Designing Social Interfaces - Rough Cut | O’Reilly Media
Originally uploaded by xian
The unedited, 500 page first draft of our book is available now in PDF format for review by anyone who can’t bear to wait till September for the first (“real”) edition to come out.
Yay!
Erin Malone and I introduced some of the fruit of our effort to carve out a pattern language for social user experience design. At the Information Architecture Summit in Memphis this past week we taught our pattern library workshop and then delivered this tandem presentation:
this is a screenshot of a sampling of the tweets about the core conversation i did with erin malone re social design patterns.
there was one that said we weren’t prepared and were just promoting our book, too.
i do wish we had explicated an example pattern. the summit talk with slides will be more useful, i think. but then this was a core conversation. we tried to seed it and then go with what the room wanted to talk about. that’s unstructured for a panel.
also, we could have walked through the handout all together. live and learn.
Thanks to Julie Choi who is producing this series and Ricky Montalvo who directed and filmed this five-minute talk. I really enjoyed it and I think they did a great job with it (and the whole series, actually):
gee and i’ve only met barlow once
Originally uploaded by xian
was JP Barlow idly doing the comparisons today, or is this more like secret-admirer spam?
As you may know, I am writing a book with Erin Malone called Designing Social Interfaces for O’Reilly Media.
Erin is the the founder of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and hired me to be its third curator. Today she is a partner at Tangible UX, a consulting firm, and I maintain the library as a YDN design evangelist on Micah Laaker’s Yahoo! Open Strategy (YOS) team, in collaboration with Luke Wroblewski’s Front Doors and Network Services (FDNS) team.
The top of my agenda in the past year has been to identify, gather, and document a family of social design patterns: observed practices that work well in resolving common design problems in social applications. I’ve been looking for and teasing out patterns that enable social environments to thrive and sustain themselves.
Fortunately, I had a leg up or two. While there were very few documented community or social media patterns in the library, there are a wealth of specs, papers, patterns, presentations, and guidelines scattered around the intranet, and there was Matt Leacock’s first take on a social media toolkit, shepherded together on an internal Yahoo! wiki.
More importantly, I looked out across the landscape of the web and drew on my own personal experience as a user, analyst and addict of online social experiences.
At BarCamp Block last year I facilitated a session on social media patterns (at least that’s what I was calling them then) and the net takeaway was an amazing mindmap of potential patterns. Quite a few of them turn out to be social moments, social behaviors, or social objects; or scenarios that illuminate patterns without being patterns themselves. But the outline and cloud diagrams we built from that brainstorm helped get me started sorting out some possible organizing structures beyond what we had internally a Yahoo.
This mindmap went through a series of iterations and refinements. Meanwhile, I started presenting on the topic of social patterns at BayCHI, at South By, at the IA Summit, at Ignite and more recently at TechPulse and soon PLoP and Interaction09.
Taking your half-baked ideas on the road and presenting them to a demanding crowd of payng customers is a great way of figuring out which ideas have resonance and which miss the mark. Presenting ongoing work in progress is tough: you make yourself vulnerable and open to criticism. But the criticism will come eventually anyway. Why not hear it now while you can still address it and incorporate the best ideas of others into your work?
For that matter, I feel it’s essential to be clear about one thing: almost none of this work on social design patterns is original. Yes, of course I am naming patterns and writing them and perhaps throwing in a nugget of experience here and there, but for the most part I am still curating these patterns. I’ve been stealing from everybody!
We hates plagiarism so we cite sources and point back to originators where applicable. I’ve proposed that the nascent PLPL (Pattern Language Markup Language) standard include an attribution element, with a common structure for reflecting sources, reuse, derived work, and licensing matters.
Furthermore, in our book we are inviting a wide range of leading practitioners, thinkers, and bloggers to contribute essays on one or more of the pattern families we’re developing for the book. Because, yes, the book is in many ways an offshoot of this ongoing social pattern collecting effort. And in that same spirit we’re both interested (Erin and me) in experimenting iwth methods of opening up the writing process and seeking feedback, correction, criticism, and contributions before the book’s ship date.
We’ll probably post patterns in progress on a wiki and in the meantime we will both be posting thoughts about the chapters we’re working on on our blogs. I’ll also post some draft patterns here at least until we have the wiki process figured out.
My next post in this series will be about a set of fundamental social design patterns I’m pulling together in Chapter 2.
These are the slides I worked from today in my talk at Yahoo! Open Hack Day 08, Design Hacks with Stencils & Patterns:
My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns
Originally uploaded by duncandavidson.
Here are my slides.
UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):
At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)
I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.
In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.
For now, here are my summit talks:
and
Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:
When I get the audio, I plan to put together a slidecast to synch the slides to the talk, which should be more valuable.
Oh, and consider viewing the slides in full-screen mode. They should be a lot more legible that way. I did my best to optimize the source files.
At South by Southwest, Ted Nadeau and I led a “core conversation” on the topic of reputation, identity, and presence. Ted is great at questioning basic assumptions and had this idea of handing out placards an audience of participants could use to signal their reactions to what was being said to them.
We imagine double-sided signs on sticks to hold up, sort of like the Roadrunner does, but we settled for handing out cut paper. We’re still working on the mechanics of this, *and the whole thing is Creative Commons licensed, derivs-allowed, attrib-required, I think (it’s in the fine print), but even now at version 1.0 of this Reaction Deck, I think Ted’s really onto something:
A leaderboard, viral, breaks email (one-way only), reputation game pattern from the Circle of Trust app on Facebook.
When I saw someone was using twitter to send out quotations from Buckminister Fuller I was all over that. Getting this email message was just kind of an unexpected side treat.
Now, if Bucky Fuller really was following me on twitter I might feel a little more pressure to be brilliant and cosmic. Like a dweeby Merlin Mann.
Next Tuesday (April 8, 2008) I’ll be speaking at BayCHI on the topic of social patterns in a talk called Social Design and the Yahoo! Pattern Library:
Social networking sites are proliferating. New social media aggregrators appear every day. Venerable old sites are adding social features or trying to activate the social profiles of their users and members. A number of the interaction patterns that drive social relationships online are becoming clear (as well as a number of nasty “antipatterns”). Christian will talk about social patterns, previewing some that are in the works for the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library as well as others that he has noted “in the wild.” The newly redesigned Yahoo! Developer Network site is the host of Yahoo’s open design pattern library. Over the next few months, Yahoo! will be rolling out a series of open and social APIs and the pattern library will be gathering and sharing best practices for social web design.
I’m still trying to figure out what I can share and what I can’t, so I may focus on social design patterns observed “in the wild,” as well as my current favorite topics of presence, identity, and attention.
BayCHI talks typically have two speakers back to back, and I’m really looking forward to hearing Amy Jo Kim from Shufflebrain, who is speaking before me on the topic “Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software”:
Over the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion of interactive services that harness the collective efforts of users. On the web, services like MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr, and Digg are providing hours of entertainment to millions of people. These game-like services are changing the face of networked entertainment, and rapidly displacing television as a leisure-time activity. They share three key elements: user-generated content, community infrastructure, and game mechanics. In this talk, I’ll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and explore how to use game mechanics to create interactive experiences that are fun, compelling and addictive.
I don’t want this blog to turn into just a litany of upcoming speaking appearances, but then again it would be foolish not to post these announcements, right?
If you’re interested in interaction design patterns or in the elements of social web design, then come on down to Miami in April for the IA Summit and either sign up for one of the two pre-conference workshops I’m helping teach or see my presentation or panel in the main program.
Here are the basic facts about the two workshops (more details in the title links):
Design patterns: from interaction to design to build is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, colleagues of mine from the user experience design team of the Yahoo! Developer Network. Erin founded the pattern library and has captained it throughout its entire existence (going on four years) with the help of three curators, me being the third. Lucas is the lead designer on the YDN redesign project and works directly with the Yahoo! User Interface library team, so he’s intimately familiar with the development challenges and issues involved with implementing design patterns in the real world.
Design and architecture of social web experiences is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter. Christina is a director of product management at LinkedIn, a co-founder of the IA Institute, founder of Boxes and Arrows (the leading online user experience design magazine), and founder of Cucina Media, the makers of PublicSquare, the publishing/community software B+A now runs on. Joshua Porter is a former associate of Jared Spool’s UIE and writes the popular Bokardo blog on social web design.
And here are the basic details about the presentation and the panel:
Designing with Patterns in the Real World is a presentation I am giving with Austin Govella, a senior information architect at Comcast Media. We both have plenty of hands-on experience with the trials, tribulations, and occasional triumphs that stem from applying design patterns to real world interaction, information, and interface design problems and we plan to let it all hang out.
Presence, Identity, and Attention in Social Web Architecture is a panel I’m moderating featuring a “murderer’s row” of some of the leading thinkers in user experience and social web design: Christina Wodtke of LinkedIn, Andrew Hinton of Vanguard, Gene Smith of nForm, and Brian Oberkirch of Small Good Thing. I’ve been talking to all of these folks for some time about my latest hobbyhorse (presence) and the rest of the “human OS” stack that social web applications are built on. I plan to run a tight ship and am expecting a great multi-perspective dialogue to ensue.
I’ll devote a whole blog post to each of these items as the Summit gets closer, but wanted to mention it now while there’s still time to sign up for the conference at early-bird prices.
See you in Miami?
If you’re interested in social web design, how to model identity, presence, and reputation, and how to create and align incentives with the behaviors you wish to encourage in your online community, then join Ted Nadeau and me for a Core Conversation on the topic of “Online Identity: And I do give a damn about my bad reputation” at South by Southwest interactive this March, in Austin, Texas (of course).
UPDATE: Alex Lee in the comments asked me when my talk is scheduled for. It’s on Tuesday, and I think it’s in the morning but not sure about. Will update with exact info when I have it.
UPDATE II: It seems that we will be doing our core conversation in a late slot (5pm) on the last day (Tuesday, March 11) of the interactive portion of the conference. I say if the conversation is good, let’s continue it into the evening over food and libations. Maybe we’ll even launch a startup over beer and barbecue.
I’m having second thoughts about Notchup. The other day I checked my mail in the morning, as is my wont, and found an invitation to Notchup from a friend who left Yahoo a while back to work with venture capitalists. I wondered if this was something he had had a hand in, but I didn’t ask. I went and signed up because it sounded interesting.
A few years ago I had some interviews at LinkedIn for a position that didn’t work out (didn’t work out for me, at least) and they asked me at the time for suggestions and ideas about additional businesses or products they could build on top of their existing platform. I was gung ho at the time about the idea of a reverse-auction style site for hiring. Just as Priceline reversed the polarity on hotel and plane bookings by having customers bid what they are willing to pay and having vendors match that, I figured that job searches could also work in reverse.
Instead of applying for a job, you could advertise the sort of work you are willing and qualified to take on and prospective employers could apply to you and try to make the case that you should “hire” them to be your new boss. The LinkedIn guys suggested that that’s what they were already doing but I thought there was still something missing from that model.
So Notchup seems to be somewhat in that same ballpark, which was why I thought I’d check it out.
Next, I saw that they had a way to import your personal info (effectively, your resume) from your LinkedIn account, if you have one. That sounded a lot better than entering all the data myself, again, so even though I had qualms about this violating LinkedIn’s terms of service, and even though it’s generally not a good idea to give your login credentials for one site to another site (even if “all it’s going to do” is scrape some data from the screeen), I went ahead and did that.
So then Notchup offered to enable me to invite my LinkedIn connections into their beta, saving those people the trouble of applying. I started that sequence and went through my list of contacts, which is long so this was tedious, unchecking the folks I figured are either definitely not looking for a job, or whom I don’t actually know that well, or whom I believed would have no interest in the latest social network thingamabob.
I assumed I would have the chance to write a personal note, something along the lines of
Hi! I’m checking out this new site called Notchup. I don’t know much about it and I don’t necessarily endorse it, but I thought you might be interest in checking it out too.
Unfortunately, before I was given an opportunity to write a note or even review the boilerplate they were going to sign my name to, I was notified that the invitations had been sent. This is not as bad as what Tagged.com and some other sites have done, tricking people into virally inviting their entire address books, but it still rubbed me the wrong way.
All that morning and the next day I got email notifications of friends joining Notchup, and a few personal notes from people asking me if this was for real - because we’ve all gotten spammy invitations in the past. When people asked I told them the gist of what I would have written in the invitation, but many people just joined, apparently trusting me. By now I wasn’t sure what the person who had invited me was thinking.
Then, the other day I saw a message from Russell Unger on the IA Institute members mailing list establishing that he had done more (that is, some) due diligence and actually read Notchup’s terms of service, and that he had uncovered some troubling clauses in the user agreement:
9. NotchUp reserves the right to offer third party services and products to You based on the preferences that You identify in your registration and at any time thereafter; such offers may be made by NotchUp or by third parties.
10. Without limiting any of the other disclaimers of warranty set forth in these Terms, NotchUp does not provide or make any representation as to the quality or nature of any of the third party products or services purchased through NotchUp.com or any other NotchUp Site, or any other representation, warranty or guaranty. Any such undertaking, representation, warranty or guaranty would be furnished solely by the provider of such third party products or services, under the terms agreed to by the provider.
As Russell pointed out, this sounds a lot like signing up for Notchup means agreeing to receive spam.
He also pointed out another pair of clauses:
18. You understand and acknowledge that you have no ownership rights in your NotchUp account (“NotchUp Account”), and that if you cancel your NotchUp Account, all your account information from NotchUp, including resumes, profiles, cover letters, network contacts, saved jobs, questionnaires and email mailing lists, will be marked as deleted in NotchUp’s databases and will be removed from any public area of the NotchUp Sites. Information may continue to be available for some period of time because of delays in propagating such deletion through NotchUp’s web servers. In addition, third parties may retain cached copies of your Information.
19. Your email and other data that you submit as part of the resume will be made available to our recruiters and employers. NotchUp.com doesn’t have any control over how that data would be used. If you don’t want any such data to be displayed your only remedy is not to post any resume.
So now I’m really concerned, particularly about seeming to vouch for a site and luring a bunch of best contacts into it. I’ll keep an eye on Notchup but so far I don’t like what I’m seeing, and to those I invited in before researching the subject further, I apologize.
I’m going to write my book, Presence of Mind (working title), on a wiki with as much input from others as possible. I’m also starting a mailing list to discuss online presence and related topics (extending from closely related matters such as identity, reputation, attention, privacy and so on, out to the full array of social web design patterns).
If you’re interested in joining this conversation, let me know and I’ll invite you when the list is set up.
Joshua Porter, who specializes in Social Web Design and with whom I’ve debated in the past around the perennially boring topic of “Information Architecture vs. Interaction Design, Which is the Best Discipline EVAR!?!?,” has culled an interesting list of social design best practices from Google’s documentation of its new “OpenSocial” API collection.
The interesting (to me) recommended practices are the following (re-paraphrased, somewhat, from how the practices are labeled in Google’s document, using some of Joshua’s verbiage where I found it clearer):
- Enable self expression via personalization
- Show what friends are doing
- Let people explore friends and friends of friends
- Provide commenting features
- Expose multiple areas of similarity
- Solve real world problems through social connections
(The other recommendations were interesting too but they seemed to be more about good widget design and good web experience design in general and not particularly about social, let alone open and social.)
The last item, of course, was the theme of The Power of Many.
The browsing-friends-of-friends one is questionable, too. At LinkedIn, that’s an option. I guess it goes to openness, but it also cuts against privacy. I don’t necessarily want everyone viewing my address book or using me as a step-ladder to meet someone else. To me that’s not social - it’s antisocial. More importantly, I believe in leaving those decisions in the hands of the user as much as possible.
Porter sees some other important issues here:
[W]e’re clearly seeing a set of practices emerge across all social software that centers around getting people started quickly, allowing for self-expression, engaged in real-life tasks, yet also allowing for flexible discovery and play…. [S]ocial networks have changed the way we look at software in just a couple years.
[O]nly two or three of the best practices are necessarily part of “social networking” software. They could be used in any kind of social software, be it productivity software for groups or even e-commerce sites that help people find the right product.
That, to me, is the essence of social design. It isn’t relegated to social networking, even though the rise of social networking is what helped to clarify and refine the ideas. It’s about building software that takes advantage of social connections to provide enhanced value.
Good food for thought.
The blog world, along with my slice of the twitter world, is abuzz with attempts to understand, analyze, deconstruct, laud, and excoriate Google’s new OpenSocial initiative.
One key question seems to be: is this true openness or simply using the (increasingly at risk of dilution) “open” mean as a handy cudgel to ward off Google’s current nemesis, Facebook, with it’s extremely popular but closed application development platform, active and growing userbase, and impending social ad network play?
Another key question I’m hearing people ask is whether this is a hand-off attempt by Google to hew to its roots of faciliating access to information and monetizing the traffic and data that passes through its metaphorical ands or is it an attempt to do judo and place itself at the hub of the social web as it matures?
My meta question might be to ask whether each pair of possibilities is truly mutually exclusive.
But I don’t feel like I really can comment on this right now.
If I were still an independent writer or even just a user experience consultant at an agency with a blog, I’d be much more comfortable jumping into the geek-punditry fray, but I’m not.
I work for a company that view Google and Facebook as competition, a company full of people who use both Google and Facebook, a company in the midst of announcing and operationalizing its new strategy, a company that has just made a commitment to openness and has its own ideas about what that mean, and it’s really just too hard to figure out what has been announced and what hasn’t and I really don’t want to talk out of school, so I’ll just adopt a wait and see attitude and for the time being keep my opinions to myself.
At BarCamp Block earlier this year I led a discussion of social media design patterns. The slides I posted were really more just about patterns and how we deal with them at Yahoo! But the group exercise was to brainstorm a huge list of social media and social networking activities that could be described and documented as patterns.
These are not the patterns themselves, but at least one pattern could probably be written around each of these gestures. We found it easiest in the brainstorm to just rattle off a list of gerunds (“adding, blocking, friending,” etc.).
The list we came up is also not exhaustive or definitive. It’s one group’s idea of the various patterns that a social system could support. The initial list was posted at the BarCamp Block wiki. Then Kent Bye, one of the participants, took a stab at re-sorting it a bit and created a visualization. He also then hand-copied it into an outline format and sent me his “version two” of the list.
Since then I’ve made a few more tweaks and have produced a version 3 outline. I’ve been working on visualizing it myself, so I turned the OPML into an OmniOutliner file and then imported that into OmniGraffle. The map is so tangled that Graffle had a hard time displaying it without crossing lines, so I spent some more time dragging the various nodes and clusters around until they were each separate. The end result is that it’s huge of course, and still by no means final or exhaustive or authoritative.
In fact, it’s decidedly not the taxonomy of social media patterns we’re working on internally at Yahoo! Think of it as an open source, collaborative work in progress. The thumbnail image above links to a full-sized PDF you should feel free to grab to get a better look at the current state of play of this idea, and if you’d like the OPML file or any other format, just drop me a note and I’ll send it to you.
When I get a moment, I’ll drop by the BarCamp Block wiki and upload the file there in several formats too, at least until someone provides a better place for hosting this project.
Michael Wesch, who created the virally popular internet video called Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us (its success drew on a sort of meta-application of the very concepts it discussed), was the keynote speaker at IDEA 2007 last week. As part of his keynote, he previewed two videos he has now released to the web.
The first, Information R/evolution, examines the challenges we all face in this age of information glut and shortening attention spans:
The second, made collaboratively by one of his classes (Wesch is a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, where he is launching a Digital Ethnography working group to “examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction”), looks carefully at how we are teaching today and how out of sync it has become with the lives of contemporary students:
In some ways, for me, the highlight of the conference was Wesch’s story about how he frightened himself one night in the communal sleeping quarters in New Guineau when he thought his own arm, which had fallen asleep, was a snake lying across his body. This story became the kernel of Wesch’s reputation with the people he was studying and living among, and helped him realize that telling stories is a big part of how we gain identities and fit ourselves (and others) into society.
This is a quandary for me. I try to keep my LinkedIn network literally to people I know and have worked with or with whose work I am familiar. From what I can see, you seem like an excellent person to know, I’m flattered that you enjoy my posts on that list, and I appreciate your providing that context since so many invitations I get have robogreetings on them.
I couldn’t bring myself to click the “I don’t know Jack…” button, but since I take LinkedIn literally (I want to be able to recommend people from my own direct experience) I also don’t feel right accepting your invitation.
I hope you understand.
Just noticed there’s a conference coming up in a few weeks here in the valley that seems extremely narrowcast to me: Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook.
A lot of the usual suspects of social network bloviating are speaking (I count two women out of 20 named speakers), including representatives from Facebook, LinkedIn, O’Reilly (Tim himself), Forrester Research, TechCrunch, and of course Scoble, and others.
The conference describes itself as
for developers and marketers on how to build and distribute apps for the Facebook Platform. This event is for both business executives & technical developers who want to learn more about the Facebook environment, and how to reach online communities using social networking platforms and applications.The conference will be held in San Jose, CA from October 7th-9th. Main conference sessions are Monday 10/8 and Tuesday 10/9; an optional pre-conference workshop is Sunday, 10/7.
If you’re interested, you can register at EventBrite.
They’ve certainly populated the conference title well with buzzwords. The term social graph, popularized by facebookistas (and annoying to those who consider it an obscure jargon synonym for social network - oh, and don’t get jonas luster started on how social network software is not the same thing as a social network) seems to be everywhere these days, and of course people love to talk about recognizing and capturing (or detecting, heh) patterns.
For a counter view of the importance of Facebook’s social graph as a platform for application development, check out the truth about facebook apps: most people ignore them:
Once installed, most widgets are ignored.
Slide’s “Top Friends” boasts the most active users: 2.7 million people, or 20% of its user base, use it every day. The app with the highest engagement percentage: “WarBook,” a medieval fantasy game, is played by 18,000 people a day, or 42% of its install base. The “iLike” app, oft-cited as a Facebook success story, may be less popular than we thought: 646,000 people, or 9% of its install base, use it daily.
(via cwodtke’s tweets, who recently noted that she and I seem to be on some sort of convergence path)
Yahoo! Mash (né Mosh) is open to non-Yahoos on an invitation-only basis.
If you want to try it out, and you know me (or at least have some connection to me that you can tell me about), leave a comment and I’ll send you an invitation.
Oh, my profile there, for people already in Mash is at mash.yahoo.com/xian21370.
One of my top priorities in my job as curator of Yahoo’s Design Pattern Library is to help polish up and publish to the wider web community a series of social-media oriented design patterns that our community platform team has been working on.
The first of this, Vote to Promote (a sort of generic “Digg This!” pattern) went live last week. There are more to come. The author of the pattern, Bryce Glass, has more to say about it in his blog, Soldier Ant, and I blogged about the pattern (and a new organizational scheme I’m trying out for the library, both the internal and open versions) at the Yahoo! User Interface Blog.
As always, we welcome feedback.
Here’s my obligatory plug for my South by Southwest proposals. I’ve got two panels in contention at the cool-but-unwieldy Panel Picker, so I thought I’d provide some shortcuts here. A lot of folks feel that there are too many panels at SXSW and not enough solo presenters. I tend to agree, but I think the problem is really panels that are underprepared or have too many participants. After moderating a panel with five participants last year I’ve decided that that’s too many for a 45 or 50 minute slot. I think four (including moderator) is the max, and three or even two is probably ideal.
The first panel I’m proposing pertains to my ongoing book project (working title: Presence of Mind), on the subject of online/digital identity, reputation, attention, privacy, trust, and presence. Last year, my panel, Every Breath You Take (podcast, my slides) seemed to go over fairly well, despite the gawdawful 10 am but really 9 am because of daylight savings Sunday morning slot (you must recall that Saturday night - and, really, every other night - at SXSW involves a lot of drinking for most attendees.
I took to heart the positive and negative feedback and so the sequel this year will feature just three participants: myself, Ted Nadeau returning from last year, and Andrew Hinton, whose presentation on communities of practice at the IA Summit this year was such a huge success. We’re going to strive to go beyond the typical talking-head panel format and enage the audience in innovative ways. We’re also going to try to take the conversation past the grounwork-laying, high-level philosophizing of last year and hand the attendees some practical tools for building on what we’re tentatively calling the “human operating system.”
If this sounds appealing to you, please go vote for Online Reputation: And I Do Give a Damn about My Bad Reputation.
My second proposal draws on my experience running Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library and moderating a mailing list for pattern authors. I’ve recruited Jenifer Tidwell, the leading figure in UI patterns; Austin Govella, who can talk about implementing a pattern library in a commerical context at Comcast; and James Reffel, also now at Yahoo!, who will share what he learned getting eBay’s pattern engine off the ground.
Luke Wrobleski’s talk on patterns at SXSW last year filled a large room and generated a lot of interest and I’m hoping to serve that same constituency by sharing practical experience and advice in our panel Design Patterns: the Devil’s in the Details, which we described this way:
Patterns ground frameworks like Rails and Django drive libraries like Prototype, and enable rapid product development at companies big and small. But what happens when patterns go wrong? How do you know when a pattern is right? We’ll examine common issues facing groups who use design patterns and share our experiences at making sure patterns go right.
There are a lot of other great proposals. I kind of wish I could sort my existing votes into star order to remind myself of the ones I’ve already deemed must-sees, but here are a few I’ve been able to recall or find.
Hit me up in the comments if you’d like to recommend another panel or presenter as well.
Back in February, Mark Zeman, Lecturer and Subject Director in Digital Media, College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand, tipped me off to a search agent research project called Searchbots. I tagged it as something to blog about in my email and then, well, I got busy with my new job.
I’ve finally checked it out. Mark was clever enough to give me short precis of the project:
Here are the questions (to users) the research is designed to address:
Mark said he was planning to run a survey of users so if he notices this post, he can chime in and let us know “some of the findings on how personifying the interface effects users motivation levels.”
To help edit and refactor the list of social media patterns we brainstormed in the session, drop by BarCampBlock SocialMedia DesignPatterns.
Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto.
According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or participate in discussions about portable social networks, identity, design patterns, particularly social-media related design patterns, and the gift economy.
I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk about all of those things but when has that ever stopped me before?
Since the moment that Liz Henry and Tara Hunt tipped me off to this event, I’ve had the feeling that this was an important one not to miss. So soon after my wedding and honeymoon and with a rapidly filling-up fall conference schedule, I could have been tempted to let this one slide by, but I have a strong intuition that many of the people I consider friends, heroes, and inspirations will be there and that I’d be kicking myself if I let another Bay Area BarCamp go by without joining in on the fun.
I’ll blog from there if I can find the time between no-spectatorin’ and schmoozin’ and gettin’ things done.
Maybe everyone else in the blogosphere knows this already but I just read that Dave Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati: Technorati Weblog: A Change In Seasons
Looks like Tantek’s timing was impeccable.
I first met Dave during the dotcom bust when blogging was booming (again) on the backs of a lot of underemployed folks, myself included. I was working hard, updating Radio Free Blogistan three to seven times a day, hanging out on the #joiito channel on irc, and going to various blogger dinners and shmoozes here in the Bay Area.
I met a lot of folks with interesting startup ideas or who were looking at various ways of turning their passion for blogging and or social networking into businesses or publications or both. Dave’s idea was simple to explain and easy to understand, so I wasn’t surprised to see it get funded and take off.
I’ve got other friends working there now - some of whom I introduced to the Technorati people. I guess I consider myself a friend of the company, if that’s even a possible thing to be, and I’ve hesitated to complain or criticize too much when I’ve found the service sluggish or otherwise frustrating.
I applauded their recent redesign and I still visit the site when I am in the mood for some egosurfing (usually disappointing) or to see who’s been blogging about the Yahoo! Pattern Library recently.
It sounds like Technorati is having a tough time right now. Valleywag reported something like eight layoffs in addition to the CEO vacancy, and people don’t seem to talk about how Google or Yahoo! should buy Technorati so much anymore.
(Disclosure: I work at Yahoo but I have absolutely no knowledge regarding acquisition plans or lack of them for any startup out there.)
I’m sure the next thing Dave does will be interesting and I wish him the best.
If you missed Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Privacy, and Reputation last March at South By here’s your chance to hear me, Ted Nadeau, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and George Kelly take on these topics, very early one Sunday morning after an untimely daylight savings change and, for many people, a night of carousing and drinking free drinks sponsored by startups and web behemoths.
Looks like Technorati has reconfigured itself to be less blog-centric and to take a more multimedia look at what they call over there the Live Web (Technorati Weblog: Come check out the refreshed www.technorati.com!):
First, we’ve eliminated search silos on Technorati. In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag search and blog directory search in order to make use of the full power of our site. No more. Starting today, we now provide you a simplified experience. Simply indicate what’s of interest to you and we’ll assemble the freshest, hottest, most current social media from across the Live Web - Blogs, posts, photos, videos, podcasts, events, and more.
We’ve also worked really hard at making our user interface simpler, and more intuitive. We’ve been spending months doing user testing, and listening to you, our users, collecting and prioritizing what you wanted, what you liked, and what you hated about Technorati. We haven’t gotten it 100% right yet, and we’re going to keep working hard to improve, but I think we’ve made a big step forward with this launch.
…
With this launch, we also provide you with more context around more stuff like videos, music, and blogs. Over time, these pages will become richer and more comprehensive as we add more information about the thing itself, like where it was published, who links to it, what other things are similarly tagged, and more.
In reply to apophenia: Twitter questions (curiosity is killing me…):
First, the practical question. Can i quote you?
[ ] Yes, and you must use my real name.
[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information.
[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.Hmm, those options have an excluded middle. I’d say “Yes, feel free, and you may use my real name, my online handle(s), or whatever other descriptor you find useful.” If I have to pick one I guess I’d pick the first one.
1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?
I use it to jot down my thoughts and narrate my day and to keep up with what some of my (online) friends are doing and thinking about. I like the ambient intimacy, to quote Leisa Reichelt.
2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.
I think my followers are reading them. Is that a trick question? It’s a perfectly OK audience for me, since it’s opt in. There are people, like close friend and family whom I’d like to also read them (if they were willing of course), but there is no invite feature.
3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?
I read them sometimes via twitterific, sometimes from the Twitter website, sometimes receiving them as text messages. I don’t always read all of them but I do tend to read down till I reach familiar territory, much like the way I catch up on a blog I haven’t read in a while. (Having said that, I scan - I don’t read everything carefully.)
I read people whom I’ve met and a few whom I find interesting or appealing. So I don’t know them all but I think I know (meaning have met in person) 90% of them. I don’t expect any of them to reciprocate necessarily. That is, it doesn’t bother me if they are not interested in following my thoughts.
4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?
I haven’t thought about it too much. I go by instinct. I guess some descriptions of graphic bodily functions might not necessarily feel appropriate to me, at times. Beyond that I think it’s fair game and the character limit kind of helps.
I have thought about tweeting something and then decided not to, usually because I think it’s too random or trivial, because I’ve ceased to find it amusing in the first few seconds since thinking of it, or because I’ve posted a bunch of tweets lately and don’t want to be spamming people.
5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?
My tweets are public. I like doing things in public and don’t mind people paying attention. Therefore (back to the appropriateness thing) I probably won’t be tweeting about things that are illegal or offensive or humiliating (unless I can’t resist because it’s so entertaining or revealing). I don’t mind people coming across what I write. I expect it’s all out there and people will see it and even form opinions about me based on it. It’s all good.
6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?
I can’t get the IM interface working and I would find it useful during the workday. There are many people I’d enjoy sharing with on Twitter who are not on the system but I can’t be sure they’d like it (so many people don’t) so I don’t feel comfortable evangelizing.
On the SIGIA-L discussion list people are talking about a spammy social network site called Tagged.com. I only know about it because I received an invitation from an unfamiliar sender to a never-used spam-honeypot email address of mine. I looked at the site, it seemed shady, so I ignored it. That was months ago.
Now I’m learning that the site encourages new members to submit their email usernames and passwords. It then scours the user’s address book, sending spam invitations to all of the email addresses it finds, sent as if from the new member, and follows up with reminders. (Much like WAYN and the original version of Plaxo.)
It also make the email addresses available to “marketing partners” on an opt-out basis.
It’s nearly impossible to find out who’s behind the site. (Its registration is associated with p.o. box in San Francisco.)
It doesn’t pass the smell test.
Shun. Avoid. Eschew.
Following on its adoption of tagging last year, Amazon has now added a friends feature. At least I assume this is something new. I hadn’t heard of it before. The first clue I had that such as social networking functionality had been introduced was receiving an invitation in my email from a writer friend of mine:
When social networking sites started cropping up everywhere in 2004 a lot of people wondered what they were for. Some had clear purposes. LinkedIn is for business/professional networking. Others are for dating. But many of them seemed more like a proof of concept waiting for a business model. The next logical step to look out for is to see businesses and sites with existing purposes and flows of people and data embracing social networking as a service to their communities (and, incidentally, as a way of redoubling those flows.
Amazon appears to making tentative steps to test out these possibilities.
I gathered these links and quotations within a day or so of the panel I moderated at South by Southwest, but since then I’ve been to another conference and am generally running behind. Still, I was pleased by many of these responses (and even the less positive ones provide useful criticism) so I wanted to make a point of reflecting them here:
Jason Toney at Blog is a Mix Tape wrote:
- New etiquette rules really need to be established for online and mobile communication
- Reputation, Identity, Presence, Nameplaces - these are my kinds of buzzwords
- How does the desire for someone like me who wants a persistent online identity exist at the same time that many people (particularly young people) like the concept of disposable identity? Are their tools and applications that can make the web better for both types of folks?
- What about those who want no online identity but still wants the tools that are increasingly requiring identity creation?
The author of swirlspice wrote:
Started the day with Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation…. This could have gone on for another hour. Mostly about managing your identity and how your reputation develops and propagates (your reputation is assigned to you more than you create it).
In Wired’s “Listening Post” blog, Laura Moorhead wrote Leave No Trail Behind:
Who are you? Your Wikipedia entry or your last blog entry? What about that half-clothed avatar or raunchy kid from a few years back?
The panel “Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online” reminds us — not that we needed it — that our identity lives on and it’s mutating out of control. Friends, enemies, and crazy exes (aka Sibils) augment it, and big companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Yahoo, use and benefit from it. Where’s the user control?
Early on in the hour-long panel, Ted Nadeau, from Dot Line Inc., reminds us that though we’re all pro privacy, there really is no privacy online.
Take a look at the top handful of sites trying to offer users control over their online identity - be that one or 12 personas - and expect to be disappointed. “Reputation 1.0 isn’t working - there’s no consistency in someone’s reputation,” says Nadeau. “There’s big thinking, but no one coding yet.”
What’s the perfect reputation system? Perhaps, says Nadeau, one in which you can move your persona from one web site to another, with different data stores and key spaces (say, your copy, that of others and a shared version).
This is pretty much what panelist Kaliya Hamlin, a freelance evangelist for open standards in user-centric identity (OpenID2, i-names, XRI/XDI, SAML, icards, Higgins), backs. With OpenID2, she says, you travel the web with your identity. Essentially, you own it, and there’s no breadcrumb trail for online companies to feed off.
Mary Hodder, founder of Dabble, a social search site, goes on to ask, Why shouldn’t users own all their clicks? Hodder put this question to companies like Amazon and Google — and (amazingly) they agreed. She’s even got a tool to track a person’s online life via clicks.
This idea of leave no trail behind is big. Eliot Van Buskirk’s article about the RIAA’s latest poison pen shows us why users might want to own a copy of all their online wanderings and actions.
Another option (I think from Hodder and Hamlin): If all our info is public, but anonymous, that’s even better.
One last nugget from Hodder: We’re agreeing to things we don’t understand. Consider Google’s deal with San Francisco to set up the city with a wireless network. Taxpayers are giving up their “attention data” — their online entities — for 17 years. Hodder says that’s worth millions, far more than the cost of the wireless setup. Shouldn’t the city or someone get a cut?
Bill Humphries wrote in his blog Whump, I’m a 10th Level Link Blogger:
Liz Henry: Ted Nadeau says our non-monetary assets are: Identity, Attention, Intention, Influence, Reputation. (In addition to Str Dex Int Wis Con Cha.)”
Laura Fisher wrote in her a later date blog:
Attended a great panel, moderated by Christian Crumlish, on web identity and attention. There were some terrific things said; I took notes - it deserves a post of its own.
Laura Porto wrote in Digital Dialogs:
Identity and reputation in the digital space is one of those gigantic topics to try to tackle in an hour. This panel provided some discussion starters, but unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to go deeper.
- Mary Hodder made the suggestion that we all be transparent about what we do online so that the government can’t stigmatize certain people or certain behaviors
- Ted Nadeau made the point that while you are connected to your identity you are not in control of it
- George Kelly showed us the interactive Johari window as an example of how our reputations so not belong to us, but rather to the people who interact with us
One of the most interesting points of the panel came from an audience participant who asked about changing identity. We are, after all, a young industry. How will we feel about having one identity in 10 or 20 or 30 years? I for one, find it fun to Google my Usenet entries circa 95.
Another interesting point raised was how we manage the public versus private space.”
Rob Pongsajapan wrote in arrivals/departures:
One panel that was excellent, however, was the Christian Crumlish-moderated panel on identity, attention, presence and reputation. I was trading notes with Aly after the session and sent her my impression of the panel: “Mary Hodder didn’t disappoint,” I texted.
In Composite: Thoughts on Poetics Liz Henry transcribed very accurate notes and wrote, “Wow, I dig all the stuff Ted has been saying.”
In Eco-Geekery Brian Fitzgeral wrote:
This was a great panel, really well facilitated by Christian Crumlish, author The Power of the Many. He’s working on a new book, and claims “my scam was to put this panel together, take notes on what they say, and sneak it into my book.” Man, that is SO going to be a book if he does so. His online identities are. xian, mediajunkie.
Chris Hunter wrote in jugglebird:
I’m at SXSW early for a panel on reputation and identity. It started out very slow, with the moderator, Christian Crumlish, rambling on without making many definitive statements.
Ted Nadeau went next, with an admitted preface that he was new to identity and reputation. While his talk was rambling, he threw out some interesting observations about existing reputation systems (eBay, LinkedIn, Slashdot, etc…) but generally noting the lack of widespread and open reputation systems. It definitely seems like there’s an opportunity for something tied to OpenID and given the direction LoTV is headed, it’s worth paying attention to this area.”
Mary Hodder spoke next about the Attention Trust, starting with an example of how Google uses attention in the form of links and AdSense to power their businesses. She related that the Attention Trust founders actually had a much easier time than expected in getting large internet companies (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc…) to release this information to their users.”
The last panelist, George Kelly, spoke about the interactive johari window which allows an individual to self-select attributes and then compare them to the attributes selected by others. The inverse, a nohari window, allows the selection of negative attributes with the same kind of comparison and filtering.”
The author of worldmegan took extensive notes, including this:
This panel is called Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation. Christian Crumlish is our moderator. He seems nice, though very sleepy. Poor west coast people. Hell, I’M sleepy.
and notes on the discussion of an attention economy:
Attention: The “attention economy,” what is this thing? It’s actually incredibly consequental that Google is collecting your information - this has to do with the attention economy. A link to a site is a vote of confidence in Google’s eyes. Rank results are based on this, are based on what a person clicks when they search for something. Adsense is also based on all of this. The “attention trust” asserts that you own a copy of this information. (Attention is still bothering me, I’m not quite getting it.) Seth Goldstein and Steve Gilmore started the attention trust, Mary is explaining. They got everybody to agree that the users own a copy of their attention streams. An attention stream is all those clicks you put into your browser, all these things someone is recording. There’s also a recorder you can use to record your own stream, it sounds like… this is actually really interesting! I like Mary Hodder.”
Rex Hammond did some very thorough very thorough liveblogging.
Will Kern wrote in 15 Meanings:
The first panel I went to was Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation, which consisted of Christian Crumlish from Yahoo!, Kaliya Hamlin from Identity Woman, Mary Hodder from Dabble, George Kelly from the Contra Costa Newspapers and Ted Nadeau from Dot Line Inc. The title of the panel seemed very intriguing and I thought I could gain a lot out of it and how it applies to social networking.
There were a few things I took away, but not necessarily how they directly applied to social networking. Kaliya talked about identity and namespaces, which I thought was good. She illustrates how OpenID like services work she was pitching the Yadis protocol, which would bring the various OpenID like options into 1 single sign on.
Ted discussed reputation (which he knowingly admitted that prior to a few days ago; he did not know much about the subject matter, kinda scary). With that being said, he did make some good points on the matter. He defined what reputation is as it pertains to the web and how you are not the primary authority on your reputation as it appears differently to different people.
And Leisa Reichelt wrote in her blog disambiguity:
Every Breath You Take - an incredibly intelligent, engaging and interesting panel on identity, attention and reputation which are topics that I’m finding incredibly interesting at the moment. There are all kinds of problems and opportunities around identity at the moment and this panel, including Christian Crumlish, Ted Nadeau, Mary Hodder, Kaliya Hamlin and George Kelly took a run at some of them. I’m still thing about the idea of Identity Friction and how we need to increase identity friction in virtual spaces to better replicate how it works in the ‘real world’.
On the whole, I think we managed to spark some interesting thoughts and kick off some much needed conversations around these vital concepts for the social, living web.
Note: I’ve added Ted Nadeau’s slides to my own in an earlier post to this blog.
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to wake up! in the Social Design category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
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