picnic: the emerging real-time social web
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I’m assuming that many of you will have played with Dopplr, or hopefully are happy users! At least I’m hoping you’re familiar with it, as I’m not going to pitch you... but I would like to set the scene a little...
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is about the future, which you can’tautomate (yet)
This diagram shows the ‘lightcone’ of the future and the past of an individual ‘observer’ - Dopplr is about what happens if you have this view - and take it social. The ability to remodel and optimise your travel plans based on those of others. That’s why we’re called Dopplr - alluding to the Doppler effect as things approach and recede from you.
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http://www.dopplr.com/group/picnic-08
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“For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it
all the time.”
Everything begins with an E(no) - Heʼs probably our patron saint!
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As a service, our goal is to add our valuable information to the coral reef of the real-time social web that people already inhabit.
But... how’s the reef doing lately?
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<rant>
I can’t help thinking that collectively we’ve taken our eyes of the prize in the last year or two.
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I’d been thinking this for a while, but some stuff lately really made me think hard about what we’re all designing and building. BTW - this is not to pick on FriendFeed. They are very clever people, but...
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You’re kidding, right?
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More Merlin... I love his pronouncement on the ‘fake follow’ feature: “this is a major breakthrough in the makebelieve friendship space”
Although - his call for a ‘pause’ button is something I think a lot of us could relate to. We have “mute” on Dopplr, which we think is more about your relationship to a flow of information, not a person.
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Friendingconsideredharmful.
<rant>
What does that terrible neologism ‘friending’ mean anyway? Do you even need to tell computers who your friends are to get the benefits of the social web? BTW - can you believe there was a Friends videogame?
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For Dopplr, we have been careful to use language and controls that are explicitly about sharing information, rather than ‘making friends’.
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Asymmetry
We made sure that weren’t obligated to share information, just because someone else had shared with you. By avoiding the language of ‘friendship’, something like this doesn’t feel as awkward.
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Friend is not the only social role we play
But as I say - “friend” is not the only social role we play, and it’s not the only thing that social tools should focus on IMHO.
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For example: this is part of Intel Research Berkeley’s “Familiar Strangers” work, looking at the patterns forming from regular, casual contact in the urban environment.
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And it’s this casual, social interaction with objects which there’s still so much mileage in. For instance, whether it’s dog-eared pages of books...
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Our tools... (this is bruce sterling’s keyboard)
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or our environments
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“Wear and tear” is often how mental models get out into the world. Incidentally, the movie is of a machine my friend Jack Schulze built to record the way that people draw maps to explain directions to other people. [Will Hill and other talked about “edit read” and “wear read” back in 1992. ]
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This is a map from the collection of the National Maritime Museum, where successive explorers annotated new opportunities, theories and obstacles on the same map over several expeditions over the course of several years.
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Under glass, no wear-and-tear... no collective intelligence worn in...
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Bungie let players see ‘Heatmaps’ online of where thousands and thousands of players of HALO3 died on different levels - allowing them to visualise strategies for the game. E.g. “Kills with the Gravity Hammer in Rat’s Nest”...
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This is Citysense, which takes these heatmaps of the city onto a mobile screen - I’m guessing that Adam Greenfield will be talking a lot more about this sort of thing in his talk at Picnic.
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</rant>
This complex spectrum of social roles is essential in our physical social environments, the original real-time social web. The health of cities depends on it, as Jane Jacobs and other point out to us. And the health of the social web depends on it.
We need to widen our exploration of social software again from ‘software for making friends’ to “software that’s better because there’s people there”.
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Thanks! [email protected]
http://www.dopplr.com