mishmap

Small Worlds and the group web

Posted on May 31st, 2008 by Brian.
Categories: mashups, social networks.

I’m impressed by Small Worlds, the virtual world (now in Beta) by New Zealand based Outsmart. Unlike worlds like Second Life, Small Worlds is an in-browser flash application that works without an audience diminishing separate download. As I’ll explain in this post, it has the potential to bring a new social dynamic to the masses.

After creating your avatar, you choose a room and populate it with furniture and gadgets including a radio streaming last.fm, artwork displaysing your flickr feed, YouTube videos or Twitter tweets, and arcade games to challenge your friends. Click on a pool table or a chess board for a quick casual game. The mashup possibilities with other popular Internet services seem endless - I’d love to see an in-game map or globe where I can pinpoint previous or future travel destinations.

But I’m most excited about how easy and natural it feels to interact with other people. The last 5 years of social networking have demonstrated a progression in interactivity. First it was your individual profile - you create a page of self-description (favorite quotes, bands, etc). Then came the testimonial or public wall where you left messages to be discovered by others trolling your page. We then graduated to the Facebook newsfeed, where you can keep tabs on your wide social circle in a less time consuming way (no need to click each profile for the latest updates).

But while a sense of community was formed, it wasn’t real time. With an avatar based paradigm like Small Worlds, it’s natural to communicate with many people in your virtual room and participate in real-time group dialog. The learning curve is much lower than Second Life, where it takes hours to acclimate.

I experienced an AHA! moment, where I envisioned myself sending friends and new contacts a URL link (all rooms have their own web addresses) instead of an email address or Linked In invite. Once clicked, they enter my room and get treated to an online representation of Me - my design aesthetic, latest ideas, projects, photos, playlists, favorite restaurants and reviews. Ringing a bell might alert me through my IM client that I have a visitor so I can open up Small Worlds in my browser and catch up, maybe inviting a few mutual friends to plan a BBQ next weekend.

We haven’t yet reached Snowcrash technology, but Small Worlds is a step closer to a web less about Me and more about Us.

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No more work-play division

Posted on April 13th, 2008 by Brian.
Categories: social networks.

I’m reading Everywhere by Adam Greenfield and came across a few paragraphs that describe today’s facebook/twitter reality. With employers googling and myspacing potential new hires, it’s unrealistic to be both a content publisher and expect a work/play division.

And above all, what happens when the composite view we are offered of our own selves conflicts with the way we would want those selves to be perceived?

Erving Goffman taught us, way back in 1958, that we are all actors. we all have a collection of masks, in other words, to be swapped out as the exigencies of our transit through life require: one hour stern boss, the next anxious lover. who can maintain a custody of the self conscious and consistent enough to read as coherent throughout all the input modes everyware offers?

What we’re headed for, I’m afraid, is a milieu in which sustaining different masks for all the different roles in our lives will prove to be untenable, if simply because too much information about our previous decisions will follow us around. And while certain futurists have been warning us about this for years, for the most part even they hadn’t counted on the emergence of a technology capable of closing the loop between the existence of such information and its actionability in everyday life. For better or worse, everyware is that technology.

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Avoid fancy applications with the Facebook Platform

Posted on June 19th, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: social networks.

Something irks me about the recent hype surrounding the new Facebook Platform. Visually, these new applications all look the same and it feels so bland.

Universally celebrated by both users and programmers, Facebook’s decision to open up its ecosystem to developers certainly spiced up a social network formerly known for its cool way of tagging photos. Now you can superpoke me, Flixster or Flickr, read my fortune (or horoscope), PET MY LOLCAT (PURR!), digg! me, pirate music that you iLike, and stalk me all over the globe.

And you can do all of this from your comfy 1024 x 768 pixel easy-chair, branded with that trustworthy (heck, it must be safe - your friends are all here!) blue and white Facebook design motif.

And therein lies the problem, at least with the initial batch of applications; they’re so uniform, void of individuality as they all pipe the same tune of riches through Facebook monetization (?). Some of these apps do too much, trying to recreate the well-designed functionality of their full-blown website, but tamed in an awkward foreign environment.

On one hand, I commend Facebook on the (calculated) courage it took to lead the anti-myspace dance and embrace an open platform. Their API would make any VC firm salivate since their web 2.0 investment can now interact with 25+ million users (”fantastic demographics for our advertisers!”) through special text markup and custom database queries (”FQL” makes me snicker).

However, third party applications would be better served by focusing on the golden nugget offered by Facebook, which is the “network of friends” and the viral opportunity presented by “news feeds”. If Johnny sent Sarah a free gift, it must be worth something and I must click on the free gift application and send one to Marcus right now!

Just as Twitter’s gift to the community was the text messaging infrastructure, Facebook blessed us with the social network infrastructure and viral nature easily leveraged by existing websites to drive up their page impressions.

So instead of reproducing your website’s functionality on Facebook, write a Facebook application to be a simple “dashboard”, highlighting how a user’s network of friends interacts with your website.

You might consider headings like:

• Most active friends in your network
• Recent reviews by friends in your network
• Photos (or artists or books) most popular in your network

The items under the headings would link to the appropriate page on the destination website. This way, logging onto Facebook is all about checking your friends’ updates (as usual) on your start page and then maybe clicking on a few of these (new) applications to see what your friends are watching, reading or listening to, depending on the nature of the application. The Facebook application acts as a quick preview, but if you want more detail, click a link to visit a separate website.

In effect, Facebook becomes your social aggregator - an easy to read dashboard into your friends’ lives.

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event recommendations by mobile social networks

Posted on May 19th, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: mashups, mobile, social networks.

A mobile social network can recommend events of interest by analyzing information from users with similar profiles. For example:
Miguel, a gay 30 year old New Yorker vacationing in San Francisco, wakes up on Sunday morning wondering what to do. His cell phone beeps with a text message suggesting that he visits Dolores Park later that afternoon.

This suggestion was made because his social network has data that on hot and sunny Sunday afternoons in San Francisco, hundreds of gay men in a social network spend time in Dolores Park.

Let’s deconstruct how the social network arrived at this conclusion:

• In the past 6 months, hundreds of people used their mobile device to access the network from Dolores Park. It knows this because the phone communicates the user’s GPS coordinate. Many phones already have this capability, either built in or through a bluetooth connection with a GPS.
• Whenever a member accesses the social network, it logs the time. Many of these accesses from Dolores Park occur on Sunday afternoons, between 2pm and 5pm.
• On each access, the network contacts an online weather service and logs the weather condition and temperature. Many of these accesses from Dolores Park on Sunday afternoons occur on sunny days above 65°.
• Many of these network accesses correspond to gay men between 25 and 40 years old, as specified in their user profile under “orientation” and “age”.

By collecting data about how and when members use a service, social networks can creatively analyze and find patterns useful to the community. Furthermore, when Miguel arrives at Dolores Park, I would expect the network to facilitate a meeting with other like-minded members nearby.

Update: Related to this, check out this posting describing GyPSii, a social network that tracks users’ GPS location

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