Nodal PointsThe emerging real-time social Web

Jyri Engeströmzengestrom.com

This talk is structured around 3 key concepts:

1. Social objects2. Social peripheral vision

3. Nodal points

Mark Sigal:

“There has to be more to the Web 2.0 storythan accessorizing my Facebook page with

one-dimensional pseudo applications”

“Create a Facebook application like Top Friends, which has almost 3 million active users, and you

could be into some serious Internet dough.”

“tendency for individual applications to grow very quickly within the first few weeks, and then to

plateau in growth after a few weeks”

Social network theory is good atrepresenting links between people

- But it doesn’t explain what connects thoseparticular people and not others

Another tradition of theorizing offers anexplanation of why so many YASNS ultimately fail

Pierre BourdieuSociologist1930-2002

Yrjö EngeströmActivity theorist

1948-

Bruno LatourActor-network theorist

1947-

Karin Knorr-CetinaSociologist

1944-

Lev VygotskyPsychologist1896-1934

People don’t just connect to each other

They connect through a shared object

From John Thackara: “In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World.” Used with permission.From John Thackara: “In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World.” Used with permission.

From John Thackara: “In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World.” Used with permission.From John Thackara: “In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World.” Used with permission.

Good web services allow people to create social objects that add

value

Flickr did it to photosDel.icio.us did it to bookmarks

YouTube did it to video

New objects -> new value

Mobile devices make it possible to capture slices of reality that people

couldn’t capture before

Camera phones -> photos

Text messages -> status updates

Video phones -> live streams and video comments

2.0

GPS & cell ID -> places

Bluetooth -> people you’ve met

Barcodes/RFIDs -> physical objects

Objects are interesting as such

Yet it’s even more interesting what other people say about an object

and what they do with it

Define your verbs

(verb)

Adam Photo

Blog post

Video

Event

Music track

Place

Favorited

Commented

Rated

Posted

Played

Visited

A BX

Actions (Alexei N. Leontiev)

Speech acts (John R. Searle)

Communicative acts (Jürgen Habermas)

Utterances (Conversation Analysis)

Actions leave traces on the Web

- Some actions we type ourselves- Others are auto-generated

Social peripheral vision

No awareness of other people’s intentions=

Inability to make plans

Sites that publish what people have been doing

Imagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as

in WoW

From Joi Ito http://joi.ito.com

Over the next 24 months many of the services we use regularly will

probably become socially aware

Not just activity streams

Maps - where are my friendsPhonebook - what are people up to

Email - prioritizingPhotos - facial recognition

Terminator 2

The Daemon

Marauder’s map

Object lockers

Activity aggregators

Discovery layer(search actions)

People transmit updates, kind of like pulsars in space

At Jaiku it felt like we were hacking together a transmitter/receiver

Aggregation at massive scale

Pattern recognition

Detecting nodal points

What should I be aware of that’s happening around me?

Was what just happened significant to someone on the network?

What?

Who?

Where?

Just-in-time delivery

Discovery is becoming social

Pagerank “Facerank”?

Who links to it? • Social proximity (friends in common)• Physical proximity• Shared taste• Shared objects

• ...

Identity OpenID

Authorization OAuth

Interoperability OpenSocial

Own it, port it, share it

Ok.

1. What is your object?

2. What are your verbs?

3. What are your nodal points?

Quick checklist :