience relationship and, for better or worse, permits new ways of speaking.

Some have remarked on ChatRoulette's utter simplicity, and asked why it took the internet so long to produce such a thing. ChatRoulette is not new, but its popularity outside the adult web idiom is. And it shows that some of what the medium does and does well, that which compels by means of voyeurism, curiosity, the arbitrary, creating experiences both self-conscious and in ways liberating too, derives from some very simple combinations made possible by the medium's unique use of mirrors, windows, and surfaces.

Related:
Social media: the attention economy explained

User Competencies of the Social Media User

ChatRoulette, from my perspective by danah boyd

Some Interesting Facts About Chatroulette by Fred Wilson

The state of realtime culture, and the future inter-subjective web

It has been a busy week for realtime social media enthusiasts. Google's launch of Buzz has given us something to try out and to talk about, and this has been the biggest test of a new online messaging platform in quite a while. After digging into details for the past few days, I feel it worthwhile to drift up momentarily for a high-altitude flyover.

The way I see it, that is in the online world according to Chan, social media are currently undergoing a radical if not inevitable transformation. We have come off the page, out of the network, and with that struck forth from territorial identity for nomadic travels and connections. We identify less now by where we are from and more by who we connect to. We maintain this identity less by identity through place and more by identity through sociality.

I'm speaking not just metaphorically, but directly to this realtime culture in which we now spend so much of our time, and to which we commit so much of our attention.

The siloed world of mass media, with its disconnected channels, its fixed real estates, and branded identities, is receding from relevance and by virtue of acceding ground to global nomadism, losing its claim to authority. A new mode of production is in place -- one based not on manufactured goods, not on information, but on communication. And social media are its mode of production.

Social media may now be approaching the point of coming off the page entirely, reaching a condensation point (system threshold) at which stage communication may connect to and permit interaction by means of mediated talk anywhere through and on any screen or device.

Our relation to activity in the online social world is shifting from space to time. Attention should always have been measured in terms of time. We do not occupy space in the online world -- we relate, in time and for stretches of time, to content and people.

Time is now multiply threaded, it is more often discontinuous than continuous, knitted and connected together out of intersections and connections that weave a social fabric more closely resembling the smooth and non-hierarchical architecture of felt, than the old, striated and linear designs of pre-patterned weave.

Time discontinuous is constituted on interruptions and distractions, our own individual focus of attention being the only synthesizing continuity possible. Separate times and timelines for each of us, in a world that is incapable of mediating truly shared time. A social world of adjacency and contiguity but lacking the higher and moving power of togetherness. We are next to, but not with, each other. And are our increasingly our own movers.

As we use media to stretch our relationships with people and interests across time and space, a bifurcation emerges between our own inner experience of now -- attention, focused -- and the online world's capture and persistence of now-for-anytime. We are here now, online, but leave behind a wake of meaning that once digitized is durable without decay. The temporality of online is of connectedness, not continuity, for findability and visibility are the constraints on the "value" of the flotsam and jetsam that drifts in the flow of a realtime streaming world.

The activity streams in which we now live flows unceasingly, a river of news and information, rippling and eddying when currents are sustained for their currency. Trendlines on the surface of flow. The old world of territory, with its stocks of knowledge, its piles of treasure, was a world of allotment. The new world of flow, with its moving trends, its exchange dynamics, is a world of apportionment. The old media capital value of stocks and piles now washing downstream in a flow that values currency.

Currency flows, values dynamically representing present and changing interest and value, an attention economy made productive by means -- you guessed it -- of communication, threaten to displace old media capital investments. Social capital, valued not for its number, its pile size, but for its currency when put in play, and deeply contingent not on audience size but on its distribution by audience engagement and participation, is the currency of currency -- the realtime flow.

A flow that we view not standing on its shores, but while drifting within it. For our perspective and lens on the flow is ours and ours alone -- threaded as it were on our own, unique, and personal line of time. We live in our own streamtimes, even as we seek to connect.

This is a world not of information value, but of communication value. An open state of talk in which every statement and reference supplies connectedness to the timeless world of online. A world not of information but of meaning, not of static content but dynamic and relational action. Not of know-ledge but of know-who and know-how. Social, not archival.

We are perched now at the threshold of another shift of paradigm. A world of interconnected streams, of intersections in flow and of dramatic escalations in amplitudes, of constructively-interfering ripples and waves, as well as chaos, turbulence, and noise. Meaning in the social cannot thrive on communication alone. It is only with social action and activity, that is, by means of relational connectedness, that it is cemented and validated socially.

This paradigm, of action streams perhaps, requires coupling, reciprocity, mutuality, for the proper binding that glues social connections. Talk not just spoken but heard and listened to. Talk not echoed but replied to. Talk that is not just the murmur of a babbling brook, the language of being, but the doing of becoming: communication that is action.

Streams, intersecting and cross-referential, permitting not just identities but socialities. A social media age in which communication is action, in which messages perform, and in which information is relation.

This is how I see it today. Social networking is rapidly becoming communication. Our profiles serve as resources, distributed identities but serving evergreen interests and referenced when the relevance adds value. The universe of social networks is itself becoming connected and in its connectedness, it matters less to the user where identity resources are kept and more how they are protected, secured, and made visible. And as networks become communication, communication becomes increasingly networked.

The next steps then, if possible in a world of un-coupled messaging, would be to enable interaction by messaging. To lift social activities out of their containers and architectures and embed them where possible in streams of social activity. And to architect, around communication, the meta data and state required for a truly inter-subective web.

Action streams: a blue sky proposal

Last fall after visiting with the activity streams group I spent a bit of time brainstorming what I'm calling action streams. As I lack the resources to pursue the idea for any meaningful length of time, I'm tossing it into the open here. (6 pp pdf).

The basic idea is for a distributed and decentralized stream schema that would permit posts not only to share activity updates across social networks, but to enable action within and around those posts also. Think twitter with buttons. An invite comes into the twitter stream, and Seesmic renders it with buttons so that you can reply with accept, decline, or maybe.

Posts could of course accommodate many different formats, including commercial and transactional formats. State would have to be captured and shared across posts where they appear, in as realtime as possible. I have no technical insight into the feasibility of this, so I can offer little more here than a breakdown of the idea.

If this were possible, it would make for an interesting evolution in streams overall. No longer would status updates be reports of activity, statements and messages incapable of hooking up to actions. Actions would be possible inline with the post and use simple UI elements as commonly used today. We could actually do stuff with our posts. And get system confirmation of activity at the other end.


Related:
Social and conversational implications of cross-referenced activity streams

There's Gold in that Heather: my Tummelvision video, and gratitudes

My appearance on last week's live Tummelvision show with Heather Gold and Kevin Marks is up. We talked about Google's Buzz, which at the time was only a few days old and not yet "fixed," and social interaction design applied to conversation tools like twitter. And we took a pre-recorded question from fellow tummler Deb Schultz .

I had a blast. Unfortunately, I only barely touched on social interaction design in general. But we applied it in principle to some examples of interaction on social media, Buzz included, and I think managed to keep it topical.

I want to thank Heather, Kevin, and Debs for having me on the show. And I wish to thank Heather, in particular, for her extraordinary contribution to social media "culture" at large, and more personally, for simply being a shining light of inspiration.

I had the chance to participate in Heather's first Unpresenting workshop in December of 2009. It was a full-day affair with about a dozen excellent industry folks here in the city. The workshop was on the use of "tummeling" as a presentation and workshop technique designed to increase audience engagement.

Each of us had a turn at telling a story to the rest of the group, with Heather making remarkably insightful observations to each one of us for the half hour or more that we had to present and practice. I consider myself a pretty good read of people and what they're going through, but Heather's ability to manage insights for each of us pretty much blew me away. I came out of the day both exhilarated and exhausted, but boggled at how Heather managed to maintain attention to personal nuance and detail for all her participants.

More recently, I sat in on Heather's second Unpresenting workshop here in town. This time I observed and took notes. I'm fascinated by Heather's process and effectiveness, and utterly compelled by the experience. Heather's process is flow, and she relies on each participant to provide the "teachable moments" through which to make observations on how better to (un)present. As a method it's incredibly powerful when it works, and is an example in itself of the tummeling's core practice — to transfer authority to the audience. Heather makes her points, but transfers her own leadership to participants.

It's an extremely relational and deeply human experience, and was for me personally transformative. Nothing compares to the visceral and embodied learning that accompanies the "aha" moment of realization that something — mental, emotional, or physical — has stood in the way of enjoying the experience of getting your audience involved.

It's a kind of insight that Heather has a rare talent and skill for observing, and for raising to the surface comfortably and safely. Her experience with this is uncanny and owes to a lifetime of work on-stage and off. That Heather can lift your insight out of darkness with real empathy, for you to experience and own, through which others learn and by means of which she makes her presenting points, and to do so in a way that feels natural, is a gift writ large.

So if you do a lot of presenting, if you are a firm or organization that relies on effective communication, and you suspect that sometimes the slides and presentations get in the way of meeting your goals and closing the loop, book Heather. I recommend the experience unequivocally. And I'm grateful for the opportunity to express this. Thanks Heather. You rock.

I Wanna Know What Buzz Is w/Adrian Chan - Tummelvision, Ep.6 from heather gold on Vimeo.

From: Tummelvision.tv
For other great live shows, visit twit.tv

Social and conversational implications of cross-referenced activity streams

Efforts are currently underway to link up @names and @replies in Buzz and make them share-able across networks using activity streams. If successful, this would mean that naming a user in one service would surface the message elsewhere. A buzz post containing an @twitter_username would resolve to the user's twitter profile. And the mention could be surfaced within that user's twitter stream.

At this point in time the technical challenges are not simple. So the scenario I am exploring here is conjectural. But worth speculating on, if for no other reason than the probability that sharing across activity streams seems in ways inevitable. Note that the points I raise are not criticisms of the effort, but observations intended to spark discussion.

Let's contemplate the implications of conversation across activity streams. Implications involve not only the facilitation of communication between networks, but other factors too, including redundancy, notifications, noise, spam, context, and quite possibly, an increased burden on users to meet conversational expectations. Each of these is a matter of social interaction design — user experience of networked talk and relationships among users maintained in social media tools and applications. I will address these in no particular order.

For simplicity's sake, let's just assume that a single user is named in a single post authored in Buzz, and avoid contemplating multiple username mentions.

Redundancy
Sharing @mentions across networks would increase message redundancy. Our sample message would appear in twitter as an @reply. If it were longer than 140 characters, it would be truncated to fit twitter's format. Alternatively, it might appear as a system notification. For example: "@username You were mentioned by @googleprofilename in Buzz http://link". Or: "I liked what @username said" by@googleprofilename from Buzz. Formatting issues would of course have to be addressed.

Redundancy would accrue according to the number of participating networks our @username belonged to. Each would reprint the Buzz post mention. Our @username would see duplicate notifications in each network, and potentially would receive email notifications of these messages from some networks also. The result: a lot of additional notifications proliferating from that one Buzz mention.

Noise
This notification redundancy, which some might find useful, would be noise to others. My email account is already a bucketful of notifications. Which is ironic insofar as email is already meant for communication. That so much of this communication notifies me of communication gets to be noisy.

Audiences
Each network is also an audience. Users are invested in their audiences, in terms of status; posting habits; engagement with a private, social, or public presence; relationships and the expectations those entail; attention paid to message flow, awareness of audience members (services have different social uses); and more.

In other words, each of us turns to an audience for certain kinds of engagement and according to our individual habits of use. For example, Buzz for peer conversation and discussion, twitter for maintaining a profile, Facebook for friends, and so on (blogs and commenting included). Because these audiences are different and have different meanings for us, the appearance of @username messages originating in one network on other networks may lead to at least two kinds of ambiguity.

The first kind of ambiguity pertains to the appearance of the message. Do I want to see it here? Does it transgress boundaries I might perceive between each network, and more personally, to how I see myself within each one? I may, for example, engage in different kinds of conversation within each network, and prefer to have those boundaries constrain my obligations to participation in each.

The second kind of ambiguity pertains to my responses. There are two distinct issues here.

• The first concerns effectiveness. Which network is best for me to respond in, given my understanding of an author's habits of use. I may want to respond in the network preferred by that user. That's where my response is most likely to receive attention. (Many of us do this already between twitter and Facebook, knowing our friends' and colleagues' engagement styles with each.)
• The second concerns my own preferences for being seen responding to others. In contrast to effectiveness of communication, this has to do with self-perception. I may see myself differently in each network, and am aware of how I (believe) I am seen by others. This reflects on my activity and is taken into account (unconsciously or consciously) as I reply or mention others within each "space" or social context.

Not only are audiences a reflection on our self-image and self-perception within a network, they are constructed differently, too. This follows from the manner in which specific features have been deployed within the network, as well as its population, social practices, and cultures. Audiences have a sociality and are unique to each service. We can even observe tacit norms of use and conventions emerging and then passing in each network. These social dynamics affect use of @replies and @mentions. For example, the twitter practice of using multiple @names to loop users into an exchange, is not a convention (yet?) in Buzz.

A great number of these particular practices could be upset by sharing @names across streams. Others might become confusing, if, for example, @names proliferated so excessively that conventions simply broke down as a result of degradation.

Context
All talk is contextual. It establishes and creates context of its own, as meaning provided by what participants say. It refers to more than what is actually said, too, and so has social context, context supplied by references, connotations, and social significations. It has context according to who participates (including those individuals' reputations, credibility, authority etc). Increasingly, there is context supplied by location, and the different axes of relevance along which mobile checkins and posts are useful. And, of course, context obtained from the social media tool or service in which the talk appears (this informs our understanding of what participants are doing by talking.)

Contextuality will be disrupted by the sharing of @names across social networks. Not only is the originally-authored post reproduced in a new context, but any follow-on messaging will re-contextualize it in ways just described.

This disruption of context may have significant consequences for shared stream mentions simply because context provides so much of the meaning not of the message but around it also. Its references, history, and authors — these implicit cues are invaluable to interpreting (reading) what's being said and what's going on. (Talk in social media is more than what's communicated as content, but is a social activity.)

Loss of original context and re-contextualization within new streams and networks creates confusion. Confusion concerning what a message means, confusion regarding what to do with it, and now confusion about where to continue the conversation. And distributed and disaggregated messaging can mean that each of these steps in the conversational "chain" only further proliferates the branching of the series. Multiple series could conceivably take shape within new network streams. Which brings us to the next problem: expectations.

Expectations and obligations
There is no meta-data supplied with the activity post that indicates the author's desire for responses and replies. We can do this in face to face communication just by looking at each other. But artifacted (text) messages lack this intentional cue.

It is up to users to choose to respond to a message, and with shared stream posts it will be up to users to make choices in more places and in conditions of greater ambiguity. For some, I suspect this will be too demanding. Users who think about what it means to be seen replying to others, and those who might dwell on silences and may wonder if they are being ignored, will suffer the most.

The author of the original post may find the additional demands of tracking and monitoring posts proliferating across networks to be too much. Those mentioned in the post may want for a clear sense of what's expected, if anything, by ways of a reply (and where).

Loss of context robs the original post of some of the implicit and tacit expectation it solicits for responses by audiences. Where users pay attention to and are engaged by this, their perceived expectations and obligations of reciprocity and mutual recognition fail as a means of orienting their behavior.

Conclusions
I have not exhausted the implications of cross-references in activity streams. Multiple @username mentions, message length (Buzz and Facebook posts are not limited to 140 characters), commenting permitted in Buzz and Facebook but not in twitter, realtime search, and geolocation are but some of the practices that would further complicate matters.

But insofar as the technical effort to resolve identity according to some shared protocol, enabling decentralized posting within separate networks to become cross-referential, presents a clear opportunity for engineering success, social and practical ramifications are worth considering. I have only scratched the surface here. So I look forward to where this goes.


The efforts mentioned were kicked off in this post on Buzz:
Envisioning decentralized @replies and notifications with WebFinger.


Related:

• Breaking down the Gbuzz
• If twitter is micro-blogging, is Buzz micro-commentary?
• Google Buzz v twitter: more on micro-commentary
• May I have your buzz, please?

Google's Aardvark acquisition: Questions for Buzz?

Google acquisition last week of Aardvark seemed a natural choice, given Google's dominance in search. But in light of the company's Buzz launch, Aardvark integration becomes even more interesting. I have no insight or inside knowledge of Google's plans for Aardvark, but there's one possibility worth speculating on.

Aardvark was not a smashing success measured in terms of its user base. But it worked quite well, so its matching and graph mining technologies and methods must have been well designed. This alone may have been of value to Google. In its quest for social search solutions, Aardvark's price tag may have been justified on the basis of its technology and talent rather than its user base. (As was the case with Friendfeed's acquisition by Facebook).

But consider what Google could do if it ran Aardvark behind Gmail and user contacts. And if this were integrated with Buzz. Aardvark's Question/Answer service could then function within a Gmail or Buzz environment, permitting users to leverage their Gmail and Buzz social graphs for the purpose of asking and answering questions.

For example, Google Buzz could feature a new type of post: the Question post. Aardvark would mine that user's first and second degree follower relations and Gmail contacts, and notify potential answerers. Answers would then be displayed inline with the Buzz Question post. An option for private answers would of course make sense, as also an option for non-public Questions.

• As Buzz answers accrued to the original Question, Google could add to its Aardvark matching index for user responsiveness (who actually responds).
• Starring, liking, or rating might be added to allow for audience participation, and results further used to supplement the matching index for user answer quality (who provides top rated responses).
• Tagging might be added to classify Questions and their responses.
• Domain experts would then be surfaced and might be ranked to enlist social incentives for participation.
• A directory of past questions would grow, offering Google an archive of graph-sourced social search results
• And this directory might be further mined for surfacing alongside Google search results. Something like: "Related Buzz questions and answers."
• Google wavelets could be built to distribute questions to blogs, so that blogging domain experts could surface interesting questions and answers outside the Buzz ecosystem.
• A mobile option with a simplified interface could integrate with maps and offer Foursquare or Yelp-like recommendations.

And with that, Aardvark Buzz would effectively function as a kind of Google Mahalo or Yahoo Answers, as a tabbed feature within Buzz and surfaced externally within Google search (with permission).

Buzz would benefit, because content would self-organize. Search would benefit, because questions and answers would inevitably include real-time topics and interests. Google's social efforts would benefit, because Google could back its way into topical social networking by means of questions and answers. And the whole approach would fit within the current paradigm of realtime streams, using an effective idiom (questions/answers) for doing so.

As said, I have no insight into the deal. But perhaps there was more there than meets the eye.

Google Buzz v twitter: more on micro-commentary

I wrote recently about the differences between twitter and Buzz, conjecturing that perhaps Buzz is micro-commentary. I have had a few more thoughts on this that I would like to share.

I wrote in that post that communication in twitter is improbable, given its immense volume of flow. And I noted that calling out another user by name, or by RT, was one way to get their attention. Given that tweets are not addressed unless the user does this explicitly, there's no other way to initiate a directed conversation with another user.

I also noted that Buzz preserves commentary threading beneath a user's original post. (I say commentary because posts are shorter than blogs, and commentary generally shorter than comments. The mode is tighter and faster than blogging, and seems positioned between short-form tweeting and long-form blogging.)

This preservation of context also keeps recently-commented Buzz posts on the page. Presumably this is to sustain relevance and give visibility to unfolding "conversations." If Buzz is a streaming application, these active posts are like eddies or ripples — dynamics of flow where the waters are still until their self-reinforcing activity expires and they are taken downstream.

Twitter has no means by which to surface or capture this activity. If @stoweboyd puts up a hot post, you and I will miss all its @reply traffic and the original blog tweet disappears from view like any other. Twitter, and/or its third party clients, could conceivably highlight these posts to feature them. In fact it would be cool if Seesmic, Tweetdeck, and the rest provided a panel for trending tweets. Relevance would then be captured as it is in Buzz.

In Saturday's post I noted that the act of addressing another user in twitter is separate from the act of communicating. The @reply or @name must be written explicitly. This isn't the case in Buzz, where a comment box takes care of addressing. As is the case with Facebook status update commenting, this may be a small design feature but it's one with significant social interaction design implications.

These implications concern the types of users who may find Buzz a win over twitter, and the structure of the application's conversationality. And these two factors combined will play a significant role in the sociality likely to distinguish Buzz from Facebook and twitter.

First a quick observation on the "feel" of commenting in Buzz. It's very Friendfeed, as many of you have observed. Quick, effortless, and due to the lack of avatars, less self-referential than blog commenting (there's no picture, and no stats or links besides the user name by which to distinguish each commenter). By design, commentary clearly belongs to the post's original author.

Commentary belongs to the author. In other words, in commenting, I relate myself to the author. This is a matter of the conversation's "feel," and an important one.

By contrast, twitter works in reverse. The tweet entry field stands alone and is clearly "my" field of expression. And there is no commenting on tweets inline. @naming or @replying is the only means by which to draw another's attention. In twitter, the act of doing this relates that user to me. In Buzz, I relate to the author, and in twitter, I relate him or her to me.

This is not a small difference, but a rather large one. In Buzz, my comments are not distinguished to my audience of followers, but belong instead to whomever I have commented to. In twitter, my "comments" (@replies or @names) refer that user to me, and belong to me as my expressions.

In other words, twitter allows users to relate others in the social field to themselves, and this act is highly visible. It's probably one of the reasons that many users @reply celebrities even knowing that they will not receive a reply. The act of calling out a relationship with the celebrity in effect borrows the celebrity's status and (quite literally) attaches it to the user who calls him or her out.

A particular kind of sociality has emerged around this simple facet of twitter's social interaction design. One that contributes to twitter's "sense" of visibility, of seeing others and of being seen seeing them.

Buzz downplays this kind of sociality for a more proximate and less self-referential mode of updating. And this fits Google's proclaimed intent to bring email into the age of status — both in constructing shared and porous talk spaces as well as in embracing the form of the update.

(Google Buzz is also an aggregator of other activity stream sources, though it does not make liberal use of system activity messages and aggregate views. The only one I've seen is: "9 posts with less activity from ..." It's likely Google will take a filtering approach to ongoing relevance and noise issues, rather than a Facebook system messaging approach: "_______ and 6 other friends are now friends with _____".)

I think twitter's self-centricity will continue to serve it well, albeit increasingly for broadcasting and thus for broadcasters. Buzz, by contrast, looks good to attract conversationalists — those whose better contributions are perhaps not in talking about themselves but in addressing points made by others. And they will benefit from the conversational aggregation that accrues to top users and interesting posts.

I have further thoughts on the topical possibilities of Buzz. And thoughts on the devolution that heavy users like @scobleizer have noted about open talk spaces like Friendfeed. And some thoughts on what looks like an interesting and perhaps precedent-setting embrace by heavy-hitters of normative self-constraint — to wit, not importing tweets to Buzz. But these will each require a post of their own.

• May I have your buzz, please?
• If twitter is micro-blogging, is Buzz micro-commentary?
• Breaking down the Gbuzz

May I have your buzz, please?

"Many people just wanted to check out Buzz and see if it would be useful to them, and were not happy that they were already set up to follow people. This created a great deal of concern and led people to think that Buzz had automatically displayed the people they were following to the world before they created a profile.
...
Starting this week, instead of an auto-follow model in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most, we're moving to an auto-suggest model. You won't be set up to follow anyone until you have reviewed the suggestions and clicked "Follow selected people and start using Buzz." — Todd Jackson, Product Manager, Gmail and Google Buzz. (Saturday's post: A new Buzz start-up experience based on your feedback)

For starters, hats off to Google's Buzz product manager Todd Jackson for quickly acquiescing to user protests Saturday. This was yet one more in a string of somewhat bizarre social media privacy cock-ups. Ironically, many of these blunders involved products in which user privacy was deeply implicated. Meaning that product managers recognized the importance privacy means to users.

But somehow neither Facebook nor Google have realized that users are not extensions of their products.

The privacy issue exists not only between users and the outside world, but between users and the product (manufacturer) also. How it is that both Facebook and Google have managed to violate the privacy (whether you felt this way or not) of their own users, while committing extensive resources to privacy settings within their products, just escapes me.

What's more, Facebook's Beacon and Profile blunders, and now Google's Buzz restart, each seem to cut pretty close to core company strategies.

Facebook, in paving the way to socially-mediated advertising one status update at a time, must first command the trust of its several hundred million users. Surely Facebook understands the importance this trust has for its market strategy, not just today, but tomorrow.

For Facebook's combined social graph data, algorithms, and distributed connectivity (FB connect) give it the implicit authority to anticipate user interests in other people, products, places, and so much more. All of which it will be permitted to leverage only by the gradually accommodating public. One step at a time.

And surely Google realizes that, with several social failures already in its awkward and adolescent past, nonetheless sits atop the richest gold-mine of all: search and email (content and distribution).

And that where it will never match the excellence of Facebook's social bureaucracy, the ex-urban graffiti hip of Myspace, or the dumb simplicity of twitter, it has a back stage all access pass to mine and meta the hell out of gmail and search practices. And, of course, the infrastructure to host advertising around any content, context, or relation it sees fit.

I just don't get it. In matters of end-user privacy, you ask permission first. How was this not evident? Did Google's product team fear that if they asked first, they would lose the chance to leverage Gmail? It's conceivable — but even more likely now. For once you violate and lose user confidence, the walk back up is all the more difficult.

A miss-step that would seem to strike at the heart of Google's social strategy.

For we can only assume that given Google's historic misrecognition of good social interaction design, it would instead leverage what it does best: data, search, ubiquity. That it would come at social networking from behind, indexing Buzz talk on top of the social graph, thereby adding a meta data layer of social relevance, perhaps even topicality, social activity, and more.

Google knows that if all contacts are equal, some are more equal than others. And in talk, some talk is more equal that others. Attention, relation, expertise, social knowledge. Reputation, credibility, interest. These are the dimensions Google needs to extract from user activity, somehow, if it is to recalibrate its advertising machinery in the age of Buzz.

And Buzz was its chance to capture the social in talk. I don't believe that Buzz was just an evolutionary step forward from an otherwise aging communication standard (email). It simply must have been mission critical — a chance for Google to get its social on without having to succeed in the brand competition for cool (FB) or wanna-be cool (twitter).

Now that Buzz will use the follower model, it's as if Google had its own Friendfeed, using the conventional "import contacts" feature as a means of finding friends and colleagues in the system. And with Buzz likely being added as a tab to Gmail, it is less likely to serve as the next evolutionary step in email after all. The point, I'm sure, was a product deeply integrated with network/graph analysis, social search, buzz updates, email, and search/advertising. Not a stand-alone social stream available outside Gmail (this being a coming option, if not default).

So I wonder what implications this has internally for Google. Buzz should have created a chance for the company to begin mapping social relationship information to content in the context of messaging (not pages). With that it would have a leading advantage in mining relevance within and across web content and talk (by talk, I mean updates, tweets, buzz, comments).

Perhaps users would have pushed back anyhow. Cultures take time to assimilate and accept the changes introduced by some of their technologies. Or perhaps Google screwed the pooch big-time on a product that was in the making for a while. Either way, what it does next will be very important.


Related:

• Google is Dancing as Fast as it Can With Buzz Giga Om
• Google Alters Buzz to Tackle Privacy Flaws New York Times
• Google Buzz and the fabric of the social web Chris Messina
• Twitter Theory applied to Google Buzz Kevin Marks
• If twitter is micro-blogging, is Buzz micro-commentary?
• Breaking down the Gbuzz

If twitter is micro-blogging, is Buzz micro-commentary?

After spending more time in Buzz I thought I would share a couple observations on the sociality of Buzz in comparison to that of twitter. Notable, and obvious to Buzz users, will be that Buzz is more conversational. It has a lot in common with Friendfeed, in that threaded comments accrue to popular posts in a self-reinforcing manner. The more commented the post, the more attention it gets.

This is interesting in that the sociality in Buzz, which is based on the social graph of gmail + followers, is constructed by means of comments. The most connected users are the most visible. Their most interesting statements attract comments. Buzz reinforces the attention paid to these posts by notifications that appear in gmail, and by pushing commented posts to the top of the page.

Twitter, by contrast, has no threading of tweets and their replies. Tweets and their replies are neither shown together (contained, as they are in Buzz), nor do replies preserve the relevance of a tweet. Twitter, or its client applications, could conceivably preserve tweets that receive large numbers of replies, and thus sustain attention to conversations in the way that Buzz does. But twitter doesn't thread replies inline as responses to the original tweet. This is why Buzz is a much more natural conversation application.

In twitter, sociality is constructed by addressing other users by @replies or RTs. The twitter stream flows so quickly that tweets are now lost to history in just four minutes on average. That is, if a tweet fails to pick up an @reply or RT within four minutes, odds are it's gone.

Sociality emerges around the efforts of a population's members to relate visibly and meaningfully. In conversational tools and practices of the day (FB status, twitter, Buzz, and their micro-messaging kin) this occurs through two social functions. First, the act of communication (the post). Secondly, social action, or interaction, represented by a response/reply (RTs, comments). Follows are a form of action that implicitly solicit reciprocity, and as such are gestural (they involve no linguistic statement and are just a social act).

In all communication systems, perhaps especially those that are built on networks (instead of spaces or containers, like chat rooms), the improbability of communication is the system's most salient problem. Improbability of communication can be addressed by communicating more, but this increases noise. Or it can be addressed by means of actions that increase the probability of communication. (@replies, RTs, starring, favoriting, bookmarking and so on are all system features that, as user actions, raise the vsibility or distribution of acts of communication.)

Communication in twitter is improbable because of its sheer volume. Simply "saying something" doesn't secure the attention of a desired audience, let alone an individual. This places burden on action as a means of increasing the probability of communication. @replies address an author, increasing exposure to one's own followers and finding their way into the @repies of the intended addressee.

Because twitter is made of un-coupled tweets, its conversation space is limited by the @reply and RT. Neither of these are captured in a view that threads conversation and makes it visible to others. Consequently, it makes little sense to try to tweet conversationally in twitter. Conversations require that statements be displayed serially and in order. Twitter can't do this. It thus makes more sense to tweet one-off statements, links, and for the most part monological messages.

Buzz solves the coupling problem: by eliminating the need to address the original author directly, and by threading comments beneath the original post. The distinction will result in a much different sociality. First, high profile (well connected) users will be more visible. They will not need to buzz as much to get visibility. Their more interesting and dialogical statements (questions, claims, arguments, etc) will attract commentary, which, reinforced by Buzz's notifications and privileging of commented posts, results in a conversational sociality.

Influence, then, might accrue to those not just with the greatest number of followers and most repeatable and reference worthy posts, but to those with the more interesting and "relevant" things to say.

Now Buzz doesn't have any topical organization, so at this point posts and comments will remain vulnerable to the topical degradation and noise that belongs to streamed messaging systems. Some topicality will emerge around particular individuals, as it does today around domain experts, pundits, and so on. But still subject to the noise enabled by a two-degree commenting boundary (First degree: I see Louis Gray's posts because I follow him. Second degree: I see the posts by others who follow him.)

If Buzz also had personal groups/lists, I could organize my view of Buzz conversations. I can group users within Gmail contacts, but I don't believe there's a way to sort Buzz by those groups.

And if Buzz had public groups/lists, common social spaces could become a step in the direction of topical relevance (akin to Friendfeed's groups). Then, of course, Buzz becomes a social space and is no longer just an evolutionary step away from email, and an answer to status updating.

Buzz makes commentary so quick and easy that commenting on blogs now seems archaic. It makes replying so easy that @replying in twitter makes me feel oddly aware of twitter's unfortunate social overhead (that I need to @reply to get the person's attention, and that I can't couple my @reply to the message I'm replying to or commenting on).

In other words, Buzz does have commentary right. This isn't replying, and it's not commenting. It's a conversational form in which limited but socially visible and relevant commentary will accrue to those with interesting things to say. Much more than to those who post the most, or have the largest followings. Which I like.

I'm looking forward to seeing how conventions of use develop in Buzz and to its development. And I'm very interested in the implications of Buzz integration with shared standards and client api's.

Breaking down the Gbuzz

I am aware of the irony of posting about the the buzz on Google Buzz this week. But there's no other way to contribute than to heap yet more on the pile.

I'll skip over the many good points that have been raised this week within buzz and alongside it. If you are reading this, you have probably read them.

I want simply to make a few observations about the Buzz user experience, some of which are simply unavoidable, and many of which belong to the "conversation" space in general.

Talk is a difficult thing to facilitate using social tools and services. This is because in addition to the content itself, there are contributors, readers, relationships, audiences, social scenes, and public. And talk is a form of social action. A statement alone is communication. A response is action that communicates. Many kinds of actions involving talk exist (greetings to wedding vows), involving varying degrees of sincerity, expectation, commitment, trust, and so on.

I'm simplifying in order to make the point quickly. Gbuzz, and any other tool in which an original post can accrue responses from known and unknown individuals, over time, exposed to audiences depending on the tool's particular relation to other services, applications, and devices, will have issues of both content and action.

A lot of people talk about the realtime information and information overload. I view this this content as communication. It therefore has information content and relational content. Furthermore, communication is interpreted by recipients/audiences for two intentions: the act of communicating and the content/information communicated.

This fact of interpretation makes the noise all that more noisy. If Gbuzz (and FB status updates, tweets, and other activity updates) were information and information only, I could read each simply for its information value. Because these are communicative acts, however, I read each for its act as for its content.

If the message is an original post, I may consider responding. If the message is a comment, it is already a response, and I may consider my response (or not) in terms of the relationship between the commenter and the original poster. All of this multiplied for all the people I recognize.

Assuming that in Gbuzz and elsewhere I encounter posts by people I know or know of, or have at least selected.... there is ambiguity in each comment or reply made by somebody I don't know. Again, there will be two types of ambiguity: content and relation. Not knowing the person I may have more difficulty interpreting the commenter's statement (content/information). Not knowing the relation, I might not know what to make of it, whether to respond, and if, to respond to the person, and/or what s/he said.

If this seems complicated, then I'm making my point. That being that in conversation tools, issues related to meaning are quickly amplified with each case in which ambiguity may exist around an intentional act of communication as well as solicited response or reaction.

I'll use "post" to cover status updating, tweeting, buzz posting, etc.
I'll use "comment" to include replies and comments.

In social interaction terms, ambivalence or ambiguity will exist around:

• who the author is
• who the commenter is (involves a relation; and intent)
• what is said (information alone)
• what is said relationally (asked for, solicited, impression made, feeling expressed, etc)
• who it is said to
• who is supposed (hoped) to see it
• who is/not to respond

In audience terms, ambivalence and ambiguity will exist around:

• Who sees it that I know (my followers, contacts, FB friends)?
• Who else sees it that I don't know (if RT'd, @replied, searched, FB friend of friend, if Gbuzz commenter to poster, etc)?
• Where do I post for best visibility within my social scene?
• Where do I comment to get the author's attention?
• Whether this is the best place to create conversation with and around that author
• Whether this is the best place to comment to be seen commenting to that author
• Whether this is safe
• Whether this will be surfaced later in search

In terms of attention, temporality, and speed:

• Where do I go for the most recent and up-to-date posts/news
• Where do I go for the most recent and up-to-date responses/commentary
• Which has the most attentive audience relevant to me
• Which keeps posts and comments alive?
• Which is for what's happening now?
• Where does the person post where they are now/what they are doing now?

Topicality

• Which has the most attentive audience by topic, for this topic?
• Which has the highest quality random commentary?
• Where should I invest effort in becoming a topical expert or authority?
• Where should I solicit responses of a topical kind?

Preservation and durability

• Which service will archive posts?
• Which service will archive comments?
• Which service will archive conversations?
• Which will be searchable?
• Where are users most likely to search?
• Which will have topical organization?
• Which is best to use for reputation building?

I just wanted to break down some of the problems users have expressed with Gbuzz. I'm only just getting started, but will stop here. I hope to have made a couple points clear, however. That talk is a kind of social action in which who we talk to, why, who else is present, and how it appears can all matter as much, or more, than what's said. And that in tools that facilitate posting original messages, replying or commenting, to or in front of others assembled by means of friending, following, or addressing, some ambiguity will exist around the meaning of what's said as well as ambivalence around responding.

Some of this confusion will get sorted by Gbuzz developers. Some of it will get handled socially, as each of us finds and practices uses that, in time, others notice. Some will simply persist as residual noise, a byproduct of the fact that when content is separated from action interpretive possibilities are doubled and amplified (what to do?).

It might also be worth noting that at this point in the development of talk technologies and services we have industry competition and incomplete commitment to standards (activity streams). Furthermore, we have little to use that offers meta visualization of notifications. We still have to read everything. I strongly suspect that will change, making it possible for us to browse or skim social conversations for relevant headlines and activity. (Bring on the social searchers and data visualizers!)

On social interaction design and the detective

I have a thing for British television. It's from having grown up in Edinburgh, I'm sure. But it is bolstered by the fact that some British television is in fact really good.

One of my favorites is the crime drama "Cracker," which features Robbie Coltrane (whom you might know as Hagrid of Potter fame). This three-season gem is a masterpiece of the form. In it, Coltrane plays a hard-drinking, hard-living forensic psychologist who is called in by the police to help solve particularly nasty crimes.

The series pits the cops against the killers, and the psychologist against the cops. For in spite of Coltrane's nominal role as a psychological copper, his method of insight and principle inevitably runs up against his more empirical and evidence-collecting colleagues.

Both psychologist and cop are after the truth. But where the cop sees it in a trail of evidence, the psychologist sees it in motives. Like the cops, he's on the killer's trail, but the trail forged by the killer's instincts, not that which he leaves behind.

The series opens with Coltrane giving a university lecture on forensic psychology. He tosses out the canon of literature on psychology and instructs students to use what they know: what's in their hearts. (The scene is only a minute in length, and runs from 1:20 to 2:20.)



As in Cracker, online social interaction might be approached with both evidence (through research) and human insight. Measurement and metrics for the provision of evidence and user activity data; and insights for an understanding of what users do, and why. The approach might be a kind of forensic social analysis, and would address not just social design in the abstract but in its particular emergence on a specific social platform.

And were it to exist, it could prove to be truly interesting. Media companies and advertisers alike would plunder its findings for more effective ways of reaching their targets. Investors and developers would rely on it for more accurate expectations and better assessments of risk in startup investments.

There isn't yet any such thing as forensic social analysis. But in the meantime, we can take some inspiration from Coltrane's message to his students. And write a script of our own.

We start by borrowing from Hitchcock, who once famously declared that he'd never made a Whodunnit film. His films were never about who committed the crime, but why, and for whom. In fact some of Hitchcock's films open with the crime, and so this part of the mystery is solved already. What Hitch does is to then unfold the reasons behind the crime, usually by involving the audience in the solution to a puzzle that his characters are not yet privy to. Hitch's victims are sometimes unwitting perpetrators, of crimes committed on behalf of or by proxy for somebody else.

The audience is involved in social media, too, as is the medium that sees (though it's not a camera, but a browser). We all know the experience of being seen, perhaps of being watched, and possibly of being caught in the act. But these are not netcrimes, and our actors are not the hunters and the hunted. Resemblance between media may include the function of audiences but ends at narrative forms. In social media we write our own scripts and stage our own performances. But there are still motives and interests involved.

In Cracker, the deductive reasoning employed by Coltrane's character Fitz draws on his inner truths and personal experiences. Fitz is a dark man, deceitful, corrupt, manipulative, and deeply human. All the better to catch the thief by. But again this is not detective work that we're talking about in social media, so do the parallels of crimes committed and thoughts thought hold any merit? If design would normally choose to deduce, if marketing would prefer to research, if engineering would prefer to map, and if the entrepreneur would prefer to succeed, what if any role befits the gut? And whose?

Coltrane's not informidable gut is a belly full of appetites and instincts that indeed serve his forensic inclinations — as well as his gastronomic impulses. As it is for us, his interest is less in mapping the territory covered, but in covering the territory not yet mapped. He wants to know where the killer will be next.

Is there not a possible lesson here in the task of anticipating what users want to do? In grasping motives, understanding what the social is capable of? For the purpose of thinking creatively and constructively about social application design?

It's not that requirements specs, integration of user feedback, usability testing, and user flow miss the point entirely. But if we focus just on the elements of design and its architecture, we risk thinking that we have addressed possibilities (framed as "needs") and are in control of the design process. Social tends to run away with design — on the basis of how users have begun to interact with one another. And that's where the possibilities for a social app get really interesting: not in use cases per se but actual social and cultural practices.

For example, I just received notice of a new feature on a social site. It's "featured members." This is a common feature and it's thus easy to grasp why it's been implemented. But I happen to know, given the site's theme and core activities, that there are other less obvious ways in which the site could support its community and enrich individual as well as social practices.

These would require that developers approach social using Fitz's deductive reasoning, and human insight into how social dynamics work. And they would have to take some risks in trying new practices that best practices such as the featured member section addresses. They would have to draw upon intrinsic directions surfaced by the community at hand, not the extrinsic options presented by design solutions.

My point is that the social interaction designer should call on creative insights informed by observation and participation in an application's social practices and cultures. Innovation ought to be driven by use of our social skills, as much as it is by our knowledge of application features.

Once a social system has a population, what it can do and what can be done with it becomes specific. To build out incrementally according to common or "best" design practices risks missing out on opportunities made available by a specific user population. Improvements can be made in design, yes, but those improvements will be limited by how we frame our approach.