Swurl: lifestreaming and timelining

Like many of you, I simply can't keep up with the river of lifestreaming applications hitting public beta this year. Many seem to simply do the same thing, more or less, with a bit more of this or a bit more of that to differentiate each from its competitors. But social apps are bound, perhaps more even than "conventional" software, to conform to best practices. Why? Because they are social applications. Social applications succeed only if they can extend the individual user experience out into new and interesting social experiences.

And they do have to be interesting -- for social applications, again more than conventional software, must be interesting. More often than not they are interesting because they are used as tools for talk. Talking with, to, at, amongst, in front of, behind, and to the side of. Talking with friends tends to be interesting to those involved simply because it is among friends. But where the face to face dimensions of social interaction are also rewarding for the obvious reasons, social applications must deliver a working substitute. There is no real "spending time together" online.

Even chatrooms, which are as much a precursor of lifestreaming as anything else online, can only approximate this sense of togetherness. I recall early days in IRC chatrooms where that sense of being there or of being in it was as much due to the suspense and waiting (for somebody to type out their response) as it was due to the "room" itself. One might even argue that this pressure of time grows in the user the slower the technology is to record and transmit time. The longer the latency, the greater the waiting, and thus the greater the anticipation, suspense, and urgency! (Is it not said that suspense in film is simply the time that it takes for something to happen?).

Swurl.com is interesting because it has a visual timeline of the lifestream (pictured above). In calendar format, and well-designed, the timeline looks good and is an attractive visual representation. It's low on conversational content and talk, but it captures the past of a user's activity in a compelling presentation. Plurk.com also has a timeline, but one that is used to steer interaction (and which looks more like a horizontal river display). Not only does Swurl's calendar provide thumbnails of pictures and shortcuts to posts, it expands to accommodate periods of heavy activity. All days do not look alike. I like that.

This variation is important in lifestreaming apps. In contrast to the profile-based site or service, the stream stands in for the profile. The person's talk stands in for profile elements. These choices make sense, because the call to action in a lifestreaming service is talk. It's not browsing, searching, or navigating. At least not quite yet (I believe we're ready for more order and structure). Really, each message/post/tweet in a lifestreaming app is its own call to (inter)action, which is also why most users are in it "now" or never.

Which makes Swurl's representation of past user activity interesting to me. Most lifestreaming have stayed away from the archive of past activity (what's the pleasure in paging backwards through a user's posts?). But there's a lot of value in past activity, and visual coverage of the past can take many forms (think Edward Tufte). We've seen none of them yet (Chirpscreen's slideshows come to mind, though it would be nice to see them become actionable) but I'm certain that we will.

If twitter is the power curve of lifestreaming, then apps like swurl might show us some of the value in the long tail -- the long tail being the past. To picture this, take the standard long tail graph and turn it sideways. The Present is the curve, the Past is the tail.

Mining the tail of time is mining in depth rather than mining across connections. Mining the connections of past time, for lifestreaming apps, might mean drawing connections across the past times (pastimes, experiences, too) of a site's users. Currently, Swurl engages conversations around a user and his or her posts. But we could imagine indexing user streams for the purpose of making connections and extracting content. After all, a user's post posts, talk, uploads, etc are used by many applications to predict or anticipate choices and preferences.

I'm excited to see what Swurl, with minimal complexity, has done to wrap a bit more around lifestreaming than we get out of tools like twitter. Twitter will remain for me my primary talk tool, as it has and will continue to have the best audience awareness. But if you wanted to imagine social networking, and profile-based social networking around lifestreaming instead of profile pages, Swurl would be a good place to start.

Join me on Swurl!


Related reading:
Readwriteweb on Swurl
Techcrunch on Swurl

Lifestreaming apps and designing time and flow

Twitter's success over the past year has given birth to a new category of social media applications. Lifestreaming apps, known also as flow applications, permit users to publish a steady stream of online activity. Readwriteweb.com has a primer and later published a roundup of 35 lifestreaming apps, some of which are already defunct. Where these apps aggregate comments, friends, content topics, and media types, they can also be categorized as aggregators of distributed conversation (see the Techcrunch article on Friendfeed for more.)

Lifestreaming applications pose an interesting challenge to designers. From the perspective of social interaction design, site organization, navigation, publishing rules, and content organization shape the user experience, and thus the social practices that emerge around lifestreaming. Twitter has set a convention based roughly on a hybrid of email inbox and chat: tweets flow from newest to oldest. Third party twitter apps hew to the convention for the most part, eschewing additional navigation or structure for the simplicity of the stream. Broadly speaking, lifestreaming applications serve as a news wire service or news scroller of personally-relevant announcements and messages. The content sourced for publication is selected by the user.

I suspect, however, that we're only at the beginning of the design cycle of these applications. Now that we have established the utility of a twitter (or friendfeed, facebook status, activity, or news feed) as both social and personal utility, focused around talk and speech rather than writing and publishing (e.g. blogs), we might anticipate diversity. This, I suspect, will come as it normally does in variations of the apps themselves, and in their application to social practices. We have spent much of this year on the tools, technologies, and companies providing lifestreaming applications but relatively little time exploring their user and social experiences.

Consider the user experience of time-based talk vs page-based talk. If most of the social web is organized around the publishing/print/web page model, which subordinates chronology to topicality, then lifestreaming tools do the opposite. They subordinate topicality (search, browse, drill down, categorization, relatedness by tags, taxonomy, etc etc) to the flow. Flow privileges the present, not the past, and not the enduring. Flow apps put the user in the flow (assuming that s/he is paying them attention), aggregating the multiple times/presents of one's friends into a common stream. They give the illusion of togetherness, as does any aggregation of content online, but in the now, in time, rather than in place, such as on a page/site. In fact this illusion works greatly to Twitter's benefit -- this sense that while each of us sees a unique timeline, we feel that we're on the same page (!). Most of us do not use Twitter for search, browse, or navigating content, but for a sense (foreground when we use it; or background when it's on standby) that we're "there." "Being there" is a matter of being in time.

If aggregating timelines is the design challenge addressed by lifestreaming apps, the current basket of sites and services leaves much room for innovation. By which I don't mean improvement. Social web design is iterative, to be sure. Not only are we all in beta, but each release of functionality or design updates engenders new user experiences. And as new user experiences accumulate and coalesce, new social practices take shape. The UI of social media is the social interface. Page-based social sites have been developing for years; lifestreaming apps are by contrast relatively new.

The techniques we use in designing page-based services haven't yet found their way to time-based apps. Scale, rank, featured, comparison, grouping and categorization, tagging, and more. More significantly, the value in time-based apps ought to be content over time. So, in this case, talk over time. Imagine twitter snapshots, timelines, and histories. Time-based apps will have rhythm and pacing where page-based apps don't. Time-based apps have moments, episodes, periods (of time).

News, for example, has its message content and then its urgency. The significance of news is as much a matter of its arrival as it is what is said. News is one of those strange kinds of message whose importance is announced on its envelope (Urgent!). Given that twitter now serves as a newswire, and is used so often for news (and not "What are you doing", which is rarely newsworthy), we could imagine interface solutions that explore the temporal dimensions of talk and speech over the content dimensions (which have been mined by search, browse, and other page-based navigation conventions).

To get more specific, and to explore these thoughts further, I will address these ideas further by looking at several lifestreaming apps in the days ahead.

Related reading
Stowe Boyd on Lifestreaming
Brian Solis on Lifestreaming
Mashable on Lifestreaming

Future of social web: system and practices

Jeremiah Owyang has posted his thoughts on what may come in the long-term for the social web, beginning with the increasing relevance of activities like friending: Why 'Friending' Will Be Obsolete. He writes that as the system learns about our behaviors, preferences, and relationships that it will be able to automate and supply information we normally have to declare explicitly today. I couldn't agree more.

Jeremiah summarizes his model like this:

"The System: The system is the combination of all websites combined, it's a massive data base of content, clicks, search terms, time on site, shared posts, wall posts, links, and tweets.

Teaching the System: Humans are constantly speaking in machine language, from use of hashtags in twitter, or boolean searches in Google, or even from the act of friending folks in your social network. All of these behaviors are humans teaching the system how to understand us, so it can better serve us.

The Intelligent Web: Software that is able to collect and make sense of all the data in the system and is able to deliver meaningful content back to people in context -- often without us saying or gesturing that we need it."


The web was built on links between documents -- objects -- and since it's inception has grown to accommodate not only many different object or media types, but their relevance, popularity, and other measures of use also. In fact links on the social web need not always point to the same thing. Social navigation in the form of a top-ten, for example, points to not only a changing set of top ten items, but updates itself as it is used, thus reflecting social use.

Behind Jeremiah's vision of the future is the system's interest in capturing and recontextualizing its own use. If the static web was merely a network of static connections, the social web is a dynamic network of changing connections. If we assume that social use will remain a priority for web builders and designers, applications and their businesses, then the relevance of information provided by the web will likely be qualified along two axes: the personal and the social, or the particular and the general. The next generation web, in systems speak, is a second-order observer system. Meta data supplies a second order observation of its own use: the web knows not only what it publishes but also how users interact with it.

Because the system is open, is dynamic, and is always in use, the new system is not a static collection but a dynamic and changing set of connections -- connections whose relevance to an individual user and to the audience in general change over time. The next generation system has time. The first generation system did not.

I see, or would like to imagine, a system whose links are no longer document links but are instead "views." Each view (link) of information might then take into account meta data along our two axes: one user-centric, the other social-centric. A user centric view would be informed by my past history and tacit (learned) and explicit (declared) preferences. My tastes and interests, in other words. The social-centric view would be informed by social usage, social ratings and votes, interests, trends, and so on. I might use sliders to set the view I want on a social site -- stuff for me or stuff socially organized.

There is another development coming for the next generation system, and that is the temporal organization of system (vs spatial organization). The topic comes up in discussions on lifesreaming and flow apps (which I'll discuss soon), and often takes the form of talk-based apps vs page-based apps. Twitter, for example, is not page based: it lacks navigation, topical organization, topical layout, and so on, choosing instead the temporal organization of content used by time-based apps like IM, chat, and email. As more of these apps innovate, become more visual, and go mobile, time-based interaction tools will mature. We'll have two modes of interacting with the system: from within the river of flow or from its shores: watching as it streams past.

Innovation of late may have produced many look-alikes. But it's when things begin to look alike that exploration begins anew at the margins.

Radian6 and climate change: views of mainstream, blog, and twitter conversations

Using Radian6 to investigate social media conversations around one of my own personal involuntary preoccupations -- climate change -- I geeked out this afternoon for a while and have these screen shots to share and discuss. What you see above are three topical clouds created by a search across media types over thirty days for the keyword phrase "climate change." (Click it for actual size.) All media (top left) includes blogs and forums, video, images, mainstream online media, and twitter. The top middle shows results from just blogs and forums, and twitter. And the top right window shows results for twitter only.

Below the cloud panes is a topical drill down spanning the same time period: showing results for terms within the "climate change" results. (In other words, a comprehensive survey would require additional searches. Each results in a bucket of results that can then be further filtered and searched.)


I noticed "radiohead" in the twitter view, top right, and clicked it to see posts. (screenshot on left). Cooler heads prevailing, Radiohead had turned down a US promotional gig to spare the air. True or not, I didn't have time to check.

Looking at the results, I clicked the peak on April 21 to see what was up that day. Doh -- earth day. I entered that, and a few other terms, for the screen to the left. (It being earth day every day here in San Francisco, this one had pretty much slipped out through the fissures that crack me up, in my mind, way in the back of my mind.... Ok, honestly, earth day a bit redundant nowadays, isn't it?)

I used the cloud views to find keywords to add to the trend panel. Radiohead didn't register in the trend panel, for example. "Green" is just below "earth day," suggesting that perhaps "Green day" could have taken advantage of some free media coverage (are they still together? I confess I don't recall. Another case of fissure. Fizz-ure... ) Next in prominence on that day were "food," "gas," "action," and "president," which, if I were a writer for The Colbert report, I could have made into a joke, using, perhaps, either "food" or "gas" as the subject of "action" taken against the "president."

Interesting that on Earth day both food and gas were of concern. Food growing or food eating? And seeing as "prices" are just beneath "president," it's possible that food and gas prices may have occurred in Earth day commentary that included administration policies and leadership. Or not. One doesn't want to read between the lines. (Though the lines are pretty close together, and track nicely, so hey, why not?)

As you can see making sense of these verbal trends is not rocket science. Could we have guessed without searching that food and gas prices would come up together? They track with earth day, but to be fair, there was a UN report released that wknd regarding the food crisis. It's possible that they're related. Wouldn't take a poet.

Now what's cool about this tool is that you can read the news sources for any additional key phrases right here. Even view videos. And you can browse a list of influencers (sites and blogs) for the topical profile. Shown here are influencers and a "river of news." Global warming was the biggest hit within "climate change," and shown here are posts that refer to global warming. (Inluencers can be sorted by unique commenters, total comments, enagement (number of comments and length of comment), and topical inbound links.

Now in this view, which focuses on April 20 - 22 (earth day and one day prior and post), there are interesting differences between the topic clouds for mainstream media. Look at the list below. Differences in terms used in the mainstream media, on blogs and twitter, and on twitter alone, are clear. Mainstream media describe a high-level view of the discourse, blogs, commentary on that discourse, and twitter, more personal and actionable conversation.

_____mainstream_____
emissions
issues
america
government
department
public
scientists
national
federal
country
world


_____blogs and twitter_____
save
reduce
live
weather
real
better
information
future
article
action


_____twitter_____
industry
fight
students
right
difference
help
water
citizen
officials
college
sustainability

So far this search has turned up roughly what one would expect of it, and indeed you find what you're looking for when using measurement tools. The benefit of tracking end user conversations such as those on twitter ought to be in the authenticity of twitter talk, and in its speed and immediacy. Radian6, because it updates in real time, can be used to follow these conversations as they happen. That said, it's necessary to supplement twitter talk with blogs and mainstream media, for they provide the narratives, arguments, and semantic map of the conversation space. Topical context is assumed by twitter users (as it is often in chat and IM) -- that context is provided by the slower talk media. At this time, twitter is still very small, and on-topic results for searches on twitter are noisy and fragmented. But for those interested in personal expressions and conversation, and for a read on real-time audience attention and interest levels, there's a lot of potential yet in what twitter can surface.


Note: I did not explore Radian6's tools for influencer results and additional keyword drilldowns in this post.

Influencers, Promoters, Inviters and other social media user types

I happened on a local bookstore going out of business yesterday and raided the psychology section, picking up a number of cardinal texts at $2.98 a pop. One of them was Please Understand Me, by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, of the Keirsey personality test. Actually, they call it temperament, not personalities. Reading the complete descriptions of what makes up INTFs and ENTPs et al was a real eye-opener, not to mention an entertaining and insightful read.

Character types, modified to account for the effects of social media and related technologies on interaction and communication, and taking into account users' communication styles, relationship preferences, and sense of self and self image, could be a powerful addition to current efforts to architect social analytics and conversation analytics programs.

The state of the art in measuring and making use of social media users and social graphs still centers on relatively straight-forward views of influence, attention, intention, and social capital. While these are more easily measured on closed social networks, a model for analysis of distributed social media tools, including twitter and feed-based apps, is clearly on a lot of people's minds. PR, marketing, advertising, branding, and customer service industries all want in on social media, and whether they stand by the sidelines watching, tracking, and monitoring, or jump into the river of conversation and engage, analytical tools and engagement applications will be essential. Nobody, but nobody, could possibly manage to be in the flow everywhere and at all times.

Traditional mass media approaches to audience metrics may have given us the right questions, and brought us to an appropriate starting point. But social media approaches will be needed now if we're to make proper sense of audience behavior. And here's where character psychologists like Keirsey might be of help.

I have an approach to social interaction design that takes conventional view of user experience and interaction design and extends it to social media users. With an eye to interpersonal dynamics, communication, and social practices, I like to call user behaviors "competencies." Each of us, as users interacts with social media and with others using it according to personal preferences, tastes, and most importantly, perceptions and interpretations. Our social skills online are social competencies. But each of us is different in our uses and, as psychologists would say, our behavior is informed by our psychology.

While this might be looking down the road a couple years, wouldn't an effective social analytics tool, and engagement platform (say, for advertisers and marketers) use not only social metric data but also psychological and personality models? Take the concept of the influencer, for example. As it stands today, an influencer is a well connected, credible, trusted, and active. He or she may also be on topic. That's not currently in the model, but should and probably will be, shortly, as we fold in not only who the person is but what s/he talks about (with credibility). So we might add expert to influencer.

But there are other kinds of user types, too, whose role in conversation can benefit specific marketing, branding, or advertising interests. There's the expert. The inviter. The emcee. The connector. The artist. The follower. And more. Keirsey has 16 types, I've got a similar number, tho based around communication and presencing styles. The inviter, for example, would serve the needs of event promoters. The follower, the needs of PR and news dissemination. The expert validates new products. The emcee gathers together like-minded friends, and would benefit branding or entertainment rollouts.

This is a new medium, and it begs for appropriate analysis. The metrics used in mass media measurement serve the purposes of a medium in which two-way and friend or peer-network constrained interactions don't exist. The future is engagement. Granted, masses of data will have to be mine and modeled. But isn't that what we're good at?

There's consistency in psychology, and applied appropriately and insightfully, durability in behavior and relationships. The noise will subside if we can wise up and if we put users first. If we fail, the doors blow open and a river of spam will inundate the flow. Either way, the mass marketplace is going to enter the stream.

Keirsey temperament overview see:
http://www.simpletone.com/cdi/aharon/types.htm

Climate change and web 2.0

An article on bringing Web 2.0 to bear on climate change caught my eye this sunny and serene Sunday am. It's a short post on Climate Feedback presenting threaded discussion forum for use in managing debate and discussion among those interested in climate change. Conceived as an "argument tree," here's a summary of how it's supposed to work:

The structure requires people to present their comments in one of four categories: issues to be addressed, options for resolving those issues, the pros in favor of various options, and the cons against them. In this way, the debate could become self-organized, making it easier for people to see what’s been said, and whether points have been supported or rebutted.

Mason Inman, for Nature Network

There's no argument with threaded discussion as a means of conducting an exchange. And the tree format shown should work fine as a means of structuring topics. (Keeping users on topic is another, and a separate matter; a community vote or approval system might work as a check on post topicality -- e.g. topical digg.)

But at a more general level, other web 2.0 tools should be able to contribute to climate change conversations. We know already that social activism has benefited from the social web. And fundraising -- to wit, Obama -- along with micro-funding and philanthropy have also made notable headway with the help of web 2.0 sites and tools. In the conversation space, things are a bit murky still. For example, I've got an ongoing interest in sites like change.org, greatnonprofits.org, razoo.com, goodtree.com and others, for their potential in shaping discourse and circulating ideas and sentiments. They offer the hope of shifting cultural dispositions in favor of conservation and ecology-minded consumerism. And insofar as they integrate or contribute to social networking sites, by providing users with green interests and green identities, they help to green affinity groups and cultural trends.

Might there be benefits, too, from twitter and conversation tools? In spreading news and alerting audiences to breaking climate change stories, for example? In shaping sentiment by making green a more visible taste or consumer preference? By demonstrating that green matters to the social media savvy crowd? And most importantly, by illustrating to big media that every week should be green week, every day should be earth day, and that the issue of climate change is not a holiday, special report, or feature, but an ever-present and persistent daily concern?

Of course, the planet's own changing weather may change our reality sooner than we change our mentality. And at the end of the day, green branding may be seen less as a shift in opinion and more as a necessary cultural adaptation. If our practices are a reflection of our views, if what we do is a manifestation of how we talk about it, then talk technologies should indeed have something to offer.

Mining social media

I had some compelling conversations with Joseph Carrabis of Nextstage Evolution this past week at SNCR's NewComm Forum where I was also formulating what I'll be doing this year as a sr research fellow. Joseph's company has a patented method for predicting or anticipating user behaviors online. As described, the patent sounded quite broad, but with or without patent his approach was interesting.

It's based on a number of user profiles based on information. I'm a relational and communication-oriented person, so I took some friendly issue with his approach. Insofar as the social web is a communication space, and social media facilitate talk -- in varying degrees of speed, depth, persistence, contextuality, and topicality, I can't see how a model can ignore characteristics of communication and interpersonal psychology.

When our interactions are mediated, ambiguities of intent, trust, sincerity, motive and so on seep into online communication. Psychology and personality differentiate user behavior as they do in any social encounter, and people engage and respond according to their tendencies, sensitivities, and blind spots.

A combination of user psychology (developed perhaps in the form of personality types modified to suit communication styles online) and information-centric interests and preferences might make for a powerful tool. And as the glut of information online is intensified by the sudden popularity of talk tools like Twitter as well as feed-based applications, anyone interested in reaching users/consumers by interest, affinity, or taste, will need intelligent engagement tools.

This will be a huge market. And the companies that not only succeed on the analytical side of monitoring, tracking, and measuring user behavior but also on the engagement side of giving marketers, publishers, and advertisers targeted, social graph-informed, and actionable campaign management tools will pull in some serious cash.

The social web is a gold mine. And as was the case during the gold rush, it's the guys selling mining tools that will make a killing.

Psychological profiling and forensic analysis -- in social media?

Ever since Fritz Lang's "M," featuring a maniacal performance by Peter Lorre in the role of a marked man (literally - ! ) furtively evading a public stirred by published reports of a child molester on the loose, we've had a dark fascination with the mentality of criminals. They are pursued by cops, private eyes, private citizens, mobs and mobsters, and more recently, forensic professionals. Witch hunts aside, the two most common methods of capturing the criminal are with deductive or inductive reasoning: the analysis of evidence, or psychological insight. The pursuers either read the signs of the crime for the criminal behind it, or figure out where he's likely to strike next based on a grasp of his motives and obsessions.

It would be interesting to apply this to social media analysis... One might use site and user behavior and activity to form a bed of evidence, and accompany that with insights into user psychology, habits, tastes, preferences, and other interests, for predictive purposes. With a solid framework marketers and advertisers might more successfully reach the right consumer at the right time. A multiply-targeted and designed campaign, scripted to appeal according to user interests, and launched into the user activities most likely to reach that consumer, and to provide the greatest benefit to the marketer, would eliminate some of the wasted effort of today's online marketing.

It's worth the thought. After all, it took decades for the film industry to produce the genres we're familiar with today. At this time we're still in the nascent stages of creating genres of social activity online -- and truth be told most of them have been designed and engineered by, well, designers and engineers. Content owners and producers, those in publishing and entertainment for example, have yet to engage broadly in using social media tools not only to promote and distribute but to create and develop their properties. So what we know of social media is a reflection still of what the end user does with them -- unencumbered by scripts or production value, but also perhaps wanting for more compelling experiences and narratives.

It wouldn't be difficult to imagine a marketing industry that takes advantage of the bridging opportunities here. Social media marketing vehicles might emerge that are far more interactive, narrative, engaging, and content-rich than the simple viral and pass-along popups and widgets we're seeing even today. This might be a case of wishful thinking, it's hard to tell. But it's safe to say that we've yet to push the frontiers here.

We may still be in social media's era of silent film. Could it be that we've yet to think of what we'll do with the "talkies?"

New slideshow on social media user competencies

This slideshow introduces a view of the social media user that emphasizes the sociability, communication, and interaction skills and competencies. In it I make the argument that user experience and interaction designers approach social media with the user's social interests in mind -- and not "needs" and "goals."

I set the user's interest in his or her self image, interest in others, and relational interests. These can be used to build a set of social media competencies, from "telling" about oneself to moderating conversation. Based on social skills but modified to fit the particularities of web and social apps, these competencies might offer a better approach to grasping the user experience than concepts based in a model of user needs.

The big idea here being that social, communicative, and relational "interests" are radically different than the interests based in a cognitive science-based view of the "rational actor." That said, the presentation's light on theory!

A follow-up presentation will look at psychological personalities and propose alternate "personas" for use in social media design.

Downloadable versions of this presentation (keynote, ppt, and pdf), and on slideshare.

| View | Upload your own

Scoble banished for botting Facebook

Folks who know me know that one of my interests last year was social analytics -- and that I'm interested in new ways of capturing and representing our online profiles and activities. Well the news that Robert Scoble's been kicked off Facebook for running scripts indicates, for now at least, that we're going to have to wait on the social networking sites to give us data after all. There's nothing unexpected in this, and I would be surprised if Scoble was caught by surprise.

http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/03/ive-been-kicked-off-of-facebook/

New slideshows on social media and social interaction design

I've posted a couple new slideshow presentations to my site here and to slideshare. This time I threw in some graphics and I've attempted to be as economic with prose as possible! I have one on the conversation dynamics of Yelp.com, and more theoretical one on the Psychology of Users of social media. I'll soon post one on user competencies with social media, and then one on the disruption of markets in which the social web has influence.

Slideshows on Gravity7, downloadable as pdf, powerpoint, and Apple's keynote

Slideshows on Slideshare.net

Comments and feedback are welcome!

What is Social Interaction Design slides

heya folks,

I can finally re-launch my site (softly), which now focuses on social interaction design entirely. I also have a slideshow that introduces, with the brevity forced by use of bullets, the concepts of social interaction design. I'll be posting several more in the week to come on specific aspects of user psychology, web 2.0 applications and how they structure social practices, and case studies/examples.

Have a look if the topic interests you, and I'd love feedback!



On slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/gravity7/what-is-social-interaction-design/

Social technology's transparency among teens

It's no surprise that many of today's youths exercise a their social skills through social media technologies. They've got a kind of socio-technical competence that would make many of us look like complete hacks. That's interesting to me. What happens to a person's competence in face to face interactions if she or he spends a great deal of time in mediated interactions? If, as a recent study claims, these technologies are truly transparent (a software designer's dream!), is their absence in face to face encounters noticeable? Are teens more likely to be shy in real life?

It's much easier to control one's own face if it's not in front of somebody else. We can hide behind our emotions if there's a screen to represent them instead. Flirtatious gestures, suggestive comments, messages, emoticons, jokes, and so on present the personal with the technical help of what amounts to a technical communication system. Codes, idioms, genres, forms of writing, posting, commenting and so on remove affect and flatten out differences, rendering communication somewhat less communicative...

It would be interesting to know if a new generation is becoming more shy in face to face situations.

And this is truly just hypothesizing out loud.. Is it possible that if the demands of getting through face to face encounters with successs, being and feeling liked and recognized while making others comfortable during some shared facetime -- without recourse to the screen and the imaginary sense of remote control that it can bestow upon its users -- is it possible that a reliance on technical mediation of the social could produce real symptoms?

Just as parents shrink at the communicative risks and unknowns, the faux pas that might lurk behind every dialog box and mouseclick... Would a dependence on the props of social media be seen and heard in conversation malaprops and stagefright?

If so, what a sad thing it would be. We get to know each other best in person.



Excerpts from The virtual generation by Jo Chandler, August 14, 2007


"As a new global survey of 18,000 youths commissioned by MTV and MSN has found, while today's youth are engrossed in a constant conversation, almost 40 per cent do not even notice the technology that enables it. This is despite a similar number saying that checking their mobiles is the first and last task of every day; two-thirds of them saying that checking who is online is their first priority whenever they boot up; and all of them using email or instant messaging every time they log in. They have skills that would have classified them as computer nerds a decade ago, but they don't regard themselves as technophiles. This is just their country."
....

"For girls, it is mostly about the social networks, with the music and tricks an add-on. For the boys it is the opposite. They enjoy the process of creating and sharing music and imagery and jokes - hence their love of YouTube; playing virtual games and invisible wars; breaking codes and deciphering clues to allow them to better understand and manipulate the technology."

....

"AS TEENAGERS' virtual networks expand, their real worlds contract. "We put more and more money into pastoral care, into communicating with each other, but when it comes to communicating face to face, we are poorer than we have ever been," says Shelford principal Pam Chessell.

....

She says the task of 15-year-olds is to begin to find and define themselves. But "teenagers are so immersed in their fabricated virtual identities that these become real to them"."

....

"They get bored so quickly. They need this gadgetry. They need to keep the balance of books and technology."