Collab-Or-Ate

This is a response to Chris Poile’s comment where he points to an interesting article by Cory Doctorow on Facebook friending….

What do you think the world (AKA the social networking website world) would be like if you didn’t need to confirm your friends on Facebook (LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, etc…) ? In that universe, it could be argued that friends lists would be meaningless. But as Chris, Cory, and many others point out, you often feel obligated to friend-back people you don’t particularly feel friendly with in our current universe, so how meaningful are friends lists now? You can draw a firm line and say you will only friend people you have met face-to-face, but that subset of “friends” still includes a lot of “non-friends” like the bully from high school.

If friends are unconfirmed, you would be freed to build your list anyway you like. You could actually create an accurate list of who you think are your close friends and colleagues. Or you could leave it empty. Or you could fill it with millions.

You could decide on a whim to add or remove people without offending anyone. Or would you still offend people? Is there so much pressure to reciprocate the friending (this pressure created by these websites, not by anything in our “real” lives) that we would carry that over to a universe with no required confirmation?

Real friendships are often not perfectly balanced. I consider my sister to be one of my best friends (yes!), but as we jokingly discuss, she might not even consider me a friend at all, but rather just a sister. I recently tried and failed to convince her to join Facebook so I can friend her. So where does that leave me? My Facebook friends list is totally wrong! I wish I could add her without requiring her to confirm or even join the site.

What do you think a no-confirm-required friending model would look like in practice?

There’s a new concept device out called the “Moody Sensiblog,” which the creaters at Yanko Design describe as a “biological twitter.” Much like twitter, it broadcasts what you are doing to your friends, but instead of sending text messages, this device automatically broadcasts your motion (from an accelerometer), sounds (from a microphone), and your galvanic skin response (your palm sweat detected from electrodes). Would you consider wearing this? Yea, me neither!

But it it similar to a project I worked on with Andrew Fiore and Vidya Lakshmipathy in 2002. Conductive Chat was an instant messaging interface that automatically changed the size and color of your typed text to reflect your level of excitement, becoming bigger as your galvanic skin response increased and turning red when you were at elevated levels.

I found out about this via Mobile Messaging 2.0.

“Facebook isn’t just a crazy ex-girlfriend, it’s a crazy ex-girlfriend who follows you around when you’re shopping and whom you can’t get to stop calling you.” — Some Bits: Nelson’s Weblog

People (1, 2) whose opinion on these matters I respect a great deal are voicing their dismay at Facebook and their new ad model.

Should be interesting to see how this plays out, particularly because Facebook responded a year ago to user outcries by putting in more privacy controls.

Have you ever worked in an open office setting without any cubical walls? The closest I came was in 1997 at a 15 person company where the cubes were organized into groups of four. In that setting, when anyone entered our area, all four of us would look up.

Jeremy Birnholtz presented a very interesting paper at Group that discussed a study where he, Carl Gutwin and Kirstie Hawkey examined several 100% open office workspaces and the verbal and non-verbal negotiation people go through before initiating conversation. He talked about two concepts: “attentional legitimacy” (what are you legitimately allowed to look at within your co-workers workspace?) and “public displays of attention” (the acts you go through so that others know you are trying to get their attention). He talked about a 3-4 foot bubble that people hover within around your desk while they assess how available you are, before they approach you.

What I like most about his talk was how he highlighted that tools that have been built for managing awareness between remote colleagues have not taken into account that there is often a subtle, non-verbal, two-way negotiation going on between people to assess the availability of someone. If you are wearing headphones you are not available. But if you see your boss walk by slowly, looking over, you may take off those headphones and make yourself available. Both parties adjust their behavior to fit the environment and to signal to each other. How could you do that over an electronic mode of communication such as instant messenger?

Here is the paper:

Jeremy Birnholtz, Carl Gutwin, Kirstie Hawkey. (2007) “Privacy in the Open: How Attention Mediates Awareness and Privacy in Open-Plan Offices.” Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing and Goupware Technologies (GROUP 2007), Nov 2007.

* Image of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Company Headquarters building, Racine, WI

I was also presenting a poster at Group on a project I worked on while at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. The application is called Constellation and it uses social network visualization techniques to reveal to users the location and relationships between experts and novices in an organization.

Joan DiMicco, Nicole Yankelovich. (2007) “Constellation: Using Visualization to Find the Path to Experts.” Poster Presentation at the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing and Goupware Technologies (GROUP 2007), Nov 2007.

This image is a screenshot of Constellation. The nodes are people and the lines are the relationships. The social network relationships shown are the management structure, co-authoring history of internal and external documents, patenting history, and neighboring offices. The blue lines (the thicker lines) represent multi-dimensional relationships, meaning the pair are connected in multiple ways, such as both authoring and patenting together. The user can turn any of these relationships on/off at will.

What I think is cool about Constellation is that you can figure out the relationships between experts in a topic area, for example here the experts in “hardware” are shown in the screenshot. There are two hardware research clusters in Sun Labs that have done a lot of work together, but haven’t done any collaboration across each other. The weak linkages between these two clusters of researchers is a tie that says “sits near.” So if you wanted to begin to have these groups work together (by writing papers or patents together), the first step is to go to the people who have the “sits near” relationship and get them to start talking to each other.

The proposed use of Constellation is for novices. If I add myself (a novice in “hardware”) to the graph, I can see the shortest relationship path between myself and the experts already shown. By exploring the relationships between these experts and myself, I can figure out the best way to get a personal introduction to an expert in hardware.

Users have so much knowledge about who they know and who they comfortable asking for help from that is NOT captured electronically, that I think the strength of Constellation is leaving the ultimate decision of who to contact entirely up to the user. Rather than presenting the user with a ranked list of mysteriously calculated “hardware experts,” this interface lets the user visually explore the social network space and selectively focus in on the persons of interest.

(I also wrote about an extension of this project for the CHI 2007 Shared Encounters Workshop, “Enriching Encounters with Social Networks.“)

I had this great idea to do live-blogging from the Group Conference, but now I’m back. I’m going to do some “not-live” blogging about the interesting papers I saw presented — stay tuned to this RSS feed.

I was at Group presenting a Note on a study of IBMers on Facebook, which was a fun analysis to do and generated some interesting discussions at the conference. Here’s a link to the paper:

Joan DiMicco, David R Millen. (2007) “Identity management: Multiple presentations of Self in Facebook.” Note, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing and Goupware Technologies (GROUP 2007), Nov 2007.

Do you read as much as you wish you did? Do you pretend that you’ve read more than you have?

I’m not going to hide anymore. I recently, openly confessed that, except for during that rushed last moment before a paper is due and I don’t have any post-millennium “related works” in the related works section, I haven’t read an academic paper this year.

I also haven’t been reading books. A month ago I hauled off a pile of (presumably) wonderful non-fiction books to the used bookstore that I hadn’t touched. I’m in a bookclub, where we read one fiction book a month. I haven’t even purchased the last four books.

(So you don’t think I’m illiterate, I’ll also confess that I read, well skim, the WSJ and the NYTimes everyday, and I justed finished a historical novel, Loving Frank. So it isn’t like I’m totally not reading, it is just that I don’t read nearly as much as I wish I did.)

Last week I read a review of yet-another-book-I-won’t-read called “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.” And since I read the review, I feel qualified to give my opinion on the book without having read it. It sounds great! Apparently the main gist is:

Not to worry, Mr. Bayard counsels. Just because one hasn’t read a book doesn’t mean that one cannot talk about it with the same confidence as someone who has, and perhaps with greater acumen, not having to get bogged down in messy details.

What a relief! I will attend my bookclub this month, with or without having the book, and I will give my opinion!

I know I’m not alone in hiding my non-reading. Particularly in the field of research, where we feel we should be reading everything related to our own research, it is hard to admit we aren’t. The most concrete piece of evidence I have that researchers fake it is at least 50% of the papers that reference my research have significantly misstated my research findings. If those authors are not reading my papers, then oh my gosh, who is??