A recent article from Stuff.co.nz reports on the growing dependency of young adult and teen New Zealanders on text messaging. In an interesting twist, it is discovered that teens expectations on the device/service is central to the social interactions of these teens. Seemingly, the awkwardness and shyness one tends to feel at this age are easy to overcome when the only eye contact made is with the LCD.

Of course, with the good comes the bad. Bullying continues to evolve. Whereas I originally mentioned (in my very first post no less) fear as one of the bullying techniques, this current crop seems to rely more on technology.

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Over the past couple of weeks, I have been taking some time to read through Donald Norman’s “Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things”. I came across an interesting passage that discussed our fondness for photographs and the role they play in our lives.

This discussion focused on many of the mundane tasks associated with the collection and maintenance of photographs which reminded me of the fledgling efforts of the SNS world and it’s placement relative to individual’s needs. It’s quite clear that there are some striking parallels between our desire to capture and collect memories using photographs and our obsession with recruiting and recording our relationships using SNS.

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Zbigniew Lukasiak posed an interesting question for me yesterday relating to my notion of a User-Context Gateway (UCG). He asks:

So generally what you propose is something like a digital assistant managing your contacts. In my opinion we cannot rely too much on explicite instructions given by the user since it would quickly become too complicated for everyday usage. So the important question is how can we collect the implicite information clues on which the digital assistant can rely. I can imagine something similar to what we do for filtering spam messages - a bayesian filter learning while being used, after all both in the heart of the problem have the scarcity of our attention

I certainly agree that a system that relies completely on explicit rules would become overwhelming to use very quickly, however, I’m never one to take away too much control from the user. Here are some quick ideas on how to fold a User-Context Gateway (UCG) into the normal flow of a user’s day.

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Joi Ito wonders on the value that GPRS carriers can offer by providing content to users on the go. He notes that the pay-as-you-go route is best served for time- and presence-sensitive information services more so than the traditional corpus of “content”.

The main value that always-on provides is presence information, short messages and time sensitive stuff like news. I don’t really see the need to have broadband to do that. I think the carriers should focus their energies on stuff like identity, payment systems, IM and presence and leave the content business up to people who know how to move large volumes of bits around at low cost. The problem with most telephone companies is that they have spent their whole lives worrying about quality of service, but moving large volumes of data around is not about quality of service. You can afford to drop a few bits if they’re not time sensitive and it’s a completely different game than the circuit business.

Source: Joi Ito’s Web, ” Carriers should be context providers”

The comments on the post are especially colorful. One interesting point raised was that of the persistent Wi-Fi network, or Wi-Max perhaps. It does seem more than likely that the net cast by Wireless IP could be a strong compliment, competitor, or both to the 3G and 4G cellular networks. There have already been rumblings that the integration is set to happen and VOIP seems to be picking up some much needed steam. Who knows, anything’s possible ;)

This, of course, presents another use scenario that could be problematic for the Always-On consumer. The same technology I described earlier could also be applied to mobile devices and cell phones. A User-Context Gateway (UCG) could easily be embedded into the device itself and provide much needed filtering while single-handedly preventing the embarrassment associated with inappropriate, untimely phone calls and alarms. As an owner of a Treo 600, I have already seen software that allows me to redirect, filter or otherwise block calls based on time of day and calling number. The move to a UCG seems almost too natural for an integrated device like this — and realistically for most connected communicators.

I read yesterday of what Stowe Boyd is now calling the “Simnett Context”, named after Ed Simnett of Microsoft. As Stowe describes:

Kind of like a presence indicator for the instant message session itself. So the participant could query the IM session (perhaps by moving the cursor over the title region of the message, and getting a tooltip) and seeing the context.

Source: GetReal, “Ed Simnett’s IM Context Insight: IM Planet Notes”

This actually got me to thinking about our ever-increasing connectedness and what it implies. Let’s assume that I am always connected (not far from the truth). Despite this, I might not be available for access at the moment. Naturally, there are the traditional measures for indicating presence (1 - sign off, 2 - set away status). However, something more adaptive may be required in the future.

In the Simnett Context, the application passes contextual information along with the presence information and message. In this other context, however, I am imaging that there would be a User-Context Gateway. This gateway would be responsible for keeping tabs on what I am doing, who I am communicating with, and prioritizing alerts, requests, downlioads, etc. based on my activities and preferences.

The usage scenario might be likened to the “username is typing” status indicator on MSN. Although this does not prevent me from responding, it does alert me consciously that the other party is typing and raises the possibility for me to delay my response to see the forthcoming message. MSN’s implementation is flawed primarily by that fact that the application as a whole listens for keystrokes as opposed to the individual message windows. This creates a scenario where if I am typing in a Word document, others see that I am typing, despite it not being directly related to them.

Another scenario that would be thwarted is the inadvertant loss of focus. IM can be a very distracting force in the workplace — especially when individuals are engaged in work requiring concentration or verbal conversations. In addition, IM tends to pop windows in front of the individual taking application focus away. I can recount hundreds of times where I have been typing a document or editing code and it is accidentally sent over to an unassuming messenger.

Now imagine the world in this new context. It’s 10 A.M.. I am busy editing a powepoint presentation for my meeting at 11 A.M.. John sends a message to me indicating he wants to meet for lunch. My User-Context Gateway activates automatically and queue’s the message into a lower-priority bin for me to review later. John receives a status message notifying him that I am occupied and will be back at 12 P.M.. How does it know all of this? Well the system knows that John is in my Friends group as opposed to my Work group. It also knows, either adaptively of through explicit instructions, that when I work in Powerpoint I do not want to be disturbed. Hooking into my PIM, the system is also aware that I will be in a meeting from 11 - 12 and will be unavailable.

Several years ago, I had written an e-mail system that worked in this very manner. It was definintely not as intuituve or adaptive as the system I have just described, but it did provide a SmartResponder that was both time and day sensitive, with additional presence information to back it up. Of course, back then, people didn’t believe me when I told them e-mail would be very important to their business lives and couldn’t fathom that customers would quickly grow annoyed with delinquent or abrasive responses.

I would imagine there are about a million other uses and extensions for a system like this? Anyone know of something like this?

News.com has some coverage on Central and the problems that it is encountering as it tries to morph from its Developer Beta to Consumer Product:

A year after Macromedia revealed ambitious plans to expand the reach of its Flash format, the software maker appears to have trouble building support for the effort among developers and information technology planners.

So far, only a handful of applications have been released for Central, a framework for allowing Flash applications to run outside a Web browser. Downloads of the Central player, available in a “developer beta” version since last fall, appear to be minimal, and Flash developers that CNET News.com spoke to showed little interest in Central.

“There’s not exactly a stampede for this,” said John Dalton, an analyst for Forrester Research. “Technically, it’s a great idea. But I think it’s going to be a very hard sell for them to get developers on board.”

Source: News.com, “Macromedia Flash effort does slow burn”

This article pretty much summarizes all of the points I made in “Casually Connected” and later in “Casually vs. Occassionally Connected”. One interesting angle that is raised, however, is the potential threat that Longhorn’s Avalon Rendering system will have in the long run on Macromedia Central’s viability.

Yesterday’s snafu was a certainly unexpected and definitely a little bit embarrassing. I’m a reasonably intelligent person and and super-nerd to boot, so I don’t generally expect to fall pray to most forms of online deception. Luckily, the organic web and it’s little darling the blogosphere are quick to react and the information was corrected quickly enough (mind you I am surprised anyone knew to tell ME!).

The problem is the lack of context for the recipient which opens the door to misinformation and deception. In this case, I believe there are two primary factors that make a “hack” or any other maligned activity possible, Incomplete Comprehension and Incomplete Evaluation.

Incomplete Comprehension

This really is a reflection on the recipient’s ability to digest the information presented to them. The other day I recieved a spoofed e-mail from some spammer that claimed to be from Citibank. They indicated that some information was required of me and that I should click the link in the message. This is not a new hoax, previously it was Ebay, PayPal, Insert Major Entity Name Here, etc. When I received the message, I immediately looked to see where the link went to. I also recall wondering how many people get caught by this — wouldn’t your average person just click on the link (assuming their SPAM filters had let this message through already)?your average.

And such is the nature of a Comprehension Hack. Lacking the domain of knowledge to discern how something “should” work, it’s easy to fall victim to a betrayal of this nature. This is, naturally, not limited to online trickery but also to a thousand other real-world scenarios, from the office to the car lot. The problem is there isn’t a solid solution beyond the tyipcal “Awareness” campaign that warns of “suspicious” behavior and provides details of previous hacks. But where does the average person find this type of information? Why aren’t there more pages like the this one at CraigsList?

Some might argue that we fight deception with education. I would argue that’s quite possible the opposite of the solution. Comprehension is too expensive and sometimes impossible. We could never assume to reach enough people to educate them on the eide subject matters that open the doors for this type of activity. Alerts are simplified and summarized — two critical traits of anything easy to understand and immediately actionable.

Alerts are already growing in importance to our lives and technologies like RSS will only make their effectiveness more pervasive. Just think, we have alerts for everything from virii (biological, computer), to missing children (Amber Alert), to terrorists (Homeland Security). Unfortunately, most of this information is hidden away and if you stopped your average person on the street you would hard pressed to get actionable information. But what about the Social Virus? Where’s the alert? How do we protect ourselves?

So we’ve got two homework items I think: 1) design a system that streamlines the creation, location and distribution of Alerts to the world audience 2) start to catalog and expose the wild social hacks that are flourishing in the wild and look more seriously at how these things are spreading. I’m interested in starting this now at socialalerts.com, who wants to help out?

Incomplete Evaluation

Whereas comprehension addresses my ability to understand the information presented to me, my evaluation of that information is often tied to the source. Information received from a suspect source is easier to dismiss than information from a reliable one. Information from a trusted, insider source is almost always evaluated.

The problem here is two-fold. On the one hand there is a compromise of your authority figure, on the other there is a corruption of context.

In terms of your authority figure, if they receive information that they deem to be true, they may report, publish or otherwise distribute that information to their audience or network. As your respect, confidence, and trust for the source increases, our tendency to accept information as factual increase. The system then cycles and the behavior is replicated, annotated, or otherwise disseminated over and over again.

In terms of the corruption of context, this is a side-effect of our delivery mechanisms. Often we are rushed or otherwise harried as we deliver new information. We have devised many ways to get this information from one place to the next, not limited to phones, voicemail, e-mail, web sites, blogs and rss. The problem arises when information is shorted or concatenated into a more digestable form. During this process, compromises are made and, often enough, the end product does not wholly convey the same meaning. RSS generators are especially responsible for this as they often generate excerpts on the fly. However, the technology alone is not to blame as it is us, the reader, that fails to investigate the information further. As Scott Allen notes in the comments of the Orkut post:

Add to that the whole RSS summary issue, and, well — I imagine that many who saw this headline in their RSS reader didn’t come read the article, so no telling how many people are going to quit using orkut simply because they didn’t investigate the story any further than a headline and a one-paragraph summary.

Source: User Comments, “Orkut.com turns out to be a master’s thesis project?”

Yesterday’s Orkut fiasco could be classified mostly as an Incomplete Evaluation. I originally read the entry on Many 2 Many and was quickly excited at the news. Trusting the authors of the site, I chose to then post my own view on the matter. As we have found out, of course, the entry I posted on was based on some information from another party. I had visited the source pointed out by Seb, however, that source was also incomplete. Only later would I find out that a very important last sentence was missing indicating the press release was meant to be humor and not real.

In many many industries and enterprises, there are a wide number of failsafes and precautions in place to prevent potentially damaging actions from occurring. In the blogging world, at least, there are far fewer constraints for the time. As Scott asks later in his comment, “So, what’s our responsibility in this sort of thing as blogger/journalists?”. I don’t know either, but responsibility is the key and it’s up to us not to be wolves.

On the way in to work this morning, I was listening to z100, one of the more popular stations here in the NYC Metro area. They were running an interesting segment on a new Reality T.V. show called “Forever Eden”. In this show, people are dropped onto a tropical resort and have a variety of “essentials” taken away from them.

In any event, the radio segment was about what things could we not live without for a week. They polled both the crew and the general public for answers. Here were the first few responses that were rattled off:

• E-mail
• Cell Phone
• Toothbrush
• Instant Messenger (AIM)
• Voicemail
• Television
• Tivo

Naturally, my ears went up when I heard this many people NEEDING technology to stay right throughout the day. More to the point, each of these tools (except maybe the toothbrush) provide us with connectivity to the world at large. E-mail, Cell Phones, Voicemail, Instant Messaging — they all connect us with a kind of immediacy that we’ll some day, if not already, look back on as trivial. Television and Tivo, however, provide more artifical proxies to the real thing and foundations for future interaction. Sure we tend to veg-out as we watch TV, but we also are learning a variety things (some of them wrong and against our will), but we’re still soaking up many different messages and seeing others interact. On the other hand, this TV content serves as topics of discussion from the water cooler, to the web log, to the bar for many days to come and provides a certain level of familiarity that can help grow or launch new relationships.

The reality is that we’re addicted to being connected — to devices that extend our reach and connection to others.

It seems that Anonymity is on more people’s minds than I realized. I was quite surprised to find out today that two other interesting threads have been started at essentially the same time, but two people I indeed respect, Seth Godin and Joi Ito.

It seems that Seth started the discussion with his post “The problem with anonymous (part VII)”:

Virus writers are always anonymous.

Vicious political lies (with faked photoshop photos of political leaders, or false innuendo about personal lives) are always anonymous as well.

Spam is anonymous.

eBay fraudsters are anonymous too.

It seems as though virtually all of the problems of the Net stem from this one flaw, and its one I’ve riffed on before. If we can eliminate anonymity online, we create a far more civil place.

How hard would it be to do?

Source: Seth Godin’s Blog

Afterwards, Joi responded with his “Anonymity on the Internet” post:

I disagree. Although most vicious attacks I have received have been anonymous, I still believe there is a role for anonymity and that the value outweighs the cost.

[…]

Remember that the Internet is one of the few tools for a variety of people who are at risk including whistle-blowers and human rights workers. It is very difficult or impossible to “fix” the Internet without breaking it for others.

Source: Joi Ito’s Blog

Both have led to some interesting discussion and commentary — check it out. I’ve already added my two-bits in “Almost Anonymous” yesterday.

Over the past few days anonymity and its role in our daily lives has been brought to my attention on many fronts. Interestingly enough, each of these recent run-ins has revealed a little bit of insight into our need and perception of the thing itself.

A few days ago, it was reported that Amazon Canada had inadvertently released the identities of the persons that had previously made anonymous book reviews. Here’s a little from that article:

“That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd,” said Rechy, who, having been caught, freely admitted to praising his new book, “The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens,” on Amazon under the signature “a reader from Chicago.” “How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them.”

Rechy is in good company. Walt Whitman and Anthony Burgess both famously reviewed their own books under assumed names. But several modern-day writers said the Internet, where anyone from your mother to your ex-agent can anonymously broadcast an opinion of your work, has created a more urgent need for self-defense.

Source: News.com

As best I can see, the practice is rationalized by three different camps:

• Self-Promoters - persons that wrote favorable, rave reviews for their own works
• Defamers - persons that wrote intentionally poor, negative reviews for the sake of lowering consumers’ expectations for one work in favor of another (usually for their own personal or social gain)
• Balancers - persons that suspected some form of abuse was underway in the review system, either positive or negative, that needed adjustment

Anonymity as control.

Earlier yesterday, I was reading through some follow-up comments on actionScriptHero’s recent Central post and one commentator chose to launch a quick, anonymous, missive at the author. Oddly enough, the same user came back later to add in a half-positive comment and was inadvertently caught - by IP address no less - in the act. asH called him out on the matter and the commentator provided a rather interesting response:

There are several reasons why I responded like I have done

1. I did not respond to your first ‘Central for Golddiggers’ post, but when I read your second, almost identical post I just wanted to leave my first impression without spending any time on further argumentation.

2. In such a situation it is better to respond anonymously. I am not interested in receiving mails from other readers initiated from the emailaddress I left at the blog. In case the owner of the blog wants to know more he can trace me an contact me. I always reply those requests.

3. You asked twice for an argumented response on your blog. So I thought it would be fair to give you the argument behind my ironic initial response as a new comment instead of an email.

4. I knew, that in case you were interested, you could easily trace that this message and the first message are sent by the same person.

5. I did not want to spend my time on explaining the reasons behind my initial ironic response. They have no added value. So i just gave you the answer you asked for.

It would be nice if you and all your fellow bloggers make it easier to provide an anonymous comment, so people don’t have to go to a process of inventing fantasy names and email-adresses just to pass validation. Usability, you know. If I have the time for an argumented response I always provide my real firstname and lastname (no acronym or nickname!) even if the message has a critical tone. You know this. If I don’t have time for an argumented response, but feel the need for a quick respons, I prefer an anonymous reponse. Most of the time this is respected.

Source: actionScriptHero User Comments

Anonymity as convenience.

Last night, we attended a Leashes & Lovers event to both provide support to our new friends as well as to promote the SparkCard System. We met a great bunch of people and had a lot of interesting conversations about anything and everything. Naturally, one of our main topics was the SparkCard itself and the anonymity it enabled one to have. Not surprisingly, some were less enthusiastic than others about our promised benefit. In this context, I should make it clear that when we say “anonymous” this can be taken to also mean “personal or private”.

It was interesting to learn that a few people were quite willing to laud their cell phone or e-mail address onto a casually encountered stranger. What’s interesting is the driving force behind this. A little further discussion seemed to reveal that despite the very public, non-private nature of that information, many people felt secured by it — it offered a level of anonymity to them. It seems that the absence of face-to-face interaction can, in many ways, be seen as a safety net on its own and hence, creating that pseudo-anonymous space.

I see this as a matter of focus for the most part. As a technical-type, living a highly-connected life, my e-mail address, phone number, etc. are held far more sacred to me than someone that is a casual user. I understand the ways that information can be leveraged today to reveal a great deal more about me than I necessarily care for anyone to know. Many people can treat their online identities as disposable because, for now, they are. However, as the online world blurs more and more into the offline one, at what point do the costs of abandoning my identity outweigh the costs of protecting it?

Anonymity as security.

Control, Convenience, Security. Quite a wide array of roles when you think about it. Of course, they’re all perversions of themselves.