Commentary

The Future of Social Media

September 15th, 2009  |  Published in Commentary

Here in IBS, one of our current tasks is to describe our vision of the future of Social Networks and Social Media (in the next three to five years).

To get started, Reijo gave us a Mashable post and a SlideShare presentation to enable some insights on the current ideas about tech and the influence on social, digital interactions.

These are the themes that I came up with so far.

Additional inspiration came from J. Owyang and C. Li.

ubiquity

technology pervades everything BUT is acting as a bridge between people or people and objects

immersive interaction metaphors require no special knowledge (contrasting to: keyboard, mouse)

examples: RFID tags, augmented reality apps, immersive tele-conferencing, project natal, vision 2019, mind-reading tech

immediacy

opportunity cost, friction for changing a device, place, situation is approaching zero:

activities happen in real time, user adaption (syntax, knowledge, habits) becomes unneccessary

examples: realtime search, touch interfaces, natural language commands (Mozilla ubiquity), speech commands, gestural interfaces

connectedness

every thing (physical object) is connected to the web,

all information about all things is interconnected

there will be no line between different applications (contrast: Gmail, Moodle, Joomla, Wordpress, Word Document, Notepad, Paper or SMS vs. Email vs. Facebook Chat vs. IM), documents as such don’t exist anymore

no passwords, no profiles, only ONE constantly-connected individual

examples: Arduino, portable identity (Facebook connect, OpenID), semantic web, Google Wave Applications and Basics

contextualization, where, when, who

computers, services know the users context and adapt accordingly

examples:

when GPS locates you in office, cellphone is muted, callers get info about next available spot on your schedule

when you write in a “word processor” (text input field), spell-checking will recognize the language without needing any manual settings

a service knows your media consumption preferences, shows you only videos or transcribes audio-only material to text based on usage patterns

information normalization, one right answer

based on connected information and natural language processing, services will be able to fully interpret a users intent,

when one definite answer can’t be computed, the activity will run in a feedback circle with another human (à la Aardvark, Amazon Mechanical Turk or Elance) in real time

examples: curated datasets (Wolfram Alpha), recommendation engines (Amazon, Netflix)

Influence on social media and social relations (scenarios):

Reviews from amazon can be viewed inside the book (small screen), user can see the relationships of reviewers (who is also publishing their books with this company?), authers biography can also be looked up.

Your fridge knows its content (RFID) can send you an SMS “buy milk” or order the groceries via email and have them delivered to your home.

Your computer identifies you via facial recognition, logs you into all needed systems.

You read a book by opening it in MS Word, edit the text as you wish, put in your own words, click a button and your prose will be converted to bullet points (for a presentation in power point). Additionally, pictures to illustrate your point are added automatically by a recommendation engine.

If the computers, devices around you know all facts in the world (even events), relationships, jobs and the basis for recognition in relationships is changing quite heavily.

If your computer/cellphone can exactly characterize a new contact by his facial expression, facebook activity log and other internet activities, you won’t meet many people outside of your comfort zone.

The Waves are rolling in

June 7th, 2009  |  Published in Commentary

Ok, so as I’ve been at I/O 2009, I now have the luck to be a Wave Sandbox Account holder. Until now, most observations around my trial runs with the Wave Client revolve around minor bugs and annoyances (like not having any contacts to talk to with this shiny toy).

But then again, there is one new idea for a wave application/robot/gadget on my mind per day.

While I won’t find the time to implement them all, I might as well jot them down here and see how long it takes for them to be implemented by somebody:


Legacy System integration
Although there is a Twitter search bot, most other current systems are not yet integrated with the Wave Protocol. To make the Wave Client a true “one inbox to rule them all”, there are some obvious knots to be tied:
  • Email – sending messages to a Wave account via email, syncing your current email contacts with Wave contacts and sending out messages to non-wave users.
  • RSS/Atom – using a Wave Client as a feed reader: write a robot to take an RSS url or an OPML file and push new feed entries into the current Wave.
  • ICQ/AIM/MSN/Jabber – same as Email, but for all Instant Messenger Protocols
  • Twitter/Friendfeed/Backtype – write a robot to auto-post all conversation threads as wavelets that revolve around a certain hashtag/blog post/tweet/blip/URL: no matter if they are on a Movable Type, Wordpress, Blogger blog; Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, identi.ca or brightkyte. Take Backtype/IntenseDebate or Feedly as an example/inspiration.
Wordpress Publishing Robot / Plugin
As some have pointed out the diffculties of SEO on a wave, I would just go the same route as the existing “Bloggy” robot: Publish a wave to an existing Wordpress Blog.
Result: your custom look, a great interface for writing and edits and (possibly) a moderation panel for below-the-fold or even inline comments. I remember an experiment using YUI for displaying comments at a certain line withing a regular blog (and can’t find the damn link).
But then again, do we really need our own “view” on contents or discussions? Have our own logo, colors and fonts attached to a certain thought?
Let’s see in the next examples.


Wikipedia Editing powered by Wave
As with any Wiki, concurrent and simultanious editing is a bummer: In comes the Wave. If there is a Robot/API/Frontend for editing regular Wikipedia content, current contributors could swarm into a certain section or article and redo it based on previous discussions. The discussion around the artcle itself could be handled in a linked wave.
Although the notion of 25 people re-editing an article at the same time might make watching it “live” impossible, the replay-feature and the usable WYSIWYG editor can ease the influx of new contributors to the project while circumventing the challenges the other 95% face.


Additionally, while lots bemoan the chaos of a “traditional” wiki, especially the Wikimedia community has found the right means to organize around content creation.
With LiquidThreads never properly integrated into core Wikipedia, Wave as a protocol, frontend and delivery mechanism for discussion could become the engine of an even sharper growth of the content base.
And in case this approach (due to corporate sponsorship by Google) is not realized onsite, all contents could be ported into a mixture of Knol, Squidoo, Wikipedia, Mahalo and SearchWiki.


Realtime Answer Services
If there’s something you want to know that has only one answer, who/what do you ask? Google, Wolfram Alpha, your Twitter/Friendfeed/IM buddies?
How about a Wave Robot that dispatches the question in your blip to Aardvark, Twitter, Friendfeed, Wolfram, Bing, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers and (depending on niche, services like Stackoverflow)?


Wave Edit/Update Handling
As a Wave client user, one thing about the realtime updates can make handling a large volume of waves impossible: minor updates.


Since logging into Wave for the first time, the test waves sent to all users have been edited several times: typos, formatting, wording etc.


The big question: Which of these updates is important enough for me to be notified about? And who decides this?


I’d suggest measuring the relevance of updates in a ratio of delta/length of blip. So, if you add a new blip to a wave, I get notified, but if you edit 5 characters of a 500 char text (1%), I won’t be pinged about it. As engineers, the Google guys should figure out the right ratio/percentage, but I’d like this as a setting for the client as well.


That’s it for now about the Wave.


The takeaway: With Waves, content is king. Whatever you write will be scanned, sliced, diced, enhanced and published allover the web. All in realtime.


Add your own ideas and comments below and follow the discussion:
Examples:

the Web will always be in your Browser

May 12th, 2009  |  Published in Commentary

This is a reply to Rod Edwards @ TechFold.

As Adobe and MSFT try to improve on the UI and UX with their “parallel web” ideas, Mozilla and more importantly Google are bundling the remaining features into the native browser experience (Prism, Gears).

As soon as Chrome reaches a market share of 10 %, they’ll integrate location awareness and similar hardware bindings (e.g. O3D) natively (opt-in, where applicable), thus making the advantages of AIR, JavaFX and even the iPhone SDK nonexistent from a feature-set perspective.

Combined with App Engine and the Chrome plugin structures, they might be able to pull off the web app marketplace: paid or adsense-integrated “browser apps” that will run on your desktop and mobile. The difference is only in the presentation layer.

While it makes sense for the NYT to have a standalone app to create information vendor lock-in, such a strategy (akin to the Kindle) will only survive in the short run. As all information is moving onto the internet, the real value is in linkage, context and ambiance, all of which are duplicate features or non-central issues in a standalone app like this.

The overall user experience from start to finish is the remaining issue to solve:

From my point of view, installing a desktop app (after signing up for yet another user account) to read the news sounds to me  almost like waiting for the print edition and reading it on paper.

And we know what is happening to those cases.

 

Disclaimer: I’m a believer in SaaS, the Cloud, UXaaS and the Open Stack.