Category: Social Software

At SXSW, I facilitated a session on “RSS: not just for blogs anymore”, with Chris Frye of Feedburner, Scott Johnson of Ookles (formerly of Feedster), and Robyn Dupree of Bloglines.
The panelists gave many examples of the non-blog uses of RSS. The most prevalent is audio/video, which currently represents 20% of feedburner-measured content. “Structured blogging” applications like calendars and restaurant reviews are nifty and seeing experimentation, but not big takeup yet. RSS on mobile devices is used by a small number of users, but those users are very heavy users.
The most fun part of the session was the “fireside demo” format modeled after Wiki Wednesday. This being SXSW, there were plenty of people in the audience with interesting RSS applications. People lined up at the mic to give examples of RSS uses and hacks, including:
* Stuffopolis, a utility for keeping track of lending personal stuff
* Toolshed, a toolset for online music promotion
* 30Boxes (calendar) and Dodgeball plugins for WordPress by Andy Skelton
Here’s the delicious list

Upcoming has good attributes of both guy culture and Silicon Valley culture.
In girl culture, there are infinite nuances to invitations, non-invitations, and anti-invitations. Girls invite to pre-parties, afterparties, and other intimate moments that complement official get-togethers. When a traditional girl wants you to come, she looks you in the eye an invites *you*. When a traditional girl wants to know you’re only sort of welcome, she tells you that there’s an event going on. When a traditional girl wants to snub you, she tells the person standing next to you that they are invited to her event. Bonus girl points for making sure you hear, while whisking the other person away.
Guy invitations are delightfully simple, by contrast. A guy describes an event, and assumes that’s an invitation. Hey, there’s a tailgate party. Or hey, we’re going riding.
Upcoming does the delightfully simple, guy-like version. The event is declared, with a time and a place. The attendee declaresly, openly and impersonally, if they are “watching” the event, or, “attending” the event. Here it is, come if you want to, no big deal if you don’t.
Upcoming also has aspects of bay area culture. People have a facility at declaring parties. There’s Mobile Monday, and Tag Tuesday, and Wiki Wednesday, and “bar camp”. People pick themes or places and flock, often enough that you need some automation to keep track of it all. And the communities are big and dispersed enough that a public bulletin board is helpful; in smaller communities, it’s easier and more obvious to let the subcommunity who needs to know more directly.
The one thing I wish it did was slurp events into a personal calendar. Today’s task was copying and pasting sxsw sessions and parties.

Edgieo is a conceptually nifty decentralized listing service — like craigslist, but it aggregates listings you put on your blog. The bit this misses is how and why an individual would put a listing on his/her own blog rather than craigs list or ebay, when those services already have a large audience and easy listing tools.
In order to get adopted, a standard needs to be:

• supported by an existing community
• supported by a widely used tool, or
• of benefit to the user him/herself, or
• a mix of these. As far as I can tell, edgeio doesn’t have any of these, just a sprinkle of decentralization magic pixie dust.
  

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Did some conversational noodling about why group calendar software is so bad. The trouble is, it doesn’t support the social processes that people use to schedule events.
First of all, the negotiation required to schedule a meeting. Today, this is done with the brute force method of giving the meeting-ee access to your whole calendar. All free time looks equivalently free. And, exposing one’s whole calendar is “too much information” unless one manages nuances of calendar entry types. It would be nicer to be able to do an automated version of the “pick the best option” drill — you publish some candidate times and the meeting-ee chooses from among them.
Second and worse, the affordances needed to quasi-schedule and unschedule a meeting. How do you set up a request for a casual lunch sometime that a few busy people happen to be free? How do you politely defer a meeting? Scheduling software is a clumsy, second-best replacement for the refined and obsolete skills of personal secretary or traditional wife.

Phil Edwards writes about the discontent felt by del.icio.us users when the big bad Yahoo buys out a social software web service. It’s tied into a critique of web 2.0 as an exploitative phenomenon.
I suspect this pattern arises from client-server architecture and server cost, regardless of malice. Successful client-server apps like google and del and flickr wind up costing someone a truckload of money. They need to do something to pay for the servers. There’s hardware and backup and patches and air conditioning and so on.
Even if you factored out venture money and outsourced r&d and the other artifacts of high-tech commercial culture, you’d still need someone to pay for the servers. Thus the classic phenomenon of a successful, idealistic web app provider doing a begathon when the server goes down.
The governance issues posed by server ownership get particularly strange when it comes to online games and communities. Eventually it could lead to political governance, where costs are paid via taxes to a democratically chosen government.
Some applications (aggregated comments) might be done decentralized. e.g. a shared bookmarking service that aggregates the bookmarks in each of our browsers, and allows browsing and querying of the virtual db, or a decentralized aggregated comment tracker.
When these apps are conceived after there’s an installed base of tools, it requires painful standards work to make this sort of thing happen, and then the installed base turn adoption process can take years. Data standards are political; the user base needs to have enough power and organization to create and demand the standard; this can take a long time. In many cases it’s easier to throw up a server, which gets us into the economic bind.

Pesonal digital identity is on the wrong side of the network effect. It’s a chicken and egg problem. Individuals don’t pick a digital identity solution, just like they don’t pick an ignition system. It’s plumbing that’s provided by the tool vendor. There isn’t end user demand for it.
Meanwhile, social software tool vendors haven’t felt enough incentive to use a third party digital id system. The path of least resistance for a tool vendor is to implement its own internal single signin system. SixApart has TypeKey. Blogger has its own login system. Yahoo just merged Flickr’s login system.
Sxore is an attempt to stimulate end-user demand by providing a a solution to a real problem — comment spam. Sxore is a cross-application comment system with capchas, moderation, whitelist and blacklist features. The idea is that if a user signs up to comment on one blog, they’ll be able to comment on other blogs. Sxore will work with WordPress and MovableType, so someone who likes it can use on their own blog.
This would have been brilliant 18 months ago, before the major tool vendors and projects added anti-spam features. Today, end-users will tempted to follow the path of least resistance, which is to use the features that come with their tool. Perhaps one opening is open source projects interested in some Sxore features. But there’s no evidence on the Sxore site that Sxip is offering code.
The handiest — and maybe the creepiest — feature is the ability to follow comments for an individual user. Sxore creates an RSS feed for each user. Presumably you can follow comments made by that user across different blogs. So, if you think someone has good ideas about blog visualizations, you get to read what they also think about President Bush.

Over at Worldchanging, Emily Gertz reports on a social VOIP application that lets Chinese immigrants use their mobile phone to find an available English-speaking volunteer. The Guides help new immigrants with school registration and other practical puzzles of American life. The software uses ad hoc conference calling to patch together the caller, the volunteer, and a third party such as a local business or government agency.

Imagine a flat panel wall-mounted screen with a very slowly alternating selection from Flickr. The FlickrFrame could come with a remote control that lets you fast forward, pause, and navigate through friends, interesting photos, themes.

flight of the rainbow, Originally uploaded by linny.

Traditional art selection is a commitment. Unless you are wealthy enough to rotate a collection, you get a photo framed or buy a piece of art and live with it for years. The FlickrFrame would provide visual variety without Martha Stewart’s budget.
There are images that are emotional or loud, that I’d want to look at sometime, but not everyday all year long. The FlickrFrame would allow the viewing of jagged and soothing images, without being locked into states of permanent angst or tranquility.
Looking at the Flickr API docs, someone has done a little bit of this with a hack that lets you display Flickr photos on a TIVO. “You can choose to display pictures searching by tags, groups, sets, users or just the most recent photos. This is configured by a GUI on the PC, or command line options for the adventurous.” It doesn’t have the very-slow-rotation feature, and it requires a Tivo.
The idea of transient art is implemented in 3d by the Canvas Gallery, a cafe and gallery in San Franciso that has art for sale or rent. I haven’t seen the model in other places, not sure why. If there is furniture rental, surely there should be art rental.

Thinking about different settings to surf image, it would also be cool to have a Flickr browser for a handheld or screenphone. This would want a similar interface as the FlickrFrame’s remote control, allowing navigation of tags, people, and other streams with a few keypresses and good lookup. Good for meditative time on trains, in line, and other time spent otherwise waiting.
this looks like one way to do it.
Thanks to Peter Kaminski for Flickr-inspired brainstorming.

Here’s what I mean by conversation clouds:
The cloud would be a picture of a conversation surrounding a person or a topic. The picture would show the relationships between the participants in a conversation. The densest areas would represent people who frequently cross-reference each other over time.
You can start with a participant (the url of a person’s weblog), or a search term (a word or tag) Nodes are clustered based on closeness, measured by number of links and reverse links over a period of time (comments, too, if you can measure them).
If the picture starts with a link, then that link is at the center of the picture. The picture shows the links between the first node and the other nodes, and between other nodes that are connected to each other.
If the picture starts with a word, topic, or tag search, then the cloud contains a cluster of blogs that include the term or tag in the last time period. The picture shows lines between blogs that link to each other. Unlinked blogs are thrown out.
The cloud is built from a data set over a time period; the user should be able to scale the time (conversation over a week, a month, six months) The conversation cloud would need to provide ways to navigate through conversation space. If you click on a blog, perhaps you re-center around that blog’s conversations. If you click on a tag or topic, you search based on that. You’d need to experiment with several ways of allowing browsing out from the first cloud.
This type of picture would not measure rank. Instead, it would illustrate the connections within subcommunities.
Cloud-browsing represents a pattern of blogsurfing. A reader might start with danah boyd, Stowe Boyd, Ross Mayfield.
The cloud would show in graphical form what a Technorati or Blogpulse search would — who linked to the post. And it would also illustrate the repeated links and cross-links as people reply. If you zoomed out the time horizon, you’d see some relationships become more obviously dense, with repeated patterns of links and counterlinks.
I think this sort of presentation would get more of what we’re looking for — a picture of the relationships in a community that reveals participants, both loud and quiet. The ability to browse the conversation.
The results would be more interesting than a diagram of an email thread — where participants already know who’s talking to whom. It woudn’t be particularly rankist, since webwide popularity isn’t relevant to the picture. It would let you browse to related people, or related ideas that the same people are talking about.
The next step is to test this idea, maybe with a manually drawn picture, and then with a dataset and a toolkit like TouchGraph. This seems like a good experiment to me. It could be somebody’s done this already. Or somebody’s tried this and proved that it doesn’t work. Please share if you know.
p.s. Zawodny talks about the need for content discovery. I don’t know about you, but a lot of the content that I discover comes from browsing through a conversation and finding voices that I want to keep hearing.