2004-02-11

People-to-People: From Close Friends to Stranger
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4933
(Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research)


- some stuff on where they're coming from, and demos


Background: Microsoft V-Chat, also Comic Chat (your interaction becomes a comic
strip. Very Laurel/Computers As Theatre), more.

Lessons learned on sustaining meaningful interactions:

- individuals: persistent user IDs, self representations
- environment: critical mass, non verbal
[there's much more]

* self representation

when you're designing a model, you're designing a person.

"me centred social interaction"
"fuzzy self-representations preferred"

example:
"customs" most popular v-chat feature
easy to see, 0 clicks [includes expressive communication]

* environment

most groups are small: 75% have less than 20 total members

probe, people's lives & endings: we're very happy to throw probes out into the
real world and see how people use them, but we mustn't forget that people are
using these things to meet people, to socialise: they're part of people's lives.
we have to be very careful about how we remove them.

[random thought: i wonder what a command line flickr would look like, one that
would appeal to danny's alpha geeks who live on sync scripts, no cross app
control, shells and text files]

[man, I'm feeling really fried.]

* Wallop

- awareness of people you care about
- socializing in the context of your media
- ability to "bump" into friends

"every object in the system is a first class object"