2006-06-02 reboot8 day 2 Urbanseeder maya lotan a system for flirting where it "just happens" (real life, you forget a bag, go back and meet someone) current dating systems: huge questionnaires. feels like an insurance claim. questions: immediacy vs delay staged vs improvised formal vs ambiguous (like you don't know if a wink is for you) profiling vs mystery isolated vs integral (people spent hours in the separate world of dating sites) chair demo: chair reads body language from sensors on it (bored; interested; making a pass, etc). you can sit in it, and other people can ready your body language off a display chair conclusion: - technology makes mistakes - therefore take advantage of these mistakes insights - lure hunters into our territory - girls go to the place where the guys they like hang out - add joint junctions into people's path - twist fate to create accidental encounters feel like magic - guys only like to talk to girls after seeing them repeatedly - romantic concept: less than saying "can i have your numbers", and more than just "hope to see you around" really nice shirts that have an ID on to contact people. it's a polo-neck with the id exposed if the collar is up. you can have privacy by folding the collar down--builds on the way people play with clothing anyway. also beautiful uniquely coded patterns, but tiled so it looks really good. printed on different clothing; passive interaction. # Telling Stories ...what Homen, Dickers and Marvel Comics can teach your (social software) Tom Armitage [pretty structured and data-rich this talk, i'm hoping tom puts the slides+text online afterwards.] "retcon" -- Retroactive Continuity [is this going to be about hypertime?] - Crisis on Infinite Earths in social software: Flickr has a "replace" button, which changes the photo without resetting the comments, etc. [this is like when people edit their comments near the top of a thread in a messageboard, changing the flow] "there is no default for truth or fiction" [this is a debate we really need to have. we don't tell lies - fiction - over the phone. why not? when did that happen? it makes me very sad when i see people haranging bloggers who are experimenting with ambiguous fiction and applications--not just identity play, but things where you really don't know. jokes have to be obvious or people get upset. does the internet need to be a representation of an authoritative "real world", or can it be its own thing, which isn't required to represent or be unambiguous?] tom answers this with a fantastic WoW anecdote about somebody being kicked out a guild for racism against elves. # Blind Men's Baseball: The Social Importance of Peripheral Vision Jyri Engeström [jyri is wearing possibly the best tshirt i've ever seen--black with a watercolour landscape on it.] 2 aspects to highlight: 1. seeing the surrounding space (this is the spatial aspect) seeing the space in the present. all about being in the world at the moment, not about describing things. from the perspective of baseball, it's about seeing the whole at once. it's before you act. what if you can't see the whole? it's like the blind men and the elephant. if these blind men were playing baseball, the only way they could communicate would be by calling to each other. jyri says this is unfair, but he's just trying to highlight what lacking peripheral vision is like: it's like trying to navigate in the dark. phones: designed with the assumption that you know who you want to call. (eg addressbook) except: before dialling, one needs to decide if it's a good time to call. there are many questions--when you do call, you start by asking context, "where u at?" but phones don't tell you much. in IM, there's a status line which is often used for location information (and availability status). what if this was in your phone addressbook? jyri's new company on working on this now. [awesome. if anybody can do this properly, jyri can] this is the spatial aspect - kinda - but really about the present tense. 2. the temporal aspect "we see each other as vectors that are spatial and temporal at the same time" on the freeway, we can see ahead--not loads, but a little and enough. (now showing how something like upcoming could be merged into the addressbook) mobile 2.0 is not about multimedia, it's about enabling social peripheral vision--across space and time. How will we interact in the future? WoW is modded to display a lot of information in the periphery. what will this look like in mobile devices? important issues: "Those who won't be using the technology will seem more and more out of socially." jyri knows people who refer to their hotmail friends--friends who only have email addresses but don't use these other social technologies. we end up with a skit from Who's on First by Abbot and Costello # Networked objects and the new ecology of things Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker there is a circulation of ideas around the idea of "networked objects" - ITU's Internet of Things report - Sterling's Shaping Things - Bleeker's A Manifesto for Networked Objects - thinglink - a thing can be created and have an indexical identity in this digital world in the first IoT report, it was all about business practices [i was talking to someone who uses UWB for locating objects. the main current use is by cisco, who can see when their offices are being unused and thus save on rent. enormously brilliant, practical, and not at all what the technology was intended for.] blogject - objects producing content - reporting about themselves, interactions with the world, environment - eg aibo blog platform, including a photo diary. the user can add comments - the blogject output is not intended to be like the aibo one, but this is just an example - but the aibo blog is a kind of instrumentality some blogject characteristics: geospatial traces. blogjects exist in the physical world - eg flightaware, cab tracks in san francisco - this data tends to come from military or art/tech projects - the reason flightaware is good is that it doesn't just represent the "flight", it represents the physical lump of stuff itself. where is it, actually? where has it been in the past? you can sit outside and spot tail numbers, and tail numbers are the thinglink for aircraft. - "extraordinary rendition" emerged because people wrote down the numbers of unmarked planes, and looked up the flight traces blogjects know their origin stories - "How Stuff is Made"--visual encyclopaedia of manufacture blogjects are assertive, have agency, and may shape social pressure - [this is honest, i like that they talk about how the contrail attached to objects - and their instrumentality - can inflict violence] - tripsense, seeing how you move around the city in a car (environmental impact). could you subscribe to a feed of pollution from the stretch of freeway you use? - [i'm now thinking about the car rental companies who put gps in the car so they can check if you speed] [end of characteristics] networks create new potentials for physical movement of objects (eg, walmart warehouse) can this digital control over physical movement be harnessed? could we take these business practices and reappropriate them to help in our own social world? eg, bleeker has a concern about his use of amazon prime, which is a great way of buying books but include lots of deliveries. what if he could say "i'm willing to wait an extra day if i could be on a more environmentally efficient route"? blogjects: why does this matter? what is at stake? what is the social web with networked objects? mentions both - cognition, what we see objects as - latour, objects in as much as they relate to actors, what they are questioning objects is part of a global trend. creating legibility and transparency blogects can reshape market relationships establishing relationships amongst physical and virtual worlds - from weak signals to blogjects: xport, rfid tags, public/private spectrum on a camera lcd # Doc Searls Markets 2.0 how we talk about markets: bulls bears invisible hands forces battlefields stuff that reduces to transactions and nothing more that's the reason for saying that markets were conversations. markets are relationships. traditional search hunch for relatively static stuff, not live stuff. it searches for "sites" that are "designed" and "built" at "addresses" the live web is branching off the static web: between space and time. one looks through billions; the other listens to millions. - technorati's goal is time-to-index, listening to a ping - live web search responds only to signs of life on the live web, the demand side is supplying itself. slashdot, flickr, youtube, boingboing. this is happening on the static web too, only slower. "podcasting is part of the great unbundling" [terry someone credited for that phrase] in the new networked economy, power isn't redistributed. it's re-originated. it originates with people who converse, transact, etc. in the live web economy, the value chair is replaced by the value constellation. (there's an article by a couple of french economists about this, and a book too) the live web will help drive the "intention economy". intention is a marketplace is what you get when the customer's mind is made up. you have attention (deciding) to become with, then comes a decision about whta to buy exactly and it becomes intention. what then? it's silo to silo to silo in the regular world. couldn't it be better? we're obsessed with marketing, but we don't think enough about when the customer is ready to buy. we still think that a free market is "your choice of silo". # I'm taking a ride - curve surfing and speed mania Robert Willim major qs: - how do we find/predict the mysterious twists of history? - how do we make sense in heated times? based on case study of framfab. swedish internet consultancy started in 1997; still exists but in a different form. peaked around 2000. framfab is an abbreviation of "the future factory" one way to communicate this attempt to envision/create the future is through spatial metaphors: "virtual land grab" the S-curve comes up a lot, eg penetration of internet in society. same curve comes up in 17th century farmers adopting a new kind of rake. how do we know where on this curve we are? you go curve surfing into some kind of virtual future. but this makes you think about history as something linear, when we're going in a certain direction--like travelling on a train-track, something with a determined direction. metaphors of vision: - the ability to think about or plan the future - a mental image of what the future could be like - a trance of a dream central metaphor in these: conjuring. important in management and marketing. conjuring involves - extrapolation of trends (like by curve surfing) - vaporware example of computer extrapolation: swedish [gov?] warn that the rows and numbers of computers would turn people into robots. with VR, the warning is about people not being able to tell what reality is speed mania: - first mover advantage? - escape velocity? - by being part of the new economy, a company can leave the old industry behind and lift off into the new world. we see speed as representative of the future: - fast computers/companies/economies/people. conceptual congruity - is speed an end in itself? flow/reflexivity - to go with the flow - but where are we going? - when is it possible to ask reflexive question? [a question i didn't get to ask: on reflexivity: europeans do this a lot, generalising terribly. i believe that in the long term it'll work out. but i've heard people from silicon valley refer to it as cynicism. when people get really excited about something, really optimistic, they're happy to make many small experiments, and not mind to much when small things go wrong. it could be that the way the web and the internet grows is more in line with this kind of model, an excited collective. we wouldn't call it "smart", because it's a blind organic growth. but it seems to work, at least in the last few years. the speaker saw this strong, unquestioning belief before. how necessary is it to success, inclusion and happiness?]