Social context, Facebook Likes, activity and action streams

This post began as a comment on the following post by Adina Levin, but quickly became too long, so I am posting it here instead. Read Adina's post on social context first (excerpted here).

Where is social context?
In yesterday's post on the problem with Facebook Like, I wrote that Facebook is trying to be the sole provider of social context. This got me thinking about the various places that social context may be represented in a networked system:

1. in the object or message (which ActivityStreams helps enable)
2. in the context where it is created
3. in the contexts where it is seen and used
4. in each node of the social graph
5. in sets of social graph elements
6. in decentralized elements of the social graph (e.g. aggregated/syndicated profile elements)
7. shared understanding in participants minds
8. unshared understandings in participants minds

Facebook's model is seeking consolidation in two places. By replacing a metadata-rich, standardized, ActivityStream based representation of the message with a proprietary API call, Facebook is foreclosing opportunities for the adding of context in creation and in viewing and utilization (items 1-3 in the list).


By acting as the sole provider of social graph and profile services, Facebook is seeking to own those aspects of context (item 4, 5, and 6 in the list). Is Facebook doing anything to enable the exchange of subsets? (item 5 in the list)

________________

What is context? Is it a matter of where or what or something else?
Interesting post — it raises for me the question: What is context? or perhaps, what is the value of context. I am guessing that context means original context, but that begs the question: What's the value of preserving original context? And in the question of context is the presupposition that shared context is valuable (shared context or shared understanding) — but that is a normative claim and the post also argues for diversity and difference.

Several kinds of original context then spring to mind: context tied to to original intent; context tied to original audience addressed; context tied to object references; context tied to linguistic references; context tied to original activity or practice; and context tied to social or public in which the content is produced.

Any one of these may arguably supply context, if context is meant to include:

• what does the author/contributor mean (to be doing, saying?)
• what does the content mean to communicate (internal references, external references)
• what is the content's social status (what social or audience does it tacitly address, and what contribution does it make to what practice within that context)
• what routine practice does the content refer to or belong to, that might help in understanding its meaning
• how might one respond (convention, activity, situation, and other kinds of interpretive context external to the content)
• who is involved (audience context so important today because intended audiences are always involved or presupposed)
• there are certainly others

On the loss of context
As I'm not a huge fan of the value of content of original production, being rather more interested in creation, production, interpretation (re-contextualization), I don't mind loss of context as I believe:

• that there's no particular normative privilege involved in original intent — the contribution was made online and w some understanding of what this results in!
• there's no normative claim in consensus or agreement, or in other words, the original context doesn't preserve truth or rightness of interpretation; the contribution is made online and thus w an expectation of multiple uses and interpretations
• neither the intentions of the contributor nor the interpretations of the reader supply "truth" — the online world is a communication space in which contest and commentary are assumed — and therefore context as a supplier of original meanings vs context as a referential system that informs interpretive schema are each valid forms of context

Which leads me to believe that context needs further critical reflection. What about context is so important?

An alternative to context: frames, and communication and action
Systems theory provides one way around this — communication. A difference is a difference that makes a difference. The question, then, for social interaction design, would be: what action is possible, what communication can be made more probable?

I would then (no surprise here) nominate different types of action, activity, and social practices as contextual frames of reference, from local and onscreen user interface selections and actions on up to routinized social practices meaningful only over time and within the shared practice of a number of actors. Both action and communication can be pretty clearly articulated, and neither requires a regression to original context, be that of intent, reference, linguistic claims, or what have you.

I know that this contradicts some of the common assumptions made in system design about context. But I don't think we developed these paradigms with social action in mind — I think they were conceived to facilitate effective and efficient user interaction with systems of information (applications). Thus the very notion that original context ought to be preserved is a problematic one — it assumes that meanings ought not go astray of originally intended activity.

We assume, often, that this original context belongs to the object — that, too, is problematic, for much of what is going on is not object centric but is embedded in ongoing communication and social practices (actions).

An example: games and rules
Game rules, for example, better supply context to action and interpretation than do objects — and as Wittgenstein showed long ago, such rules are tacit. Frames can refer to other frames — a move may be understood within its application context or by means of its reference to another frame of activity — in this case, the game.

In social gaming, the game itself may be understood by participants as a social pastime in which several members are contesting supremacy, and this in turn may be a social interaction whose consequences are known only to a small group of individuals in which long-standing social contest for status is re-enacted repeatedly by gaming (game within the game).

Thus the entire question of context may be reframed in terms of action and communication, each of which can involve application-specific meanings on up to social and cultural references. Context might then be better understood within the practices that reframe and recontextualize online contributions, thus permitting ongoing action and communication. Social theory doesn't have a special place for original context, for action supplies its own context.

Practical reflections: activity streams, action streams
Finally, and to get practical for a moment, some thoughts on the matter of activitystrea.ms and Facebook's monopoly of distributed social web activities are warranted. Activity streams supports a broader range of activities than does the anti-social Like. The Like is a one-size-fits-all solution to Facebook's need to venture into social search and socially-contextual advertising and marketing.

Likes eliminate differences of kind and of degree: liking is simple affirmation and association with an item at a minimum, passionate and loyal commitment and dedication at a maximum. But the Like itself neither captures nor represents the degree. And Liking fails to capture nature or kind: does a person Like because s/he identifies with the item, brand, cause, person, etc; own or want to possess it; feel social affinity with the scene or culture it is associated with; mean to gesture or signal activity or engagement (in a game, an offline practice, etc); or what have you.

Activity stream meta data would permit a greater number of updates and qualify them by attributes that supploy more context around the update — which in turn would enable richer and more differentiated interpretations and responses. But these updates, too, are unilateral and monological. Social web updates are a monological system of self-referential declarations. Updates are posted into the open and held open because there is no action possible on them that transforms the update into a move of some kind — a social action.

A transactional system would offer coupling of action updates and closure of activities in which the simple yes/no response essential to social action and communication would be represented within stream updates. A dialogical system would not only solve some of these context problems (not just the where but the what of social context) but would facilitate forms of social networking around messages themselves: distributed or federated, dis- and re-aggregated.

Activity and action streams might not solve the audience context problem, but would permit greater linguistic differentiation of statement types and corresponding responses (invites: accept/decline; offer: accept/decline; news: like/share; purchase: buy/do not buy; and so on). Language itself supplies context, in its grammar and in its role within communication practices.

The fact that so much social web content is treated as information, not as communication, is re-inforced by the loss of context. But could be addressed if we were to standardize the handling of linguistic types and enable reciprocation — or response. The fact that present-day streams now dominate social web activity just seems to beg for this solution of transactionality around coupled messages.

What's there to like? Facebook Likes and social object relations

Facebook's recent F8 announcements concerning the Like button, connected pages, and Open Graph api have resurrected some discussion around social objects. I wrote last week about social objects from a theoretical perspective, and want to clarify a few top-line points that I think are worth consideration, particularly given Facebook's apparent semantic and social search strategies.

There are two approaches to social objects. One is theoretical, and one is practical. I will only touch on the theory of social objects briefly here, focusing instead on a few practical implications of an object-centric theory.

In Facebook's Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer's Perspective, Dare Obasanjo does a nice job of recapitulating one view of social objects relevant to Facebook Likes. He cites a post written by Hugh Macleod in 2007: social objects for beginners

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that "node" in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.
Example A. You and your friend, Joe like to go bowling every Tuesday. The bowling is the Social Object.
Example B. You and your friend, Lee are huge Star Wars fans. Even though you never plan to do so, you two tend to geek out about Darth Vader and X-Wing fighters every time you meet. Star Wars is the Social Object.

In this view, the object structures relations and is the reason for communication. It represents a shared interest, and for all intents and purposes serves as social navigation. Tags are a similar kind of navigation, useful for finding people with a common interest. And this would seem to be the purpose of Likes on Facebook: a digg-like vote of interest that facilitates people finding and creates possibilities for connection.

But I disagree that the object of shared interest is necessarily the reason for interaction and the object of communication. Objects do not create reasons for connection, nor do they ground communication and interaction. I believe it's the other way around. Communication and interaction may take up objects as a topical theme, but the interest is as much person to person as it is person to object. You may invite a friend to dinner, but this is not because you are hungry.

Objects do not proscribe and structure social relations — objects are subordinate to relations. And interests between people are relational, not object-oriented. The object may supply a shared topic, object of interest, navigational or activity context, but need not itself be the object of communication. Instead, it facilitates connection and helps to create possibilities for communication.

The issue I have with the social object description cited above is that it conflates object and motive. Objects are viewed as causal, of social interaction and social relations. I don't see how we could ground social interaction in objects, or even object worlds, in a manner sufficient to the psychological complexity of human social motives. Objects are not equivalent to the relations in which they are taken up.

In fact, one of the oft-cited theorists of social objects, Karin Knorr Cetina, makes this very point:

Objects of knowledge, the ones important in the present context, are characteristically open, question-generating, and complex. They are processes and projections rather than definitive things. In our interpretation, objects of knowledge seem to have the capacity to unfold indefinitely; in this sense they lie at the opposite end from pure tools and commercial commodities.

Her paper is about object worlds — she uses the example of day traders and stock market representations — not about objects as things. I think we may have misread her discussion of objects to be about things, when in fact it is about relations we take up with things, their meanings, and their representations.

Nor do I think that objects completely supply context, for context in social interaction, too, is relational. If you invite your friend to dinner, two contexts of social interaction are now relevant: the dinner as object, and the invitation as social action. Action can as easily supply context around social objects as any objective relation, or objective property. This is the approach taken by activity streams, and the reason that activity streams supports more than one expression of action. Liking alone risks digg-ification of shared social interests, and a loss of intent and meaning.

Adina Levin makes this point in a post about the Like

But that's what Facebook's "Like" gets rid of. See, there's an alternative vision about social context. And that is that Facebook is your one and only source of context. Thomas Vanderwal suggests, in the discussion of Facebook's recent announcement, that Facebook is not doing such a great job of this today: "The social graph is dangerous without context and much more dangerous w/ partial context." ActivityStreams fosters competition among services that want to provide social context of various sorts, and Like forecloses that competition.

But it is not only context around social objects that is lost, as Vander Wal suggests. It is loss of action, too. Which is one reason for my interest in action streams. Action streams would not only be like-able social objects; they would be actionable social objects. Actionable social objects not only permit more linguistic and expressive (e.g. gestural) actions — invites, offers, announcements, etc — they capture actions on them. For example, an invitation action object could be accepted or declined. This would not only add power to objects, but would capture some social relationality — in the form of reciprocity or mutual interest. Social objects today are still only asymmetrical — two-sided liking is not required for them to serve as interest pivots between people.

There are a couple reasons a double-sided object relation model might be interesting. The first is preemptive: we avoid inundation by system status messages telling us everything about what our friends now Like. The second is enabling: we get better social data. Social data is one of the reasons, if not the main reason, for Facebook's Likes. Facebook will preside over a world of social objects related to people whose interest declarations will given them a reason to advertise by interests served up on page context, within streams (presumably), and across its open graph (presumably) contexts.

As Obasanjo writes:

In the social media space, a few people have focused on the fact that this data is put in place to enable sites to be added to Facebook's social graph. However there is little reason why other social networking services couldn't also read the same markup as a way to add those web sites to their social graph. For example, Yelp is one of the sites that now supports the Open Graph Protocol so when I click like the Pro Sports Club it is added to the list of "pages" I'm a fan of on Facebook. However I could just as easily see that being a [Twitter — Like] button which would add the Twitter account for the gym to my following list along with tweeting to my followers that I liked the gym. It would only take adding a markup element to what Yelp is outputting to indicate the Twitter account of the page being liked. With my Windows Live hat on, I can imagine going to Amazon or IMDB and clicking a [Windows Live — Like] button which would add the movie to my list of favorite things. There are a ton of possibilities this opens up in a totally decentralized way without forcing services or users to be locked into a particular social network.

Unfortunately, the Like represents a pretty thin expression of interest. It fails to capture degrees of interest, or how much you like something; motivation, or why you like it; or social relations, or who you like who likes it. In this, the Like still suffers from the long tail assumption that people are alike who like the same thing — or that likeness between objects is reflected in people who like them being alike one another. Not so, of course, but this is the state of social targeting today (objects of interest are consumer segments; consumers identify with what they like).

It's unfortunate that the Facebook Like is so close to social bookmarking, to retweeting, to diggs and the like that we still cannot capture more of the differences of kind and degree that would make the social web really interesting. But who can fault Facebook for drawing up a semantic and search strategy around the vote of interest. One-click solutions are simple interaction solutions, if not too simple. The majority of advertisers and many marketers, too, will be satisfied with the metrics Facebook will be able to offer about audiences pegged to shared Likes.

But I think that the future of social marketing still resides in a system better able to provide social relational information captured from actions, interaction, and communication. For the grail in social marketing is not the individual, but the social graph, and in particular, who to market to in a social graph. For the power of liking is not just that we like something, but that we like to be liked, too.

SxD: Social Objects

This is just a quick post on social objects. The concept of social objects is pretty widely used in social interaction design, but we're missing a solid definition of what social objects are. Or, whether they really even exist.

The most common use of the term "social object" refers to shared online resources around which interactions develop and coalesce. Examples could include gifts on Facebook, videos, or what have you. The object sort of serves as a shared object, a focus of attention, an actual digital object, and so on. And the object plays a role in governing or informing interactions; we know what objects mean and what to do with them (give them, comment on them, play them, etc.)

But the definition of social object is a bit too fuzzy for me, and for a couple reasons.

Firstly, as designers, the object plays into our interest in having an object language -- things to design and design for. We are biased to think in terms of objects; objects belong to the world of interface design. So there is a possibility that where there is actually other stuff going on, we focus on the object out of our own interest. (By analogy, consider the anthropologist who focuses her attention on these social objects: a ceremonial mask, money, a wedding ring, a football. How much of the rituals, pastimes, social and cultural practices belong to the object and are explained by object properties? Not much....)

Secondly, objects are easily confused with their properties, attributes, qualities, uses, and so on. This is just how language works. We name a thing and give it attributes, and having done so we have a stable concept. Plato's ideal chair, vs all real chairs. Concepts then substitute for the real thing. It's possible that we're actually talking about the concept of social objects, and not social objects as used.

Which is a more accurate description of gifting on Facebook: the relationship between two friends and the practice of giving gifts on birthdays, or the graphic of the beer mug? The more accurate description of user interaction would be that which explains the practice of gift giving, the symbolic act of presenting a gift, the Facebook tradition of recognizing birthdays, and the social space in which gifts are seen by others such that birthdays create a cause for a stretch of social interaction.

We know that social objects are a shared cultural resource -- their meanings are culturally context-specific. We know that many social practices involve social objects. We know that in the digital domain, social objects are unique in that there is no original object but many copies; that an object can appear in many places at once.

For example, I give you a beer mug and it is on your wall but in my stream also -- same object, but not really, since one is the one I gave you and yours is the one you received. We're really talking about a representation, not an object. In other words, the object represents the act.

If the social object is sometimes the representation of an act, then perhaps the focus should be on the act, and on interaction practices, less on the object. The act of recognizing a friend's birthday by gifting a graphic beer mug is a better explanation of the user activity. The object is merely a representational vehicle by which the activity is sedimented into a mediated, visible, socially recognizable form.

Social objects, then, might be better understood as common forms. Forms in which many kinds of graphics, rich media, even textual forms (for a tweet is a social object as soon as it is retweeted) permit diverse kinds of social interaction. The object, in other words, is not an object, but a form.

If social objects are a form of representation, we can expand our understanding of what they mean. If a form has visual content, it is an image. If it has linguistic content, it is a text or an utterance. If it is a video, it is televisual.

If it is a gift using a graphic, such as the beer mug, then it is both a symbolic token (as described by traditions of gift giving -- the gift is an object with meaning inherited from the tradition of gift exchange, and specified by meanings belonging to the object: price, ownership, status, utility, etc) and an image. The beer mug graphic indicates "a drink" (this is basic theory of representation stuff: the image is a beer mug); the act of giving it refers to "get you a drink for your birthday". The interaction, in other words, is a symbolically-mediated one, referencing a content (get you a beer) and a cultural practice (on your birthday).

We can now see that the interaction situates and contextualizes the object. Not the other way around. The object doesn't tell us what's going on, nor does it define uses and interactions. Those belong to practices -- namely, practices in which objects are used.

There's another reason that the object should take a subordinate role to the interaction. Tweets are social objects. Tweets are utterances that take a form, and which, given that twitter is a distribution platform, can be circulated, referenced, recontextualized (posted to streams, blogs, surfaced in search, etc), and so on. We miss out on the significance of the "commodity" form of mediated talk if we think in terms of objects. Because we think of objects as things.

But clearly, anything that can be mediated and used as a shared resource can be a social object. And this includes tweets, things, and much more. So if the world of social objecst includes linguistic statements, gestural tokens (emoticons), signs, numbers (is a follower number a social object? it certainly is the object of a lot of social activity!), images, graphics, avatars, and on and on. We would have to admit that not only is the idea of social objects so broad as to be almost meaningless; but that it's lost any critical or explanatory power. A concept too big to give us any guidance.

So that's where I am on social objects. We need a better description. Personally, I think we can borrow from linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology. I would argue that the interaction domain has primary importance, and that the subdomain is symbolically-mediated interaction.

Within this, then, types include:

• linguistic statements
• symbolic tokens
• currencies
• representational objects
• images
• gestural signs
• signs
• numbers
• rich media (video, etc -- stuff playable online)
• bookmarks
• avatars
• etc

Using the disciplines I just mentioned, we would be able to use:

• linguistics for linguistic statements
• semiotics for signs
• representational theory for representations (looks like something) and images (is of something)
• cultural anthro for exchange practices and their token objects
• media theory for numbers (stats, counts, etc)
• and so on.

The types are then unpacked in the contexts of their use, in their contribution to interactions, in their meanings, and as expressions of intent and guidelines for interpretation. And, most importantly, we would be able to account for the enormously innovative and unique ways in which symbolically-mediated interactions can refer to all manner of meaningful activities online, from social games to Second Life (which is, kind of, a total social object world!), from gifting to retweeting, and so on. It's a bigger project, but the online world is incredibly rich. And I'm convinced that we might misinterpret what's going on around it if we allow ourselves to think of objects as objects.

Geosocial filter failure

I have been off blogging for a couple weeks while taking time to make headway on a book on the principles of social interaction design. I don't like being away from blogging this long. It can precipitate lifestyle changes in the offline department, which when combined with the recent stretch of fine Bay area weather we have been having, can becoming self-reinforcing. Pro-social in an offline way, anti-social in an online way.

Today's the day that I reflect on the book, come up with examples, and look over the rough cut to get a sense for what's still missing. I was doing this a few minutes ago when I drifted into thinking about Clay Shirky's concept of filter failure. I had been searching for what to say about geolocation services. And something jumped out at me that I think merits a quick post.

In news of SXSW recently, geolocation services (primarily Foursquare and Gowalla) were cited as the geek habit du jour (or make that week). Several attendees blogged that Foursquare had replaced twitter as the means by which to find friends and coordinate meetups. Of course this was how twitter was used at SXSW a few years ago. Both tweets and Foursquare checkins, if they are used to signal one's location, effectively do the same thing. Tweeting is then reduced to its signaling function; and Foursquare subordinates location checkins to user location signaling.

This is interesting if you dig into it a bit, and not only only because in each use case the primary function of the tool is subverted to its event-specific use case. (Live socializing changes uses of all social tools in that attention and audience are now both focused and directed on a social occasion. The sociality of networked audiences is replaced by a physically co-present sociality, or situtation, in whose service social tools can now simply provide communication and signaling functions. Interesting, eh?) For twitter, subversion of the application occurs when tweeting is used to signal, or in other words, when talk is subordinated to posting one's location. And in Foursquare, the subversion of the application occurs when users, instead of checking in to a place, use places to post their location.

Twitter at SXSW = linguistic statement communicates position. The tweet, rather than being conversational, is used to coordinate meetups and to be find-able during the course of the event. The linguistic statement loses its expressive function in favor of signaling.

Foursquare at SXSW = checkin to place inverts relationship between person and place. The business or establishment is not as important as the location of the user; the user's interest is in sharing his/her location, and the checkin serves as a somewhat arbitrarily chosen means of saying "I'm here." The Foursquare checkin loses the its function as a means of capturing the value in where people go, in effect to be used for signaling location rather than declaring affinity for places frequently visited.

Now, clearly, geolocation services and applications are useful for different reasons and in different ways, when used during live events. As is the case often with twitter, be it to find friends nearby or to tweet during presentations, etc. But the most common use case for Foursquare is not the live event. It is, I think, in capturing local habits of its users, surfaced in where users go. We all know from checking in that doing so does not mean "find me here" or "I'm free, let's hang out." The checkin does not signal social availability here and now. Some have observed that Foursquare's approach to friending is in contrast with following on twitter primarily for this reason. We neither want to be followed in real life as we are on twitter, nor mean to suggest by our checkins that we are free to meet up.

This suggests that there might be a problem ahead for Foursquare, if it wants to move from point-based checkins to some kind of higher value social utility. And here's where I am somewhat confused about how geolocation services fit into the social media landscape.

Ideally, a social application extracts and captures some kind of value from a user's activity, builds relations between the user's selections and content, and makes those available for others (e.g. the majority of non-participating users) to navigate by and reuse. User checkins with Foursquare really ought to do more than locate users, or provide them with points and badges. They ought to layer taste and preference mapping onto physical maps, thus socializing the otherwise asocial world of place and location (maps). And it would seem that Foursquare, in working with businesses, sees this Yelp-like opportunity quite clearly.

But does the checkin capture any of that relation? Besides habits of frequenting particular places, and aside from the assumption made that a person checks in because she or he likes (vouches for) the place, what value can be extracted from the act of checking in? Checkins are not modified by ratings, are not accompanied by mood icons, or presence-availability signals (eg Free, Do not disturb, party time!). All checkins are equal. As a system that should be adding value to location by extracting subjective preferences and habits, the checkin model is too simple. (The whole point thing is another matter altogether, and certainly adds bias that may later look to have been a mistake. Good for viral adoption; bad to turn location services into game-like experiences. Though points may be put to use by businesses, in which case Foursquare will face other troubles ahead.)

I want to return now to the filter failure comment by Clay Shirky. For in the context of information overload, filter failure may be part of the problem (and solution). But all social web content is not just information. Much of it is communication, and some of it is relational -- interpersonally, or socially. And filters applied to communication and to relational interests perform notably poorly.

Filters applied to information, as search results, subtract "unwanted" results per criteria selected or saved by the user. The filter is meant to eliminate and sort out information that's noisy. The implication being that information overload can be solved by application standing criteria. I want more of this, less of that. But the relation between me and the information I want is only unilateral. And unless I am willing to adjust my filters regularly, I am going to have to choose standing interests and preferences. And when applied to communication and social relationships, standing interests and preferences simply fail to reflect the transactionality and dynamics of social talk and interaction.

Now it occurred to me that there might be a different way to think of filters. I take Shirky's comment at face value and so to mean filters on content. So, terms, phrases, authors (sources), and perhaps other meta data (time period or recency, trend or popularity, etc). Criteria applied to the data format, or to the information value of the content. Filters would be one-sided, or individual. Each users sets his or her filters according to his or her own preferences.

But the problem of information overload in social is solved by capturing value in relations between users and content (places included), and of resurfacing that value for use in social interaction and communication. It's intrinsically a two-sided problem, not a one-sided problem. Communication and social relations are each reciprocal and mutually-interested forms of action. Information filters are monological. Social filters would be dialogical. The distinguishing feature of value in social is that it is shared. Shared interest distinguishes social content from the unilateral tastes and preferences I might apply by means of filters. I want multi-polar social filtering, not just an upgrade of the types of filters I use for search.

In the action streams proposal I wrote up and posted recently, the critical difference between activity and action streams was the two-sidedness of the system. I proposed that stream posts be capable of coupling, and that with coupling, posts would be capable of conduction social action. An invitation post carrying buttons for accept/maybe/decline, for example, would be an action stream post used for invitations. This two-sidedness that comes with post coupling permits social interaction because it enables reciprocation.

I wonder if the same issue may be at hand for social tools. If, for example, no granularity in filtering will be good enough to solve the social problems surfaced by geolocation services, unless they are two-sided, reciprocating, and mutually shared. Social filters would then permit us to use relationships to filter information, and would capture real social value from shared interests (mutually recognized interests).

I have thoughts on what this would look like. But I wanted to get this out because it struck me from SXSW commentaries that when social is live and located, as it is in the case of events, social filters are in effect and systems work well. Shared and mutual interests in themes, topics, meeting places, and being found for face to face interaction are tacitly and implicitly approved by those who checkin using Foursquare during an event. Not so, when we drift about town and occasionally check in to a cafe, restaurant, bookstore, or bar. One sided filters won't suffice here. We need to know more than what we know we like -- we need to know what others like. Including, of course, whether they are available to hang out and if so, interested in doing so with us.

Interestingly, I think many of us use twitter to check each others' availability in this Foursquare use case. Which just goes to prove the point that communication is two-sided, and that social and relational content exceeds the handling capacities of one-sided information filtering. The question "hey, want to have coffee?" is way of ascertaining mutual interest. But of course dm'ing or tweeting that is to risk a "no." And that's where a two-sided signaling model might come in handy.

Eleven tips on how to apply social interaction design thinking

One of the key social interaction design deliverables is the social interaction design requirements document. Like the market requirements document, this spec covers social needs and requirements. Social needs of the product, of users, and of course, the business served by each. And its value applies equally to social media startups, campaigns, enterprise applications.

Writing a social requirements spec, much like the MRD, involves organizational and company goals. What are your business interests in social media? What kind of audience are you assembling — and how? What's the engagement model? How is content, in the form of interaction and communication, captured and returned to participants and non-participants alike? And of course, how do you help and add value to your social media audience?

This requirements document serves startups in the social media space as well as brands or companies using social media for "campaign" purposes. For it is important to identify end-user goals and interests in order to best serve them with social media. Principally, because interactions between members of an audience will not only result in compelling experiences but also leave behind content that can be consumed by those who don't participate.

The social interaction design requirements spec thus wants to address user diversity. Users have different needs and interests — in terms of social media participation and use habits. Users have different ways of engaging in social media, too. And they are likely to interact with other users for a great variety of reasons.

I thought I would share some of my own insights and approaches, in a roundup of simple tips. I write this in the spirit of sharing a look into how best to apply social interaction design thinking. Social interaction design is, as I approach it, not what is on the screen but what happens off it. The emphasis is on social, less so design. And design is as much about our own frames and perspectives, as it is in the products and experiences we create.

This list is not exhaustive, and for many of you it will seem basic. But sometimes we forget the basics, myself included. Oh, and this list goes to eleven.

1. What moves your users?
Social is all about putting people in motion. And people move each other as they are also moved. So what kind of audience are you assembling? Is it a public, a crowd, an attentive audience, a gathering of individuals? Is it groups, passersby, or players playing social games?
Audiences have different psychologies and are moved in different ways, according to their collective sense of presence and involvement, and their individual sense of participation. So think first about what kind of audience you are assembling, and how it is moved.

2. All content is communication
All content in the world of web 2.0 is communication. Yes, it is information and it informs. But it is created and left behind by countless individual acts of communication — with the intent to communicate. If you view social web content as information you're still in web 1.0. The talkies are here.

So consider the interests of your audience members, and read and listen for what they are communicating and to whom they are communicating. Communication does not just want to speak. It wants to be seen and heard. And people don't just talk about stuff, they talk to other people. So how do you help users get from talking at to talking with?

3. What's the user's investment?
You have made an investment in social media. Well so too have your users. So what's their investment, and how are they invested? Consider the things that reflect on people, provide them with responses and feedback, with impressions and a sense of being involved and valued. Are they here to build a reputation, to talk, to maintain friendships, to contribute and feel acknowledged? Likely they are.

We all are in this because we are invested, personally, in what our experiences return. Reflect on what your own investment is. Do you track your progress and are you invested in your own success? Speaking honestly and for myself, I know that I will look at traffic I get from this post. That's one of the ways in which I am invested. And likely, you do the same — whether for your own company, campaign, or that of a client. So you have yourself in mind — as do I when I check the numbers. And that's precisely the point: your audience thinks the same. So get past your own investment and have your audience in mind. What's their investment?

4. What are your users' individual motives?
Users are people too, like you and I. So they have motives of their own, and they participate in social media because they want to, and because it involves things they are good at. So think about what motivates people you know. I try to as much as possible.

When constructing my social personality types I built a list of a few dozen friends and put myself in their place, emotionally, mentally, and habitually. I tried to think through their experiences and habits on social media. To get out of my own experience and to enrich my palette and understanding. Who would invite friends to events? Who would check twitter by phone? Who cared most about pageviews or follower numbers? Try doing the same. We are all different, and we recognize only what we know. But the greater your grasp of these differences between people, the more user experiences you can recognize and accommodate.

5. Embrace ambiguity
All social interaction and communication is ambiguous. Embrace it. For ambiguity is precisely the unresolved, the unknown, and the unacknowledged of human exchanges that keeps all interaction and communication going. We interact because it's never finished. We keep talking because there's more to say.

Social software is not regular software. It is not comprised of discrete transactions and well-defined tasks. It's an open state of talk in which transactions always sustain the possibility for more. So consider the ambiguities that both sustain interaction and communication around your service. And which provide for ongoing interests expressed and exchanged by people never completely in the know.

6. Change your frame
It's not about you but about them. Success in social media comes when you shift your frame of perspective, and take your user's interests to heart. This change of frame is as much about thinking less in terms of your own product or service, as it is thinking from the user's perspective and experience.

We think too much about what we are trying to achieve, about what we have designed or built, and thus in terms of what it does or should do. That leads us to think in terms of controlling outcomes, or tweaking features for new behaviors. All well and good, but those engender a product and design-centric view of what's going on. Social is happening out there, and your users do not have you or your product in mind, but their own experiences and those they share them with. Change your frame.

7. Know your blindspot
We all have a limited perspective and understanding of the world, and that includes our interpersonal and social relationships. We build this into our products and services because we tend to want to confirm our own views. Users are not taking a drive in your car — they are going someplace.

Know your blindspots. Reflect on what matters to you and to what and how you seem most inclined. Then fill in, as much as possible, what's in your blindspot. Self awareness and humility will return generously.

8. What's your surplus value?
What surplus value do you capture and extract from your social, and how does it add value to the experience for all? We live in a system of excess information, of noise, redundancy, and a collective clamor for attention. How are you designing your product or service to provide surplus value to the experience?

All social media is about interested users — interested in other people and interested in their contributions. Interests are preferences, tastes. And social media are about tastes: capturing tastes, reflecting tastes, making tastes. And tastes are individual, social, and cultural. So what do you do that offers a view or experience of collective participation that no single user can see and enjoy?

9. Help users help each other
Facilitate random acts of kindness. We are all kind, and an exchange of kindness is the spark that lights up the social like no other. Think less about what people want, and less about what you (think) you have to offer them. Think instead about the moments and opportunities you might design through which users might experience spontaneous and serendipitous kindness. The virtuosity of kindness needs no architecture, and its spark needs only connectedness and a gap to bridge.

10. What differences make a difference?
We talk a lot about identity online, but identity really only matters because there is difference. We are all different and all becoming different by differentiating ourselves. Even when we identify with somebody, or with a brand or idea, we differentiate ourselves in doing so. Difference matters most in social, not identity. So consider how your social allows differences to make a difference. Think about how you encourage and enable people to be different. How you capture and represent social differentiation. And how these differences might add some interesting facets to the differences that make our identity what it is: different.

11. Don't lose yourself in metrics and numbers
You are better than that, and to lose the forest for the trees is to undermine your own knowledge, skills, and effectiveness. Social is in the heart as it is in the head. It's about everything you already know and all that you would still like to learn. That goes for your users as it does for you. So disregard the numbers when you sense they are a comfort or distraction. Objectify your social, and your users will be stats and numbers. They should count more than that.

Social dynamics and agile social design

The launch of any new social tool is a moment of high anticipation and anxiety for any development team. Try as they might, through internal use and limited alpha testing, engineers and designers must hold their collective breath for what happens when their product goes live. There's nothing like the real world for final proof of concept.

As pregnant as this moment is for the vendors and creators of the full spectrum of social applications — blogs, wikis, communities, apps, games, you name it — it need not be filled entirely with speculation alone. And it would be a poor reflection on designers if the launch event were subject to complete uncertainty. But in the world of social tools, design can neither regulate nor legislate social outcomes. Social behaviors are not a reflection of design, but are an appropriation of design: design put to (social) use.

This may fly in the face of some design thinking, but in social media it's simply a reality. And I need not point to the unexpected reception that even some of the most highly-funded and well-engineered social products have received of late (Buzz, Facebook's public status updates). Not to mention the efforts of a one-man shop like ChatRoulette.

For the uses to which social media are put hang on the dynamics of actual users, not the architectural blueprints and feature specs of designers and engineers. Users look to other users for an indication of what a tool or service is good for. And what they notice first is neither design nor features, but the communication left behind by other users.

But even if launching a new social application is not entirely unlike the grand opening of a new bar or restaurant, hostage to the whim and fancy of passers-by whose decision to enter follows a critically ambivalent period of nose-to-the-window peering and contemplation, there must surely be common social patterns and conventions by means of which social interaction designers might anticipate early outcomes. If not predictive and regulative, design can, at least, anticipate.

So before you hand over the keys, let's consider some of the early social practices new social tools are often subjected to.

Population dynamics most likely play a large role in the early growth trajectory of social media startups. Though it would be very great to have research on this, I don't know of any myself. Anecdotal evidence existed for Orkut and Friendster, and does so probably for other services, suggesting that membership composition of a service early on can affect scaling. Friendster in the Philippines, Orkut in Brazil. And more recently, Wave, Buzz, Foursquare, among others, provide more current reference points.

Consider the likelihood that early social practices shape the direction of growth and use in social media. If we could better understand how these population dynamics shape a social tool in its beginning stages, we could potentially leverage some of them for more pronounced effect. Social system design would then include mechanisms of soft dynamic social regulation.

• What aspects of a population lead to culture? Follower numbers? Heavy use? Viral invitations and connections? Social discovery? Communication?
• What balance, or mix, of features that support top users as well as incentivize casual users benefits certain social outcomes?
• Does the design allow activity, uses, and practices, to stick?
• How does it surface and present these such that their use is reflected back into the social system?
• What options do designers have to adjust emphasis of social activity to reinforce some activities and demote others?
• What would be the social interaction design methods for such early interventions?

Early developments
Social applications and services develop practices early on according to the activities and behaviors of their first users. At this stage, behaviors and practices reinforce themselves, and initial signs of common practices and culture emerge. All of this happens by means of the tool or application, but on the basis of interactions among users. Their observations of what's going on inform their expectations of how the service works, how to proceed, and what to do with whom.

Nascent sociality emerges around several cultural and social forces. The social interaction designer can delineate these to better identify and monitor them. (Note that top users often embrace a tool first, test it well and thoroughly, and publicly, and leave behind a substantial amount of communication in the process. This can, in cases like Buzz, dominate the experience for casual users. And the feedback provided by these top users should not be mistaken for global feedback, product feedback, or normative feedback: top users are not every user, have their own interests in mind for the product, and are not necessarily the best judge of what most people want to do.)

Salient early social forces and practices include:

• Users and their individual interests and habits: what users want from a tool and what they do with it, and with others
• Individual user activity and behavior: how users user the tool or service
• Communication between users: made specific by the tool's means of capturing and representing communication
• Interaction structured by means of system elements, navigation and other features of social architecture
• Temporal rhythms based on speed and frequency of user activity
• Early social differentiation among users, resulting in notable users, relegation of experiences of casual users and marginal users
• Stylistic and cultural specificity, in which tone, etiquette, self-restraint, and other aspects of regard and care become soft but recognizable social norms, leading to a kind of arrangement of social furniture
• Topical sedimentation as collective cultural themes emerge around the specific user interests, communication, and interaction that gain early traction

We can take a closer look at these separately. Each of the following lists describes some (not all) of the social and cultural factors at play in developing social practices.

Early adopters
Early adopters shape the population growth of a service or campaign, in part by attracting friends, colleagues, and like-minded people (location included). These early adopters:

• Set the style and tone for others
• Spread the word among friends and colleagues
• Tend to use the tools and services in ways that best meet their needs and interests, thus creating more content and activity around certain features in particular
• Set the bar, high and low, for participation and activity levels

Member connections made
Early adopters will inevitably make introductions to other new members. How this is done will depend on the styles of those early members but possibly begin to take the form of social convention. According to the ways in which a tool reflects the practices of early adopters, and of top users in particular (e.g. Buzz, which preserves and amplifies top user activity) connections may aggregate to individuals. Alternately, connections may be established more diffusely (twitter following). These early social connections are necessary for social density, grouping, social differentiation, and more. Connections happen between people, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly facilitated by a social activity. They are identifiable by their use of:

• Private messaging to directly communicate interest
• Public messaging such as blogging and commenting
• Status updating to solicit interest
• Following
• Use of symbolic tokens (social objects) to suggest or attract interest
• Matchmaking and introductions
• Helping
• Promoting
• Karmic offerings, gifts, etc
• Personal but socially visible (public) compliments, testimonials, vouching and so on

Social differentiation
Participation by early adopters sets expectations for activity and participation. In any service that surfaces users for their contributions, visibility and distinction are earned. How they are earned could establish trends early on, for example, around differentiating factors like:

• Looks and appearance
• Behavior
• Activity volume and frequency
• Friends made, and their social status
• Stats, points, and other socially signifying quantities
• Communication style, personality, and character
• And more

Activities
Social activities transmit a lot of social and cultural information. Users observe and take lead from what others are doing, particularly when it seems successful. Thus early activities will establish expectations and possibly become self-reinforcing:

• Status updating to solicit connections and interest
• Public writing such as blogging, articles, comments
• Content contributions using content inside or outside the site
• Competitions for points and game-like distinctions
• Status pursuits by means of system incentives (featured member, most active, etc)
• Status pursuits by means of social incentives (elite, mayor, etc)
• Voting and rating to qualify content or users
• Tagging or categorizing to identify content or users
• And so on

Rhythms
Social participation will vary in speed and frequency, time of day, and regularity. Early users will shape expectations for the participation and engagement of others over time. The site or service will reflect frequency and regularity of participation according to how it captures and represents activity over time. Furthermore, use of messaging in public and private, including realtime status updating, will shape expectations around user responsiveness. For example:

• Status updating will speed up site participation for those available to it
• Direct and private messaging will bury the responsiveness of member activity
• Blog and commenting responsiveness will establish visible social rhythms
• Changes to tags, news, featured content and members, and other content lists can be made in real time, or by slower updating schedules
• And so on

Conclusion
These and other factors shape emerging social practices and culture in social media. They can be attributed to users interacting with and through social technologies, mediated by constraining and enabling design features and choices. In this way social practices do reflect technical architecture. But if adoption develops into regular use, if not committed participation, more "purely social" forces emerge.

We can understand these forces as reflections of individual users, their communication, interactions, and collective social practices. Technology then becomes transparent and social practices supplant design as the primary organizing principles of activity. Close observation of these dynamics can suggest ways of intervening in them — and of steering the development of your social.

Good research on this would be interesting to conduct and have, for the reason that managing population growth early on could in fact be a mission-critical task in social media growth and campaigns. There's an understandable tendency in the development of new social apps to push for widespread adoption early on, after which agile development (=tweaking), responsiveness to user feedback, and community management might avail companies of limited steering mechanisms.

But there's as of yet no such thing as agile social development. Which would mean, in my view, phased release of architectural add-ons and features on an as-needed basis — as populations scale, social practices emerge, and cultures and communities of users coalesce.

Agile social would suggest that growing communities, shaping populations, and steering practices might in fact be in the designer's purview. That not every social tool should be launched fully-dressed, or with the full set of accommodations that its architectural plan includes. But rather, as communities themselves grow from campfire to city only over time, agile social anticipates architecturally and is socially responsive and dynamic.

In contrast to the world of real world products, social applications really only get started when they are brought to market. They are not finished. Why then should the designer's role be done and over with? The skills involved in seeing a social tool to market and beyond, through its early stages of use, may not be among the pages of most design textbooks. But it seems to me that designing the social is a much what happens after launch as it is what happens before.

From followers and game mechanics to more valuable social functionality

Some interesting perspectives appeared this week on game mechanics in social media and the corrupting devaluation of social systems, user experience, and metrics that seems to accompany follower counts, foursquare check-ins, and other numerical incentives to use.

I just want to throw in my two cents from a social interaction design perspective. I agree that the simplicity of incentive models predicated on growing your numbers (and status) exist. (What I've called the apparency problem in social media: the apparent appearance of social status and relevance.)

But I think these are systemic outcomes and not necessarily a reflection of human nature alone — as is often argued.

I'll start with context, and with brief excerpts from Peter Michaud, Dare Obasanjo, and Louis Gray. And begin with a status update from Alex Payne of twitter. (Contrast with this recently from Craig Newmark: "Design and esthetics don't solve problems")

"Game mechanics aren't going to fix your product and they aren't making people's lives better. Great essay: http://j.mp/aN66i8" Alex Payne, twitter

Peter Michaud, in an aptly titled post on Achievement Porn, writes:

1. Our society is set up to make us feel as though we must always achieve and grow. That’s true because individuals growing tend to bolster the power and creature comforts of the groups they belong to with inventions, innovations, and impressive grandstanding (Go Team!).
2. Because of this pressure to grow, there’s another incentive to make growth easier. More perversely, to make growth seem easier.

Dare Obasanjo, reflecting on Peter's piece in Achievements, Game Mechanics and Social Software, agrees that game mechanics should not be used as an easy fix but notes their marketing appeal:

"I will say game mechanics can more than “fix” a social software product, they can make it a massive success that it’s users are obsessed with.
....
Finally, is it better for me as a person to have traded achievement treadmills where I have little control over the achievements (i.e. number of blog subscribers, number of people who download a desktop RSS reader, etc) for one where I have complete control of the achievements as long as I dedicate the time?"

Finally, Louis Gray, writing yesterday in an un-related about followers, addresses the metrics, value, meaning, and bias problems:
The Followers Game Is So 2008. Time for New Metrics.

"Humans have this innate sense of need to be ahead of all others, to measure themselves, and deliver some level of self-assigned worth thanks to what are questionably valuable statistics.
....
We have got to achieve more accurate ratings of influence that determine value.
....
How would social networks be improved if we just hid them away entirely, and stopped looking at growth or relative sizes? My value is still the same, in terms of quality, whether I have an audience of 2,000 or 20,000, especially if I have the right people."



I think there are several points worth making here from a perspective of social interaction design.

First, it's not humans or human nature that are the cause of this. It's systems and the design of social experiences and systems. To attribute the follower incentive and achievement reward dynamics to human nature I think falsely attributes outcomes to essential human values. Social theory tells me that individuals of any society will choose and reflect values validated socially. And viewed empirically, societies around the world are organized in wonderfully different ways, manifest in a tremendous range of culturally diverse traditions and pastimes.

So I think this is a matter of social organization and not of individual human nature.

Secondly, we need to consider not only the outcomes for social systems — those being a devolution of interaction and a devaluation of meaningful differences — but also the user experience and user actions the system enables.

Social outcomes, including those that characterize the dysfunctional if not failing state of many social media designs, reflect aggregate individual user choices and selections. Users can only do what the system permits them to do. And in the case of social design, user choices are a reflection of individual nature and interest only on the first order of interaction — where users engage through UI and features.

At the second order of social interaction, where aggregated individual activities are presented back to the population and used to thematically distinguish the tool as a social experience, system choices lend bias and weight to activities that matter and privilege those that make the most difference.

Social media are intrinsically socially diffuse and the social activities possible in them are for the most part only loosely coupled. Given that a user's interest in a social system is a reflection not only of his or her interests but of his or her social position, actions and activities that make the most social difference readily stand out.

Actions like following and follower numbers matter because system designers choose to surface these numbers as an individual difference made that makes social differentiation possible.

The problem is in the simplicity of these social models or mechanics. Following is a unilateral action. It may solicit reciprocity but is successful, as an action, without it. That's Michaud's easy achievement but stripped down to the basics: acts that make a social difference. (We don't need to attribute the act to human interest in achievements and a cultural inclination for success. For we could refer back to psychological validation, interpersonal recognition, or many other motivations just as equally.)

Furthermore, following serves as a gesture of interest, of one user in another. But as a form of communication it lays no burden on the one followed to engage or participate. So in a blind social regime like twitter, it offers a low-risk means of connecting precisely because it's asymmetrical. And in a disconnected social order like twitter, connection is the first step to social relations.

That we pay attention to this stuff, as we all are profoundly aware of, is testimony to the fact that these systems have successfully provided one metric by which to measure social value. But it is clearly an underwhelming and uninspiring metric, when viewed from the perspective of user acts and not overall influence or status. The attention accrued to status achieved by means of numbers and counts betrays the user's interest in deeper and more meaningful interpersonal or social engagement.

In other words, the value surfaced and valued by the system is not very valuable from the perspective of attention paid and sustained by users, or value derived from use and experience. Consequently, our social uses of social media (the micro) suffer devaluation at the hands of system values (the macro). It's a bit like being in a country that continually devalues its currency.

Social systems can function technically and operationally even when they are dysfunctional socially. In ways our entire social order grinds along in spite of or perhaps because of fundamental and internal dysfunctionalities. It would be hard to tell the difference in fact between a social system that reproduces itself in order to fix its problems from one that reproduces itself because it is successful and growing.

The challenge ahead for open and distributed social media is, I think, in coming up with better and more well understood social dynamics. Acts and actions that satisfy on the first order of user experience but which result in more compelling, meaningful, and socially interesting system dynamics and outcomes. Ambiguity needs to be our friend, numbers less so.

All social systems can handle more information as they complexify internally. So our information problem may be an internal complexity problem. But if so, then one to be addressed by differentiating the ways in which communication communicates and makes a social difference. This, not coincidentally, at a time when social media encourage ever increasing amounts of communication.

Greater differentiation of social activities and better social design at the presentation layer will permit more user behaviors and activities to make a difference. And when that happens, social complexity and differentiation will engage more, better, and with richer and more diverse results.

I see us moving forward from a phase in which basic and open socially networked communication tools established early and basic practices, like following, and now begin to integrate more and different types of social interactions. If this pans out, simple means of getting attention will fade in value and be replaced by activities that are genuinely more interesting.


Related:
Foursquare vs Yelp: Recommendations and Reviews
Social Interaction Design: Leaderboard
Social media: the attention economy explained

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?

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