Collab-Or-Ate

The general upset about Google Buzz is interesting to me. One of the objections I’ve read is that email is always private and status messages are always public and never the two shall meet. It is wrong to mix these two types of communication.

What I find really interesting about this argument is that there are no fundamental truths about how online communication must happen. Why is email private? Because it has been since the 70’s? Why are status message public? Because that is twitter’s default setting? Status messages can be private (e.g. protected tweets) and emails could be public (maybe that’s what blogs are). These private/public distinctions are pretty arbitrary in my mind. Sure, I assume that the email I send today is private because that is how my email software behaves today, but I can imagine email environments that don’t operate this way.

Google also has enough market share and influence that the way they design their applications can fundamentally change how we think about email and status messages. If Buzz takes off, we may look back a few years from now and have trouble remembering that there used to be a clear distinction between emails and status messages. It is all just communication with our network after all.

This is not the most interesting blog post, but I need to make public my personal notes on what papers were interesting at HICSS. So here is the list, with my short summaries and links to the papers.

Agents of Diffusion – Insights from a Survey of Facebook Users, Rebecca Ermecke, Philip Mayrhofer, Stefan Wagner

On viral adoption on Facebook

Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter, Courtenay Honeycutt, Susan C. Herring

How people use the @ reply mechanism in Twitter. Did you know that 30% of messages get replies?

A Conceptual and Operational Definition of ‘Social Role’ in Online Community, Eric Gleave, Howard T. Welser, Thomas M. Lento, Marc A. Smith

A theoretical paper on determing social roles in an online community. Best paper award for the Track.

Hello Stranger! A Study of Introductory Communication Structure and Social Match Success, Daphne R. Raban, Stephen T. Ricken, Sukeshini A., Grandhi, Nathaniel Laws, and Quentin Jones

Social introductions.

Mycrocosm: Visual Microblogging, Yannick Assogba, Judith Donath

Overview of the mycrocosm service.

Cyber Migration: An Empirical Investigation on Factors that Affect Users’ Switch Intentions in Social Networking Sites, Cheng Zengyan, Yang Yinping, John Lim

What triggers migration between different social network sites?

A Life Cycle Model of Virtual Communities, Elham Mousavidin, Lakshmi Goel

The lifecycle and stages of an online community

Knowledge Workers and the Realm of Social Tagging, Ralph Boeije, Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten, Pieter de Vries, Wim Veen

Social tagging by workers.

Groupware for Design: an Interactive System to Facilitate Creative Processes in Team Design Work, Arjun Venkataswamy, Rajinder Sodhi, Yerkin Abdildin, Brian P. Bailey

How do you design groupware that is specifically supposed to support the creative process of team design work?

Cultural Diversity, Perception of Work Atmosphere, and Task Conflict in Collaboration Technology Supported Global Virtual Teams: Findings from a Laboratory Experiment, Souren Paul, Sumati Ray

I already blogged about this one and how it is an interesting finding about conflict and cultural differences in distributed teams.

Blogs Are Echo Chambers: Blogs Are Echo Chambers, Eric Gilbert, Tony Bergstrom and Karrie Karahalios

Are bloggers talking to like-minded bloggers?

Employee Adoption of Corporate Blogs: A Quantitative Analysis, Sunil Wattal, Pradeep Racherla, Munir Mandviwalla

Model of when/why employees start blogging.

Monetizing the Internet: Surely There Must be Something other than Advertising, Eric K. Clemons

Great title and interesting discussion of some other possibilities for making money on the internet, besides through advertising.

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.

NYTimes Bits: Big Changes Coming to Profile Pages on Facebook

“The changes come as Facebook aims to simplify its user pages, which have become as cluttered with applications, photos and information as pages on MySpace — long criticized by visual purists as being a bit too visually chaotic.

The changes come amid indications that growth at Facebook might be tailing off. According to a recent report from Nielsen Online, 22.4 million users visited Facebook in April, down from 24.9 million in March. Overall year-over-year growth slowed to 56 percent from last year’s 98 percent growth rate.”

I’m definitely looking forward to this clean up (see the article for details)! As I collect more and more Facebook friends I’m having a hard time getting anything useful out of looking at their profiles. What I’d really like to do is to subscribe to feeds of my friends’ photos and comments, so I can cut through the clutter using my RSS Reader. Anyone have an idea how to do that? I have a feed to my friends’ status messages and am enjoying that.

While at CHI last month (our international conference on human-computer interaction (HCI)), I went to two panels (“Celebrating ‘The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction’” and “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful?“) that had really interesting discussions about what defines our research conference (CHI) and our field of study (HCI). I’m still synthesizing my thoughts around these panels and what I’ve been reading since, but based on them, here is how I think about the HCI field today:

1. The HCI field (and the CHI conference) began in the 1980’s with a strong grounding in computer science and cognitive science. Card, Newell, and Moran’s The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction is considered the seminal textbook describing this approach.
2. Computer science and cognitive science guide us towards taking a systematic, scientific approach to building and evaluating software (for e.g. GOMS). This is a solid way to build systems and many of the early successful HCI research projects utilized this approach.
3. As the software and consumer electronics industries exploded over the last two decades, it has become obvious that there is something more going on here driving user adoption, in addition to computer science innovation and cognitive science usability. You could summarize this as “design” or “context” or “the third paradigm.” However you describe it, it has to do with human emotions, social dynamics and desire.
4. As Greenberg pointed out in his paper presentation, evaluating an early prototype in a systematic way, particularly in terms of usability, can kill the innovation process. Early design often gets things wrong, but it is a critical stage in the product innovation cycle and should not be stunted through rigorous evaluation. He claims that inappropriate evaluation is harming the quality of the work presented at CHI — read Greenberg and Buxton’s paper for more details.
5. The CHI community is struggling to find an identity that simultaneously supports a scientific process (so that there is a criteria for judging quality) and product innovation (so that CHI has an influence over the technology world, outside of academics).
6. The paper The Three Paradigms of HCI (Harrison, S. Tatar, D. and Sengers, P.) tries to define exactly what this “third” thing is that is missing from our traditional HCI education, calling it the “phenomenological matrix.” Research practices this third paradigm include are ethnography, action research, practice-based research, and interaction analysis, where the “goal is to grapple with the full complexity around the system.”
7. Because I’ve been working within the space of design, social psychology, and “context” for so long, this approach to building technology seems so logical, yet surprisingly hard to justify to CHI paper reviewers. But on the other hand, my response should not be to reject the CHI’s body of work as misguided or uninformed. I think a rejection of stringent evaluation techniques should not lead to a rejection of the innovations that have been born out of this structure.
8. My conclusion from this is that I should read more, spending time becoming more aware of and inspired by the work done before us. I’m all in favor of coming up with alternative evaluation methods or no evaluation criteria so that we can foster risky, exciting ideas within HCI. But I don’t want to abandon all the early work’s ideas.

Some Recommended Readings:


The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, Stuart K. Card, Thomas P. Moran, Allen Newell

Twenty-five years ago, Card, Moran and Newell’s book, “The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction”, named our field and launched us into a new world of user-centered design and development. These pioneers believed that “a scientific psychology should help us in arranging [the human-computer] interface so it is easy, efficient, error-free – even enjoyable.”

Saul Greenberg & Bill Buxton’s paper “Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time).“

Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done ‘by rule’ rather than ‘by thought’. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision. If done to validate an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design’s scientific worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today’s reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow’s eager acceptance. The choice of evaluation methodology – if any – must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration.

The Three Paradigms of HCI, S Harrison, D Tatar, P Sengers

Informal histories of HCI commonly document two major intellectual waves that have formed the field: the first orienting from engineering/human factors with its focus on optimizing man-machine fit, and the second stemming from cognitive science, with an increased emphasis on theory and on what is happening not only in the computer but, simultaneously, in the human mind. In this paper, we document underlying forces that constitute a third wave in HCI and suggest systemic consequences for the CHI community. We provisionally name this the ‘phenomenological matrix’. In the course of creating technologies such as ubiquitous computing, visualization, affective and educational technology, a variety of approaches are addressing issues that are bad fits to prior paradigms, ranging from embodiment to situated meaning to values and social issues. We demonstrate the underlying unity of these approaches, and document how they suggest the centrality of currently marginal criteria for design, evaluation, appreciation, and developmental methodology in CHI work.

Thomas Erickson, David W. McDonald’s new book, HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community

From Tom Erickson’s web page:

The goal of the HCI Remixed project is to produce a collection of essays in which researchers and practitioners reflect on a paper or other piece of work by someone else, that is at least 10 years old, and that has had a personal impact on their view of or approach to HCI.

It is that type of day where you mean to get some work done, but you first have to check out your blogs. Because checking blogs is kind of like getting work done, right? So of course I’ve spent half of Saturday catching up on politics and pop culture and not getting any work done. Unintentionally though I think I found something to help with my data analysis, which I swear I will get down to as soon as I finish this blog post!

On Lynn Cherny’s blog post about Colbert and book sales, I was admiring the data charts she posted from Juice Analytics. Turns out they have a bunch of tools and tips for making your chart-junky Excel charts look a wee bit better with a simple click of the button. I’ve downloaded their CleanCharts Excel Add-on and, when it works (kind of quirky), it works great. I also picked out the best of the charts in their Chart Chooser and downloaded those templates.

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.

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.“)

What I mean is, when a website offers “friending,” or social networking capabilities, is that valuable enough in itself to be a marketable product? Or is it just a necessary tool or feature that is part of a larger software solution? Can a company make money just from the fact that it offers social networking and a lot of people use it for connecting?

The Economist has an interesting article that poses this question (Social graph-iti, October 22, 2007), in which it said basically says “No. It is not a product.” Facebook’s $100 billion valuation may be overestimated by those overly-enthusiastic about the possibility of marketing products through social networks. (Sorry, Facebook, I don’t mean always target you in my blog posts. It is just that you are the biggest target right now.)

The article has some interesting points:

• Facebook’s value seems to be based on its large social network. Where as the user experience innovation in Facebook is around two things: the friends-centric newsfeed and the importing of applications. These features are being replicated by other sites as we sleep.
• Social networks do not scale in usefulness, meaning that they do not become infinitely more useful as they grow in size. Once everyone is in the network and everyone is connected to everyone else, there is limited information to be learned from the network and limited utility in using its paths for accessing information. Bad investment!
• Observe how exclusive social networking sites are popping up everywhere (aSmallWorld and Ning are two examples). Exclusive networks have special powers and it is these that marketers and advertisers should want to get into.

Yesterday, Warren Sack visited IBM to talk about his latest research thoughts about how to evaluate software, in particular the aesthetics of information visualization. Here is an excerpt from his talk’s abstract:

This presentation is a part of a larger project to articulate critical criteria for
evaluating information and communication technologies (ICTs): criteria of democracy and the public good. It is hoped that these evaluative criteria offer alternatives to the way hardware and software developments are usually evaluated by computer scientists and
information architects.

My interpretation of what he said, and a point I heartily agree with, is that we embed our values into the technology we design. A nice example he gave is of object-oriented programming paralleling the structure of modern top-down, distributed corporations. We believe that is how efficient programs and companies should be run. In some situations, the applied value structure is not the best design and it can be hard to break away from certain structures because our value systems are so ingrained into our models for thinking about systems. In particular, he is focusing on issues of democracy and deliberation (see his project Agnostics for some of this).

You know how once something is pointed out to you, you see it everywhere? Well, you have to read Walt Mossberg’s column yesterday, entitled “Free My Phone.” Mossberg is voicing a frustration that many cell phone users have over the limitations of the technology. He describes the problem as a conflict in values. There are two value systems at play: that of the cell phone service providers and that of the creators of the Internet. He claims the cell phone service providers are applying a “Soviet Ministry Model” (obviously that means it is evil) and the Internet was build upon the values of a free market and of free-flowing information (capitalism and free speech, can’t get less evil than that).

Here Mossberg outlines his values:

I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.” Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them.
…
But, in my view, they shouldn’t be allowed to pick and choose what phones run on their networks, and what software and services run on those phones. We need a wireless mobile device ecosystem that mirrors the PC/Internet ecosystem, one where the consumers’ purchase of network capacity is separate from their purchase of the hardware and software they use on that network.

You will probably agree with him because you wish your phone were cooler and you were able to customize its applications. But do you agree with his value statement that the phone industry should reflect the Internet’s “ecosystem” that was largely invented by libertarian academics? If you are reading my blog, you probably do. But you should be aware that one value system that works for one technology may not be the best model to apply to the next. Our libertarian politics might be great for most things, but are these always the right values for all circumstances?

If you don’t work at IBM, you probably are not aware that this week is Lotusphere.
As an IBM and Lotus Notes newbie, I’m only just beginning to understand the history and culture surrounding the IBM Lotus products. Basically, Lotusphere is like Macworld for Notes users, although admittedly not quite as cool. (Sorry, no iPhone, but we got SameTime 7.5.1!) Because the Lotus software products are focused around collaboration and workplace productivity, these products are the ones most closely related to my research and the research of the other members of the Collaborative User Experience group.

This year’s Lotusphere has generated a lot of press (I don’t think this is usual), but it is fun to see press about the research projects of my colleagues.

InformationWeek has an nice article covering the coolest research that will hopefully become Lotus products:

One of the best things about the IBM Lotusphere conference is always the glimpses it gives you of the future of computing. The various IBM Research labs send representatives who staff a room filled with demo pedestals — two dozen this year — where creators show off their projects. This year, as usual, several projects look like good prospects to become future products, and IBM Lotus has even put one up on the Web so you can get a look at it even though you’re not at the conference.

The article mentions Malibu, Tagging in software development, and Many Eyes, all from CUE.

This is a very funny post on “Creating Passionate Users” that hits on one of my pet peeves about tech companies and tech conference and the XXL t-shirts they give out. In this age of trying to recruit and support a diverse workforce AND in this age of product specialization and customization, it seems rather backward to hand out t-shirts that only fit the XXL attendees. If you give out a fitted woman’s shirt, the women will not only take note that you consider them valid members of the community, they will also WEAR the darn shirt!

The point is showing us that you care about more than just saving a few bucks on a t-shirt print run. That you care about ALL your users, not just the Big Burly Men. And even if you do not care, you’d think the marketers would get a clue that people aren’t going to be wearing your logo around giving you free advertising if the shirt doesn’t fit. The bar’s been set pretty low on this, so even a MEN’S SMALL would make me happy.

I agree!

Just when I had accepted the term “Web 2.0″ was something to acknowledge and work with, there are now rumblings of Web 3.0. So soon! Are we ready? Well, as with 2.0, 3.0 isn’t anything new, it is just the next logical step in terms of internet technologies: Web 3.0 = the Semantic Web hits the NYTimes.

A quick and final post about SIGGRAPH, before all memories of it fade… Here is a run-down of some of the other interesting applications I enjoyed, some of which relate to collaboration:

• Shared Design Space: a collaborative, tabletop, augmented-reality application, for sharing documents, sketching, brainstorming, anything! It was amazingly intuitive and interesting to use. You interact with the tabletop with a pen which knows its exact position on the table from tiny grey dots on the projection screen's surface. Using the pen, you can draw, arrange photos, annotate digital content, and share screen views with others around the table. The pen is able to interact with any piece of this special dotted paper, so the interaction doesn't have to be only on screens, but can also be tangible objects such as physical “paint trays” that can act as toolbars would in a desktop app. They had a really nice implementation of pick & drop and translation and rotation of objects,. This is work done at Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences Digital Media and they have other interesting projects listed at their Office of Tomorrow website.
• Mixed Reality Interfaces: an application where digital contents are being easily controlled with tangible objects. For example, a 3D model of a car can be viewed on a screen from different angles and with different lighting through the manipulation of a toy car, a toy light source, and a toy camera that you move around a physical space. It was immediately very intuitive to use which I liked. This is a product designed by the company KOMMERZ in Austria.
• DanceDanceDance: a game like Dance Dance Revolution, but full body motion required. When playing, you see a silhouette of the position you should be in and then you see your own silhouette for comparison. The more poses you get right, the better you do. The dance moves are somewhat like Y-M-C-A and it was pretty fun to play. Thankfully, they set up their booth so that the person playing was in a relatively private corner of the convention floor, limiting the complete embarrassment factor. See a video of it in use at Siggraph. The research is being done in the Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering at National Taiwan University, but I can't find an official website. Here's an article in the New Scientist Tech
• Invisible, the Shadow Chaser: this is totally Ghostbusters. One person has a spotlight for searching for goblins and the other person wears a backpack with a vacuum hose for sucking up the goblins. It was totally fun and definitely a collaborative activity. This work is being done at the Image Processing Lab, Nara Institute of Science & Technology in Japan.

• Fabcell: a multi-colored fabric that changes colors when a current is sent through it. This fabric was amazing to watch, as it changed from black to red to orange to green to a vibrant blue. Its colors were like a mood ring's, transitioning towards blue as more current (or heat) was applied to it. This was developed at the Keio Univeristy Media Design Program in Japan.

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