Nodal Points The emerging real-time social Web Jyri Engeström zengestrom.com

The emerging real-time social Web

Jyri Engeström

zengestrom.com

This talk is structured around 3 key concepts: 1. Social objects 2. Social peripheral vision 3. Nodal points

Mark Sigal: “ There has to be more to the Web 2.0 story than accessorizing my Facebook page with one-dimensional pseudo applications”

“ Create a Facebook application like Top Friends, which has almost 3 million active users, and you could be into some serious Internet dough.”

“ tendency for individual applications to grow very quickly within the first few weeks, and then to plateau in growth after a few weeks”

Social network theory is good at representing links between people - But it doesn’t explain what connects those particular people and not others

Another tradition of theorizing offers an explanation of why so many YASNS ultimately fail Pierre Bourdieu Sociologist 1930-2002 Yrjö Engeström Activity theorist 1948- Bruno Latour Actor-network theorist 1947- Karin Knorr-Cetina Sociologist 1944- Lev Vygotsky Psychologist 1896-1934

People don’t just connect to each other They connect through a shared object

From John Thackara: “In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World.” Used with permission.

From John Thackara: “In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World.” Used with permission.

Good web services allow people to create social objects that add value

Flickr did it to photos Del.icio.us did it to bookmarks YouTube did it to video

New objects -> new value

Mobile devices make it possible to capture slices of reality that people couldn’t capture before

Camera phones -> photos

Text messages -> status updates

Video phones -> live streams and video comments

2.0

GPS & cell ID -> places

Bluetooth -> people you’ve met

Barcodes/RFIDs -> physical objects

Objects are interesting as such

Yet it’s even more interesting what other people say about an object and what they do with it

Define your verbs

(verb) Adam Photo Blog post Video Event Music track Place Favorited Commented Rated Posted Played Visited A B X

Actions (Alexei N. Leontiev) Speech acts (John R. Searle) Communicative acts (Jürgen Habermas) Utterances (Conversation Analysis)

Actions leave traces on the Web

- Some actions we type ourselves - Others are auto-generated

Social peripheral vision

No awareness of other people’s intentions = Inability to make plans

Sites that publish what people have been doing

Imagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW From Joi Ito http://joi.ito.com

Over the next 24 months many of the services we use regularly will probably become socially aware

Not just activity streams Maps - where are my friends Phonebook - what are people up to Email - prioritizing Photos - facial recognition

Terminator 2

The Daemon

Marauder’s map

Object lockers Activity aggregators Discovery layer (search actions)

People transmit updates, kind of like pulsars in space

At Jaiku it felt like we were hacking together a transmitter/receiver

Aggregation at massive scale

Pattern recognition

Detecting nodal points

What should I be aware of that’s happening around me?

Was what just happened significant to someone on the network?

What?

Who?

Where?

Just-in-time delivery

Discovery is becoming social

Pagerank “ Facerank”? Who links to it? Social proximity (friends in common) Physical proximity Shared taste Shared objects ...

Social proximity (friends in common)

Physical proximity

Shared taste

Shared objects

...

Identity OpenID Authorization OAuth Interoperability OpenSocial Own it, port it, share it

Ok.

1. What is your object? 2. What are your verbs? 3. What are your nodal points? Quick checklist :