alleshannes.

danah boyd has been working for years on the life of youth and particular what role digital media plays for them. At last year’s Aspen Ideas Conference she made three statements that I found extra interesting (beyond my general respect for her work):

• teenagers engage in emotional exchange with their peers, especially late at night. This is new because without (digital) media they couldn’t meet at these hours before as they were not allowed to go out so late.
• they don’t need/want super-immersive online worlds for their friends (like 2nd World) but meet them in asynchronous online communities. Problem here is that you can’t connect from MySpace to Facebook.
• best thing for them is to “take their friends along in their pocket“, i.e. on their mobile phone. But carriers wall their networks and services even heavier then online communities do and, in consequence, “you don’t see innovations happening in mobile” on the social network side.

And this is a sad thing. As you can see here and as we also found out by our own research, mobile communication has the potential to address exactly these wishes of young people. Already now they make use of the technology in maybe unexpected ways: from sending photos from the fitting room to check their new look with their peers to subtle ring tone patterns that inform friends about the success with dating the latest crush.

T-Mobile’s My Faves looks like a move into the right direction because it is open to “even landlines and other networks” — it seems to be a success in the US but is discontinued it in Europe (where “other networks” were only available in one of the options). It’s people who live in social networks and these networks are not determined by a certain web framework or carrier. If carriers want to respond to that they need to open up and get ready for it before the online communities do and take the lead completely.

This news is already a couple of months old, but it reached me now and struck me: Jaiku got abandoned by Google.

atmasphere is shedding a tear

I have to admit that I didn’t use Jaiku all that much, basically because of a lacking base of “followers” or–even more important–people to follow. Back then, I was “following” a guy I got to know at ars electronica, and even though we were pretty far away and didn’t exchange that much on other channels, I had the impression of knowing a little bit of his life, some of his feelings, his overall mood. All created by those tiny, subjective, and instant status messages (he was also posting pretty frequently, which is a precondition but also comes by itself once everyone is addicted…). I didn’t get this experience out of any other channel. And it became my standard argument why “those private and boring details of someone’s daily life” are actually pretty valuable.

When I logged in today (6 months after my last message…), I wanted to add someone’s twitter feed. Adding other channels to your stream was actually one of the big pluses of Jaiku over Twitter (Robert Gaal has 3 more)! But all the cool options were gone (example), no other feeds to read nor to add, no nothing. Just the simple message box (which, at least, is still working).

Then I checked the phone client, which was actually much more than that: It was a replacement of your phonebook, giving you quite a bit of status information about your contacts. You could even see whether the other one was using her/his phone currently, so you didn’t have to call in vain or talk to the answering machine instead.

This feature is missing as well (you could operate Jaiku even through SMS, but I get this service is no longer supported, either…). Btw: All of this came out of a Finnish research project a couple of years ago.

On the other hand, Jaiku is now Open Source! And this means, anyone could start a similiar service. Which is great (Jaiku founder Jyri says). Unfortunately, it appears to me, that the spirit of Jaiku was also based on an substantial amount of hardware and money that allowed to run the service smoothly and provided, e.g., to receive status updates via SMS for free. So, it might be more a some- than an anyone who could create “JaiTwo”.

I’ll try to keep an eye on the great Jaiku team, as they are up to something new for sure. Meanwhile, I’ll have to turn to the twitterverse…

Growing without design? housings in El Alto

The more I get to know the work in large corporations the more it strikes me how much money they spend (or waste) on generating new ideas. Thousands and millions are made available for new or not so new ideas and for exploring new fields of business in continually saturated markets. It comes by little surprise that a lot of the results are pretty poor. Granted, when dealing with “innovation processes” you never know what you’ll get for your investment which makes it hard to judge which money could be saved. But what could be sparked with these funds if applied elsewhere, outside of the business context?

A lot of “ideas” or development efforts are not focused on new technologies or services in the sense of making our lives better. They are just meant to produce new or refined business models so that the company can earn more money. Serving the user’s (let’s say: real) needs from a more holistic point of view is just not taken into account (literally!). In the end of inovation workshops, the single factor for decisions about the future “life” of an idea is profit and not user needs.

I don’t want to criticise companies (at least not here) for their single minded goals of making profits–in the system of capitalism it’s their only reason of existence (and even the companies can’t keep the money but have to pass it on to their shareholders. The contradiction between user needs and profits grows even more this way, as André Gorz describes very clearly). But if we allow us just for a little moment to think outside these business restrictions: Enormous resources are spent to make some bright minds comfortable and creative every day so that they struggle with those oversaturated markets and fight against the “no need barriers” of obviously happy customers.
What if a fraction of these efforts was directed on problems like child poverty, ecologic smartness, cultural diversity? What if oxfam, amnesty international or terre des hommes could be supplied with a comparable stream of brain work?
For sure the effects would be enormous. So many people are longing for a better life and don’t have to be convinced by (insanely) expensive marketing. And all those people are more than willing to contribute as much as they can (and often fail because of lack of influence).

Increadible amounts spent to get ideas on how to cram even more products into costumers in the one world and the destruction and the eradication of so many perspectives because of lacking funds and minds in the other one: That’s an insight that makes me really, really sad.
Of course, you could believe in the Trickle-Down-Effect and hope that the more profits large companies make the more they can invest in new ideas that finally will make the lives of all of us better; but noone is able to tell how long are we supposed to wait for some drips to reach the bottom.

On the contrary! It might be totally plausible that we can’t design within the usual innovation (business, distribution) system if we want to reach this bottom…

Profiles are a handy thing on the web, as you usually can’t have direct (some would say “real”) contact with others: the internet lets you filter information at a probably unprecedented scale, which makes finding friends with the same or coresponding interests a lot easier.

What if shared interest actually don’t matter (so much)?

It’s a pretty common experience that staying in touch with distant friends is difficult, whether they are “web friends” or not, and even if you share a lot of common perspectives. Psychologists at the University of Leipzig report that (fresh) students, that got randomly seated for their first lesson, were more likely to be friends a year later when they sat next to each other back then (via Die Zeit).

Some basic requirements provided, physical proximity is the best predictor for actual friendships. Intrestingly enough, another group around Pentland, Eagle, et al. conducted a huge empirical research using mobile phone data and found out that the number of meetings in person and phone calls are very good indicators for friendship. While this behaviour might be considered as intentional, the new findings imply that proximity “causes” friendship even unintented!

On the one hand, we could conclude that our increasingly “remoted” social life still faces difficulties that we can’t overcome: Relationships need face to face meetings.

On the other hand, we could also think about whether this finding applies to the online world in a more abstract way: It might be more likely to stumble upon possible friends than actually finding them intentionally (i.e. using sophisticated search methods)–quite an argument for associative browsing support.

On this year’s Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Liz Lawley complained that

Many social-networking sites essentially force users to become part of a huge community, or they force users to choose whether someone else is a friend or not, with no other subtleties defining that relationship

Of course, this direction fits perfectly to my thesis. But more specifically, I get the impression that more “subtleties” are nice and essential but also require a lot of effort by the user. Maybe similiar to metadata that was/is supposed to establish a “semantic web” but needs very simple interfaces to come to real use (delicious’ tag auto complete might serve as a good example). But while “bad” tagging might just mess up your knowledge base, getting the subtle interpersonal relations adjusted wrongly will get you in deeper trouble with your friends (light friends/good friends/best friends).

via experientia via macworld

[this is just a fast article that will be extended later on, hopefully]

Finally, my studies at FH Potsdam come to an end. I will give the presentation of my Master’s Thesis and projects on

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 15 h
in the FH Potsdam Casino.

It has been a tough time untill my book went into press and I’m still quite busy preparing a decent show for you. But, hopefully, you will enjoy it and I will succeed in gaining a proud and honourful Master’s degree.

Buddyguard is helping me with making up a proper guestlist. But you are invited now already, as a reader of my blog!

A public version of my home grown “buddyscanner” is now available! It is a visualisation tool that I built in order to analyse communication log files of my group of test persons. This data can be usually found as a part of your phonebill or it can be extracted out of email archives.

You can give it a try right away: Start the buddyscanner

Of course, the visualisation is not too meaningful until you use your own data. But with this anonymized version you can get an impression of how it looks and works. (If you would like to have a private visualisation (where private means your data and a safe, password protected place) just let me know: blog [at] emotisys.net)

The visualisation can be rearranged to reflect different aspects of the data. It offers items that can be found in the raw data directly (such as the overall duration of communication), as well as computed values like reciprocity. The final value (from the perspective of my thesis), relevance, is available, too. Relevance is similiar to a kind of “rank” or “importance” of that person as it is seen by the machine. Although I’m using rather simple scoring methods, the results were quite meaningful to my test persons, already.

Some additional explanations:

• In order to rearrange the diagram you need to click into the select boxes at the end of each axis. There is a third box available that is used for the “third” dimension, which is mapped onto the size of each square.
• Hovering over a data point will load a flyout window with a more fine grained diagram. To keep it opened, you can click onto the according square.
• In the flyout, a bar for each call/mail is displayed at the day of the year when it took place. The height is related to the duration/size of the event. Light blue means it occured during (usual) work times, dark blue is for the evening and medium for the weekends.
• You can make some remarks for other users in the comments field if you like to.
• If you want to keep track of some points across differnt sortings, you can highlight them with the button at the bottom of the flyout.

If you want to see more, express your doubts or have some remarks, don’t hesitate to make a statement below!

The more I get into relation detection via communication data, the more services come to my mind. But of course, I don’t invent this wheel for the first time (Pete Warden’s blog brought a lot of evidence to me): In an article two years from now (already!) ZDnet UK has a nice portrait about the emerging business of email analysis. A positive focus is put on Clearwell Systems because of their special (unique?) ranking algorithm (oha! — I bet Google pays very close attention). Its software

weighs the background data and content of each email for several factors, including the name of the sender, names of recipients, how many replies the message generated, who replied, how quickly replies came, how many times it was forwarded, attachments and, of course, keywords.

Well, so do I… But in the light of a fully grown business, ranking emails gets away from a personal (autonomous) assistant that is just nice to have, handy and good for reflection. With the huge amounts of email produced every day and about every topic relevant to any business process, corporate email archives contain pretty any information a manager, and — more delicately — a prosecutor can desire:

Email has come to be viewed as a source of truth. If you want to know what really happened, you look at the email.

As it became clear to me, too, during my research, collecting and archiving (intercepting?) all electronic conversations improves the the basis for statistical analysis and heuristics and hence the quality of the ranking a lot. A lot of entities (Google, security authorities) are after our data, consequentially.

Pete Warden has to receive an honrable mention once more because his position of “trying to generate a useful index with no human intervention” resonates with my basic motivation, too. I find his blog to be imensly interesting and very relevant for my thesis: Like expoiting the time information inherent to email that I thought of using in some kind of “contact profiling”, all the privacy issues entangled, especially in business context, and drawing profit from the knowledge that accumulates often unnoticed in a company (or workgroup). And he complains about the missing Gmail Api, too. All written in a very comprehensive manner.

Imagine, you’re back from a trip abroad and want to tell your friends about all the fascinating experiences that you have made (And you either don’t have a blog for that purpose or don’t want to publish it publicly). Usually, that means you have to go through your entire address book and select the appropriate persons. However, if your computer knew about your relationships it could help you a lot with this task.

How could an interface for this case look like? Here are some propositions (and some problems to discuss!). …

Here comes the all new and sparkling abstract of my Thesis (old stuff). You might want to have a look at it and give it some comments!

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In my thesis I propose the idea of a socially aware computer. In order to get to know the user‘s circles of friends, it will mine and analyse the data that is left as traces by her communication, mainly phone call logs and email archives. As a result, a value for personal or subjective importance can be computed for each person in the user‘s network.

This allows for a new arrangement of the personal address book so that more relevant persons can be found more easily – an important feature regarding our ever expanding and globalized personal networks.
Moreover, tasks that require knowledge about the user‘s personal relations can be handled automatically: One is turning the user‘s attention towards old friends that tend to be neglected when he is burried in work or because he is always on the run due to our mobile and flexible times. Another one is managing access to her personal data that she stores online, like photos, travel plans or her activity stream that gets created by recent software like Jaiku or Twitter.

Handling friends and acquaintances in such an environment opens up new challenges that are explored by means of a visual prototype. Different types of displaying, managing, and enriching information about related persons are developped. Results from a user testing will be provided.
As a preliminary study, the data sets of several people have been analysed and plotted into an interactive diagramm in order to investigate the potentials of the communication data given. It also offers the possibility to look for the relevant parameters that determine different types of relations (e.g. best friend or old friend).

To provide a conceptual background, existing social network theories are explored and related to personal, ego-centric ones. I take a closer look onto the whole process of operationalisation, i.e. turning human behaviour into quantifiable data by statistical methods. Finally, implications and problematic consequences of both, the software itself and the concept of the „network society“ in general, are discussed. The felt need to turn our friendships into „social capital“ is one of the most remarkable shifts in the functioning of our societies. Others can make draw profits from this capital if they collect detailed data to establish profiles of us and our relationships. Thus, the whole field of privacy is entangled.
And across all these dynamics, computers become so inseparably intermingeld into our daily social life that borders between our (extended) self and the machine is often hard to determine.