Karsten Januszewski on 'web 2.0'

Bruce Sterling on Interaction Design

Karsten Januszewski — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:17:00 GMT

Just came across this video on Adaptive Path's blog of Bruce Sterling talking about Interaction Design:

Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.

Missed him at SxSW this year, but this video gave me my fix. He's really clear on what spimes are right at the beginning. He has to do this to establish his overall theme, which is to think about interaction design not in literary terms -- "sense of wonder," etc. -- but just "don't make me think" and "reduce my cognitive load." He's dead on right here. And some interesting commentary on Google and Microsoft at about 22:00. Microsoft as "vehicle" compared to Google as "techno-social." And a funny comment about Flickr at about 32:00. His quote from Tony Dunn: "My default mental model of a user is a tortured, existential soul drifting through complex technologically mediated consumer landscape." Nice. And a quote from Bruce: "The net and its adjuncts are becoming a hybrid meta medium that links everyone...the former hierarchies of the creative disciplines are coming violently apart, right in front of our eyes. Yet at the same historic moment, profoundly powerful networks are assembling." Sterling is an elder for this era.

Using Flotzam At A Conference

Karsten Januszewski — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:58:00 GMT

Here is a guide for using Flotzam at a conference:

Flotzam at a conference is fun. It gives the audience the ability to immediately participate in the event as well as on the blogosphere. Their photos, twitters, etc, show up on the big screen.

If you would like to see Flotzam in action, you can (1) install the application from http://www.flotzam.com or (2) watch a video about the application at http://flotzam.com/video.htm. You can also watch a video that discusses the Mix Flotzam Restyle contest and the winners here: http://visitmix.com/blogs/News/Flotzam-Design-Contest-Winner/.

If you aren’t familiar with these social networks used by Flotzam, here’s a brief intro of what they are and why they are interesting.

Twitter allows you to text messages from your phone to the Twitter service, which then get posted on the web. So, by displaying Twitters from conference attendees, you can see almost real time information about what people are saying about the conference.
Flickr and Facebook integration is about allowing attendees to upload their photos of the event to their service and then Flotzam will pull and display their photos.
Digg is service that allows the community to post interesting stories and then vote on their relevance.
RSS is a syndication format supported widely – you can display any RSS feed through Flotzam.
YouTube is a site that allows people to upload video.

The end result is that Flotzam aggregates all these networks and does a fun visualization.

A few things to note:

· If there is another social network you want to add to Flotzam, it requires more code to be written. There’s an explanation of how to do it here: http://flotzam.com/blog/post/How-To-Add-A-New-Datasource-To-Flotzam.aspx. An easier route to getting different data into Flotzam is if that social network supports RSS.

· Because Flotzam pulls data real time, there is the chance that inappropriate content could appear on the screen.

If you would like to use Flotzam for your conference, you need to do the following:

1. Download the .exe build of Flotzam here: http://www.flotzam.com/download/flotzam.zip

2. You should have a machine with w/2GB RAM and a video card of 256MB. Be sure to test on your hardware to catch any issues in advance.

3. The machine must have network access. Flotzam does not do well with intermittent connectivity; if you can’t guarantee a stable connection to the internet, don’t use Flotzam.

4. Determine what feeds you want Flotzam to display.

Note that you will need to somehow communicate to the attendees how to access the services you set up. Another option is to not let attendees know about the tags and simply have your conference folks twitter and upload photos.

Here are the steps to configuring Flotzam:

1. All settings can be changed by clicking SETTINGS AND OPTIONS in the upper left corner.

2. For example, if you want everyone who is at the event have their Twitters appear, you can create a Twitter account such as myconference, let people know about it, and then specify for Flotzam to “Watch My Followers” in the Twitter settings panel, providing the username and password for the myconference twitter account.

3. If you set up a Facebook event for your conference, you can enter the Event ID in the Facebook settings panel. The Event ID found in the URL when on the Facebook event itself, so if the URL for the event is http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2367953648 the event id is 2367953648). You'll also have to provide you credentials to Facebook.

4. If you want to add a different Flickr tag, you can modify the tag in the Flickr settings Panel.

5. You can specify a DIGG setting and a YouTube tag.

6. If you want to manage which RSS feeds show up, you need to do that management in Internet Explorer.

7. Lastly, if you want to have different skins show up, you can check that box in the general settings tab.

Check Out ChaCha

Karsten Januszewski — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:47:00 GMT

Last year at SxSW, I discovered Twitter, which has since grown tremendously and continues to gain momentum. My discovery at SxSW this year? ChaCha. ChaCha is a free service that adds a human factor to a search. Where it really comes in handy is on your phone. Basically, you can text any question to ChaCha and, within 5 - 10 minutes, you'll get an answer, which is usually spot on. For those that don't have internet access on their phone, this is great. But even if you do have internet access, the responses you get from ChaCha are better because they are filtered and parsed by a human. I found their answers quite good and often with a sense of humor as well. Checking out their website, I found out that anyone can become a guide for ChaCha, making $0.20 per answer, which works out to between $4 - $10 an hour. So that is how they scale and how they have people answering questions 24/7.

MySpace Developer Platform

Karsten Januszewski — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:08:00 GMT

The MySpace Developer Platform is now online, sort of. Hats off to these guys for shipping, although at this time, you can only play by invite only, which they are hand picking, according to their blog. The other slightly frustrating thing is that, at this time, if you do manage to get a key, and you do manage to write an application, you have to invite others to be able to see it, as explained here. The interesting model in this case is that you have to actually log into MySpace as the application in order to grant others the right to use your application. All of this is subject to change once the platform matures, but it makes things a little rough at first. I just want to get on the whitelist!

They have a REST API and there's already a good thread going in the forums on writing a .NET Client library for it. Interested? Come join the thread.

Another interesting thing to note is, on the server side, they've implemented this using Windows Communication Foundation, which they'll be talking about at Mix. My goal: bring some client WinFX goodness to the party ;).

Makes me wonder what kind of WCF client could be written for these services. There is the [WebGet] attribute. So, I suppose, you'd grab the XML from the REST service and infer schema from it and then pass that to SvcUtil to generate a proxy. Should work. I guess the question is how much elegance/productivity/performance one gains by using WCF on the client for a REST service.

Sidenote: too many .NET wrappers out there seem to roll there own serialization. There's such great baked in support in the framework for XML Serialization that I'd love to see the emerging MySpace .NET client take advantage of it, whether through WCF or not. The other option would be to look at the work done in the Google .NET client library, which is factored so elegantly and has a rockin ATOM parser. It still isn't entirely clear to me how much of the MySpace data is formatted as ATOM data.

Welcome to the (Open)Social

Karsten Januszewski — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 21:55:00 GMT

I've spent the morning playing with OpenSocial. After all, OpenSocial fits in with my conceptualization of the rhizohm and my general interest in web APIs. Plus, I want to be ready to get at all that data on MySpace. I'm always interested in abstractions of data, which is really what the APIs attempt to do (What is part of a person object? An activity object? etc.), not unlike what WinFS was attempting to tackle, in terms of creating schema that everyone adheres to, or, to go back a PDC or two, Hailstorm.

The beginning of my research was attempting to play with the API and look for implementations to see things working. This was an exercise in futility as the sites that actually implement a sandbox for the API's seem to be pretty darned flaky. The only gadgets that I could get to work were "static" gadgets; I was never actually able to see data from one site appear on another site (list of friends, activities, etc.) It is alpha code after all, a 0.5 release. Nonetheless, my conclusion at this point is, from a development point of view, it is pretty much unusable. I imagine the Orkut implementation is a more solid, but I haven't been approved to play there yet. I applied for the Orkut sandbox but haven't heard back yet.

So, after that exercise, I then started reading the various posts in the blogosphere. Perhaps the best was from Dare Obasanjo whose technical and business critique was on the money I thought. He links out to several other bloggers who had some pretty insightful commentary, in fact so much so that I have nothing to add. I did find his link out to Russell Beattie amusing, again hearkening back to the Hailstorm backlash.

I still wonder about the other option for data retrieval, best encapsulated by what the guys are up to over at dapper.net: the notion of the semantic web through strongly typed screenscraping of HTML. This is a different approach than the Facebook approach (closed system) or the OpenSocial approach ("open"* system), in that it doesn't attempt to try to schematize data. This gets back to that argument: you can't fight the web. It will proliferate rhizomatically.

*See Shelley Powers piece on terms for more on what "open" means in this case.

Joshua Allen on Marc Andreessen

Karsten Januszewski — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:33:00 GMT

Joshua Allen has some good posts going on over on VisitMix. His most recent, Response to Three Platforms You Meet, is an excellent response to Marc Andreessen's post on The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet. Joshua's take is not what you might expect. He's on to something here, thinking about data as opposed to APIs, something that I'm thinking more and more about, regarding the flow of data on the web. In general, I'm all about Joshua's particular perspective on the world. He's a great voice coming out of Microsoft. Folks like him and Jon Udell are inspiring voices and yet more evidence that there's more to Microsoft than meets the eye.

Triangulating Moonlight, Yochai Benkler and Web 2.0

Karsten Januszewski — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:16:00 GMT

With the recent announcement of Silverlight being released to the web and the corollary announcement that Microsoft will work with Novell to create a player, named Moonlight, for running Silverlight on Linux, there's been quite a bit of commentary, some of which can be seen on Digg and SlashDot. There are many different lenses to view this announcement with. For me, the announcement dovetails with a lot of thinking I've been doing about the Web 2.0 phenomenon and, in particular, its articulation by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks. I'm about halfway through the book (at over 500 pages it is dense). As Bruce Sterling commented at SxSW last year, it is the Das Capital of Web 2.0 -- the allusion to Adam Smith in the title shouldn't be discounted either. Invisible hand of Web 2.0 anyone?

I love Benkler's theorization of commons-based peer production. He quite elegantly unpacks the "new modes of production" that are governing the transformation of information and entertainment. But sometimes I feel his position isn't nuanced enough and becomes either too celebratory or too barbed. And Microsoft seems to always fall into the "bad guy" camp, where, for example, IBM doesn't? I don't feel that he gives Microsoft credence in being a positive force toward the "transformation of markets and freedom." Partly, this is because he wants to use open source as his shining example of how commons-based peer production works and, rhetorically, he must position Microsoft as the "other way". He never teases this out fully, a shame, and his discussion of technology disrupts his more interesting theorization on the cultural and economic consequences. In discrediting Microsoft, he ends up putting Microsoft down and not recognizing that, in fact, Microsoft is not antithetical to commons-based peer production. He falls into the very common trap of not acknowledging Microsoft as a platform company. The infrastructure required for commons-based peer production is made available by Microsoft, often for free, whether it is in the form of an operating system, a development language, a database, a web server or a blogging engine. The list could go on and on here: Popfly, Codeplex (not to mention the thousands of Windows and .NET projects on SourceForge), Windows Live and more.

And this is where Moonlight comes to mind: to me it is yet another example of how Microsoft is in fact committed to the explosion of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Just as Microsoft embraced web services and interoperability for improved heterogeneity in the back end, Silverlight and Moonlight are acts of embracing interoperability and heterogeneity on the front end. To bring it back to Benkler, I can create my videos using Microsoft tooling and know that they will be viewable on a Mac, a Windows box or a Linux box in the browser of my choice.