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 14 Jun 2004 @ 18:29, by ming. Internet
Adina Levin, part of the SocialText team, talks about Chris Alexander's patterns that relate to levels of intimacy, and how that might apply to social software:Alexander writes about an "intimacy gradient". There are some areas in a house that are public -- the front porch; areas that are indoors and public -- the living room; and areas that are indoors and more private -- bedrooms and bathrooms.
The design opportunity is to create livable, workable, more-public and more-private spaces, using a "social software method" that focuses on helping people connect and collaborate with people in the least restrictive, most appropriately trusting way.
This is a different design philosophy than the traditional methods for setting levels of privacy. The underlying traditional assumption is that information should be available, and users should have privileges, on a "need to know basis." Individuals should have as little information and as few privileges as they need to do their jobs.
The goal of a tool for group work is to be able to restrict access with as much control as possible. Content and privileges should be controllable at a highly granular level. A work process should be clearly defined, to determine what users should have access to what information, and a given stage of a process.
This methods depend on a highly-structured, formal process. Analysts and administrators need to carefully define the types of information, to parcel out privileges, and to be able to monitor information access. So, the alternative might be to not have complicated and forced privacy and sharing settings, but rather to structure things so that the right things naturally tend to happen in the right places, and the right things tend to be seen by the right people? I'm all for it.
I've often thought about it, for that matter. A problem is that the hyperlinking nature of the web short-circuits a lot of what works in architecture, which is Chris Alexander's field.
In a house, different sorts of activities naturally happen in different places. That is in part based on how deep into the house those places are. The entrance hallway is easily accessible and has a number of doors. Good place to say hello and share general messages, but it is superficial. One can go further into the house, into the living room, which is more sheltered, and have a deeper conversation there. The bedroom is a step further, and feels more intimate, as it takes several steps to get there. Now, there might not be anything that physically hinders some guest from storming straight into the bedroom without being invited there, and start looking through the closets. But everybody will notice that it doesn't feel right, and will deal with it somehow. And it rarely happens in normal homes. You start in the entry hall, and if you sort of pass that test, somebody will take you further into the house, and for most people it doesn't feel right to overstep the norms for how one behaves in somebody's house.
But a website tends to have the equivalent of links that say "entry hall", "living room", "kitchen", "bedroom", all appearing at the same level. And with Google's help, there will also be direct links to "bedroom closet" and "the reading material next to my bed". Which sort of kills the gradients of intimacy.
The problem is that parts of the net aren't working as much as *spaces* as we think they might have. It is really just a lot of information. And we'd like direct access to information, with deep linking, without anything annoying standing in the way, like having to register.
Doesn't mean we can't re-invent *spaces* as a parallel effort. To get to certain spaces, to hang out with certain people, it is acceptable enough if I need to jump through some hoops to get there. I don't know how to design those spaces so it feels natural, but that is potentially solvable.
As long as a certain chat room or wiki page is accessible directly with a deep link, it is going to be very hard to make it feel more intimate than any other place I can reach with similar ease. So a hierarchical structure of links doesn't do it. On the web you can't force people to accept your hierarchy if it is all just links.
One thought is that the spaces that need to be more intimate should not have permanent locations, but rather a dynamic location. E.g. if I wanted a certain type of conversation with certain people, I might have to go through those people and get their agreement that they're up for such an interaction with me today. Rather than me linking directly into it. Even if we had a very similar conversation yesterday. More >
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7 Mar 2004 @ 21:54, by mre. Internet
A previous article, A New Heaven, has an overview of the voice of humanity (voh) concept.
InterMix is middleware; it can be thought of as an "engine" or black box whose working details can be ignored. The Application Programming Interface, or API describes exactly how programmers can connect their applications to the InterMix engine in order to participate in the voh network. This is where we begin to bring the concept down to earth and it has to be done right. Our goal is to keep the interface simple enough that web scripters, of whom there are millions, will feel comfortable using it. As you will see, this article is very much a rough draft. More >
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28 Feb 2004 @ 17:10, by ming. Internet
Alright, so having a mobile phone with a camera I of course need to have a moblog. "Moblog" is an even worse word than "Blog", but that's somehow what it got to be called. It is essentially that you can make a posting on your blog while on the go, from a phone or PDA. Typically it is done by having the latest picture in a sidebar, which then links to the gallery of past pictures. So it becomes sort of a different track, with smaller snapshots of things one is doing, without having to be able to say something clever about it.
I had in mind programming it myself, so that it could be integrated with my NewsLog blogging program. So, the first thing needed was a gallery. And there's of course no reason one should only be able to post to it with a phone, so I made it so one can upload from a normal file too, or grab a picture from a URL. And so one can edit the titles, delete mistaken pictures and stuff like that.
OK, then the aspect of how we get from my phone to a file on the server, if I go that way. I could make my own approach, but I glanced at other people's suggestions to see what might be the best practices. Like this how-to guide by David Davies.
So, I set up a separate e-mail account for the purpose. No problem to send a picture from the phone to an e-mail address. Then I'll put a password in the subject line, which will ensure that no random spam gets posted. And I'll put some descriptive text in the message itself.
Now, picking up e-mail from a pop account, and finding an attached picture, is not quite as trivial a programming task as it might look like. It is no wonder that most e-mail programs do something different and often screw up each other's messages. The standards are rather complicated, and everybody doesn't keep them. So this part took the longest time. I used PHP's built-in IMAP functions, which is based on a common IMAP library. Which exposes a lot of the dirty detail, rather than just doing the job for me, like handing me the attachment no matter where it was hiding. For starters, I made it so that it at least picks up the text and attachments the way my phone sends it. Which happened to be two different ways depending on whether it was a photo or a drawing. Next I'll try sending pictures from my normal e-mail programs and debug what goes wrong with that. Anyway, I made the program pick up mail once per hour, as the mail pickup is rather slow, and I don't want to overload anything if there ends up being many of these accounts.
You can see the current result in my right sidebar. Just a few pictures so far, but you get the point.
And for you other guys who use my NewsLog program, I need to work out a few more details, then this functionality will be available for you too. I.e. you can have a picture gallery, and optionally post to it via e-mail. Only hurdle for that part might be to acquire an extra e-mail account for the purpose. More >
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 2 Jan 2004 @ 20:31, by mre. Internet
At this point, the plans for a voice of humanity are sketched out and time has come to begin coding. Fact is, though, a combination of the flu and the holidays has slowed me down and I'm finding it hard to switch over from the 2 percent inspiration stage to the 98 percent perspiration long haul, so I've decided to recap what has been developed so far before settling down to work. More >
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 24 May 2003 @ 14:53, by quidnovi. Internet
"A bamboo forest stands next to the property. It is a wonderful world...
Yesterday's dinner was enjoyed at Lake Mitchell's gourmet cafe. The special dessert was Georgia peach crème brulée. Someone wanted me to translate "beurre blanc." I translated, but I did not consume.
The docks at the lake restaurant stretch out over green waters, rippled by geese and baby geese, pontoon boats and gentle southern breezes. A couple of children sit on the dock on the other side of the river, fishing. You stare at them for several minutes before you realize they are carved of wood."
---i2i [Floating Bridges] More >
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14 May 2003 @ 15:01, by ming. Internet
There's a buzz about social software, software for better connecting people together, facilitating that they find like-minded people, work more closely together, etc. Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes and now Groove, says:"What's incredibly exciting to me is that a confluence of factors e.g. ubiquitous computing, networking, web and RAD technologies, the state of the job market - in essence, loosely coupled systems and loosely coupled minds - have created what amounts to a petri dish for experimentation in systems for social network formation, management and interpersonal interaction. An exciting time to be exploring what may happen to social structures, to organizations and to society when the friction between our minds can be reduced to zero ... to the point where we can truly have superconductive relationships." Superconductive Relationships! Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. But, if you follow the link to Don Park's Blog to "Misgivings about Social Software", you'll see that there are also potentially negative sides to examine."Korea is emerging as one of the most advanced Internet nation in the world. Young Koreans, in particular, live and breath Internet, each belonging to large number of online communities. One would expect them to be well informed and objective, yet they are not. Their views are warped and often radical. While all the world's information is at their fingertip, they consume information subjectively and produce misinformation biased by their views. Adding highly effective social software to this is frightening to me.
When I was last in Korea, a close friend of mine told me he was thinking about sending his six-year old daughter to schools in the US. I was shocked. How could he think this way? He said he initially thought the idea ridiculous, but he changed his mind after talking with people he knew, people who are just as well-to-do as his family. Apparently, they are all thinking the same thing and this warped his common sense." There's a point there. Sufficiently pervasive and effective social software might allow groups of people to walk around in a completely different reality, and have it be continuously reinforced by people you're connected with. I suppose we're for example talking about players of online multi-player virtual reality games. And I do notice that for my 16 year old son, his social relationships within Asheron's Call, or whatever he's playing right now, often are more real than then ones in this world. And if we make the software better and better? Hmmm. More >
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 16 Mar 2003 @ 21:21, by quidnovi. Internet
THERE IS NO PEACE, THERE IS ANGER
THERE IS NO FEAR, THERE IS POWER
THERE IS NO WEAKNESS, THERE IS THE DARK SIDE
More >
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 18 Feb 2003 @ 03:07, by ming. Internet
This is what I want: resources of all kinds that are filtered and ranked according to people I trust and respect.
I assume it is a complicated problem, since I don't have it yet, because I'm for sure not the first person to think about it. But I believe it can be solved, if some capable person can work out the math.
The Google PageRanking mechanism is the most successful collaborative ranking mechanism there is, which is able to successfully operate on a huge dataset. For those of you who for some strange reason don't know, Google will rank webpages not only based on what words appear in them and how prominently they appear, but based on how many other websites carry link to that particular page, and how many websites carry links to those websites, and so forth, producing a surprisingly accurate and fair ranking mechanism.
I wouldn't know how to implement that myself. But the basic formulas are available, and Google does it with hundreds of millions of pages, so of course that can be figured out.
But what I want is to do a personalized version of that kind of thing, based on choices I've made about other people, other websites, or about anything else, like books or movies or brands of shampoo. I want not just to get the aggregate 'best' choices, chosen by all websites in the world. I want the best choices by people I know, like, respect or trust, or by the people that they again know, like, respect or trust. And I want a similar, complicated huge matrix calculation that adds all of that up, just for me. And for you.
I'm also talking about involving more dimensions than just the number of links. I want to add up the qualitative judgements of people I have a high opinion of, or that I'm likely to have a high opinion of. So, the further that gets from the choices I explicitly already made, the less value they'd have.
No, I'm not just talking about Amazon being pretty good at recommending books I might want to read. They do that well, and it is a practical and working example of collaborative filtering, but I doubt that their math is very fancy, as they really just recommend other popular choices in the categories I've looked in myself.
I want the algorithm that accurately and fairly adds up the collective advice implicitly given to me by my friends and friends of friends by their aggregated choices, weighted by how trusted their opinions are in relation to me. I mean, I suspect that it is just a formula and an algorithm for calculating a ranking value. Something that can be explained in abstract math, and then we can go and figure out what specific values are included and where they'd come from. If it is impractical to calculate at this point without quantum computers, I'd like to know that too. But I suspect it is perfectly feasible to do this well. More >
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 12 Feb 2003 @ 18:01, by ming. Internet
My e-mail program is a constant element of annoyance in my life, because it doesn't do the things I'd need it to do, and I get way too much mail for it to work right. It is Eudora 5.2, which is a fine e-mail program as it goes, but I need a whole other level of functionality. These are things I need:
- I need to keep track of my correspondence with different people. It should be easy to immediately see all prior incoming and outgoing messages in chronological order between me and a certain other person.
- I shouldn't have to create special mailboxes and filters to do that.
- Some people have several e-mail addresses, and I might have several e-mail addresses. I still want to be able to see my conversations with one person in one place, no matter what address we used, and no matter how we spelled our name that day.
- When I get a message, my e-mail program should know whether this is somebody I know or not. Certainly it should know right away whether it is somebody I've ever exchanged e-mails with, and it should tell me somehow.
- It should preferably also know if it is a known member of some group I'm in. There are 7000 people in the NCN directory. I'd like my e-mail program to recognize one of those people if they write to me, even if we didn't exchange e-mail before.
- I'd like my e-mail program to have a reasonable assurance that an e-mail really is from the person it says it is. The SMTP protocol allows anybody to enter whatever they like as sender, so I need some kind of ID mechanism built in here.
- I need SPAM recognition that I can train, like Apple's Mail program. I don't want centralized anti-SPAM blacklists, because they work badly and block things that shouldn't be blocked.
- Any message that isn't from somebody I probably know, and that doesn't have proper digital ID, should go into a totally different place than messages that are from real people.
- I need to be able to put a given message into any number of folders at the same time, without creating several copies. I need more dimensions. I want to always remember that a certain message was sent or received, so in principle it shouldn't actually leave my outbox or inbox, but at the same time I might want to file it under several different subjects, and give it various flags, and find it according to any of those keys.
- I want statistics. How many messages do I get per day, how many did I answer, how many did I send, etc.
None of those things are overly hard. Hardest part is probably the digital ID. The rest I could probably program myself, if I had a few weeks with nothing else to do, which isn't very likely. I need similar things for my Instant Messager programs. Actually I want continuity in my conversations across several different applications and platforms. Has anybody solved these things well in a program I don't know about?
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 6 Feb 2003 @ 20:41, by bushman. Internet
Some of you may have heard of Mplayer.com. They closed couple of years ago, and basicly tossed 1000's of people out into cyberspace, like dust in the wind we landed all over the net, some in yahoo, msn, the whole list of online chat and gamming places. Still, Mplayer was the place, maybe the last bastion of freedom. Some people didn't give up, some people decided to show Mplayer, god rest thier soul for selling out to gamespy, lol. Build it and they will come? And they did, took a few years, and loosing 2 main investors in the WTC, they fought on. I don't know much about how .NET framework, works, but thats what they built SeeMePlayMe around. Being that its new, there are a few things that could be fixed, like, the program is set up for gammers, which I am, lol, But I don't play too many games on the net these days since Im on dial up, lucky to get 26.4. So basicly this program likes fast connection and XP machines the best. Everyone Ive talked to in SMPM love it if they have fast conection and XP. The people that run win 98 do fine if they have fast connection, but some problems in the voice chat and in the cams, like you only hear one person, usualy the one that made the room, same with the cam stuff, for me it wont load the cam at all, but people with 28.8 and above have better luck with the voice than the cam. They will fix these flaws. If your intrested in gamming and you see a game you like you should try it out. If your into meeting people, the chat is awsome sound quality, even if it breaks up bad for me, but it sounds good for those with fast connections, lol. The big differance between Mplayer and SMPM is that SMPM is built with .NET framework, 10 times more secure than Mplayer could ever be made. There are a bunch of game that havent been launched yet, so if you don't see your game, send them an email and ask for it. Yes, you have to pay if you want the power to make a game room, see the cams and voice, turn off the banner/popup adds, and to change your font and font color. If you are useing win 98 and have a slow connection like me, a gold account is the best deal, you get voice/cam, you can put up a url in your room, and get the font controls, but cant block adds, you also get 3 sub accounts. :}
Well heres the address: www.seemeplayme.com I would go to windows update first and get the .NET framework, some win98 users may have to get and install the soap tool kit, it will tell you if you need it. I also sugest that you run your scan disc and defragmenter, before getting the .NET framework, and after. Then go to www.seemeplayme.com and download the software. If you have a fast connection and or XP, you can just go and download direct from SMPM if you want. Remember this is new, never been done in this way. Out of the dust and ash of Mplayer, SMPM rears its ugly head, to give all a place to play/compeet, chat and to be who they are, or not who they are, lol. P.S. Its free, to use the software, so you dont have to get an account to type chat or join someones game. Also if you see a guy named albert who is the owner, Albert with a red star next to his name , just page him, and ask nicely, he will give you a trial gold account :} More >
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