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Monday, July 07, 2003 |
 Faces - Perceiving not Judging.
Marc Canter talks about faces :
"Face time.... not sure how I missed this - but Clay's last post - points to a wondeful post by Liz Lawley on faces one of my favorite subjects!" Marc goes on to say : "I'm totally in love with the idea that one's face is their moniker - it's their social greeting card. The computer graphics folks know that rendering a human face - is by far the most complex task to accomplish. Combine this with the ability for an RSS channel to have one's face and new kinds of aggregators could rely upon the face for a cool visual display. Faces are also key in cross-between language barriers, expressing emotion and as a search metaphor. Now take FOAF, faces and some sort of People's DNS (OpenIdentity standard) and we're starting to ROCK!" [Marc Canter]
 Particularly interesting when you talk about a shrinking globe, and networking with people thousands of miles away. I have found myself wondering what a person i've been connecting with through my blog really looks like - its a 'touchy-feely' thing really - difficult to express - yet once i can put a face to the words i read, they somehow seem so much more human and real, and easier to make a connection with. Moreover, it moves me away from 'judging' into the area of sensing and perceiving. If i don't find a picture on a blog - i turn to Ryze - and more often than not - i find one there. I like Marc's blog for this reason - and am quite happy to deal with my news feeds slowing down due to his large picture files ! And Ton has a neat faceroll at his blog.
[Conversations with Dina]
I really believe in this face stuff. Way back in 1993 - we did an interface for Tokyo's Ohdaiba island - which was supposed to be a digital city. It had faces as the core of the interface. Our MediaBar project in 1996-97 also had faces. Each station had a camera attached and set-up - so as you sat down - you saw your face grabbed, resized and placed into the interface.
![[Image: ]](http://radio.weblogs.com/0114726/images/ross%20mayfield.jpg) Each station then supported multiple people - and a face-bar was formed - allowing end-users to easily switch between 'current' profiles. End-user's entire media collections, recommendations, tastes, conversations, reviews (nowadays blog posts and RSS channels) would be swapped into memory and made current. That was 7 years ago.
Maybe now faces will come into their own! FOAF certainly has it down right! And Ryze! And Friendster!
Don't ask what..... I have received some emails from friends concerned about UserLand. There is a lot of good energy and good people around these tools. I do believe that there's still a lot of great things that can be done. The key is: how do we do them, have fun (and make some money for everybody in the process?). Hint: it starts from sales. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Yes - it does start with sales. Money is what makes the world go around. Getting the About.com gig - was a real win for SixApart. We actually bought run-time licenses for Userland's Frontier technology on three different projects we did. I also was the one who introduced Paolo to Frontier - back in 1998.
It's been along run. Now hopefully a new chapter for Userland is about to be unveiled.
EyeChat.
Finally connected with my younger smarter brother via iChat and iSight. Dan, methinks it's your home network... 
[Steve Gillmor's Emerging Opps]
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Getting iSight and iChat AV Running. This is my older, wiser brother Steve and me, using the iChat AV and iSight package from Apple. We tried any number of times last night from our home networks with no luck. Today he's still writing at home, and I'm sitting at San Francisco Airport running over a T-Mobile hotspot. Go figure... [Dan Gillmor] |
Well we got the Gillmor boys - on iChatAV. :-) I might get one just so I can iChat with Paolo about Userland.
Coolio - so now we can finally see what Pete Kaminski has been working on. He and Ross (of SocialText) have been talking about combining a Wiki and a blog - and now I know what they mean by that. Take a look at the SuperNova Wiki.
They've added the concept of 'categories' to Wiki's - which can encapsulate concepts like PEOPLE, Bofs, any sort of 'special section - into a special kind of Wiki page. They then take that 'category' and turn it into a series of blog entires..... delineated by each category linefeed. The PEOPLE section is a blog, the Bofs page is a blog, etc.
So the Socialtext Wiki IS a blogging tool now.
HHhhhmmmm......
I sure hope they support FOAF. And ThreadsML.
RealNetworks released its SMIL (synchronized multimedia integration language) implementation as open source today -- this is good for developers of content, like myself, who want to start synching events in video to other media. So, for example, if one had a "happening" a la the Emergent Democracy happening and recorded the audio call, the happening could be played back in Real format while the chat scrolled out as it did during the call. And, if the programmer is clever, new participants could annotate the record with their own comments, agreeing or disagreeing with the speaker or the chatters for viewing by others, later.
[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]
I don't talk about SMIL - as it's one of those non-standard standards - that just doesn't cut it. It's based upon the premise that media is coming in - over the web - and that you want/need to synchronize media - on the fly.
One problem - you can't reliably count on WHEN that media shows up - which throws a kabosh on any synchronization efforts.
Not sure how I missed this - but Clay's last post - points to a wondeful post by Liz Lawley on faces one of my favorite subjects!
face time
When people say "face-to-face" communication in the context of social software, they're usually talking about in-person as opposed to computer-mediated interactions. But given the direction that tools like Friendster and Apple's iChat are taking us, I'm increasingly convinced that face-to-face communication is an important part of new social software technologies.
Everyone--really, everyone--I've shown iChat to has liked it. It's immediately appealing. Why? I suspect it's the faces. When I'm chatting with my friends, I see their faces. It makes me smile. The context for the words is real, is connected to my sense of them as real people as opposed to disembodied words on a screen. (Think about that word, even. "Disembodied." It immediately has a negative connotation associated with it.)
Similarly, there's been a lot of discussion lately about Friendster. From TerboTed's rant (which Clay pointed to recently) to the discussion by Adam Greenfield that I mentioned, one of the things that seems to come across over and over again is the fact that people using Friendster really like seeing their friends' faces.
Hydra is a good example, too. Because it uses Apple's Rendezvous networking functionality, it gives you the same thumbnail photos that iChat offers. That's part of its appeal. You can see who's working on the document with you, you can visually connect content of the collaboratively edited document with the person's name--and face--in the sidebar.
I've gotten a bit of flak regarding my complaints about the visual appeal of wikis. But I continue to believe that how things look has a not insignificant impact on how people feel about them. The argument that how it looks is a trivial aspect of a software's functionality is not what I'm seeing in the behavior of users. We can dismiss those users' concerns as "shallow" and "trivial," or we can acknowledge those concerns as legitimate and try to build software that works for the users. Modifying underlying code and demanding that users learn arcane editing conventions doesn't lead to software with broad appeal. That's fine if we're only designing communication tools for power users. But if we want things for "the rest of us," I think we have to stop denying the power of the visual interface. Me, I want more "face time"--online and off. [many-to-many]
 I'm totally in love with the idea that one's face is their moniker - it's their social greeting card. The computer graphics folks know that rendering a human face - is by far the most complex task to accomplish.
Combine this with the ability for an RSS channel to have one's face and new kinds of aggregators could rely upon the face for a cool visual display. Faces are also key in cross-between language barriers, expressing emotion and as a search metaphor.
Now take FOAF, faces and some sort of People's DNS (OpenIdentity standard) and we're starting to ROCK!
Good phrase: Context Bottleneck. I had one of those "aha!" moments talking to Petri Maenpaa of Nokia the other day, when he used the phrase "context bottleneck" to describe the way social cues get stripped out of mediated interaction.
This idea seems to me to be a useful lens to view a lot of social software through. IM differs from fast email exchanges, for example, in part because one of email's (many) context bottlenecks is its lack of presence. Likewise, Liz's "Its the Faces, Stupid" design parameter is a way of reducing context bottlenecks.
Of course, some bottles need necks -- the virtues of compression and asynchrony are not to be sneezed at -- but thinking about developing or improving social software with an eye on context bottlenecks seems potentially fruitful.
My #1 context bottleneck wish is better context for mailing lists. Although they are the serial killer app of social software, there has hardly been any work done on them in the last decade. Most of the improvements in mailing list software, in fact, have been improvements in the admin interface, not the user experience. Given that all the traffic on a list goes through a central server, one could add all sorts of metadata about posters (most quoted line), threads (# of days, # of responses), or the whole list (users to lurkers ratio) before re-sending the message. Instead, the best we get is munging the Reply-to: header and adding the list name in brackets. If ever there was a medium crying out for experimentation on reducing context bottlenecks, the humble but vital mailing list is it. [Corante: Social Software]
I wonder if Clay has seen or tried out Steve Yost's new (ThreadsML compliant) QuickThread feature in QuickTopic Pro?
It provides a wonderful mechanism for migrating an email interchange into a discussion board/mail list.
Phillip Pearson has a comparison chart of how different harmonizer implementations handle error conditions. It's cool to see a critical mass developing so quickly. Phillip is attempting to harmonize the harmonizers. Good idea. [Scripting News]
Phil has a unique perspective as someone who has 'implemented' many specs from Userland before. He also doesn't get flustered if the spec is a little vague and not 'implemented' the same way - by all. That's gotta be un-nerving, yet Phil deals with it. Thank you Phil.
And imagine how weird it must be for Phil - with so many implementation naming confusions:
phillip andrew pearson - python
philip miseldine - .net
andrew pearson - php
Off to DC. I'm heading down for Supernova. This week, most of my blogging (such as it is) will be on the Supernova Weblog. If you aren't attending, there are several tools linked to that page for follow ing the conference remotely. [Werblog]
Good luck to Kevin and everyone in D.C. for Supernova 2.0. I'll try and participate as much as I can. And have some cous cous for me!
Investigating the Liberty Alliance. Marc Canter points to Brian FIeld-Elliot's SourceID project, an open-source implementation of the Liberty Alliance system. I found an article that attempts to explain the whole thing; it seems similar to what I've been talking about, except with more XML. In place of my tokens, it has SAML assertions. The interesting part of it is that sites using an authentication provider don't even get to see who it is that is authenticating -- they just get a random number, and then presumably connect back to the authentication server to ask for more details later. This is identity federation. In my case, I'm not sure if this is necessary, or even desirable, as the whole point of my authentication system is to prove who you are, or at least what resources you are responsible for. I wonder ...
Comment [Second p0st]
I just hate to see folks write code that somebody else has - is willing to give away - and would help build standards. PingID has this code (even though it IS written in Java) that Phil Pearson could use. Why not - I say?
 TouchGraph LiveJournal Browser. The TouchGraph LiveJournal Browser V1.0 lets you browse through social networks on LiveJournal.com. Users who list each other as friends appear as connected nodes on the graph. [HubLog]
This is totally cool!
xxx has really tapped into a motherlode. Now we get to see if the Live Journalers (and DeadJournalers) use it. I've often wondered if these nerdy tools 'translate' down the pyramid. Now we get to see.
These sort fo graphing products seem to come 'early on' in the social networking cycle - but I'm not sure what use it is. I installed Huminity - played with it once or twice - but is it worth having to sign-up for yet another social network - just to see a graph of it?
Then there are those software developers who believe that FOAF can/should be used to access social networks (like Danny Ayers.....) And there's this guy named Valdis and.....
So then Ross can report on it.
But what good are these social network maps? What's their purpose besides being pretty and visualizing a structure of people? Why?
The coolest thing about this - is that it's a LiveJournal 'add-on'. Right on! And thanks you to Brad Fitzpatrick for making that possible.
RSS 2.0 feeds in k-collector. We're testing a new feature on k-collector: each topic has now an RSS 2.0 feed you can subscribe to. For example, this is the RSS feed of the RSS Aggregators topic. A next step should be allowing users to generate feeds from lists of topics they are interested to. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Here's an example of what happends when folks start to extend RSS 2.0. Now the big question is: "Will Dave blog it?"
It still seems pretty slow. What the hell is that aggregator built with?
I was sitting at home minding my own business when the phone rang. Hello, is this Dave? Yes. Hi, it's Mr Safe. [Scripting News]
This post describes why Dave doesn't like the Echo effort. In his mind - RSS 2.0 can be extended using it's namespaces capabilities. However it seems to me that Echo is a lot more than adding some vocabulary to RSS 2.0. It combines the data structure of RSS, with blogger APIs. So that seems to say that Echo doesn't directly compete with RSS 2.0.
Existing aggregators will continue to support RSS 2.0 and exiswting content will continue to be syndicated using RSS 2.0.
Also doesn't Matt and Paolo's ENT extend RSS 2.0 - with it's namespaces capabilities? Then why doesn't Dave talk about ENT as an example of how to extend RSS 2.0 - properly?
Single sign-on infrastructure. I'm building some infrastructure so I can get my community server stuff playing nicely with my search engine. Over the weekend I started prototyping it in the [[Topic Exchange]. Currently there are two XML-RPC calls: identity.getToken(login, password)... which takes your login & password, and returns a token. identity.validateToken(token)... takes a token, and returns the login id that generated it. The key concept here is that you can authenticate yourself to a remote server by giving it a token from the Topic Exchange. Tokens are only redeemable once, and expire if not used in 10 minutes. If you get a token that validates, you can be pretty sure that the person who gave it to you owns the userid you got back from the validateToken call. The first application is proving to a search engine that you own an account on a community server. I'm going to hack this into the Python Community Server, so people can connect to a search engine and validate themselves as members of a community (and thus show up in search results when people search for text published anywhere on the server). It will become slightly more complicated: the plan is to make it so you can give getToken more info, some sort of cookie, which will be passed back in validateToken, so a server can give you some info about the type of token it wants and you can be sure that the token is only valid on that server (preventing the possibility of someone getting a token under false pretenses and passing off as you elsewhere). This could trivially be used as the hub for a single sign-on (Passport / Liberty Alliance-like) system. Apparently the OpenIdentity folks have been working on something, which I'm really looking forward to seeing. I wonder if it has much in common? IMHO the world really needs a single sign-on system that is as trivial for developers to use as RSS and XML-RPC. Let's make this happen ...
Comment [Second p0st]
Hey Owen! Hey Nikolaj, Fen and Drummond! Hurry up! Phil's spending precious time writing all this code - that you guys are gonna do once and give away! This is one of the problems of our age. The People's DNS.
Hmmm - maybe Phil could just use Bryan Field-Elliot's SourceID code? Hmmmmm
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