May 2007 Archives
Hacked together a little Lifestream aggregator the other day. Super raw, but it aggregates feeds from Last.fm, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Tumblr, WeRockNYC, Flickr, and Dodgeball onto a single page. Next step: cleaning up the UI, piping it all out in a single aggregate RSS feed, and building a few little widgets (an excuse to play around in Flex???).
Went to an interesting talk by interaction and information designer Brad Paley tonight at Monkey Town. Paley spoke on a number of topics, and showcased a number of his works, notably TextArc and his map of science [pictured below].
Paley is the director of Information Esthetics, teaches interaction design at Columbia, and provides interface design services on WallStreet.
I especially enjoyed Paley's candid open-ness, especially in his explanations of process and exploration. He was really into promoting information and interaction design - and sharing all of his work to help people create and learn.
The massively connected meta-verse enabled by new Internet technologies has hit another level of hype with Lifestreaming. Lifestreaming is a concept, rather than any specific app, service, product, or technology. There are currently many systems available with which an individual or group may broadcast his, her, or their activities, locations, thoughts, sights, purchases, feelings, soundtracks... at any given time, at any given place - as long as there is some access to a network that can somehow reach the World Wide Web.
The concept of lifestreams has been in existence for a good amount of time (in internet-age terms), according to the CS department at Yale - since around 1994 [http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html]. Of course, the lifestreaming of '94 differs slightly from today's mainstream version of Twitter, Flickr and Del.icio.us feeds. Just as blogging was once called weblogging and very much not 'mainstream', and just as the Wiki of today's Wikipedia is the same technology used in the first Web documents - the original read/write web.
The original lifestream was conceived as a replacement to the desktop metaphor ubiquitous in personal computing. Lifestreams created a document-centric interface model, much like the interface preference of the prominent information designer Edward Tufte. Documents are given precedence over applications and any GUI. Functionality is simple - create, clone, transfer, find, and summary [http://acm.org/sigchi/chi96/proceedings/videos/Fertig/etf.htm].
Lifestreams in the Web2.0 geek-mainstream version of today provide similar functionality to the document interfaces of the '90s, in terms of productivity management, and chronologically-based organization. This comparison may seem ironic, however, as Twitter and other like apps offer a huge distraction. The essence of this technology framework is in the data aggregation, ordering, and access methods. Lifestreams are inherently tied to a linear temporality, seemingly modeled after human perception, existence, presence. Most of these lifestreaming services take advantage of the fleeting, fast-paced nature of internet activity, publishing small bits of data for a contextual consumption.
Current lifestream trends, in contrast to the earlier realizations, are mainly centered around the transmission and consumption of personal documentation data. In 2006 Jeremy Keith noticed the linear/temporal aspects all his online publishing activities and decided to aggregate them into one interface - his personal lifestream [http://adactio.com/journal/1202/]. Keith combined his Flickr, Last.FM, Del.icio.us, Twitter, personal blog feeds into one single time-based stream - and published it. He took advantage of web application APIs and RSS feeds to route and mash-up all these disparate channels into an object that offers one consolidated pipe. The pipe can be tapped into in real-time. More, the output from this singular pipe can be archived, and then searched - by channel (source feed), date/time, tag or categorization, keyword... Now there are a number of services for consolidating an individual's aggregate lifestreams.
Part of the impetus behind creating and using these new lifestreaming technologies lies in the importance of peripheral data in context-aware systems. Jyri Engeström gave a presentation at Reboot 8 on 'the Social Importance of Peripheral Vision' that provides a great argument for services like Jaiku [http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2006/07/blind_mens_base.html]. Jaiku differs from Twitter and other direct presence and consumption streaming services (according to Joi Ito, among others) in a number of ways, most notably in the contextual nature of the service. Engeström sees lifestreaming as more than just a real-time broadcast of media consumption and pushed messaging - he sees lifestreaming as real presence: status, availability, mood, as well as the pushed content (blog posts, Twitter tweets...). Most existing platforms for organization (calendars, usually) are individual-centric. Engeström and other proponents of the new lifestreaming make a compelling argument for the socialization of scheduling and communication applications.
Elizabeth Lane Lawley vocalized the importance of 'presence' in the networks of today and future on a post to her blog mamamusings [http://mamamusings.net/archives/2007/03/06/why_twitter_matters.php]. Lawley emphasizes the light-weight nature of most popular lifestreams (Del.icio.us and Flickr streams, Twitter tweets, Dodgeball pings...). The throw-away content that these platforms embrace is simple to consume or ignore, easy to catch up on, and trivial to archive.
Like the consumption trends of the Blogosphere, individual lifestream popularity follows the logarithmic long-tail distribution. A very few prominent members of the tech elite broadcast to many, and the vast majority of lifestreamers have a minute subscriber base. But the afore-mentioned relatively light weight of these streams encourage casual links, loose ties.
There is, however a more interesting network effect at play - lets look at Twitter, the recently popularized status ping-ing app. Twitter is obviously different from mainstream, generic social-networking sites like MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook [though Facebook does have some similar features, to be examined below]. Twitter is extremely simple - send in a ping, get pings back (from contacts, etc). The network of the Twitter-verse is emergent - both in terms of users [nodes], contacts [links] and user-content [meta]. Communication in lifestreams such as Twitter is largely ego-centric - not conversational but a sequence of an individual's posts. But even this self-status broadcast is in flux, with a new and unexpected use of the service; Some users have begun 'shouting' at specific contacts, as denoted by the '@' preceding their tweet [http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/twitter_tips_th.html].
This network topology as seen in Twitter creates a fascinating social phenomenon: spam. Spam that people enjoy. Voyeuristic, perverse, linear, narrativistic, purposeful information-overload. "Who would want to be bugged by hundreds of messages a day from your friends telling you what they're up to. Well, as it turns out, lots of us would" [Leo Laporte, http://leoville.vox.com/library/post/goodbye-twitter-hello-jaiku.html]. Such an issue has not yet withstood the test of time, but already people are noticing productivity losses in their endeavors to keep up with their friends', associates', contemporaries', and random contacts' status updates.
Unlike the missions of some existing social networks, the social lifestream networks employ and seek to build bonding capitol among connected users. Although they are often light-weight, lifestreams convey an incredibly accurate picture of an individual's life. Stories can be found in the barrage of updates from any particular streamer. Such access to this level of information, even in such a granular state, can in fact (according to many, varied accounts of lifestreamers) diminish physical distance and enhance existing relationships.
Lifestreams have spread like wild-fire throughout the tech-savvy web2.0 community, sparking debate along the way. Some proponents of this new fad call for 'presence' – something lifestreams seek to capture – as the new big 'p' word, replacing 'participatory' in web2.0.
Last Thursday, a little after 6pm, I presented my thesis to the ITP community. Getting up there after 2 challenging years of incredible work was a hell of a rush. Some fellow ITP second-year compared it to sky-diving (which sounds almost right). For not practicing my talk, I feel it came off well. Many thanks to Nick Law, his R/GA crew of reviewers and the entire class for getting me in presentation-shape.
You can check out the video archive of my presentation here.
The entire thesis-week archive is available here.
...These past 2 years... best of my life.
I give my final thesis presentation at 6:20pm this evening.
slides are here.
Polarizr.net will launch, but not today. and not tomorrow. maybe next week.
