Liz Lawley:
saw Twitter becoming a conversation like IM away messages that didn’t require a response, could
happen over a period of time
students building a typology of Twitter users
these kinds of communicating presence
Linda Stone sees these tools de-emphasizing your relationships
Liz sees them as strengthening ties
communicating day-to-day lif – the patterns, the nuances of it – is difficult to do across
distances
Panel on “interesting implementations of presence
Matt Biddulph – Dopplr (http://dopplr.com/)
Much more about potential presence than something like Twitter
“absence of notification” – you’re going where she lives but she won’t be there
all they do is take where you tell them you will be
the important thing about travel is memory – the side artifacts of your presence in a place
the idea of URLs as important resources
if you put a trip on Dopplr, there is no URL you can use outside of Dopplr for it, but that is
going to change
heuristics for who travels a lot to a certain place
exploring expertise through the social graph; helping people help each other
showing you someone who knows about where you’re going instead of saying “we’ve started a forum
about your trip and invited this person to join it”
looking at the fuzzy edges
Jyfi Engestrom – http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2007/08/what-makes-a-go.html
what would happen if you fuzzed up the edges of your trip
can optimize travel and figure out which is the best day to go if you know who will be there when
(earlier than you, later than you, during your trip – if you go a few days early, you’ll see these
people)
geographical fuzziness (how far you can travel from where you will be) = “coincidences”
how do we create natural-feeling interfaces to make these things fuzzy?
The documentation and real artifacts that you put out there from your trip
can easily hit the Flickr photos or Twits for a trip
can you take this data set and compare it against another one without having to do the geotagging
(which most people don’t get around to)
working on a Facebook app that puts your Dopplr updates into your minified
What has changed in the world of the people who matter to you? – not just their status
how can social software avoid lying to your friends about your presence?
Tom Coates – Yahoo
“Geopresence & Fire Eagle” – It’s where you’re at
Communicating your state to other people
90% of Twitter’s traffic comes from APIs
connected data sources – “an aggregated web of connected data sources and services”
data that actively looks for opportunities to recombine itself
letting these data sources “see” you and potentially hook into you
not so much as me making myself visible, but also making myself comprehensible to software as well
becomes a foundation to build on, rather than a goal between two people
Fire eagle tries to express this – http://fireeagle.research.yahoo.com/
what if the web just updated your location ambiently in the background?
how you could use fire eagle to manifest your presence:
1 – twitter maps
2 – phone app that would communicate ambient location of friends so you could look for a group
Geotragging all user content
app on mobile phone would SMS your location to tell you useful things around you
“proximizer” – boss status/presence (how far away she is)
desktop widgets showing pictures of people and their status/location
ambient sense of where your family is
Unexpected uses of this information and what could go wrong
1 – revealing too much information and not knowing you’re doing it
2 –how to trust whom
3 – specific circumstances when you may want to hide
Slide of how you could authorize Flickr to use your fire eagle data and how much they could have
access to
App would check in periodically to make sure you still want to share information at the level
you’re at
Could specify a neighborhood instead of a specific location (like your home)
Gilad Lotan – Presence: intimacy and immediacy in mediated spaces (http://giladlotan.com/)
Love, power, tribute, culture, architecture, religion
Connection and how it informs in mediated spaces:
– tangible: importance of the tangible online and how we can enhance it
– intimacy: the ability and choice to be close, loving, and vulnerable (eg, imPulse – heartbeat
sharing devices, something you don’t share with anyone other than your loved ones or doctor)
– immediacy: having a meaningful conversation, the more synchronous it is, the more attention it
requires; asynchronous lets you connect with many friends at once but is superficial; wanted
deeper meaning in deeper relationships, less on the screen, more complete experience so went to
Jerusalem; intimate connection to the Wall in Jerusalem at Kotel (webcams) but people rarely do
that
– culture & context: we’re all used to cultural norms all around us; when you take a certain norm
or an object and place it outside of its cultural context, you get a much stronger sense of it;
took real missiles that fell in the Gaza Strip and re-enacted scenes on open streets (art exhibit)
Ubi.ach – takes email away from the screen; a ubiquitous doll (pronounced u-beeyatch, heh) that
uses email filters
Tibetan prayer wheels – took the concept and let them react to world news – as you turned these
“news wheels,” images from current news would randomly appear
danah boyd
publics not just as civic spaces but where collections of people come together, often with people
you don’t normally interact with
we validate who we are and make sense of the world around us, differentiate ourselves, in the
presence of others
“always on intimate communities” – spaces created via mobile phones
(davidtr on irc: “attention cannot be forced, but surely distractions can be minimized”
You have a way to express yourself through what your friends say about you, meant to be witnessed
by others (eg, you know others will look at the wall on facebook- showcases your relationships)
Public displays of teenage dating – you talk about having sex long before having it; progressions
who is the intended audience of these performances? Peer group
teens create these images to create presence online and be together when they can’t be
constant construction of profiles as presence
animated visual cues, two pictures merged together, written for the display to people around them
when a breakup occurs, you delete somebody (the only time you do this)
presence and investment disappears when you delete them – comments disappear (except on Facebook)
When we conceptualize presence, it’s people sharing place and time
uncoupling location but keeping time together; can be doing the same thing in different places at
the same time
asynchronously being together
how do we think about technologies that inspire these things
Presence as etching into artifacts
actually see time as part of it
Why does presence matter to people? What is necessary for presence? Shared space, shared time?
What role does persistence or ephemerality play in the construction of presence? Synchronicity,
asynchronicity, semi-synchronicity?
Is time bending synchronicity?
How are people creating presence out of tools that aren’t made for that?