Justin Baum's Barbarian Blog

Activity Streams Ambient Awareness and Ambient Findibility: Navigating the social stew

justin@barbariangroup.com(Justin Baum) — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:09:33 -0400

I try not to write longer posts but I missed the boat on getting the following thoughts out of my head as they came to me. This one has been brewing for months and solidified at SXSW after listening to an Activity Stream panel and a Recommendation Engine panel back to back in the same room. The social web is at an interesting crossroads. Part growing up, part progress/innovation, part adoption by people beyond our insulated tech culture. With Twitter’s unusually quick growth and the issues emerging around Facebook’s re-design I am really excited to see further discussion and progress on two related topics. Ambient awareness and ambient findability.

Ambient Awareness: The product of all those status updates

The idea of ambient awareness caught a little buzz in the social web community through the New York Times article, “Im so, digital close to you.” In the midst of putting together this post I have seen it re-surface a few times as focus generally shifts towards activity streams. You could classify “ambient” as a flavor of the month buzzword, its definitely percolating, but I like it because it forces the question – “ambient awareness,” great, now what?

“Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye… But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered.” -NYT article

Activity Streams: the vehicle of ambient awareness

You see them on almost all social sites now days. Activity streams are the familiar lists of updates from the people you have elected to connect with, follow, friend etc. Activity streams may appear differently site to site, but one thing they all have in common is a steady trend from trickling to flooding as you connect with more people. Facebook bests illustrate this. Pre-redesign the “news feed” you saw on the Facebook homepage was a mystery. Why certain things showed up in the feed and others didn’t was unclear to most. The old Facebook news feed gradually bubbled things to your attention while post-redesign the feed on the homepage is a full blown activity stream of all your friends earth shattering contributions to the social stew. The signal to noise ratio has tipped in favor of the noise. I went to a panel at SXSW on activity streams and their was some hearty ribbing of Facebook’s representative, mostly because of how similar their re-designed UI/UX was to sites like FriendFeed and Twitter. Geek ego aside, Facebook’s shift in focus marks a move from a profile centric social web to an activity stream centric social web. In other words its not about blinging out your profile on Myspace anymore, its about tweeting every minute of the day. Activity streams are the state of play now, and ambient awareness is the bi-product. Again, I like the term because it forces the question, what now? What do we do with ambient awareness, real-time web etc. I certainly don’t want to stair at an un-filter flood of randomness, nor do I only want to follow 25 people just to keep the volume down.

Findability: Can we get more out of activity streams?

Most people have seen someone struggle to walk a huge dog down the street. Well activity streams are walking us right now. Their difficulty to manage is shaping our behavior. Unless we elect to cap our follows/inputs at a certain level the signal to noise wall comes up pretty fast. Their are also people who are cool with the flood and sifting through an overwhelming amount of information. Thats fine for certain uses, but I would hope that this new aspect of the social web experience has more to offer. Echoing something my fellow Barbarian Rick said to me… This stuff is great for broadcasters right now, but not so great for readers who are seeking specific things. In a perfect world ambient findability would flourish along with ambient awareness.

“Ambient findability describes a world at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. It’s not necessarily a goal, and we’ll never quite arrive, but we’re sure as heck headed in the right direction.” -From an interview with Peter Morville on Boxes and Arrows

Ambient awareness is not the be all end all of activity streams. Its only one aspect of a significant shift in how we use the web. I find it hard to be ambiently aware of 100+ people every day and get anything out of it. What happens when the noise eclipses the signal? Ambient Findabiity by Peter Morville is one of my favorite books about the web and seeks to answer some of these question. Peter approaches findability on the social web from an interesting perspective. In 2005, when asked about the death of taxonomy according to Tim O’rielly, Peter Responded…

“People have been predicting the end of hierarchy since the beginning of hierarchy. But it’s not going away. In fact, I dedicate a whole chapter to explore the hyperbole that swirls around social software and the Semantic Web. I make the case for a “sociosemantic web” that relies on the pace-layering of ontologies, taxonomies, and folksonomies to learn and adapt as well as teach and remember.“

I found it interesting that the pace-layered approach Peter discusses came up at the SXSW09 Recommendation Engine panel but not the Activity Stream panel. We have a wide open faucet of activity streams across the social web inundating us with a barrage of status updates, photos, links, and other stuff. Unfortunately we are learning that an activity stream focused social web easily slips into information overload/fatigue with little effort. There needs to be a collective shift towards addressing findability within activity streams. Its not the flood of status updates (a common complaint) that “ruined” the new Facebook. Its the lack of tools to filter information of any kind down to what each individual wants. People are creating the status updates and other activity, and they are doing it more and more, its not going away. The tools need to catch up. Many aspects of what Peter Morville called the pace-layered sociosemantic approach are underway and will help solve these issues. For example the DiSo project is focused on issues of interoperability and meaning in activity streams. Its exciting to think about the potential user experience of these tools once some of the bigger technical issues on the table are resolved. Thats going to take time, but in the meantime there are some things designers and developers can focus on to ease the pain as we transition into a activity stream focused social web.

Filtering activity streams: The “all filter” is broken

What do you do when the noise eclipses the signal? Everyone has their own threshold for their email, news reader, twitter, etc. Imagine if one day you could not use your email filters, folders, labels, rules, smart playlists etc. Overload, saturation, fatigue, game-over man! Thats about where we are at with activity streams on the social web. After a certain amount of information flow the “all filter” just stops working for anything more than a casual glance. There have been some strides toward better filtering lately, but basic problems have not been addressed. The trajectory of filtering UI for activity streams is a traditional and very familiar vertical list of sources on the left and feed items on the right. Its easy to see why this works for applications that deal with a live or frequently updating feed of information. Not the most innovative UI, but its a safe and effective pattern. Google reader is my favorite example of this style of filtering UI on the web. Nambu the OS X Twitter client does a nice job of utilizing this UI style for twitter. And of course FriendFeed and Facebook among others. In addition to the all filter, what are some ways we can or should be able to filter activity streams?

Filter by Group – Twitter clients, Friendfeed, Facebook and others offer grouping features which allow us to create clusters of people to filter activity streams with. Groups are best used as a way to collect people that have something in common which may only be relevant to you personally, not necessarily for mapping real life relationships (co-workers, family etc). There is a lot of potential power in telling a system that a group of people are related, and even more power if you can tell it why. For example, I group people that are into the same obscure sub genres / cultures of music that I am interested in. You can imagine I do this for other topics, ideas, interests etc. I realize that this behavior may be on the power user side of the spectrum right now, but it has become essential to me effectively using Facebook and Twitter as a consumer/seeker of information. I imagine there could be some interesting outcomes of telling the system – “people in this group are related… now show me trends within the groups activity stream… and I will teach you (the system) which trends are related to why I have grouped these people together… then show me more of those relevant blips in the stream.” Unfortunately creating and maintaining groups on the social web is a absolute mess right now, but this is a topic of another (shorter) followup post.

Filter by object – Ambient awareness of WHAT? Relationship statuses, what someone had for lunch, peoples moods? If that floats your boat then cool. But what else are you into? What makes you tick? Videos of cats, tweeting about your feelings, web dev, collecting sneakers, obscure music, fixed gear bikes, knitting, politics, fencing, wine? Social objects are certainly floating around in activity streams. As more unique social objects manifest on the web in their digital forms, they become worthy filters for navigating the social stew. The more niche the more potentially interesting the results in my opinion. Integration of niche social-objects into activity streams hinges on what DiSo is working on, social network interoperability and the openness of social nets in general. In other words, the site defining those social objects need to be able to play nicely with other sites like Facebook and twitter in order for the objects to have any meaning within activity streams. TALL order there. For now, simple examples of filtering activity streams by objects can be found on FriendFeed or Facebook where you can filter down to just photos, or just status updates etc.

Filter by topic/context – This a nut that hasn’t been cracked yet. While these activity streams are full of a lot of disposable, fleeting chatter they are still often about something. There is a narrative, there is conversation, there are common threads, there is progression. Context is sorely lacking from activity streams. We have the magnifying glass soo locked to the “right now” that we cannot zoom out and see the greater arcs in the stream over longer periods of time. Something that is 5 minutes or older is easily wiped of it’s meaning on. Sure, its the real-time web, but the past and the future are of course still important, right Matt Jones? Hashtags on Twitter are a great example of how to hand-jam context and meaning into the system. It lacks grace, but it works, kind of. What if the system was smart enough to pick up on context/meaning and provide it as a set of additional filters? A question I am decades late to, but hopefully our fearless leaders are approaching an answer. There is some technical magic required that I know little about, but my brain goes back to the pace-layering “sociosemantic” web Morville put out there. Read/Write Web has some of recent semantic web happenings for further reading.

Filter by geography/location – Speaking of context, physical location is potentially a great way to glean context from information. Check out this chat with the DiSo boys and Brian Oberkirch if you have some time. Its interesting to me that Facebook doesn’t allow you to filter your activity stream by geographic network. You can filter your friends by geography, its just buried on the friends page. Perplexing. Mixing and matching location with other filters is definitely something I would love to be able to do. For example I am in NYC for a weekend. I have a group of people that are all into the same electronic music I am. I would like to filter that group by NYC and potentially an object like events.

Filter queries – There are always cases where a good old fashioned “advanced search” is sometimes necessary. Yes one of the goals of our smart systems of the future is to eliminate the need for these types of queries but we aren’t there yet and there will probably always be value in very precise detailed searches. Yahoo’s Sideline is an interesting approach to advanced twitter search. The Air application allows you to create groupings of multiple searches. These groups then produce a stream of tweets. You can include tons of queries in one group that produce very interesting results. The flow feels a lot like creating complex mail rules or smart playlists in iTunes. Its a really interesting way to follow topics on twitter without hash tags.

My gut: A shift in toolsets and mindset is coming

People may read this and say, “I just don’t use Twitter or Facebook like this, nor will I ever, I follow 50 people and it works fine.” Im cool with that, its a very reasonable approach and probably the majority approach. Im definitely approaching this stuff from a “design for yourself perspective,” for better or worse. I recognize that. But what keeps me chomping at the bit for more effective tools is the imbalance of power between the social-media broadcaster and the sociac-media consumer. Old-school broadcasters have fallen all over themselves to effectively utilize and monetize this new way of communicating. There are a ton of tools aimed at broadcasters using social media. We haven’t necessarily seen the same robust tools for the people soaking up more than they are putting out. On second thought, soaking and consuming are not the best words to represent who I am talking about. I am really talking about the finders/seekers. That is after all what the majority of people do on the web. They find stuff. I want tools for the pro-finder on the social web. Google Reader / RSS has been the undisputed hub of my information consumption for a few years. Activity streams are on track to match syndication/aggrigation, but before they can, we need better tools for being seekers of information on the social web. We have arrived arrived at an ambient model of communication. Now lets work on better finding what we want in the social stew.

Facebook, Twitter and 2008 data portability questions still chapping my ass

justin@barbariangroup.com(Justin Baum) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:36:03 -0400

The question is no longer Myspace or Facebook. It is now Facebook or Twitter. Those two sentences are enough to get anyone to close a browser window. But wait! Up until now the resounding, and easy answer, has been “BOTH!” Unfortunately that question is about to get a lot harder to answer as Facebook prepares the launch of their new homepage. Which is essentially a play to become more Twitter like. With Anderson Cooper and everyone else blabbing about Twitter, and the Twitter experience being adopted rapidly by a more mainstream audience I can’t blame Facebook at all. It is the right move. And I gotta say, I am excited about their new design. As the above Read/Write Web post describes, FB will start to look more and feel more like a stream of tweets or other aggregate sites like FriendFeed. The focus is now even more on “the feed.” It’s what a lot of people don’t know they want yet, and FB is just showing them the way. The irony is that this new tweak to the FB experience will coach and prepare users to take the plunge to the stripped down purist (better?) approach of Twitter.

I already struggle with when to update my status on FB verus when to just post to Twitter. What is beautiful about Twitter is that it boils down the cultural shift that has happened with communication and technology into it’s essence. A simple, reductive scaffolding for no rules, many to many communication from which endless amounts of interesting things can be built. Thats the opposite of Facebook, a lumbering monolith. Yet FB has come about as close as you can get to nailing profile centric social networking, and I love it. What Facebook has realized is that being profile centric (myspace) is no longer relevant. Being feed centric is 2009. Neither site will ever replace the other because of how meaty FB is and how stripped down twitter will remain (hopefully!). Oh god here we go again… back to 07/08 and the multi-profile fragmented/fractured nature of our lives on the social web. THE HUMANITY!

Cranking up my wambulance for some whining here. As FB and Twitter rolled up a lot of momentum recently a whole horde of music people I dig started popping up on both sites. If you know me or check out the occasional DJ mix I post to my podcast you know the cast of characters I speak of. This has been a blast. I forgot how geek dominated the landscape of the social web, or at least my corner of it has been for the past 3 years. So many lulz and good info came along with these new found friends on twitter. But with all those new tweets came the need to filter. I have ranted about filters and findability on here before.

So I am sitting here staring at Tweetdeck and the various columns of different sets of friends that Tweetdeck so nicely allows me to create. Ive got a list of famous people, a list of SF party folks, music/DJ types, super nerds, serious bros, the list goes on… But what really chaps my ass is that when FB relaunches their new homepage I am going to want the same exact filters / lists on there as well. And I am going to have to MANUALLY re-create them. Wouldnt it be great to be able to sync or import/export these filters. What happened to the great data portability movement of 07/08. Is the summer of love over? When do the users get to reap the benefits? It seems as though we are still in the early land-rush stages of the social web. Its unfortunate but I think some of these common sense elements of the social web experience that don’t exist now could be years off. We have got some leveling off to do. Maybe its generational? Good old http://www.brianoberkirch.com planted this seed in my head a few months back. Zucky is of my generation. But he stands amongst some old Karl Rove like characters in the forest of tech. It will be interesting to see what happens.. to say the least.

As my friend Rey Flemmings likes to say – Its ALL about filters. The problem is filters are increasingly becoming important on the social web. Not being able to get them in and out of various sites is going to make situations like rabidly using twitter and facebook a total pain.

Hulu vs. Boxee and why networks should wake up and look at Netflix

justin@barbariangroup.com(Justin Baum) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:59:52 -0500

I haven’t written about this yet, but things just got really interesting today.

First some context, skip it if you know the story. Hulu is a great site that offers full lenght TV shows from major networks at high quality for free (ad supported). Boxee is a media center application (think Tivo for web / bit-torrent content). People tend to run boxee on small computers hooked up to their TVs. Up until recently Boxee provided a lovely way to access Hulu’s content on the big screen. Pressure from whomever controls Hulu’s content (the major networks) forced them to block access of their content by Boxee. DRAMA.

Today two interesting things happened

Boxee, the strapping young lads that they are, came back at the networks with a total Haymaker. Boxee, laughing in the networks face, provided rudimentary access to Hulus content through their built in web browser (it doesn’t look like a browser, but thats essentially what it is). Hulu is just a website after all, right? Oh what a BURN. Hulu responded by doing the only thing they could do. They blocked Boxee entirely. Why? Because if they don’t, some dinosaurs at the networks would pull the content plug on Hulu and they will bleed out in their fragile early stages of life.

Remember that scene in the movie Dune when the gross guy with boils pulls the “heart plug” on some pour soul? Well the networks are the boil covered gross guy (Baron Harkonnen) and the innocent soul is Hulu. SPOILER ALERT for the movie and this whole debacle: The boil covered gross guy dies in the end. I think his uncle was the music industry?

The networks have a serious win with Hulu. People love Hulu. But the monetization pheromones in the air have caused them to possibly flub it. The networks are essentially saying – we would really prefer if you hulu users watch our content on a tiny computer screen and not your TVs, please turn off Boxee and go back to your web browsers. The irony of this logic is that Boxee is essentially a glorified web browser. And the further move to block Boxee from Hulu’s RSS feeds reinforces the networks misunderstanding of the entire medium. To them watching Hulu on Boxee feels WAY to much like regular old TV that they aren’t making enough money on or in control of. Networks, Im looking at you… hasn’t the success of Boxee, iTunes, Tivo and other “have it my way” solutions spoken to you at all? You won’t have a TV channel forever. You are only as good as your content can throw you. And do you know who is going to throw you like a 90 mph fast ball in the coming years? People like BOXEE! Make friends.

Back to the flawed logic of Hulu blocking Boxee’s access. There is nothing stopping me from opening up my favorite run of the mill web browser and blasting Hulu full screen all over my living room on my flat screen. Are the networks going to kick down my door and tell me to stop until they figure out how to mOnEtiZe it? When the future is obviously staring them in the face why do they insist on going the route of the music industry? For the love.

Lets look at Netflix. They are kind of like Hulu. They offer content from a lot of different people. They just implemented their streaming media-center-like software on a bunch of different platforms, xbox360, OS X, Windows, etc. Granted they have a different relationship with their content providers than Hulu, its an example of how to do it right. The future, forget it, the NOW, are these Hulu, Boxee, Netflix-streaming style experiences. Networks, why bother fighting whats already here? Stop being surprised when these young bucks whip past you at 90 miles an hour. Soon your time will be up as a TV channel. Im sure smart people at your organizations are already telling you its here. Embrace the change, stop stifling innovation, and get some smart people to figure out how to make money. We just want to watch your content, and your content is increasingly going to be all you have.

The User Experience angle on Tropicana

justin@barbariangroup.com(Justin Baum) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:58:25 -0500

I’ll make this quick because you have all been reading about the thunderous fail verdict the blogosphere passed on the Tropicana re-branding. Adaptive Path, those insightful devils, are as usual on point with their thoughts. Let me pull two quotes for you…

Adaptive Path Interview with VP of design at Coca-Cola

Adaptive Path – “What does user experience mean for Coca-Cola? We have our own interpretation of it here on the West Coast and in the digital community, but I imagine it’s something quite different for you guys.“

Coca Cola – “For us it has to do with the usability of packaging and equipment and as well as communications through clear information hierarchy, etc. We’ve brought new focus to ergonomics and the use of our packaging, which is how people touch and experience our brands and products.”

Note the mention of usability and information hierarchy, an issue with the Tropicana packaging.

Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path for Harvard Business

“So it turns out, the new (Tropicana) packaging introduced what we in user experience business call a usability problem…Tropicana was so focused on reinvigorating their brand, on making new emotional connections, they totally lost sight of the experience their customers have in the supermarket.“

Those two quotes sum it up for me. I have been under a rock lately and had the luck of seeing the new Tropicana packaging totally unaware of the debacle. My reaction was “what is that? A high-priced specialty juice like POM or Naked?” This was probably because I was in a particularly froofy supermarket here in San Francisco. Eventually I saw that it was Tropicana, and my reaction was simply puzzled. Im a dole man, so I snagged my pine/orange and headed for the guacamole… Anyways those two articles from the Adaptive Path family are an interesting read if you want a different opinion on the Tropicana discussion, and in my view the most constructive way to look at it.

Content Strategy and User Experience

justin@barbariangroup.com(Justin Baum) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:02:45 -0500

Kristina Halvorson wrote a great article for A List Apart about The Discipline of Content Strategy. I have found myself re-visiting the post over and over again since I read it. Kristina ends the article by calling out something that…