The End of Cyberspace

Community Building

(Notes from Mobile Mash-Up 2007. As usual, these are my notes, for what they're worth.)

Moderator: Serena Glover, Tango
Matthew Rothenberg, Flickr.
Jessica Alter, Bebo.
Kevin Yen, YouTube.

SG: Where do you see communities going? Broader with less depth, lots of focused communities, what?

MR: People tell stories through photographs; we're enabling that.
JA: The purpose of most networks is to facilitate self-expression. People go to Flickr to interact, but also to express themselves: they say things, and have people to say them to.
KY: Groups within Flickr are forming around specific interests; we provide breadth, and let people create their own depth.

SG: How will open APIs change the nature of communities? Good, bad, change the value proposition?

KY: The cool opportunity is to develop one app that works across several platforms, eliminating versioning work (which "is a big drag on creativity"). Little apps may clutter the experience.
JA: We're surprised by what people turn out to like. Multiplatform development is good for developers. Downsides: something like Open Social probably won't be as deep as the applications developed for Facebook; user experience can be diluted and made more confusing by a proliferation of apps; you've got to give up some control.
MR: Flickr was built on open APIs, and they've always wanted to make it as easy as possible to move data into and out of the service. Open APIs don't excuse us from having to moderate and watch what these APIs do, or what people do on them: if application developers subvert the tacit social contract between Flickr and its users, then we've got to step in.

JA: Needs to be a real focus on the user experience. Mobile "is an inherently different beast than the Web." (What differentiates genuinely mobile networks from ones that have a mobile portal?)
KY: Utility is obviously very important, and people will be willing to trade a measure of convenience or ease of use for functionality.
MR: Interaction of mobility with social interaction sites: ease of accessing or creating content. "The next generation is creating services that augment your experience in the real world." Most current services are about taking you away from your social context, but social context matters immensely for mobile phone use.
JA: Mobile phones matter a lot more than PCs in other parts of the world: you've gotta pay attention to that.

SG: Do you think existing communities will jump to mobile?

KY: "Flash communities" of people who are in the same event-- like this conference. From taking pictures to live streaming media.
JA: Mobile social networks have a Web component; you've got to design for both. "Taking your real life and creating a mobile experience" around it will be really important.

SG: Web communities are global, and users play a big role shaping those communities and their norms. Will mobile communities be more local, or have other kinds of social norms than obtain in Web communities?

KY: In YouTube, we're still learning: for a long time it was all in English, and we're starting to localize in the UK, Japan, and elsewhere. Even still, a huge amount of the traffic goes to the U.S.
MR: Flickr has been a global site since the beginning, and we're trying to figure out how to make it possible for users to group and wall themselves off when they really want to-- or protect themselves from things they consider objectionable.

Technorati Tags: community, end of cyberspace, Mobile Mash-Up 2007, mobility, social software, Web 2.0

Mobile Mash-Up 2007

I'm going to be spending much of the day at Mobile Mash-Up 2007. I'm moderating an insanely short discussion on "The Future of Connected Communities," featuring Eric Paulos (Intel Research), Marc Davis (Yahoo), Andrew Fiore (Berkeley), and Scott Golder (HP Labs). It's one of those panels where the job of the moderator is to watch the clock and get out of the way-- the best kind of moderator gig.

Technorati Tags: community, conference, end of cyberspace, Mobile Mash-Up 2007, mobility

Jeremy Shapiro and Linda Crafts, "The Streaming Body as the Site of Telecommunications Convergence"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

People's bodies are interfaces for media, and the processes by which people import media and radiate their bodies out into the world of media and networks (the streaming body) are the subject of Shapiro and Crafts' talk.

Inscribing the Body. We do lots of things to inscribe cultural values and representations onto the body: think of tattoos, scarification, piercing, etc.. The Apple iTunes ads suggest how we sync our bodies to devices; we also stream bodies, posting videos of everything from lip syncing to sex, contributing to diet or medical advice Web sites, etc..

Synching and Streaming.

Action and Perception --> Technical world --> Simuli (ICTs, media, Internet, etc.) --> Embodied Human -->

We're familiar with the technical structure of convergence; we have some knowledge of the cultural dimensions of convergence (this is what Henry Jenkins talks about); what we want to do is talk about the corporeal, drawing on phenomenology, science studies, etc..

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: mobility, philosophy, Budapest, pervasive computing

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi on "Time and Motion in Mobile Communications"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

(Author of Linked, and various other cool things. Now at Northeastern University and the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard.)

When do events take place? When doing things like calculating the capacity of communications system, we assume that it's random, uniform in time, and the timing follows a Poisson process. In reality, communication tends to be bursty: e-mail, for example, tends to be sent in clumps. It follows power laws, and can be mapped as a straight line on a log-log scale. This same distribution is also the case for library visits (measured by checkout records), document printing, web page views, cell-phone calls, and just about everything else we can measure.

Why does life work in bursts? Look at to do lists. We tend to assign priorities to tasks, rather than do them randomly or treat a list as a stack. When you follow priorities, high-prority tasks are completed quickly, and some will be done after a long time: you end up with a power law.

Does the length of the queue matter? No-- you get the same kind of behavior.

Random Walks. Lots of things follow random walks, or Levy walks (where jump size can vary). Studies of animal motion follows Levy laws, and humans do too: an analysis of money movement from Where's George also follows Levy laws, as does the motion of cell phones detected from tower triangulation.

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: pervasive computing, ubicomp, conference, Budapest, mobility

Jane Vincent, "Emotion and My Mobile"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

There are 2.5B users, and in some countries more phones than people; there are more Internet-enables phones than PCs. So there are lots of people using mobile phones, and using them in lots of ways.

Vincent's interest is in the emotional dimension of mobile phone use. She uses it do some familiar things-- talk, take pictures, write to others-- and this familiarity is important in the object's ubiquity. She also uses it to remember things: they take pictures of stuff in stores, posters for upcoming events, ads, etc..

On the other hand, there are differences: photos 100 years ago were memorabilia, while today's cell phone pictures are often completely disposable. The picture-taking itself can also be the point, rather than the pictures. People also use it to capture more ephemeral memories: to record things that might not have been commemorated (it's more ethnographic than ritualistic).

The research. Looking at emotional relationships or attachments to phones. Working out of the interactionist theory (following Goffman), emotion work (Hochschild on managed emotions and "moments of pinch").

• Relationships and mobiles are integral but not always symbiotic.
• Communications occur in the "middle stage" of interactionist theory.
• There's an emotional paradox of wanted and unwanted communications.
• Managing the intrusions of Back Stage-- dealing with "moments of pinch."
• Using emotion work to manage mobile phone communications.

Some "events... occur in a special or unique way when mediated by the mobile:" some users have practices that are unique: some couples talk while commuting on different systems, or use the phone to take pictures of kids because the kids react in certain ways. What they love is not the device, but what you can use it for.

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: ubicomp, mobility, conference, pervasive computing, Budapest, communication

Zoltan Kovecses, "The Cell Phone as a Conceptual Category"

Talk at the Philosophy of Telecommunications Convergence conference (caveat).

Background in cognitive science and linguistics.

Wants to understand how people think about and describe cell phones (and it'll be completely objective, since I don't have a cell phone). People seem to use four dimensions: function, significance, effect, and use.

Function. Cell phones are like computers; by implication, because we tend to think of computers are somewhat like human brains, this suggests a measure of cognitive anthopomorphization of cell phones as well. Integrates a handheld device with a model of the mind. Cell phones can be like other devices as well: comparisons with the Swiss Army knife are also popular. Some people also describe cell phones as friends.

Significance. Cell phones are like essentials: air, food, lifelines. They're like extensions of the body, organs or appendages. They're like languages: being without a cell phone is like not knowing the language.

Effect. Having a cell phone is like smoking: it's addictive. Cell contracts are like prison sentences.

Use. People conceptualize the value in numerous ways, but one dominant metaphor is automotive, both in terms of importance, and in terms of customization and price (you can pimp out both, there are basic and expensive versions, etc.).

Naturally, there are gender metaphors: cell phones are like hookers-- the thin ones cost more; they're like men-- after the first one, you know how to choose them well.

Appropriate versus inappropriate uses: driving while talking on the cell is like drinking and driving; regulation of cell phones is appropriate.

(It would be fascinating to do this study for several languages-- for English, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, etc.)

[ Posted from Hungarian Academy of Sciences via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: Budapest, communication, conference, language, pervasive computing, ubicomp

The decline of the graphical user interface (1): Mobile devices

I'm not a Mac fanatic, but every computer I've bought with my own money has been a Mac. I got an SE in 1988, and have gone through various Quadras, iMacs, and laptops since then. Since the beginning much of the appeal of the Mac was the graphical interface. First, it was the only personal computer with a GUI. Then after the appearance of Windows, it was a better version of the GUI: cleaner, faster, more intuitive, or whatever.

I still gravitate to Macs, but I'm beginning to see the outlines of a future in which graphics are really good, but the graphical user interface is obsolete.

Two things are driving the fall of the GUI. One is mobile devices, whose screens are too small to handle the kinds of GUIs we've had on personal computers. The other is the growth of search and tagging tools as an alternative to visual (and often hierarchical) systems for organizing and accessing documents on personal computers. I'll talk about the first here.

Consider the iPod. For all of the attention the neat color screens have gotten-- and they are pretty neat-- what strikes me about the iPod, and the iPod Touch, is how much of the navigation is text- and list-based. Sure, it'll play movies and TV shows, and show you album cover art, and the little screens are surprisingly easy to watch (though I have a much more satisfying time watching things I'm familiar with, probably because my brain is filling in details that the screen doesn't actually show). But you don't use icons to navigate: you navigate through text menus.

I've spent a little time playing with Cover Flow, and my sense is that it really doesn't make the iPod interface less logocentric: it provides an additional piece of information to, for example, help you tell the difference between two different versions of "Midnight Train to Georgia," but it doesn't put you back in a world of folders or desktops.

Likewise, every cell phone has a nice color screen, and some icons that when clicked on will take you to different functions; but again, most of the time, I'm selecting from menus and scrolling through lists. The screen may be pretty, and the color is nice on the eyes, but my cell phone company hasn't tried to create a little information landscape on the phone's screen. Instead, they've gone with menus.

That's probably a smart choice, because menus are probably easier to work through, particularly when you're only giving partial attention to the interface. When I was sitting at my desk, I could focus on icons and folders, but when I'm walking down the street or driving (not that I ever do that), I want something much simpler: looking at simple words, or better yet, one-touch dialing.

Creating devices that let you interact with information while interacting with the world reduces the appeal of interfaces that are themselves little worlds. And I suspect that shifting from situations where we devote the bulk of our attention to graphical interfaces, to ones where we devote fragments of our attention to text-based interfaces, reduces the relevance of the the idea that we're interacting with an alternate dimension of information.

Technorati Tags: design, end of cyberspace, interface, mobility

My favorite new example of convergence

Yesterday I discovered something called BluePhoneElite, a program that lets my cell phone talk to my MacBook.

The great things about it are that 1) it lets me sync my address book on my Mac to my address book in my Motorola Razr; 2) you can dial phone calls from your Mac, so if you don't have a phone number in your cell phone's address book, you needn't rekey it; and 3) when I have an incoming call, it'll turn off my music (I've usually got the headphones on when I work), and tell me who's calling.

A couple of my colleagues have also discovered it, and are crazy about the SMS support-- get a text message, the MacBook will display it and save a copy-- but since I don't SMS much, it's less a thing. For heavy-duty SMSers, I can see how it would be cool.

It's a great example of what device convergence ought to be.

It's also an interesting experiment in either the limits of convergence, or the way boundaries between devices may be defined by use context and user habits. For example, there's a beta version of BPE that lets you actually make calls and talk through your phone's microphone-- essentially turning your computer into a giant cell phone headset-- but I think I'd just use Skype if I wanted to make a call through my computer. There's no gain to be had by running a call from my cell phone, through my computer, and from there either through my lousy speakers or into a headset. Essentially, I'd be turning a cell phone into a really clunky land line.

What I'd really like is the opposite functionality. I'd like to be able to use my cell phone as a Skype headset, and either make calls on the cell network, or through Skype, depending on what made the most sense. This would give my Skype some ergonomic flexibility, without requiring me to buy some expensive new hardware.

Perhaps this is a clue to mapping what kinds of convergence will succeed. Convergence that increases functionality and interaction flexibility-- like the cell phone as headset scenario-- will win; convergence that doesn't provide greater interaction flexibility-- like the computer as cell phone scenario-- will lose. Or they'll lose with me, anyway.

Technorati Tags: computer, end of cyberspace, phone

Smartspace

One of my Technorati watchlists pointed me to Smartspace, a newish blog (started in February, not long after this one) on

annotated environments, intelligent infrastructure and digital landscapes--the merging of technology with the environment around us, and the overlay of digital environments on the physical ones we inhabit.

Hmm, sounds like familiar stuff. And the banner is one of the most beautiful I've seen on any blog. Is that Hong Kong? Tokyo?

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, end of cyberspace, mobility, pervasive computing, place/space, ubicomp

Espresso @ Xando, and the nature of the Internet cafe

I'm in Baltimore for the next couple days for work. This afternoon, while walking around Johns Hopkins in the warm blanket-like heat of the Southern summer, I stopped in Xando for a quick espresso.

Xando is a pretty decent chain: I first saw them in Philadelphia, shortly after I finished grad school. And this one seemed rather nice. I'm sure it does a booming business during the school year.

When I was in school, Penn had absolutely no coffee places. There were places where you could buy coffee, but no actual cafes. I'm not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing for me in my last year, when I was spending 12 hours a day writing my dissertation. Probably since I didn't have a laptop, it was a good thing.

Actually, I wonder if you graphed the growth of cafes in the U.S. (or just around universities) with the penetration of laptops, would you see a correlation? More to the point, could you make a reasonable causative argument-- that the growth of laptops has played a role in making cafes more attractive spaces? In the U.S., it seems to me, the "Internet cafe" hasn't quite taken off in the way it has in, say, Asia or the Middle East, though it has become A Thing. Arguably we have as many Internet cafes as any place in the world, if by the term you mean cafes where people go to drink coffee and access the Internet. The difference is, in the States we tend to bring our own machines, not rent them from the cafe.

Technorati Tags: baltimore, cafe, Johns Hopkins, mobility, space, travel