Collab-Or-Ate

When I initially heard about Twitter, I thought it sounded crazy and way too mega-ego and, hello, why would I care that you just got a haircut? Now that I have been using it, oh, every day, for the past 6 months, I guess I have to admit that I find it is kind of useful and appealing. I finally put it together what is so appealing about it. Twitter is a persistent chat room. It is Babble!

Babble is similar to a multi-channel textual chat system except that its conversation persists over sessions, allowing both synchronous and asynchronous talk. Its aim is to support everyday, opportunistic interaction among members of a workgroup. [link]

I never used Babble (it was built in 1997 and used internally at IBM before I joined), but it is one of the projects that inspired my thesis research. Its key concept is social translucence:

Social translucence is the idea that we should make some (but not all) cues about the presence and activity of users of digital systems available to one another. [link]

Twitter fits this criteria and has a lot of the same features as Babble:

• you can communicate either synchronously or asynchronously (txt, mobile, browser, etc… )
• you can see who is present (Twitter’s following and followers pictures)
• you can see who is active (Twitter’s time-sorted list of who said what)
• you can selectively determine who sees your posts (direct messages, @ messages, broadcast)

The main differences between Twitter and Babble are:

• Babble has a graphical visualization showing who is currently engaged in the conversation
• Twitter’s “groups” are not bounded. Even though you and I might be following each other, my group is probably different than your group. It is possible there could be 0% overlap, but we could still communicate.
• The cultural norms of Twitter are pretty distinctive in that people use “tweets” to give casual updates on their latest thoughts, ideas, opinions and experiences. The updates are not solely focused on workgroup interaction, like Babble was conceptualized to be for. But I see this as Twitter’s unusual strength.

It would be great if Twitter had some social visualization capability. (Maybe it does? Anyone know?) Then it really would be Babble, adapted for the flexible, ad-hoc type of collaboration and communication we do in this post-2000 world.

If you haven’t read them already, I highly recommend these papers on Babble and social translucence:

Socially Translucent Systems: Social Proxies, Persistent Conversation, and the Design of “Babble”, by Thomas Erickson, David N. Smith, Wendy A. Kellogg, Mark Laff, John T. Richards, Erin Bradner. In Human Factors in Computing Systems: The Proceedings of CHI ‘99. ACM Press, 1999.

Social Translucence: An Approach to Designing Systems that Support Social Processes by Thomas Erickson and Wendy A. Kellogg. In Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. Vol. 7, No. 1, pp 59-83. New York: ACM Press, 2000.

Went to a talk today at MIT by Craig of craigslist. (As a side note, Sergey of Google was sitting a few seats away, but I was a little slow to pick up on this, despite Craig calling on him by name when he asked a question.)

I really enjoyed hearing Craig talk about his original vision for craigslist that continues to drive the site today. Some of his points:

• He recently realized he is a community organizer. In 1994 when he started craigslist it was about connecting people, mostly nerds, together so that they could get what they needed. For a long time he was an engineer. Now his title is customer service rep.
• The experience of exchanging goods is social — people really enjoy doing it. Like flea markets and the Roman Forum, places where people come together to buy and sell are enjoyable places to be.
• Craigslist is fast and simple. He’s not a designer but he knows how to make things fast and simple. He thinks the front page of craigslist is too cluttered today, but it is pretty simple in terms of figuring out what to do.
• He doesn’t care to define “web 2.0″ (yay!!) and says that craigslist is web 0.1. He wasn’t interested in talking about “what’s next” for craigslist (people were asking about video, multimedia, blah, blah), because he is more interested in doing what is best for the community.

He kept returning to the point that the no-ads and no-selling-out isn’t because he is altruistic or charitable, but rather because of his nerd ethos. He believes that everyone in the world just wants to have things simple and easy and wants to be given a break once in a while. His original decision to not have banner ads in the 1990’s was because he thought banner ads were usually lame and distracting. He always goes with his gut instinct on how best to provide a service to his users and does not think of how best to make the most money, because he’s always made plenty of money.

He still uses pine for email. How awesome is that? I miss pine!

Since I’m now a super-fan, I’ll point you towards Craig’s blog, twitter feed, and interview on the Colbert Report.

While off in our ivory tower this week, we missed the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Some interesting stories that came out of it:

• Ross Mayfield says SocialText will be a better sell in this economy than IBM and Microsoft’s solutions because SocialText is cheaper. I don’t know the prices, but this sounds pretty logical.
• Facebook and Twitter don’t plan to become profitable any time soon. I think this is a good sign that the fun isn’t over yet.
• LinkedIn has released some “all work, no play” applications. Will be very interesting to see where this takes LinkedIn.

I’m listening to this CSCW paper being presented:

Being Online, Living Offline: The Influence of Social Ties Over the Appropriation of Social Network Sites
by Bernd Ploderer, Steve Howard and Peter Thomas from The University of Melbourne

The authors are saying that bodybuilders use social networking for self-promotion. Bodybuilding competitions are very competitive and not very supportive, so SNSs offer a way to gain praise, acknowledgment, and encouragement for your bodybuilding. This seem so explicit when described from an outsider, ethnography perspective, but I think these are the exact factors going on with all social network site use.