Tech

Relationship management databases dilemna

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There is an interesting take on Zdnet about social protocols: "The XHTML Friends Network (XFN) microformat could eliminate the need for proprietary social networking services such as LinkedIn, Orkut, and Plaxo, if XFN was widely adopted among users and blog and Web presence authoring tools". It is definitely true that using all those social software tools require entering information in a wide laod of format (proprietary of course). Systems like XFN as they say might be useful (why don't they mention FOAF?) The ACM News Service offers a good summary of this discussion:

Currently, the proliferation of such social networking services (there are roughly 18 services) requires significant effort to continuously update personal profiles on each of those services. An ideal situation would entail individuals maintaining their own personal contact information on their Web site, blog, or contact management software, allowing all their friends to refer to that resource, and XFN allows for this type of nonproprietary social linking by adding relationship context to hyperlinks. The XFN profile describes possible relationship descriptors, such as brother, colleague, or even "crush." Blogrolls offer a good example of how XFN would help create loosely coupled social networks, but currently few blog authoring tools support XFN, such as by allowing people to use the rel hyperlink attribute that indicates XFN relationships. The hCard contact record standard uses XML to display contact information in a standard way, and could be used in conjunction with XFN and XFN-crawling software to automatically create directories of friends and friends' friends. This scenario would be helped by the incorporation of hCard and XFN technologies in Web presence tools--perhaps even Outlook--and blog authoring tools such as blogroll generators. Furthermore, the XFN concept could be extended to the business realm, perhaps in the form of XBN or XB2BN microformats

Personnally I juste use foaf and sometimes xfn but I would prefer to have just my adres book connected to a foaf file connected to my blog (to generate the blogroll) and other social systems. The difference might be that in most of the social soft, there must be an agreement by the two persons to create a connection; whereas in FOAF you can put whoever you want...

Peripheral awareness examples

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My advisor asked me for some references about epripheral awareness applications... here are some:

Some ambient media projects: - Water Lamp: http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~ahutchin/AmbientMedia.htm - informative art project: http://www.viktoria.se/fal/projects/infoart/ - activity wallpaper: http://www.viktoria.se/fal/projects/infoart/actiwall.html - bloomberg's wall http://www.a-matter.com/eng/projects/Bloomberg-pr072-01-r.asp

I maintain a list of interactive wall projects with some peripheral awareness examples here:

classical example on a computer: - social proxy: http://www.pliant.org/personal/Tom_Erickson/st_TOCHI.html - visual who: http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/VisualWho/VisualWho.html

it's rough I know, no time to blog lately :(

Haptic interface: an haptic box

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This haptic box by Simone Gumtau looks nice and minimalistic. The point is to determine semiotic link between physical sensation, emotion and verbal expression through building an haptic box where different surfaces and textures can be felt without visual modality The content of this box is amazing.

Haptic interface: vibrobod

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Neat stuff here, the Vibrobod (.pdf) is a pretty darn device (developed by Kelly Dobson, Danah Doyd, Wendy Ju, Judith Donath andHiroshi Ishi):

VibroBod allows two users to communicate feeling; hand gestures and vocalizations made by one user convey emotional content to the other user. VibroBods rest on the laps of individuals having personal conversations via phone, chat or instant messaging, to amplify moods or tones that may otherwise be lost. The design intent was to facilitate awareness, empathy, and emotional influence across mediated channels. (...) In informal critiques with fifteen students and faculty, we found that the VibroBod indeed provoked strong reactions. At first, people were hesitant to place their fingers in the holes and were alarmed by the vibrations. As users learned how their actions were affecting the VibroBods’ behavior, they became very involved and attentive in experiential discovery and in trying to evoke particular vibration patterns that seemed like accurate representations of how they were feeling.

Why do I blog this This device reminds me the gum-like interface of eXistenZ's pod, which I like.

Dial +33(0) 63 27 22 06 5 and the energy produced by your phone will be recycled!

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This seems to be an appealing project: +33 (0) 63 27 22 06 5. If your dial +33(0) 63 27 22 06 5, the energy produced by your phone is going to be recycled! It's carried out by David Strebel. A banner is attached to a building. "Recyclez votre Appel +33 (0) 63 27 22 06 5" (Recycle your call) is printed on the banner. Several antennas are installed inside a room in the building. The antennas are able to register microwaves released by mobile phones.

On location several antennas had been installed to perceive interferences from telephone calls. A device had been constructed recycling the occuring interferences.

Therefore a optoelectronic relais, a mobil phone and a ventilator is placed under a cardbord box. The relais is connected by optical fibres to the LEDs of the antennas installed on the wall. A half cutted plastic bottle is sticked upside down into the cardboard box. In the bottleneck a feather had been placed to indicate the recycling of calls.

Social Software behavior

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I enjoyed reading "Public displays of connection (.pdf from BT Technology Journal) by Judith Donath and Danah Boyd. It's basically about the social implications of social network's public display. I like the typology of social software users:

  • energetic collectors of links were often referred to as ‘Friendster whores’
  • For some, the sites function as an awareness tool, a way to be reminded of friends and acquaintances.
  • For others, the sites — as promised — provide opportunities to find information, dates, and jobs. These are the people who are using these sites as exploratory vehicles for navigating an extended social network.

The article describes interesting issues like the cost of linking or the reason of such public display. Why do I blog this? I am interested in such tool, especially for network navigation and serendipituous discovering of information. However, I don't like the fact that it's based on not-so-relevant technology. I would prefer something based on FOAF (even though it's more difficult to have to have the 'mutual linking' feature: putting someone in your foaf would require the other to accecpt it). I find boring and clearly not convenient to fill those social software forms instead of having all these information in the same place: a foaf generated from your address book with contacts' acknolwedgement to be in/displayed.

buddybuzz: read text + rate it on your mobile phone

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I'm late on this, but it appears to be good: buddybuzz seems to be a nice tool for your cell phone. It is designed by the the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab (which studies how technology modifies behavior). Basically, it helps you find the most interesting articles to read, based upon your friend's ratings and enables you to read 300 to 800 words per minute from on your cell phone. You can get it here. It reminds me a project we had with an important mobile company in which we designed a similar system with rating capabilities. Unfortunately it did not work so well; anyway it was not the same context and not the same users, so we cannot draw too much conclusions from this previous experiment.

What about VoGPRS

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Via Gabriel Kent.Maybe I am a bit late on this very concept. Seems interesting, Voice Over General Packet Radio Service could be seen as:

Of course we see Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) movement in the mobile space with the creation of WIFI Phones and such --- however, we are also seeing some take advantage of the rich toolkits already offered by many smart phones (Pocket PC/Palm/Symbian etc Phones) to create VOIP capability. Nonetheless, most of this movement is focused on VOIP and therefore WIFI as some of these smart phones are equipped with WIFI chipsets.

While VOGPRS is not that far of a stretch from this current industry focus, it nonetheless opens the door for current (and near future) smart phones to take advantage of cheap voice calls to anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world (where GPRS is available) and not be confined to small WIFI spaces.

While GPRS has a theoretical maximum of 171.2 Kbps, I usually obtain about 100 Kbps over Verizon's GPRS network. Following my previous work with CELP, I can tell you a 16 Kbps voice stream sounds quite intelligible. Assuming 32 Kbps is required (bi-directional voice streams) for our conversation, then it would most likely hold up well even while driving down the freeway.

IM users typology

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A strikingly relevant and simple typology IM users by Danah Boyd. She makes an interesting discussion between IM as a presence versus a communication tool.

I have a round-the-clock presence on AIM, even if frequently idle. I share this round-the-clockness with some of my buddies - people who always appear to be on, although sometimes idle. There are other buddies who pop up whenever they're on their computer (often 9-5). Then, there are those who pop up very occasionally. (...) The thing about members of this latter category is that they *always* want to talk when they come online. This makes sense - they're appearing online only to talk, not to share presence. They are seeing IM as a communication tool first and foremost. (...) Interestingly, it is this group that complains the most about how they can never get anything done when IM is on. I try really hard not to respond in a snarky voice that i can never get anything done when they're on. They get upset when i don't have time to talk, arguing that i shouldn't be online if i don't want to talk. (...) let's go back to the people who come online just to talk. The problem with this group is that they're unintentionally exerting power. They are declaring their free time by logging on and they're assuming that i am signaling the same thing. (...) I don't spend a lot of time conversing on IM (...) The problem with IM is that the always-on'rs have gotten far more comfortable with the technology than those who still see it as a communication tool, not just a desirable presence tool.

Why do I blog this? I exactly feel the same and it's definitely a problem! From a socio-cognitive point of view, it's of tremendous interest. As a matter of fact, mediated communication oblige people to make inference about others' activity or availability. Each of us has rules about how it should work with IM (for instant some thinks that if the conversant does not want to talk he should get offline). And sometimes the mismatch between each others' rules is bad and cause various problem liek frustration, anger or misunderstandings. Another point already raised by Catherine Cramton about email is how do we deal with silence. How can we interprete silence: what means an absence of answer.

About Catherine Cramton, have a glance at "The mutual knowledge problem and its consequences for dispersed collaboration" (.pdf) which appeared in Organization Science in 2001

Turn you cell phone into a portable scanner

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According to NYT, researchers at Xerox Research Center Europe (located in Grenoble, France) are working on the means to transform the diminutive camera in your cellphone into a portable document scanner.

"When we give it to test users, they appreciate it easily," said Christopher Dance, senior scientist and image processing manager for Xerox Research Center Europe. "Even the simplest of applications, just sharing the documents and storing the documents you have captured. You could even handwrite a message and send it to someone's phone." (...) Xerox researchers believe the technology will be useful for just about anyone with a job that requires research in the field. The theory is that someone attending a trade show or conference, for example, could capture and store pertinent documents in their cellphone.

What is even more interesting is:

Xerox researchers are also working on complementary technology for cataloging these and other digital images. Although it's part of a different research project that hasn't come to fruition, the technology will sort through and group images using histograms, which chart the pixels associated with a particular part of a digital photograph. In some instances, text descriptions will be tied to these histograms.

A phenomenon called pseudo-A.D.D.

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A paper in the NYT about the ever-present and enticing potential distractions while seated at a computer.

"It's so hard, because of the incredible possibilities we have that we've never had before, such as the Internet," said John Ratey, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who specializes in attention problems. Dr. Ratey said that in deference to those who live with clinically diagnosed attention deficit disorder, he calls this phenomenon pseudo-A.D.D.

A growing number of computer scientists and psychologists are studying the problem of diminished attention. And some are beginning to work on solutions. (...) When scrolling up and down a document on a computer screen, for instance, he said, some software causes the page to jump. It's an invitation to distraction, in that it requires the eye to reacquaint itself with the document in order to continue reading. To help people understand the importance of avoiding these kinds of jumpy interactions, Dr. Bederson showed that smooth scrolling was not only easier on the eye, but reduced the number of mistakes people make when, say, reading a document aloud. (...) "It's in human nature to wonder whether you've got new mail," said Alon Halevy, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington who specializes in data management systems and artificial intelligence. "I don't think anything else is as compelling to divert attention." Dr. Halevy and others talk about making e-mail intelligent so that it knows when to interrupt the user.

Why do I blog this? It's clearly because I am a victim of this pseudo-ADD thing! It reminds me a previous post I posted here about cognitive attractors and the Cognitive Overflow Syndrome (“COS”: too many things to do, not enough time, etc). This is related to the work of Saadi LAHLOU at EDF Research and Development.

On a slightly different note, I just came across this: Marc Eisenstadt's take about the reality behind talk of 'email overload', by taking a look at some real numbers based on his own archive of all emails received over the past 12 years. Quite relevant! It's more about asynchronous attention (do you remenber the email you received 10 years ago? well at that time I only has so few that I could remember some but...)

Re-assembling and analysing spatial information

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Patrick pointed us on StarLight, a 'visible information visualization system'.

Starlight represents the first attempt to marry a variety of different types of "conventional" (and novel) information visualization capabilities into a single, integrated, information system capable of supporting a wide range of analytical functions. Further, Starlight visualization tools employ a common XML-based information model capable of effectively capturing multiple types of relationships that may exist among information of disparate kinds. Together, these features enable the concurrent visual analysis of a wide variety of information types. The result is a system capable of both accelerating and improving comprehension of the contents of large, complex information collections.

There is a very interesting example about national security. The system allows to reassemble information about real-world political and military situations into a useful "picture" of a situation. Starlight enables intelligence analysts to integrate a wide variety of spatial and non-spatial information types so that they can be jointly analyzed. It shows nice images that exemplify how this is carried out. Why do I blog this? Clearly, as for the GPS, the army is far ahead in locative media design/use (we already talked about this at open plan in Eyal Weizman's talk about the israelian army).

I listened to the pilot and the irrational nature of my fear started to fade

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I am not a Microsoft fan, nor a detractor but their scobleizer-based PR is smart. There is a column in the economist about it.

Mr Scoble started blogging four years ago. At the time, he worked for NEC. (...) Mr Scoble used his blog to converse with NEC's customers, giving tech support and listening to feedback, with such disarming honesty that his blog became a must-read for gadget lovers. (...) This caught the attention of Lenn Pryor, who is—really—Microsoft's “director of platform evangelism”. Until then, says Mr Pryor, Microsoft had been evangelising mostly one-on-one, “which doesn't scale well”. But Mr Pryor had a radical idea. Afraid of flying, he had met a pilot at United Airlines who told him to tune into channel nine from his plane seat, where he could listen in on the communications of the pilots. Mr Pryor did, and soon “the irrational nature of my fear started to fade”. It had something to do with hearing real people talking honestly. He realised that Microsoft, the target of similarly irrational fears, should have its own version of channel nine, and that public blogging by insiders should be an important part of it. (...)Mr Scoble, for his part, simply kept doing what he was good at. His blog—which he has kept outside of Microsoft's computers, and to which he usually posts in the wee hours after midnight—reads like a stream of consciousness. A reader might discover, for instance, that Mr Scoble's new wife just became an American citizen, or how to win a cheese contest. “A good blog lets you see the mess; lets you see behind the scenes,” he writes in one entry.

A coming hiatus in webfeed aggregator use

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Brian M. Dennis on a more and more apparent hiatus:

I'm starting to be persuaded by Gregory Linden's pitching of Findory as a next generation webfeed aggregator, with social intelligence baked in. I'm thinking there will eventually be a schism in how people use webfeeds somewhat similar to e-mail. There will be a teeming horde who interface relatively naively to syndicated content, maybe through a tool like Findory, ala Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Outlook Express etc. etc. Then there will be a decent sized, but not huge, pool of folks who work with such content at a higher, more sophisticated level, and will need more powerful tools, e.g. NetNewsWire or Bloglines, analagous to hardcore Outlook, Eudora, and Oddpost users.

Why do I blog this? I am more and more convinced by this kind of phenomenon...

Too complicated cell phones

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In the feature a column about the fact that mobile phones take on more and more features derived from laptop.

While there's something of a reasonable debate over whether smartphones are going to start competing with laptops for mobile computing functionality, it appears the whole idea is upsetting some people. They are afraid that smartphones take away the core advantages of a mobile phone: mobility and the "natural" use of voice as an input mechanism.

Learning the value of mobile applications

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In The value of mobile applications: a utility company study by Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Keng Siau, Hong Sheng in Communications of the ACM. Volume 48, Number 2 (2005), Pages 85-90.

Mobile and wireless devices are enabling organizations to conduct business more effectively. Mobile applications can be used to support e-commerce with customers and suppliers, and to conduct e-business within and across organizational boundaries. Despite these benefits, organizations and their customers still lack an understanding of the value of mobile applications. Value is defined here as the principles for evaluating the consequences of action, inaction, or decision. The value proposition of mobile applications can be defined as the net value of the benefits and costs associated with the adoption and adaptation of mobile application

Why do I blog this? well... if we design applications that won't be used because of such problems...

Some facts about the use of i-mode

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An interview of Kei-ichi Enoki (one of the driving forces behind the I-mode service from NTT DoCoMo) in CNET News.com:

people living in Tokyo, excluding executives, ride trains. But if you go outside Tokyo about 50 kilometers, everyone drives. Fifty percent of Japanese households have two cars. In that sense, nothing is different from America. Actually, people use I-mode more in these kinds of towns, so it's not the case that people only use I-mode during their commute. They use it in any spare time they have, waiting between meetings, etc. (...) In Japan, we want to come up with new services as well. So what we are very focused on right now is the 3G wideband CDMA and what is called the "purse" type of handset. This handset would serve to control all the gadgets or things we really have to use.

Q. You mean like a remote control?

A. Not in the sense of remote control, but this controls purchasing tickets for games, parking meters, buying things in convenience stores, entering your company.

And my favorite is certainly:

Q. How big of an impact do you think Wi-Fi will have on handsets? A. Well, we have a plan to incorporate Wi-Fi in our handsets. I think the issue is whether we will be able to get money through this Wi-Fi.