Nodal points video from Reboot 10
Reboot has now published the video of my talk on social objects, social peripheral vision, and nodal points. I gave a slightly developed, much condensed version of the same at PICNIC08 last week. Below's the blurb from the Reboot site. The length of the video is 33 minutes.
Activity streams are turning social services into a flow of updates, filtered through people. Mobility is introducing new types of social objects that change the nature of the update streams both into something more frequent and more ambient, but also more vulnerable to noise. In this world the capability to aggregate updates from across the Web and and filter out noise becomes a key problem. I'll demonstrate how the concepts of social objects and social peripheral vision can be applied to make sense of this shift in the locus of innovation on the social Web, and share some personal war stories along the way.
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zengestrom.com%2Fimg%2Fpuhekupla.gif)
Comments (0) TrackBack (0) September 29, 2008
Objects and asymmetrical sharing on Reader
This week Google Reader updated its Shared Items so users can share them with a hand-picked friend group. Up until now sharing on Reader has bee limited to Google Talk chat contacts.
From the perspective of object-centered sociality it's easy to understand why many Reader users asked for a separate list. On Talk, people connect with folks they want to chat with. The social object there is the chat conversation. Reader took a different object, a blog article, and made it shareable. Many people's chat networks didn't map perfectly to their blog-reading networks, which the Reader team recognized.
A part of my job has been to make it easier to share things on Google, so it's been great to work with the Reader team and see them launch this update. It gives users greater control over the audience they share with and consume from.
By the way, one of the details worth noting is that sharing on Reader can be asymmetrical. That is, you can let someone see your shared items without necessarily having to subscribe to theirs. Personally I find this really useful. I'm fine sharing articles with a broad audience, but following everyone back would be drinking from the firehose.
I prefer to follow a smaller group of people who are good at picking up things in a space that I'm interested in. That tends to change depending on what I'm working on, so it's useful to be able to update subscriptions without affecting who can see my shared stuff.
Congrats to the Reader team!
Comments (0) TrackBack (0) August 15, 2008
Nodal points video
Here's a video of the social objects & nodal points keynote from The Web and Beyond: Mobility conference:
The busy folks at SPRXMobile also published a video of the talk on their site today. The audio isn't quite as good in that version but the slides are easier to read.
Comments (0) TrackBack (0) August 3, 2008
Reboot 10 talk on Nodal Points
Copenhagen's Reboot is one of a few conferences I would not miss.
This year was the 10th anniversary of the event, and true to the spirit of its theme 'free' it ended with a self-organized beer-sharing huddle on the street in front of the afterparty venue.
The town being Copenhagen, and the crowd being Rebooters, the huddle swelled into a full-scale street party that didn't stop until the police arrived on the scene. (Here's a video from when it was still relatively early in the night).
In my talk I discussed how activity streams are turning social services into a flow of updates, filtered through people, and tried to show how the concepts of social objects and social peripheral vision can be applied to make sense of this shift.
Reboot is reportedly going to post a video of the talk online some time soon. In the meanwhile, here are the slides:
As usual, the conference was packed with interesting speakers and I didn't get to listen to half of the people I would have liked to hear. Some highlights included David Weinberger on Babbage, Chris Messina on 'Free to migrate' and Eric Wahlforss and Alex Ljung on their startup Soundcloud.
Also, the talks from Reboot 9 were recently posted online - here's mine about microblogging and tiny social objects.
Comments (0) TrackBack (0) July 10, 2008
Jaiku's new home
Tonight we demonstrated Jaiku running on Google App Engine, a new development environment that enables anyone to develop Web services that can scale up to millions of users using Google's massive server infrastructure.
The announcement was made a short while ago at a campfire event here on the Google campus in Mountain View. Robert Scoble broadcasted live video from the event using his Nokia phone; a production-quality video will be posted in a few hours on the Google App Engine site.
Jaiku will be fully deployed on Google App Engine in the near future. More details on the Jaikido blog.
Comments (1) TrackBack (0) April 8, 2008
OpenSocial foundation
Joe has been working on something I like a lot, the OpenSocial Foundation (opensocial.org). It was announced this morning (there's a press call starting in about an hour). It'll be jointly founded by Yahoo MySpace and Google. The current estimate for bootstrapping the entity is July.
Here's a quote from him the release: "The formation of this foundation will ensure that [OpenSocial] remains [a community-driven specification] in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open."
The three key points are as follows:
The jury's still out, but OpenSocial could become an important creative enabler as a significant distribution network for social apps. If that's the case, having the spec under the management of an independent entity is not a bad idea.
Comments (0) TrackBack (0) March 25, 2008
A beautiful day
The wedding outfits I mentioned in the previous post were released at the Paris Fashion Week on Tuesday. The dress, a flat hexagon that opens up into a complex, delicate form, is called Kide; here's a photo and reportage.
Which brings me to the title of the post. Today's our wedding day.
Ilkka Suppanen, a founder of the acclaimed Snow Crash design collective, had earlier formulated an idea he called “a beautiful day†as a challenge to designers. It is a call to act on the future of a world deep in the grip of change that could wipe out much of what people everywhere hold dear. The wedding is part of Dai Fujiwara's answer. He sees in it birth.
I think of the beautiful day notion simply in the context of relationships. We can make each day a beautiful one to those we love.
We're living a time when it is radically easier for people to come together than it was just ten years ago – like with these leading designers' collaboration around the wedding. This is no doubt a good thing. But there's another side to the growing intensity of interaction. People are also dropping relationships on a whim. According to a study by Rutgers University, only 63% of American children grow up with both biological parents - the lowest figure in the Western world.
Happiness requires longetivity. That you stick around in a relationship. But sticking around is hard, because you've got to keep changing yourself to renew it. A wedding makes one face this fact, I think. There are other ways to face it too, of course. But that's what this wedding and all the wonderful activity around it is really about: facing oneself without false presumptions, naked. Acknowledging that if love and happiness are what we desire, then making each day a beautiful one, that's what it's going to take.
Comments (8) TrackBack (0) February 29, 2008
So we're getting married
Note: this post was written on January 31st but I initially decided to not publish it because of the personal nature of the topic. I'm publishing it now, exactly a month later.
I'm one of those lucky chaps who's getting married without having to go through the trouble of proposing. My fiancée took care of that casually from the back seat while we were on our way I forget where. Her suggestion threw me off balance enough to get us thoroughly lost that October afternoon.
In the months that followed the wedding turned into a production involving six leading designers; the heritage of a deceased architect; and a living philosopher. Somewhere along the way Ulla and I will get married, but that doesn't really matter. What does matter is the idea; that life is about making each day a beautiful one.
Now, about a month before d-day, we're hosted by Issey Miyake in Tokyo for the fitting of the outfits. I can't say much about them yet except we all went a bit quiet when we saw the dress. This dress will reach out to your soul and squeeze it. It will be released at the Paris Fashion Week on February 26th.
The collection also features special pieces by the Boroullec brothers, Camper, Hella Jongerus, Louise Campbell, and Ilkka Suppanen. It will be made accessible starting the last week of February by quality design publications and at www.itsabeautifuldaywedding.com.
Comments (1) TrackBack (0) February 29, 2008
High school shooting
An 18-year old boy shot to death 8 and wounded 12 in a high school in Jokela, Finland this week. The police found the shooter on the school corridor after he had shot himself in the head with his handgun. He died later in a hospital. One of the killed students was a 25-year old single mother completing her second year of high school. She left behind two children, aged 3 and 5.
As nowadays tends to be the case, the news first spread across the Internet. Some of the immediate commentary took place over IRC, and there's a thread on Jaiku that documents the unfolding of the events pretty much as they were happening. One of the comments in the Jaiku thread is a quote from the IRC chat: "there's a boy on the other [IRC] channel whose younger sister is still over there in the classroom."
Before taking action the shooter posted a total of 89 videos on YouTube, some of them featuring Nazi imagery. The videos have subsequently been taken offline.
Damn it. Someone should have seen what was coming.
Comments (2) TrackBack (0) November 10, 2007
First week at Google
On October 9th, two weeks ago, our company was acquired by Google. Loic asked me about it on camera at Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday.
A few days after the acquisition we were on a plane to San Francisco, and now, as we're starting the second week in our new roles, most of the new faces have been met and we're able to find the way to our desks in the morning. It's time to focus on implementing the stuff that we came here to do.
To me Google is a chance to work as part of the largest concentration of software engineering talent in existence, especially a few individuals whose work has been instrumental to my own work and thinking lately; and, if we succeed, profoundly change the Web. Other facets of life play into the picture too. Some of my best friends live here, and two of Ulla's key collaborators are in the Bay Area.
Still, it's a change. Our families are 10 hours away. Moving with a baby is different from traveling as a couple. In Helsinki our company had the luxury of total obscurity. Suddenly, at Google, it feels like everyone's eyes are fixed on what the company will do next.
By the way, I also turned 30 on Friday. Picasso supposedly once said that it takes a long time to grow young. Looking around, it's hard to name an environment that could better keep us from growing up.
Comments (3) TrackBack (0) October 23, 2007
