“The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.”

This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings [...]]]> Thought provoking article on Techcrunch about the shift from dedicated web pages to real-time streams.

“The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.”

This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos and videos.

The author presents a coherent stream metaphor: “A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information – that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.” He claims that the stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them:

“Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.”

“The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge? Borthwick suggests letting go of the notion that you can ever master the stream, even just your own personal data stream of friend’s Tweets, updates, blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube video finds and so on:

This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — its a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we can’t attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it.”

This is where I have to somewhat disagree. Yes, the average user must deal with information overload more than ever. Our emphasis must not be focused towards this notion of “giving up” or realizing that we can ‘never master the stream’. We need to build smart filtering mechanisms that help us navigate this overload and data-heavy information ether. We need to build systems that help us know when and where we *should* hop into the stream. We need to be able to set and identify levels of immediacy – I am not willing to miss out on any content from my closest friends, but will easily let other content slide by. Why can I not easily set preferences across the board and am constantly prompted to setup less-than ideal preferences within walled gardens?

“So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.”

The information overload “problem” is that of smart filtering, and in a way, the article’s last sentence portrays one of the most promising filtering mechanisms – social & collaborative. By letting people you trust around you do some of the work, it becomes much easier for users to take the plunge and step into the stream.

So start classifying y’all. I want to be able to finally deal with all my feeds!

[tags]filtering,overload,web,rss[/tags]

The Art Center College [...]]]> For the past several months I’ve been working with the living profiles team at the Art Center College of Design. The project is part of the larger HealthDesign initiative, designing new open-source methods for keeping personal health records and sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Here’s a framing of our project:

The Art Center College of Design in Pasadena is developing a PHR application to help adolescents with chronic illnesses transition from pediatric to the adult care system, in which these young patients will assume greater responsibility for their health and their personal health information. The project team is working on an aggregate set of tools that gathers and integrates discrete data. By tapping into exhibited teen behavior such as texting and emotional connectivity through music, the tools seamlessly incorporate into their every day world improving communication with their caregivers.

The project is divided into several stages. For the first, we will prototype and build a moodmeter, for which the ultimate goal is to find an effective and engaging method to capture user’s moods and feelings through their daily lives. The second part of this application will include visualization of the information. The biggest challenge, I think, is creating an engaging interaction, one that will make its users want to come back and use it frequently – to create a sticky application. Our user demographics will be teens, for whom applications become sticky *mostly* because of social circumstances: they hang out in myspace or facebook because their friends are there. They participate, write comments, rate, and more, because their friends see it. One’s mood is personal. Especially when dealing with teens with cronic illnesses (the focus of this project). They will not necessarily want to share this information with all their friends. We will need to find another way to create an engaging experience. A sticky app. Perhaps in the form of a game, or with constant reminders.

But before we start exploring that, I have a more basic, underlying question. What constitutes a mood? Is hungry a mood? tired? Emotions are more easily accepted as moods. But what about physical conditions?

I fished around for a bit and found some interesting ways people use existing applications to display their “moods”. People generally use IM consoles to give some form of context to their presence. From what they feel (”head hurts”, “bored la”) to where they are (”LA”, “Away”).

moodgets is an attempt to create a sticky application that allows its users to share their feelings with friends. The site helps you create a moodget (personalized widget including an emoticon and some text) and has buttons which allow you to post it to chosen sns-es (although it didn’t work with my myspace), or provides you with the HTML code to post on the web. Very easy to use. Problem: you need to go to their website in order to edit. Here’s what I did:

twitter:: what are you doing? a very open ended question. Used differently by groups of people. An extremely simple way to get content from your phone to the web. However, for capturing one’s mood, the feedback structure is not engaging enough.

facebook :: has a status update very similar to twitter’s ‘what are you doing’. With the addition of Facebook’s SMS shortcode, it is now possible to update your status via SMS (to FBOOK).
Through the facebook apps, though, I found the moods application. It gives you a list of moods and lets you pick which one to display on your page. It also, annoyingly, asks you to write “why you feel this way” so your friends could see it. AArgh.

So explicit… And so fake. What will it take to truly capture someone’s mood? Picking emoticons is not enough. I want the application to understand the implicit. I don’t want to pick my emotions out of a category. How is it at all possible? That’s the big question for me in the weeks to come.

]]> http://giladlotan.com/blog/2008/01/project-living-profiles-the-moodmeter/feed/ 2 http://giladlotan.com/blog/2008/01/on-transactive-memory-and-why-i-disslike-twitter/ http://giladlotan.com/blog/2008/01/on-transactive-memory-and-why-i-disslike-twitter/#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:31:57 +0000 http://giladlotan.com/blog/?p=213 Overload [def]:: to load to excess; overburden; fill to excess so that function is impaired – precisely how i feel about social networking sites recently. Plunged from their initial excitement to being yet another procrastination tool – one that minimizes the already little amount of sincere conversations I have with friends. Even though Twitter seems [...]]]> Overload [def]:: to load to excess; overburden; fill to excess so that function is impaired – precisely how i feel about social networking sites recently. Plunged from their initial excitement to being yet another procrastination tool – one that minimizes the already little amount of sincere conversations I have with friends. Even though Twitter seems like another perfectly good tool for me to stay in touch with friends, I cringe.

The question that has been on my mind recently is why I dislike Twitter so much and what it is that I’m looking for in current web technology. In his book, ‘The Tipping Point‘, Malcolm Gladwell writes about an intellectual and emotional capacity we have before we become overwhelmed. A limited ability to process so much raw information. He defines a sympathy group – people whose death would leave us truly devastated:

Why isn’t this group larger? Its a question of time. If you look at the names on your sympathy list, they are probably the people whom you devote the most attention to – phone, in person or thinking and worrying about. If twice as long – you spend less time with people.
To be someone’s close friend requires a minimum investment of time. Moreover, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting. At a certain point, at somewhere between 10 and 15 people, we begin to overload. (source)

Most of the people in my sympathy group live thousands of miles away; many do not ‘hang out’ online, nor are they dedicated social network site users. I want more tools to help maintain intimate relationships with them. While it is much easier to “stay in touch”, I feel like the available tools draw me further away, and leave me with only the superficial conversations. I long for tools that support sincere interactions – other than phone conversations (which are still costly). Ways to connect truly and sincerely. Even though facebook has pretty much spanned all my networks, it is becoming too big too fast and way too cluttered. Too many friends mixed up all together in a conglomerated mess, with too much spam.

What I dislike most about the currently available services is the philosophy in which one acknowledges social interactions through an egocentric self – one that gives credit to gathering a crew of followers (Twitter’s terminology). I am truly annoyed by everyone’s acceptance of this terminology – ‘followers’ and the web’s support of a self-centered method to socialize; a way that does not work in the real world. Collecting a group of defined ‘followers’ and publishing ME-centric feeds does not work for close friends.

Ori Neidich defines a Twitter feed as ‘an IRC channel, just with a very very long lag time…‘. It is essentially a multi-cast SMS message, that is also placed online. The really great thing about it is the fact that Twitter pays for the short code – which makes it is so darn easy to get your data up online. Once there, it is easy to manipulate through RSS feeds. But what can it be used for?!

Fun, mostly.

Although I’ve been discovering that Twitter can actually help tremendously in creating applications for several projects I’m working on, for which I am looking for simple ways for users to input data from their mobile phones. The ideal situation would be a J2ME application running on their S60 phones along with a data-plan. But those conditions are quite hard to find (even I can’t afford a data-plan…), especially when dealing with mainstream, working class families, on which we’ll be testing the applications. That’s precisely why Twitter is ideal – all the user needs to do is have an account setup and validated. Then sending updates from the phone is an extremely easy task. When I was working on my thesis project, I saw Twitter as an inspirational service – one that allows anyone to place content online from anyplace (within the US) for free. They absorb the cost of having a short-code (god knows how they’re going to make money) – which allows for people to easily send in their text. This type of service would be extremely useful in developing and third world countries, where I’m envisioning a multitude of mobile-based services using local SMS messages.

On the other had, Flickr (which I love) also has a certain aspect of “following” someone’s photostream. You broadcast your photos for anyone to see, but the main difference is that Flickr has an added value: kickass organization and storage tools for its user’s digital images. I use flickr mostly for my own needs, and secondly for socializing.

I don’t want it to be so easy. But I want it free… Guess I’ll need to develop something

[tags] twitter, facebook, sympathy group, gladwell, flickr, social networks, intimacy [/tags]

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