I Want You To Want Me / by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar

3 comments April 18th, 2008

LIFTing

Just arrived @LIFT for its second day, as expected its first day was an intense experience, coming to LIFT always has the effect of recharding another… could be for the frenetic sharing of ideas, the conversations, I honestly don’t know! But I know others that probably agree with me.

LIFT as evolved, Laurent’s team introduced a lot of changes and managed to somehow take LIFT to the next level, I’ll be posting my notes from the different talks I’ve attended on the next coming days, but I would like to highlight some of the things that really got my attention on the first day:

Genevieve Bell

GBell is an internationally recognized ethnographer, and she actually gave one of the best presentation of day, or could just be me, who am a bit biased towards her presentation subject: Secrets, lies & digital deceptions. As a society we all basically lie and we’ve managed to introduce this behavior into our online life’s.

During my workshop here at LIFT I’ve talked a lot about the role of personalization inside online communities, the importance of identity, the need we as humans have to make some sort of ‘impressions’ management and the image we try to project trough our online avatars. I’ve talked a bit how the creation of this personas empower’s us as users to adapt to specific contexts. It has all to do with Integration.

So to some extent it was nice to hear someone like Genevieve stating precisely that, how people lie to adapt, as a self-defense mechanism that helps protect our identity. At the same time, sharing secrets seems to be the base of trust, as in real life, the sharing is what brings us together, so does the same somehow happens online, the more information you share about yourself the more people somehow trust you and your avatar.

Her passionate presentation is already available on video, so take sometime, I really think it’s worth it.

Jonathan Cabiria

Still on the same line of though, Jonathan also gave an great presentation on Permeability. Permeability in the sense of what comes out of our online lives and somehow crosses to our real life and vice-versa. According to Jonathan by being in virtual worlds, people are many times confronted with hidden parts (facets) of themselves, they get the ability of trying out things they might not feel comfortable to do in real life for oh so many reasons. Jonathan also presented a study that showed how this good feelings managed to transpose themselves to the real world and have helped people suffering from depressions to recover from it by rising their feelings of integration, loneliness, isolation, pessimism and/or low self-esteem.

What I took from Jonathan’s message is that the online and real worlds are merging, we’re seeing people moving a big part of their ’social’ lives online. One interesting thought he mentioned was how many times, developers like myself don’t really grasp the entire implications of a social platform that we’ve built. The social applications of a social platform is many times bigger than expected and reaches people and highs that could have never been predicted.

Second day is just starting so for now I just leave this two very short comments on yesterday’s presentations but I promise to write a bit more as soon as I managed to digest all the input I got from yesterday.

One final note for the amazing work that Cristiana and her team from Bread and Butter produced for this year, there are a total of 10 different art projects!

1 comment February 8th, 2008

Some possible impacts of online communities…

Yesterday, just as I finished the workshop on Online Communities), Hamish Campbell caught me and managed to record a short interview where I’ve answered some of his pretty hard questions about the role of online communities as tools for social change…

After seeing and hearing the resulting video I decided that (even if I was really tired and my english was far from perfect) I might as well share it since I honestly believe in the power of social change through technology. I’m posting it here with the hope that anyone interested in such possibilities might enjoy building up or commenting something about my rather simplistic answers.

Add comment February 7th, 2008

Online Communities Clinic Workshop

LIFT08 is happening this coming week in Geneva, it’s concept is very similar to the one we tried to accomplish in SHiFT (which we hope to deliver yet again this year - three full days of workshops, talks, social activities and discussions to get a look at the most important technological trends and meet the people behind them.

After almost didn’t make it this year (time constraints and in the end Patrícia not being able to come along), in the end I’ll be in Geneva to take part of this amazing event and I’ve even proposed an an experimental workshop on Online Community Design Patterns.

This workshop is the evolution from my “Conversational Design presentation“, that I presented last november at the Web2Expo in Berlin . Back in November I tried to squeeze a lot of information in a 50 minute presentation and although the feedback was more than positive, the fact was that I had to leave quite a lot out. The initial presentation aimed to be more practical than theoretical, so in a sense the move to a workshop makes more sense, workshops enable participation and sharing, so in the end we’ll manage to hear, learn and test a lot more than my ideas on this subject.

I envisioned the workshop program into a two part program, a presentation introducing:

• Social Web and Online Communities
• Conversational Patterns: Conversation Maxims on online environments
• Online Communities Patterns: Community Support Patterns and Group Support Patterns

and some group work involving all the participants (analyzing existing online communities of choice according to the materials presented before).

In the end the groups will share their findings with the remaining groups and I hope we managed to learn and share a bit more about what makes an online community thrive or die.

As side note about the workshop materials, I’ll publish them here after the workshop takes place. (yes.. as usual I’m still working on them)

Add comment February 3rd, 2008

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix

Add comment January 30th, 2008

Conversational Design

I just got back to Portugal, and thankfully with it also go back to the old good connectivity, I’ve managed to upload the presentation from Web2expo in Berlin into SlideShare, not without some trouble, it seems that their size limit (30Mb) was a bit lower than the one I had so I just managed to cut down the presentation into a 2 part presentation:

Conversational Design - Part 1

Conversational Design - Part 2

I’ll write down my notes from the presentation (as soon as I get some sleep) since some interesting topics that didn’t make their way into it because of the time, and others were just the result of the nice feedback I got at the end of the presentation. Hope you enjoy it, and most of all take some key ideas from it to your projects!

6 comments November 8th, 2007

Social Networks Bill of Rights

Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington co-authered a proposal for a Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web/Networks available under the Open Social Web website.

According to this proposition for a bill of rights, every Social Network and/or Application should guarantee 3 fundamental USER rights

• Ownership of their own personal information: own profile data, the list of people they are connected to and the the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

which in practice means that this services should display the following features:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

As further reading about this interoperability problem between different services and networks, I strongly suggest that you watch both Brad’s Fitzpatrick slides and read his “Thoughts on the Social Graph”:

Add comment September 8th, 2007

XFN: the relationships Microformat

My inner geek rejoices with the fact that Microformats have finally got a little more buzz lately! One particular Microformat I’ve been using is XFN (Xhtml Friends Network), aka the Relationships Microformats. This particular Microformat allows me to easily state the sort of relation I have with other people and for instance the blogs I link to.

Yesterday I was discussing with a colleague about whether she should or shouldn’t use them on her upcoming service and although to me the question had a dead simple question, convincing her and others wasn’t as simple as I expected!

People expect us to always have some sort of golden rules, some well defined goals or at least some clear advantages for spending development time/effort in implementing something we’re suggesting. I confess in this case we don’t have them, for for the sake of innovation I really recommend on jump into the unknown sometimes, just for the fun of it.

From our conversation I managed to sort out some key ideas on why we should all start using XFN on every service that can use it:

• CONTACTS AREN’T ALL BORN EQUAL!
  As a user I clear understand that some people are more important to me than others, accept it, it seems to me and although I don’t call everyone friend, I call them all contacts, some of the are actually my friends and family, so some type of differentiation is necessary!
  
  
• EARLY IS AN ADVANTAGE!
  If you think that you might use Microformats like XFN on your service, start using them from day 1! That’s the only way to ensure that you start collecting that extra information from the very begging and your users will start using them on every relation that they define on your service.
  
  This is actually a key factor, all social networks start with high rate of new profiles creation and with them a lot of social relations are created too, having XFN introduce later in this process means that your users will have to endure in a redefine process for every relation they already had on the system, and to me, quite few of your users will actually do it, leaving you with in a mix state of information, some of they have XFN info other don’t.
  
  
• LESS ISN’T ALWAYS GOOD!
  That’s the case with information, traditionally the more information you have, the better! With XFN in particular, the managers of that information will have a better understanding of the types of relationships that are sprouting on their services, allowing them to gather a clear typification of their user base, their interests and the type of relations they’re creating on the service: Who are they inviting, friends? Colleagues? Family? With little effort, this extra information, allow to envision new features where you should really invest some development time in!
  
  To me is relatively simple, even if at the very beginning this extra information is pretty much useless, I really believe that sooner rather than later we’ll all greet ourselves by having it rather than not. As in so many other situations, when we collect information that by itself doesn’t represent or add any value, in the end we always seem to come up with new and interesting ways of using it.
  
  
• GROUPS LACK CONVENTION!
  One of the reasons presented during the conversation for not using XFN was that from the User point of view you could get the same experience by allowing them to create and use different user groups.
  
  Well thats just WRONG!
  
  Sure, groups allow you to separate your friends, but if you allow your users to create user-defined groups, you have no way of actually knowing what type of people he/she is collecting in a particular group. By sticking with the XFN closed attributes you know that the users that used them, although randomly they’ll use it in the same sense and situation!
  

Those were the main results from our quick conversation! Now that I’ve written them, they seem pretty common sense, but they really weren’t when we started.

We surely missed some other reasons for using XFN, does anyone has other “motivation” factors for using them?

1 comment August 31st, 2007

Community/Conversational Design

6 comments April 9th, 2007

Digital Identity Mapping

It’s not new, but I Just came across Fred’s nice map about digital identity:

it’s missing some more recent services, like twitter, but nevertheless is a nice visualization of all the facets available to help us build our digital persona.

Add comment March 28th, 2007