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« August 2003 | Main | October 2003 » September 30, 2003fakester.comfakester.com: reality is optional If you could be anyone, what would you be? Category: friendster Posted by zephoria at 9:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) September 29, 2003a song about FriendsterFirst, Friendster became a common vocabulary word in certain subcultures. Now, it has become part of the chorus in a song: "I saw your new boyfriend on Friendster..." Category: Posted by zephoria at 4:53 PM | TrackBack (1) ratemyteachers.comIn recent days, schools have been getting more and more outraged over ratemyteachers.com. The site allows you to anonymously rate your high school teachers and express discontent. Of course, no teacher deals well with anonymous feedback, particularly in the form of a public site. That said, we've all been through the hells of high school and there's nothing more entertaining than voicing our aggrevation. Category: youth culture Posted by zephoria at 4:25 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0) September 28, 2003tranceport...When i was writing my Master's thesis, i listened to one album perpetually. I had just had most of my CD collection stolen when i went away to the woods to write. The CD player there didn't play burnt CDs so i listened to Son Kite's "Minilogues" for a week solid. And somehow, i continued listening to it for the rest of my thesis writing. A full summer of the same CD on repeat. Thus, when i went to listen to them spin this weekend, i was totally taken aback by how quickly my mind reverted to thesis mode, simply by hearing them spin. In a matter of moments after they hit the stage, i was working through various problems in my thesis, trying to solve missing components. Very strange audio association... Category: reflections & rants Posted by zephoria at 7:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) September 25, 2003visual tricksCheck out this image:
You know that it's a viusal trick... but you still try to focus. Painful, eh? Category: Posted by zephoria at 11:52 PM | TrackBack (0) September 24, 2003alphabetizing and crankinessI'm a bit cranky today. I'm usually very happy to look at new social networks services and share my thoughts with site creators, but i'm *really* tired of having the same automatic grumbling reaction concerning one issue: the ordering of sex identifiers during sign-up. If you're going to alphabetize everything else in your sign-up, alphabetize sex. Male / Female is only a clear reminder of who you value in your system. I can deal with the abuse of the term gender, but c'mon now.. give me one good reason for not alphabetizing sex terms other than cultural sexism? So, if you're a website creator (or know of one), (let them) know that this practice is really insulting. Companies currently making me cranky:
Companies who get it:
[Note: "Prefer not to say" is very appreciated in sites not dedicated to dating... Because what's the importance of sex other than reminding the user that you're selling their data to advertisers?] Update: The worst abuse is MySpace which not only assumes male/female but in asking you who you are looking for, it inverts it to say woman/man. Very male-centric. Category: Posted by zephoria at 5:18 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) the unsexy listNerve just put up a list of the top 50 unsexiest things, including: Friendster.com. For a few months, it was a secret cute-kid sex party. Then all your exes heard about it. Then Courtney Love got on it. Then strangers started insisting you'd shared some magical experience with them outside Tuscaloosa. You told them you'd never been to Tuscaloosa and that they must have the wrong person. Then they told you your pet hamster’s name from when you were five and you started shaking. Category: Posted by zephoria at 4:22 PM | TrackBack (0) dating/business.. another axesIn meeting people to date, the generic "you" is theoretically looking for one lifetime partner. S/he wants to be introduced to many candidates and feels little consequence if things don't work out. Worst case scenario: two of them meet and call you a shit. In meeting people for business purposes, you are motivated to connect with many people who provide you a diverse but meaningful social network. You have limited time to engage with people, so you must choose wisely and then slowly massage that relationship, particularly if the person you want to know cares little for you. The people you meet in business are often intertwined so you have to play nice from the getgo. These are two totally different ways of operating your social network. Yet we think that the same architecture makes sense. Hmm. Category: Posted by zephoria at 1:05 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) September 23, 2003friendster in the newsI used to be good about posting news articles about Friendster, but i've been dreadful lately, mostly because very few say something new. --sigh-- Of course, CNews seems to have a small obsession, fueled by the spread of rumors. Ah, yes, the power of gossip to keep anyone in the public eye. It's kinda a funny twist on social networking, no? Gossip keeps friends connected; rumors keeps individuals connected with the press. Maybe "press" should be a Fakester.... [Oh, if you have articles that i should post here, either add them to the comments or send them my way.] Category: friendster Posted by zephoria at 11:45 PM | TrackBack (0) Cash from contactsCash from contacts is a BBC article that discusses LinkedIn's model of letting the have nots have access to the haves. Cash from contacts The way the old boy network does business is being given a high-tech makeover. A growing number of Silicon Valley start-ups are emerging to help individuals and companies cash in on who they know. One of those is LinkedIn, an online invitation-only networking service based in Mountain View. Chief executive Reid Hoffman told BBC Online using the internet speeds up a user's ability to access contacts and to make more connections that he or she would have done in the real world. He says in four months LinkedIn has grown from 100 members to 23,000 and predicts more than a million people will be logging on by June 2004. The service spans 110 industries from computers to catering and sports to medicine in over 75 countries. It also boasts an 80% success rate in users making a positive connection via the network. But Mr Hoffman acknowledges that LinkedIn's future relies on the old fashioned-way of bringing 'haves' and 'have nots' together. Matching up "The 'haves' are essentially people who have resources, who have jobs, they can hire people, they can invest in companies," he says. "They have to be linked up to the other people who want to do business with them to create new business. "And so what I realised is what the 'haves' care about is trusted introductions, someone coming to them through someone they know. "Now rather than playing a round of golf for four hours, the Internet lets us make those connections more effectively and more quickly." Tina Mitiguy used the service to land a job after six fruitless months of going to seminars, talking to everyone she knew and registering with online job sites. It was only when a college friend invited her to join his professional networking group on LinkedIn that things changed. "When I think back on it, it was an exciting day. About a week after posting my resume, I got a call and a call is always better than an email," she says. "A few days later I went for an interview and landed a job as director of member services at a start-up called REd Medic which was exactly what I was looking for in the technical medical field." Business solutions What LinkedIn claims to do for individuals, Spoke Software of Palo Alto claims to do for business by leveraging employee contacts to help close a deal. While LinkedIn's service is built from the bottom up with members submitting contacts, Spoke's software works from the top down pulling contacts from workers' e-mails, buddy lists and electronic calendars. A connection can only be made if the contact gives permission, but numbers alone are useless in a company with hundreds or thousands of employees. CEO Ben Smith told BBC Online the beauty of the product is that it maps relationships between people. "We are not so much focused on getting from one person to another as discovering who people know and why and leveraging that to provide insight, access and influence for people who are using our software." One such company is Determine Software of San Francisco. CEO Scott Martin says: "We've had a couple of examples with prospective customers where we had an enquiry come to us. We then backtracked to see if we knew anyone in that company so we're not just blind responding to this request. "And in those cases where we made that contact it was very beneficial to us to have that inside coach say 'yes, this is a real project and I will go in and be a reference for you.'" Cash boost Spoke's Ben Smith says in today's fast-paced economy using who you know can translate into real dollars and cents. "We are seeing a 26% improvement in pipeline productivity because when you get right down to it, what business is about is accessing relationships and information through relationships. "It's not how great a presentation we give, but how great is the information we have to shape that presentation that often closes a deal or doesn't." The venture capital community is recognising the value of these networking operations and loosening their purse strings. Spoke has reaped over $9m in venture capital funding. Reid Hoffman claims about 15 venture firms want to invest in LinkedIn, proving his business model fits a world where no-one has a job for life anymore. "The mobility of people changing companies and industries over their career is an overall trend. "As long as that's the case this kind of service is essential because the way you cross that is when someone will take a risk on you and the reason they will take a risk on you is because they have an endorsement from someone they trust." Category: yasns Posted by zephoria at 12:37 PM | TrackBack (0) September 22, 2003my inner child
My inner child is ten years old!
Category: Posted by zephoria at 9:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1) the value of pressLast night, i was on a panel at the Hillside. Afterwards, someone asked me how i managed to cram a whole lot of theory into 8 minutes. The answer was simple: the press. I've found that the press is one of the best bouncing boards for working through academic ideas. They ask silly questions, have totally different motives, and are so far outside of academia that everything seems new and interesting. Other academics are jaded, too involved in the details and otherwise unable to provide that fresh perspective. I've given up paying attention to how they might quote me, because i don't care; i simply enjoy the conversations. Last week, i was talking to a reporter. She asked me a question about what makes interacting with people on something like Tribe or LinkedIn different than Friendster. This prompted a little a-hah moment. Dating is all about people matching.. people meeting other people. Classifieds are all about people connecting with *information.* Say what you want about the effectiveness of meeting people online, but the Internet has certainly been successful at connecting people to information... for almost everyone. And the Internet has definitely been successful at helping mediate relationships that already exist. Even when you break down the kinds of relationships that form on Friendster, you start to realize that Friendster is most useful as an information gathering tool. (Yeah, yeah... a people DNS.) Familiar strangers. Headhunters using it to look up people. Tracking down old friends. Information, not necessarily socialization. Of course, information about people is far more fascinating than information about random objects. But getting information about people doesn't necessarily prompt a desire to interact with or engage them. Must process more, but when i said it out loud, i realized that the dichotomy of people/information is a really powerful axes for reflection on these tools. Category: Posted by zephoria at 6:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) September 21, 2003knwoledge managementDina Mehta has an interesting entry called Social Networks and Brand Identity where she describes Kapferer's Brand Identity Prism (a combination of 6 internal & external characteristics that comprise a consumer's reaction to a brand). It seems as though she's doing a lot of crunching on ideas in the knowledge management space. Most of what she focuses on are the more business-y approaches, but her entries are a reminder that i need to learn more about the academic theories underlying knowledge management ('cause that's the type of information management that i want to be playing with). Category: Posted by zephoria at 11:26 AM | TrackBack (0) September 20, 2003data on FakestersBefore i left for vacation, a wonderful woman sent me a set of survey data she collected on 61 identified Fakesters (mostly Pets). Having lost track of my email during that period, i forgot to post it. The survey isn't that serious so it's mighty fun to read and there are some humorous quotes. Category: friendster Posted by zephoria at 10:28 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) September 19, 2003irritated by processWhile Berkeley is far more like Brown than MIT could ever dream to be, one thing drives me batty: there is way too much of the Northern California process, self analysis shit in the classroom. I just sat through 2 one-hour classes where over half of each class was devoted to process, analysis of the professors (section) or self-analysis by the professors (lecture). We're no longer in the first week of school so i have *no* patience for this. I'm also having a really really hard time dealing with the slowness of speech of most professors. Out of all of my professors, one of them is a New Yorker/total East Coaster. He talks as fast i do, makes no apologies for it and demands that you keep up just by his assertive manner of speaking. It's odd how refreshing this is for me. (And added bonus is that while he can do the whole post-structuralist speak, he keeps it to a minimum instead of trying to validate his existence through incomprehensible combinations of discourse words.) As most of my SF friends are actually natives of the East Coast, i forget how much the slow-paced, process-centric Californian tendencies drive me up the wall. I just want to plow through the material. If i don't get something in the first round, i'd rather repeat it than think that a slow version will allow for better comprehension. That never works for me and by going slow, my mind wanders. I think i need more sleep. Category: reflections & rants Posted by zephoria at 3:28 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) Jonathan bailedFor anyone intending to attend Sunday's talk to heckle Jonathan instead of me, please note that you'll have to redirect your tomatoes as Jonathan seems to have bailed. Category: Posted by zephoria at 3:15 PM | TrackBack (0) September 17, 2003Cybersalon on Habits of the HeartIn case you want to hear me babble: Cybersalon: Matchmaking for Love and Money, Online and Off September-21 Note: for anyone who had hoped to go to this talk to heckle Jonathan instead of me, you'll need to redirect your tomatoes as Jonathan has seemed to have bailed on the panel. Doors open at 5.30; discussion starts at 7. A $15 donation is 5.30 - 9.00 PM Directions: From the Bay Bridge or Oakland and points south, take the Category: Posted by zephoria at 5:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) would you pay $5?Folks keep asking me for my honest opinion on last evening's MIT/Stanford Venture Lab panel and i keep avoiding this, but peer pressure works so well. First, one must dissect the purpose of people's attendance. In theory, the goal is to see a panel of experts talk about the business issues around the "social networking space" (even if some panelists want to pretend as though there is no "space"). I may not have an MBA or any entrepeneurial experience, but i'm not so naive as to think that there is any expert on the business end of this phenomenon. Everyone is riding on theories; there are no success stories to say how this is going to work, how this is going to make money. Since everyone's bank rides on their theories, suddenly there are experts because when you lack data, you need to back your ideas with confidence so as to encourage others to do so as well, thereby increasing your likelihood of succeeding (business is a strange world to me). Thus, we had a panel of five people who have a lot invested in making this work, and particularly in making this work for them. Now.. let's look at the audience. Why on earth would you pay $30 to hear a panel of people who have a lot invested banter about something that has yet to pan out? One of the audience members answered this reflection when she turned to the audience, asked how many grad students were in the room and whether or not they would pay $5 more to get a list of who was attending. The room was filled with people who also wanted to see and be seen. Of course, to be seen, you must also be heard, so most questions were also about being seen, not reflecting on what one was hearing. [Of course, i'm a part of this absurdist drama as well since i went to watch and analyze and to show face given that i've been dreadfully busy. Plus, i wanted to get a sense of what was missing in preparation for the remake of this play on Sunday.] Unfortunately, very little of the panel got into the content of the topic. Instead, it was a pure dance that would've made Goffman proud. The interaction ritual between panelists was full of snide remarks and ego cutting (or soothing); it was like watching a geek version of a wrestling match... (of course, i wonder whether it was more like the WWF than a set of professional wrestlers... performed or realistic spite?) I will say that Jonathan has become much better at responding to sarcastic cuts in kind and even better at dodging the opponents. I should note that prior to the panel's dance, Reid gave a 20 minute talk with interesting data for those who might know the space. In the talk, he had one nugget that got me thinking. He noted that Jonathan believed that people have one social network; Reid countered that they have multiple. Perhaps those of you who know me know that their disagreement brings up one of my buzzwords in a flash: faceted. (Yes, yes, don't roll your eyes.) People maintain a coherent social network. The multiple contexts in which we interact create facets in our social network that we know how to maintain quite meaningfully. We certainly reach out to different people for dates than we do for jobs, but that is not a segmentation of our network into convenient chunks. Instead, we manage what is appropriate when. We don't want to maintain multiple networks; we want to maintain one network that we can facet as we see fit. This is a trick that no one in this "space" has figured out yet. This means that we don't always want a public network, because we're not always willing to collapse those facets. (More to come on this topic, i'm sure...) Anyhow, as you can see, i quite enjoyed myself, but i always do enjoy good entertainment full of outrageous actors and an interactive audience. Oh, and in case you want to actually know more about the content, Stewart Butterfield is far more concrete than i have been. Other versions of commentary: Category: Posted by zephoria at 4:39 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1) V-Day Online OrganizerI'm trying to find my replacement for V-Day. If you know of anyone in New York that'd be interested, let me know! JOB TITLE: Online Organizer (Part-Time) LOCATION: New York, NY REPORTS TO: Executive Director WORKS MOST Worldwide and College Campaign Directors, Executive Director, SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES: - Manage and update and sometimes build the V-Spot (The V-Spot is the internal site for all of our organizers. It is a HTML/PHP/mySQL system) An ideal candidate would have (in the order of priorities): - Good communication skills, patience and politeness V-Day is a virtual organization. The Coordinator works out of his/her home office which should be in or around New York City. COMPENSATION: competitive salary and benefits based on experience Eligible candidates should send a cover letter stating why they want to work for V-Day and their most recent resume to jerrilynn@vday.org. V-Day will directly contact candidates if an interview is desired. About V-Day: V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money, and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. V-Day generates broader attention for the fight to stop worldwide violence against women and girls including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM), and sexual slavery. V-Day stages large-scale benefits and produces innovative gatherings, films, and programs (such as the upcoming 2004 documentary “Until The Violence Stops;” community briefings with Amnesty International on the missing and murdered women of Juarez, Mexico; The December 2002 V-Day delegation trip to Israel, Palestine, Egypt and Jordan; The Afghan Women's Summit; The Stop Rape Contest; and The Indian Country Project) to educate and change social attitudes towards violence against women. Through V-Day campaigns, local volunteers and college students produce annual benefit performances of "The Vagina Monologues" to raise awareness and funds for anti-violence groups within their own communities. In 2003, over 1,000 V-Day benefit events were presented by volunteer activists around the world, educating millions of people about the reality of violence against women and girls and raising $4 million. The V-Day movement is growing at a rapid pace throughout the world. V-Day, a non-profit corporation, distributes funds to grassroots, national, and international organizations and programs that work to stop violence against women and girls. In its first year of incorporation (2001), V-Day was named one of Worth Magazine's "100 Best Charities." In its first six years, the V-Day movement has raised over $20 million. The 'V' in V-Day stands for Victory, Valentine and Vagina.
Category: Posted by zephoria at 1:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) September 16, 2003frustrated with information retrievalFor the last few weeks, i've been trying to appreciate the information retrieval material that is being thrown my way in my classes. For those who don't know, i'm housed in a department called "Information Management and Systems" (i.e. what happened to librarian sciences as it evolved). I'm utterly fascinated by how people construct and maintain information, most notably *social* information. What categories do we create to relate to others? How do we construct models of social information in our heads? How do we access this? Needless to say, this isn't the focus of my classes, but i'm trying to overlay my goals onto the material and find some sort of appreciation for them. [My efforts remind me of my experiences with history classes in middle school. I despised history because i couldn't make it relevant. At one point, a friend of mine told me to twist my perspective, to think of history as one giant storybook with fascinating characters. He suggested that i tried to figure out the motives and goals of the characters. Although my school focused on dates and memorization, i latched on to the material simply because i fell in love with the storybook.] All the same, i'm finding myself utterly frustrated. All of the information retrieval work focuses on this external data, how to categorize it, create meta-data around it, access it, etc. In the process, it gets further and further removed from the structures of the mind. The goal is efficiency and the approach is often to create systems that seem most computationally logical and than to figure out how to make humans be able to access it. While these researchers acknowledge that people need to have immense skills to follow this protocol, their approaches still seem so foreign to me. Of course, i find myself trapped to this as well. I had to critique SecureId the other day for a fellow researcher. This was a wonderful task because i'm a bit embarrassed by my naivety on that project. People are dreadful external categorizers. But, i just keep getting stuck on how bad people are at externalizing what they do so effectively internally that i cannot appreciate these attempts to do so. I need to figure out the proper "story" so that i can find this material interesting instead of just getting caught up in my irritation at their attempts. Category: academia Posted by zephoria at 4:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) am i a suicide girl?Now, i get a lot of odd messages on Friendster, which often humor me. Since i know way too many people on the damn site, many people think i'm collecting friends and ask me to add them. I ignore these, but they make me smile. Actually, i rarely respond to anyone who writes me on Friendster (no time..), but i utterly love reading what people write. In the last few weeks, a new trend in requests has emerged in my personal account: i keep getting messages from people asking for my suicide girl page, asking if i am a suicide girl, asking for my porn site, etc. At first, this was a bit startling (although i have to admit that i was secretly honored since i adore the Suicide Girls). For those who don't know, most of the Suicide Girls are "Pin-up Punk Rock and Goth Girls" (a.k.a. a really hot soft porn site for the younger funkier market). Many Suicide Girls and other women with sites are on Friendster because 1) it's fun; 2) they can connect with their friends; 3) it helps them connect with more people who may be interested in their site. [It's important to note that many of the Girls neither advertise their site nor their identity as a Girl.] Browsing through such women's portraits, i realized something. Many of them have collections of friends that consist of young punkster friends and older white businessmen.... So do i. Interesting. [Not so private note.... Clay - your identity play is fucking with my identity play.] Category: Posted by zephoria at 3:33 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) the idiot savantAbe's latest reflections on Friendster are fantastic. He iconifies Jonathan as an idiot savant, accidentally stumbling on brilliance. [Side note: the notion of Friendster as the product of an idiot savant makes me deliciously happy as my dear friend used to pound a mantra in my head during college: don't attribute to maliciousness what you can attribute to stupidity. Perhaps a rephrasing is due... Don't attribute to brilliance what you can attribute to luck.] In his entry, Abe argues that Friendster's success is going to be hard to top, that its growth must be analyzed and that much of it can be attributed to Friendster's simple no-nonsense style. He does directly attack my point about Friendster fading, which makes me think that i need to readdress it since i still believe in it, but also believe in what he is saying. The problem with Friendster (in its current incarnation) is that it has little motivation for people to return, manage their network or otherwise keep coming back after the fun wears off. Unless Friendster figures out how to address these problems, it will fade. To do so, Friendster needs to evolve beyond a dating-only model, which seems unlikely. That is why i see Friendster as fading and others emerging. Of course, an alternate course would be that Friendster figures out that it cannot squeeze a square peg into a round hole and adjust its model. Somehow, the savant part of Abe's conception is dropped here. I *definitely* agree that conversion is dreadfully impossible. But i also believe that conversion implies that the best model is to maintain an articulated network. I think that's going to continue to be problematic and i think that the next evolution of these networks will have to address that head-on. That said, i also know that the dating model does not appeal to everyone and that there is an age cut-off on Friendster that allows for a larger market than Friendster currently addresses. I definitely think Friendster will be around in a year, but i don't think it will be the same tool. I think that it will be a dating site with limited appeal and a lot of folks who had "been there, done that." Of course, i'm speculating like the next person and will enjoy being proven wrong. Category: yasns Posted by zephoria at 12:26 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) September 15, 2003collection of YASNSCynthia Typaldos is compiling a list of all of the different social network software services. Perhaps of interest for those in the area. Category: Posted by zephoria at 1:45 PM | TrackBack (0) codifying relationshipsLiz is pondering the issues around explicitly codifying relationships and i couldn't agree more with her musings. In a state of confusion about how to label people, we often just give up. This isn't just something that happens online. How often do i try to express my relationship to someone and get all confused. One word certainly doesn't clarify those complications, but i still find myself making up a closest approximation, but not one that i would write down in stone. Also, given the rich relationships that i have with people, i often adjust my description of my relationship with a person depending on the audience. Let me flesh this out with some examples. The most obvious is the newly dating couple who hasn't really determined what their relationship is. So, what's the likelihood that one is to exuberantly tell her best friend about her new girlfriend? Probably high - there's a bit of bragging enthusiasm / want of support. What's the probability of her telling her mom about her new girlfriend? Probably low - she doesn't want to have to deal with the yes, mom, another one.. no this one's different conversation. Same relationship but with problems codifying it. Also, codification assumes that our terms are consistent and imply the same thing. Does friend mean the same thing to everyone? Certainly not. I have quite a few friends who i've learned that "friend" means anyone that they've met. Some codes have a definite meaning, but the implications are not given. For example, she is my mom. Well, in my case, my mom and i are pretty good friends, engage with each other for advice, etc. My mom is also my friend, but the 'mom' label trumps the friend label. Yet, the implications of a mother/daughter relationship are not consistent and thus one cannot assume much by simply hearing that relationship. Liz is also dead-on when she asks what the point of codification is when we have that model internally anyhow. For most people, there is none. What's the value? Doesn't it cause more social trauma than it does any good? Don't get me wrong - i'm constantly explicitly codifying information, but i don't think that this is normal behavior. [I am, afterall, an academic whose eccentricity is just part of the process.] Finally, i appreciate Liz's pointers to my commentary on sex and self-monitoring. Marginalized populations are constantly trying to account for how they are being perceived, if they are getting information across as intended and adjusting what they say accordingly. They don't have the privilege to just be whoever whenever whereever. They must determine the appropriate information at the appropriate time. Sex is just one axis in which this plays a part. The most blatant example for people is around gay identity. If you're gay and you lack the privilege of class (overeducation counts here), what's the likelihood that you will pronounce your sexual preference as you go for a job? Is this deception or simply trying to be unclear about your identity for your own protection? Self-monitoring. You determine the social situation and adjust accordingly. That same person is not going to hide his identity when he's at a gay bar. Category: social software Posted by zephoria at 8:29 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1) September 13, 2003Cybersalon on Habits of the HeartHere's another gathering for the interested. (I will be on this panel, offering quite a different perspective - i suspect - than is normally presented.) Cybersalon: Matchmaking for Love and Money, Online and Off September-21 Doors open at 5.30; discussion starts at 7. A $15 donation is 5.30 - 9.00 PM Directions: From the Bay Bridge or Oakland and points south, take the Category: Posted by zephoria at 4:56 AM | TrackBack (0) September 10, 2003my iPod killer appWhen i got my Mac, it came with an iPod for a few extra dollars (ah, student discounts). Since my computer two computers ago crashed with all of my MP3s, i haven't bothered to re-rip them. I listen almost exclusively to online radio when i'm listening to music off of my computer. Thus, i couldn't think of a reason for why i might want an iPod, but for $30, why not? So, i scratched the darn thing before i even figured out how to use it. I didn't have a single MP3 to put on it and i certainly didn't want to go through the process of ripping my CDs again. So i procrastinated. Eventually, someone was telling me of an amazing Infected Mushroom live set. This finally motivated me to download Limewire and track down a bunch of live DJ sets from Israel. Thus, my iPod quickly turned into my little reminder of when i had enough of a life to go dancing. Well, i was reading a friend's blog today and s/he mentioned listening to NPR recordings via Audible.com. Having missed every "This American Life" for god only knows how long, i was curious. In i wandered, where i found the perfect little gift for my iPod. Not only did they have copies of NPR reels, but they have tons and tons of books on tape. And not the kind of books on tape that i've grown accustomed to renting at trucker stops (how much Louis L'Amour must one read.. i'm still damning my 5th grade history teacher for that one). No, they had a copy of most of the "to be read soon" books on my for fun bookshelf. What finally convinced me was realizing that Eric Schlosser is reading his own books! Since "Reefer Madness" is high on that list, i decided it was a must do. I've found my iPod killer app... Category: digitalness Posted by zephoria at 11:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) hatesterI got an invite for hatester from a rather prolific and entertaining personality in the social networks space. I couldn't help but smile and sign up. Category: Posted by zephoria at 8:40 PM | TrackBack (0) beautiful visualizationsA friend of mine just blogged proce55ing: Processing is a context for exploring the emerging conceptual space enabled by electronic media. It is an environment for learning the fundamentals of computer programming within the context of the electronic arts and it is an electronic sketchbook for developing ideas. [Key troublemakers include Ben Fry and Casey Reas (both of whom are brilliant)] Category: visualization Posted by zephoria at 12:25 AM | TrackBack (2) September 9, 2003Friendster as neocortical prosthetic...Multiple people have responded to my 150 person limit post with arguments about how the web should help increase our ability to connect and expand this number (most notably Tom Coates' Friendster as neocortical prosthetic...). Tom's right in that those who perceive our brains as a computer see technology as an opportunity for augmentation, parallel processing style. This is where i fundamentally believe that humanity matters. Keeping up social relations is not simply about remembering everyone you've met or having a structure to keep track of them. It is also about having the time and ability to manage those relationships, keep information flowing, etc. Social networks are not simply about people that you can store to use as appropriate. Thus, i don't fundamentally believe that an augmented version of your network will give you the tools necessary to maintain more meaningful contacts. Of course, i'd love to be proven wrong. [Direct note to Tom's post: i'm not actually trying to justify why i'm not an anomaly; i'm trying to express why the numbers don't make sense in the context of an articulated social network that spans time.] Category: Posted by zephoria at 10:58 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1) friendster populationI was guessing that the average age on Friendster was 28 and that it was 50/50 (fe)male. I wasn't far off. In the Anchorage Daily News, Jonathan reported that the average age is 27 and that it's 52% men. A friend in need may be a friend online Sunday, September 7, 2003 By Josh Niva Anchorage Daily News Mandy Yam has friends -- lots of friends. Hundreds of thousands of friends, in fact. She has best friends, fair-weather friends and friends she hasn't even met yet. These friends reside in high, low and in-between places. A 21-year-old journalism student at University of Alaska-Anchorage, Yam has been a dedicated member of the Friendster.com community since May. In that time, she's reconnected with an old high school pal, stayed connected with a group of college friends in California, made an unbelievable number of new acquaintances and even found out she's connected to a celebrity. "I'm one degree away from Flubber," Yam said with a chuckle. "How did that happen?" It's easy when one's personal network of friends totals more than 300,000, as Yam's Friendster account did last week. "And I just invited six more people (to join) today," she said. The world is not only more connected, it's a friendlier place thanks to Friendster, a free "social networking" Web site that has the cyber-universe atwitter. More than 1.6 million users have joined Friendster since its launch in March, and it has quickly become a pop culture phenomenon. "We definitely intended to create a really cool service that everyone could enjoy," said Friendster creator Jonathan Abrams from his Sunnyvale, Calif., office, "but it's still overwhelming when it takes off like this." Abrams developed the Friendster idea after following the trend of popular yet "random, creepy and anonymous" dating sites. "In real life, you meet people through your friends," he said. Unlike dating sites, Friendster is a "relationship-optional" site that is truly "friend-friendly." Friendster users create, browse and communicate through detailed personal profiles, which include basic statistics and likes along with pictures and even testimonials written by friends. Users can only browse profiles within their "personal network," which is developed through existing friendships. Users build connections by inviting others to join as friends. Once a friendship is formed, a personal network expands by adding the friends' collected friends. (Think six degrees of separation, only Friendster connections go four deep.) That's not to say Friendster isn't an effective matchmaking tool. Yam said a friend in California met her boyfriend using Friendster, and Abrams gets e-mails all the time about successful Friendster hook-ups. Yam and Cheryl Basto of Barrow, Alaska, have each made another type of special connection using Friendster. They have had cyber reunions with long-lost friends. Yam found an old friend who lives in California. Distant cousins tracked down Basto, 29, who recently tracked down a friend who moved to the Philippines five years ago. "That's the really cool thing, and we've heard a lot of that," Abrams said. Abrams said the average user age is 27, and the community is composed of 52 percent men. Abrams was Friendster's first registered user and now has 155 friends and a "pretty big" personal network. "But the whole idea is quality, not quantity," he said. Tell that to Yam, who has compiled an impressive list of 55 friends and built a personal network empire of 327,685 connections. She said 45 of her "friends" are "close friends"; none are strangers -- even Flubber. Friendster itself is growing by the thousands each day. Abrams said 550,000 users joined the community in the past month, and his staff of "less than 10" is having a difficult time keeping up. The site has suffered technical glitches due to the user overload, and Abrams is so understaffed he's forced to handle much of the company's marketing and public relations duties. With any popular trend comes backlash, and Friendster has faced plenty. One common complaint among many users is people who collect friends and personal networks strictly for statistical or ego reasons. "I don't like that some treat Friendster like a competition," Basto said on an e-mail. "I saw someone with 141 friends -- 141? Geez!" Yam added. Other user complaints come from the rash of "fakesters" who create bogus profiles or upload phony pictures. The Friendster staff hunts and deletes any suspicious profiles daily. There has even been a handful of spoof sites developed in recent week, such as Enemyster, Fiendster and Introvertster. It's also been reported that Friendster will soon charge users to navigate the site. Abrams said that's only partly true. The company is considering charging a monthly fee for users to communicate with others who aren't friends (probably less than $10), but Abrams said posting profiles, browsing and messaging between friends will remain free. Category: friendster Posted by zephoria at 6:12 PM | TrackBack (0) 3 degreesMelora Zaner from 3 degrees came to speak at Intel about the Net Generation. She had a variety of interesting approaches to the Neg Gen and since i can't find a meaningful reference, my notes from the theoretical hafl of her talk are contained within. Net Generation: 12-24 (broken into 12-17 | 18-24 ... aka home or not) The NetGen's prioritization of communication forums is interesting. Face-to-face dominates. Next comes cell phone (SMS or not). Next IM (usually AIM). Then email. Many had Live Journals which are more valuable as a form of communication than email. Email is assumed to be tracked by parents; cell phone conversations are not. Email is for dealing with parents. If there's going to be asynchonous behavior, use LJ (group commenting). NetGen only on IM when available to talk. Otherwise, it's rude to be on IM; log off if you can't talk. Away messages are not valued to them. MSN is perceived as staunchy and old, not where your friends are. Friends are at AIM. NetGen will use things that seem much "older" (i.e. older siblings like it... 17 Mag when 12, Cosmo when 17). Friends are the most influential in tech usage. Melora broke the NetGen into five categories along axes of "adult orientation" vs. "peer oriented" in terms of behavior and pressure. Isolator: 8-15% (low adult, low peer). Delinquents, drug dealers, outcasts Non-Teen: 15% (high adult, low peer). Geeks, dweebs, academics. Small social networks. Mostly men. Explorer: <10% (low adult, high peer). Group that pushes the edge, follows passion. Activists, rebels, freedom fighters, horse lovers, etc. Heavily female influenced. Interests-driven. Status Quot: 25-35% (more adult than peer). Preps, normals. Well-rounded, goal oriented. Often exhibits signs of adult stresses. Visible: 30-45% (more peer than adult). Social, well-known, pleasure seeker, charisma, large social networks. Fashion-driven. On a Saturday night, the visible would be at a party, the non-teen would be at home and the explorer would be pursuing a passion. Mass adoption starts with the explorers, peaks at the point between the visible and the status quo and dies by the time it reaches the non-teen. The sweet spot for determining success is between the explorer and the visible... the "visible leader." MTV focuses on "visible leaders" with 10% focused on explorers for tests Socializing is not communicating. The NetGen's online social network included people who are only online (i.e. fellow LJs). No desire to meet these people offline. Online is heavily 1-1 behavior... NetGen deeply desires small group organization online. [Note: without a publication, it's really hard to tell how accurate this is. I don't know her sample size or method for getting this information, but i do think that it's something to think about.] Category: digitalness Posted by zephoria at 4:11 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (7) September 8, 2003axes of info storageIn class this morning, one of our professors was talking about geographical information retrieval. Information is stored in association with a given place and thus by searching for that place, one can find information. [Note that while the professor was talking about documents, and professional ones at that, i immediately translated everything to think about social information, as that's my bent.] There are two ways to think about information. One is simply through the lens of the material; the second is through the lens of the experience of that material. Most material is associated with an event. Even along the lines of document creation, there is the location of which the material is created and experienced in addition to the location in which it might reference. This made think that much information is actually expereienced along three axes: place, time, person. For any given set of information, it may be experienced in multiple places, times or across multiple people. Information impacts place; it is not just situated there. It impacts the history, the vibe and perhaps scars the space itself (marks on the wall). Information is often felt to be ephemeral in time, as we cannot return to a given time to experience it. Information fundamentally impacts the people who experience it. They store that experience, that information and incorporate it into their identity. Also, they are likely to recall versions of that information/experience later, regardless of its accuracy. When we talk about information retrieval, we're talking about reconstructing the history, removing a set of information from the time/place/people who experienced it into a current situation. Time fundamentally changes. But what does it mean to have data stored with place and people instead of in a collected repository removed from those contextual bits? Should what be retrieved simply be the factual elements of information, or the more experiential? Can we have impact retrieval? Category: academia Posted by zephoria at 12:47 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0) flash mobs in doonesburyToday's Doonesbury comic has a great reference to flash mobs:
Category: Posted by zephoria at 8:02 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) Social Networking: Is there Really a Business Model?For those interested in hearing talks in the Bay Area, here's another one perhaps of interest: Social Networking: Is there Really a Business Model? (sponsored by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab). Reid Hoffman (Linked In) will be speaking and the panel includes Jonathan Abrams (Friendster), Andrew Ankar, Ross Mayfield (Socialtext) and Cynthia Typaldos with Tony Perkins as moderator. Should be fun! Category: Posted by zephoria at 12:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) September 5, 2003the 150 limit and social upkeepWhen anthropologist Robin Dunbar wrote about a 150-person cap in one's social network, he was not referring to 150 people in one's lifetime. He was saying that people can maintain up to 150 weak ties at any given point in time. [And that tie maintenance is directly related to gossip upkeep and brain size, just as monkey tie maintenance is directly related to grooming and brain size.] When i have 200+ friends on a site like Friendster, i'm not a social networks anomaly. What is actually being revealed is that my articulated network goes beyond the relationships that i currently maintain. While a high percentage of my friends and associates are on Friendster, not all of them are. There are quite a few relationships that i currently maintain that are not represented there. Additionally, many of the relations represented are outdated or on hiatus, not because i don't love or appreciate those people, but because we are not geographically colocated or our personal situations have created a situation where time to connect is limited. This doesn't mean that i don't love and appreciate those people, just that they're not part of my current situation. I say all of this because it's another factor of why an articulated representation is not equivalent to the network that one is actually maintaining. By suggesting that those ties are valid and relevant, we're suggesting that we can call on those, regardless of our upkeep. This is a bit problematic. For example, last nite, i needed to call someone who i could guarantee would be online in order to ask them to look something up for me. This is not a heavy favor, but in choosing who to call, i made certain conscious choices. My cell phone represents one form of an articulated network. As i browsed through the people, i chose not to call certain people for various reasons. I eliminated some people because i doubted they would be online. I eliminated others from the potential pool because i felt as though the favor would be too inappropriate given our relationship. (For example, i didn't call my advisor because it would seem an odd request.) But the most cringeful reason that i failed to call a group of people who would likely be online was because i owed them a conversational call (social upkeep) and to call to ask a menial favor when i didn't have time to do the upkeep was totally out of line. Now, the limiting factor was, of course, that the task was menial. Had i been in a desperate situation that truly felt magnificent in nature, i would've called any one of the people in my cell phone. I knew them all. I loved them all. But the support i requested was contextualized because of the value and whether or not i'd been good about social upkeep. This is important to realize in the realm of an articulated network. When people go through me to connect with other friends of mine, there can be quite a bit of social awkwardness when i failed to maintain that relationship. When i, as the bridge, have the ability to control when those connections are to be made, i have the opportunity to repair the upkeep gap before asking a favor. For example, when i get a phone call from an old colleague asking to write a recommendation, the conversation inevitably starts with a lot of social upkeep before the favor is requested. Otherwise, it would seem odd. R.I.M Dunbar, "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates," Journal of Human Evolution (1992), vol. 20, pp. 469-493. Category: Posted by zephoria at 6:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (7) on datingLast night, i went to the Commonwealth Club talk on dating in contemporary urban cultures. The panelists included folks from PlanetOut, Friendster, Match.com, and speed dating. Obviously, i went to get a better idea of what Jonathan's approach to dating was, in the hopes that it had evolved from the conversation we had a few months ago. It hadn't. He still believes that relationship formation is not a science and that they just happen. [In March, he told me that the only thing people looked at when dating online is a picture and that he only put up the rest to make his advisors happy.] Of course, he also believes that his site exists out of happenstance and that it is simply that his friends told his friends and voila everyone was interested. --sigh-- Despite my disappointment with his perspective, i was truly taken aback by the rabbi who created speed dating. He was *great*. Unlike the Match.com rep (who had fantastic statistics and scientific analysis), the rabbi just had good insight and wisdom. He told the audience that dating is like running a company. You can't just rely on sales and marketing; you need to focus on product development (the product being you). Dating takes work and compromise. He also told us to change our perspective on seeking people out. Rather than finding the best person for us, look for the person that we could spend the rest of our life trying to make happy. When two people are devoted to making each other happy, the relationship would work. Those two thoughts are so simple, but yet they were said so elegantly and i really appreciated it. Category: social observations Posted by zephoria at 1:31 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) September 4, 2003200 cap on FriendsterWell, i finally hit it. A colleague of mine added me as a Friendster and i went to approve him, but i received a nice little message telling me that i have too many friends. Apparently, 200 is the cap (although i have 215). Of course, i can only assume that Jonathan is intending to block Fakester behavior through this cap, but i find it hysterical that in doing so, he's actually blocking me, particularly since i've been so vigilent about only linking to people that i actually know (well, except for "Brown" who has done me well by letting me find old friends.). As someone who has been on the darn site for ages and is constantly in communication with folks about it, it shouldn't be surprising that i know more than 200 people on the system. I have all sorts of colleagues on there (law professors, gender theorists, social software folks, software engineers, etc.). Friends from all aspects of my life are there now. Basically, my account is a funny hodgepodge of a diverse population. I remember a few months back when one of my friends was asked if i was a Fakester because i seemed to be such a ridiculous hub. ROFL. Perhaps by being too real, i've moved into the realm of absurd and thus fake? Category: friendster Posted by zephoria at 4:24 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (1) social construction of technologyIn class today, we were introduced to the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework/methodology. I am certainly not an expert on this approach, but i'm quite curious to learn more as it's the first direct methodology that i've seen to address the socio-political impacts of technology creation and adoption. All too often in tech-land, we think of efficiency and desire as our metrics of the success of a piece of technology and its adoption. But there's so much more to how and why these items are created and popularized. Update 11/06/03: Ack, given that this is way too high on Google's search for SCOT, i thought i'd give some proper references on the topic. Anyone who is interested in knowing what SCOT is (not just my version) should read: Bijker, W. E. (1995). King of the road: the social construction of the safety bicycle. In Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: Toward a theory of sociotechnical change (pp. 19-100). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pinch, T. (1996). The social construction of technology: a review. In R.Fox (Ed.), Technological change (pp. 17-35). Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Category: academia Posted by zephoria at 1:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) September 3, 2003anthropology: time, space and otherEarly anthropologists belkieved that distance is equivalent to the past. Thus, the further away someone is to the European central, the more likely they are to represent the past. This is embedded in the notion of "otherness." Of course, we no longer believe that people far from us are that (biologically) different than us, but those early thoughts fundamentally framed some of our thoughts about difference. For most people, those far away or in a distant past feel so still fundamentally different. What is interesting about the web is that it starts to collapse time and space. In theory, this should eliminate the notions of "otherness" but somehow, in reality, i think that it will just create confusion. I'd hypothesize that people will continue to judge others along their local notions of similarity and create new barriers to time and space that did not previously exist. Of course, perhaps i'm just being pessimistic today. Category: academia Posted by zephoria at 5:12 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) Friendster: A little cash goes a long way?Friendster: A little cash goes a long way? is a CNet article on Friendster as a company. It also addresses Friendster's catty attitude towards patents (although it doesn't address the wide variety of prior art). Friendster: A little cash goes a long way? In the thick of the frenzied attention being paid to the personal networking site, its founder and chief executive, Jonathan Abrams, is manning the phones, answering press calls. "We have no marketing department," Abrams explained in an interview. "We have no press firm. I'm doing everything." The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has fewer than 10 employees. Abrams may be able to fill out his staff thanks to an angel investment, announced Tuesday, amounting to just more than $1 million. The investors include former Yahoo Chief Executive Tim Koogle, who will join the Friendster board of directors; former PayPal Chief Executive Peter Thiel; and former Amazon.com and Netscape Communications executive Ram Shriram. The new funds will go mostly into site infrastructure, Abrams said, including more servers and switches to improve response time on the now-sluggish network. In addition, the site is planning to debut new features, including an instant-messaging application. Friendster, still in its test, or beta, phase, has grown to its current size by creating permission-based individual networks of friends and acquaintances through which members can trade messages, view each other's home pages and write testimonials. While many use the site for dating purposes, Friendster has gained and promoted a following of people already in romantic relationships as well. Friendster's trio of new investors lauded the site, placing it in the context of prior Internet successes. "Just when everyone thought that all of the large opportunities on the Internet had already been tapped, along come rule-changing companies like Friendster," Koogle said in a statement. "The opportunity that lies ahead of the company is huge and global, and I am thrilled to be involved." One industry analyst said Friendster could have the potential to grow like previous Internet successes--but for consumers, the novelty has worn off even for the most successful of these. "One benefit of this model is the 'eBayity' of them," said Ross Rubin, an analyst with eMarketer. "It's low overhead. The category is also rife with opportunities for Web services to create a kind of personal portal. And they haven't really tied into the whole blogging craze yet. It's a good match. "But for most people, I think they can run out of steam. eBay, for example--I know people who went through an eBay addiction phase, but then it became just another channel for hard-to-find goods. On Friendster, there will be the curious rush. But then what do you use it for, unless you have copious idle time?" Friendster, which last week added Napster co-founder Sean Parker to its advisory board, has generated considerable buzz. The site has expanded quickly through so-called viral marketing, as current members actively solicit nonmembers to sign up and join their network. The site has spawned a slew of knockoffs and parodies, though it is not without genuine competition or precedents of its own. Ryze, for example, offers a network of contacts--but with a corporate focus. While its basic service is free, it has made the leap to paid subscriptions for premium services. Emode, another potential competitor, recently introduced a preview of its Friendster-like Emode Friend Network. Abrams warned Friendster copycats that he has a patent pending on the service and singled out Emode as one site that would be vulnerable to a patent claim, should Friendster's be granted. Emode countered that it had patents of its own pending for parts of its friend network system but declined to say which parts or to comment otherwise on Friendster's pending patent. But Abrams said his primary competitive concerns are less about start-ups than about established Internet giants such as Yahoo and USA Interactive--though neither has announced or previewed a Friendster-like service. "Those are the two companies we think are real competitors, as we try to build the next huge Internet destination," Abrams said. "They are potentially really formidable competitors, because they are strong companies that are in the areas that we are currently in and intending to move into. And no matter what they do, whether that's copying Friendster or doing what they're doing now, they have considerable resources." Before the investment announcement, Friendster had collected what Abrams described as a smaller, six-figure amount of funding from angel investors. Abrams refused to set a date for when the site will emerge from its beta phase or when it will introduce paid services. But he did promise that people will always be able to use some version of the service free of charge. "The first thing--the most important thing--is that basic membership will always be free," he said. "At some point in time, we will have some subscription component for some set of features or premium service. But those rumors flying around the Internet--that in two days Friendster will start charging--those two days keep passing, and it's obviously not true. People will never have to pay to sign up." Category: friendster Posted by zephoria at 3:08 PM | TrackBack (0) the value of the prototypeWhen we talk about information categorization, we assume that our coarse categories have no impact on the people who deal with them. People need to adapt to the atrocious indexing that we do, right? If a category is wrong, it'll be adapted, right? But the thing is that if you believe Elliot Aronson's arguments in "Social Animal," you have to believe that our early categorizations play a significant role in how people relate to the material, as they are more likely to reinterpret current information to fit their early mental models than to adjust their early categories. What does this mean for coarse categorization that is implied to evolve? How does Yahoo!s listing of categories shape the way we think about web information? Category: academia Posted by zephoria at 1:51 PM | TrackBack (0) back in schoolNow that i'm back in school, i'm going to be chewing on a lot of different ideas. I will probably post some of them here, although they will be very informal and not completely thought through. Still, it's always good to have to put things down to really question what i'm thinking... Category: reflections & rants Posted by zephoria at 12:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) September 2, 2003a real life buzz killIn addressing the upcoming Fakester Revolution protest, Clay provides too very good points: 1) The real person behind a Fakester is never as much fun as the character. "Did these people never see the Wizard of Oz? Never let them see behind the curtain -- the creator is much duller than the creation." 2) At this point, Friendster will gain nothing by reverting its policy on Fakesters. The buzz kill has already happened. I would love to disagree with Clay on the latter point, but i think he's dead-on. At the same time, i think that there are fundamental lessons for social software creators embedded in this battle. Fundamentally, a successful digital space for social interaction must allow a diverse set of uses and personalities. By creating a rigid "public" environment and controlling the types of social activity that go on, you inherently limit your audience and weaken your product. Just as in RL, there is value in having a "public" environment where a vastly diverse population can just live and let live. Diversity makes the world go round. Secondly, play is really important. With play comes humor and creativity. This is the glue the helps connect people, the motivation for doing serious activities. Life is like a treasure hunt - it's about finding those more subtle awe-inspiring moments. Connecting with people is not a dry mechanical task and to turn it into one will inevitably demotivate people. One year from now, i suspect that the current incarnation of Friendster will have faded from people's memories, a fad that was fun to play with and to find people. For the next evolution of said software, it's going to be essential for designers to figure out how to provide an environment where people have freedom, while simultaneously empowering people to ignore segments of the population. In effect, they need to figure out how to model the variety of a good city. Social software must learn from social environments, not try to artificially construct them.
Category: friendster Posted by zephoria at 9:14 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (3) back in schoolOMG. I'm back in school. I actually went to classes today. -bounce- I forgot how much i adore being in school. Also, i've been practicing new meditation techniques in class every time my mind wanders. And i decided to sit in the front row of every class. I'm determined to actually stay focused on school this time and not get destracted by all of the funny fairie adventures that run throgh my head. The first class was a discussion of how we categorize information. It involved lots of Lakoff and i was actually able to recall Aronson's "Social Animal" to argue that people will constantly adjust current infromation in order to fit their early categorization schemes (rather than adjusting those). The second class concerned legal issues around digital information. I had a hard time not going meta on this class because the teacher's style was sooo similar to the prof that i had back at the Berkman Institute and it made me wonder if all law professors teach in the same fashion (just as they learn to write opinions in the same fashion as law clerks). Tomorrow should be the interesting day though as i'm hoping to get into an anthropology class. Time to catch up on all of that theory that i've been inadequately acquiring through scanned readings. Category: reflections & rants Posted by zephoria at 8:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) September 1, 2003Types of Fakesters/FraudstersI realized that i never wrote down the different types of Fakesters/Fraudsters that i've been observing. Here are a few that i can think of right now. [Let me know if there are other ones that you've seen.] Play Characters.. These characters are meant for fun and entertainment, and to allow people with common interests to connect.
Passable Characters. These characters are meant to appear real on the system.
Note: Cloning is pretty common now. "Fake" characters as well as "real" characters are often cloned. There are tons of Jedis, Jesus Christs and Jonathan Abrams. There are also Collectors - people who collect one type of fake character. There are also Friendster whores - people who simply collect as many people as possible, including Fakesters. [Revised on 9/13 based on lots of good feedback.] Much additional information is supplied by Roy Batty: To expand upon your definitions of Fakester types: Friend supporters: we create a similiar kind of Fakester, which you might simply call Bait. A typical ploy is a sexy girl fakester, with a pic pulled from the Web. These tend to collect dopey boys, many of whom even assume she is real, and try and pick her up (so this also throws a wrench in the typically sexualizized dating site interaction you mentioned in your previous blog post). You left out Concepts, i.e. Pure Evil, Infinity, Nothing. Another group realted to Tribes could be called Collectors. These are people who only collect Friends of a certain type (robots, animals, sexy girls). I had a short-lived profile called Legion of Doom who only befriended supervillains. Because it seems that Friendster must now approve your initial photo, (but not subsequent updates, apparently), we now employ Changelings (my term, again). We sign up with a normal-looking profile, then after a few days, convert it to a Fakester profile and change the photo and profile wording. Then wreak havoc. Don't forget the great term "Friendster whore," a person who collects as many friends as possible. Category: friendster Posted by zephoria at 2:23 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (5) HICSS paper acceptedFernanda Viegas and i wrote a paper for HICSS called Digital Artifacts for Remembering and Storytelling: PostHistory and Social Network Fragments and the draft was accepted. This means that we now need to edit it based on the reviewers' comments and resubmit for publication. I'm quite excited about this because i think that we're getting at some interesting points in that paper. Basically, we stepped back from the two email visualization projects and reflected on their value. We realized that we have all of this social interaction in digital spaces without meaningful artifacts for remembering. Photographs are such valuable tools for sharing events in real life, but those same elements don't exist online. When we created SNF and PostHistory, we realized that they ended up providing that opportunity accidentally. This is interesting because it makes us reflect on the value of such artifacts for social interaction. While digital communication allows us to have all of the archives of our experience, it doesn't give us the quick coarse snapshops that let us reflect in a meaningful manner. One of the things that i love about submitting to HICSS is that the reviews are always so meaningfully critical. Needless to say, all of the reviewers commented on our failure to evaluate our tools. And they are right: we didn't. Of course, i still think that the value in what we built was more in the thought element than in any suggestion that this is a meaningful tool for distribution. Or maybe that's just my excuse for not having had time to evaluate. But i really am not sure what a meaningful evaluation for SNF would've been. I certainly don't think that it is a distributable tool (even if people keep asking to download it). Another common thread in the reviews was that they didn't understand why anyone would want to use this tool continuously. This makes me think that we didn't make our arguments strong enough. Just as people don't use photographs regularly, they wouldn't want to use any such tool as a means of information retrieval. Instead, these are artifacts to bring out during times of sharing or curiousity, not as a daily ritual. Aside from these two common threads, everything else in the reviews was inconsistent. Some reviewers loved our writing; others despised it. Some thought we were on to something; others thought the tools were pointless. Still, the various perspectives were quite valuable and certainly motivate me to want to publish there more often, even if attending the conference is a *huge* dent in the pocket. Category: Posted by zephoria at 2:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) stone butch bluesFor the last year or so, Stone Butch Blues has been out of print. This has made me utterly frustrated since it's one of the few books that i constantly buy for others to read. I went to hear Leslie Feinberg (the author) speak once and she said that the purpose of SBB was to communicate gender theory through life experience. The story is so poignant, revealing all of the emotions that one feels when experience gender confusion. I still remember the night that i read it. I was in undergrad and working for the summer. I felt really ill so i went home early from work to sleep. I picked up SBB. Every hour or so i had to put it down because i was crying so intensely, but i could never put it down for long. I watched the sun rise the next morning as i finished the story, forever moved. Anyhow, i just got an email message from Leslie Feinberg: I'm happy to announce that a new edition of Stone Butch Blues is being published by Alyson. The book will be available in stores by spring 2004. Copies may be in the warehouse as early as November 2003. It's a must read. Category: gender & sexuality Posted by zephoria at 12:23 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) |
