Archive for September, 2007

Link: Culture Chain

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

Culture Chain: Internet Phenomena. Episode 1: Ellen Feiss

Multiplicity, Niches & De Facto Social Networks

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

social network multiplicity, niches, and de facto networks

The horror Terry Semel must have felt when his bid for Facebook was rejected… His company’s “me too” social network Yahoo! 360 never became popular and then he couldn’t even buy his way into the hottest web trend. The internet titan failed on both attempts because of too little technology, too little sociology, and absolutely no phenomenology.

Yahoo!’s new product, Mash, will try to learn from past mistakes. With an avid user base for its email, instant messaging, and integrated1 acquisitions, Yahoo! couldn’t possibly fail again… right?

Social networks are launching everywhere. Whispers about Google joining in are growing louder. Four types of communities are forming:

  1. Social for Social Sake Communities: communities built around nothing more than the desire to be social online (like MySpace, Facebook, and lots of other forgettable sites)
  2. Niche Interest Communities: communities built around a central interest (like music, photography, physical fitness, etc.)
  3. Application Communities: online applications with a social element (like del.icio.us, digg, YouTube, etc.)
  4. De Facto Communities: “communities” built by websites with large user bases that don’t particularly care about being social in regard to the reason they use a site

Competing in the social for social sake market is challenging, as users don’t want to maintain duplicated lists of friends. A caveat may be for social sites that specialize in an online persona, like LinkedIn for professional networking and Second Life for alternative reality2. Niche interests and application communities are potentially endless and have the advertising advantage of a targeted audience.

Yahoo! and Google want to be a popular social for social sake networks, but they won’t motivate their users to connect with each other just by adding a friend list feature. So the obvious question is: How will Yahoo! or Google innovate to become a social network destination?

1 Horrendously, awkwardly “integrated”. A single sign-on they have, but true integration they do not.
2 i.e. people who don’t live real lives.

Wired NextFest

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

Closed social networks, like a sandbox in a desert

Wired is one of the best publications ever. NextFest was like walking into an issue of Wired dedicated to geek art.

I love physical interactive art. It’s something that I want to get more into as a creator as opposed to just an admirer. Seeing some of the awesome installations today, I’m so inspired to start.

For those who couldn’t make it to Los Angeles this weekend, I’ve compiled a few links to the exhibitors that I loved.

Social Network Interoperability and Why Facebook Still Wins

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

Closed social networks, like a sandbox in a desert

As a showing sign of maturity, the latest discussion around social networks is interoperability.

When Facebook enabled Applications and turned itself into the hottest web platform, it invigorated developers. Suddenly, any web application could gain a social element. The realization of this power came with a new concern: many different entities now owned data and sharing data became important.

The problem existed before Facebook applications, but it was less apparent. I am a member of many different “social” web applications and communities (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Wallop, Virb, Flickr, Pandora, del.icio.us, to name a few). I had to create a new user account, copy and paste my standard profile, upload my standard avatar1, and “re-friend” all of my friends for all of these sites. Projects like OpenID2 are working on the single sign-on part, but there is no consensus on the rest of the problem.

The irony is that collaboration is a core value of the supposed Web 2.0 and while many innovative new services allow collaboration between users, very few services collaborate with other services.

A Billion Little Pieces

Critics of centralized social networks primarily cite data portability as the primary concern. Social networks were created as self-contained communities. Blogging, however, grew up interconnected. Journaling, forums, blogrolls, and microformats like XFN formed communities before social networks existed. Social networks centralized these activities and used various methods to notify a user’s friends when they occurred3, but they were still closed to anyone outside of the community in a very un-web way.

Facebook Applications are a great start for those interested in decentralizing data. I can now post all of my blogs, links, photos, etc. to my own content management system (unfortunately WordPress at the moment) and have it imported into my Facebook profile as part of the news feed or duplicated as part of an App. All of my data can reside on my website. It’s already published in my Atom and RSS XML feed, but the masses still don’t use news readers. My dad is on Facebook, but I doubt he’s heard of Google Reader.

Unfortunately, this is only a start. Distribution from a CMS to Facebook is a one-way street and Facebook is the only major social network with an extensive API.

Why Facebook Wins

Ultimately, the power lies with the aggregator regardless of where users store the primary data. Whether users post their own social timelines and graphs through XML formats or new APIs from a decentralized source, the centralized service that blends and connects the user with the user’s friends’ timelines wins.

Facebook brought the social graph and timeline to the masses and Facebook opened its network to allow developers to add to it. Users now have the choice to post photos through Facebook or to post photos to Flickr and have it aggregated to their profiles.

Everyone benefits from decentralization because it keeps the centralized aggregators even. Facebook already has an open API4. It could be more open, but it makes sense to start building a decentralized social data system with the leading social aggregator.

1 Gravatar doesn’t count as a solution for avatars because it’s centralized and prone to disruption of service.
2 Many Facebook Apps still require me to register on another site before I can use the feature of the App on my profile. Annoying!
3 LiveJournal’s friends page, Facebook’s news feed, and MySpace’s alerts did what Atom and RSS couldn’t do: get everyone to use them.
4 Mosoto uses it and has built a spiffy parallel community on top of Facebook.

Sources: Thoughts on the Social Graph, Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up, Adactio: Portability, How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web’s Hottest Platform

Tuesday, Sept 11

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

Faith grows in ignorance

Faith the size of a mustard seed hijacked four planes.

It’s the first Tuesday, September 11 since the original Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

For about a month after September 11, 2001, everyone asked, “Why do they hate us?” President Bush answered the question through misdirection: the Islamo-fascists are evil and they attacked us because of our freedoms.

The devout Muslims from the middle east took out three buildings and over 3,000 lives on that day. The devout Christians in our country since have taken away many of the principles upon which our country was founded, ensuring the terrorists never attack us again because of our freedoms.

The American people don’t want the an occupation of Iraq[1]. We don’t want unsupervised domestic spying[2]. We don’t want any human being tortured for any reason. We don’t want a “big brother” spy camera system in NYC.[3]

Muslim terrorists did great damage to the United States on that day. President Bush and our other political leaders have done far more damage to the United States. They forgot, and we allowed them to forget, the reasons people first died (in our own country, for our own country) to protect.

[1] Hillary’s plan to still have troops in Iraq for ten more years is equally unacceptable.
[2] Nixon resigned over a single wiretap. Bush wiretapped the whole country without authorization and is still in office.
[3] York’s ‘Ring of Steel’

Weekly Dig on Emerson

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

Schooled: Emerson College

The Weekly Dig’s guide to Emerson freshmen:

“You are a communicator, an artist, a poet, a filmmaker, a marketeer, an actor, a free spirit with your eyes on the prize. And now, you’re an Emersonian–which means that soon, you will drive everyone on earth up the fucking wall with your bullshit.”

“Avoid: your Artist and the Making of Meaning class”

(I *hated* Steve Shipp’s Artist/Making of Meaning class. I even wrote the President about how terrible it was.)

QBN Sessions Recap

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

QBN Session speakers I liked

I attended QBN Sessions yesterday. The lectures were entertaining, inspiring, and thought provoking. The party afterwards was even better. Here’s a recap.

Phunk Studio

Phunk Studio is comprised of four guys who got into design so that they could “go to cool parties” and “get lots of girls”. Their creativity and unique style has brought them worldwide acclaim in almost every design discipline.

I loved the care free attitude the guys had towards clients. In Singapore, design studios apparently have the luxury of never doing comps. The idea of clients coming to you for your style and, for the most part, trusting whatever you come up with is foreign to me. Perhaps the trust of the client allows far more creative work to be produced. I admire how the four has translated their unique style to so many different design mediums.

Michael Muller

Michael Muller’s photography portfolio includes a long list of a-list celebrities. His shots are phenomenal. His personal and his professional work are equally impressive and I loved his emphasis on doing work you want to do even if it doesn’t pay well.

Photography is one of those things that I wish I was good at so badly. So much about photography to me seems like being lucky enough to have a situation in which to trigger the shutter. Certainly, timing is important but my favorite points in Michael’s lecture were about establishing the scene and connecting with the subject in order to create a moment worth capturing.

Favorite Quote: I’m driving up Highland and I see a fucking Storm Trooper on the side of the road.

Michael C. Place

Michael C. Place is a very British graphic/print designer. His style is incredibly simple and yet communicates so effectively. This is the most difficult design to do and Michael is clearly a master.

Matt & Mark Owens

These brothers were two of my favorite speakers. The showed off their favorite work, but also discussed more of the business and collaborative side of things. If I continue working in the “design for client” market, I’ve decided that I want to work in a “collaborative” like Athletics. More on that later, but these guys were the most inspiring to me that people can be happy in this industry. I also managed to grab a spiffy sticker before the mob trampled on me.

Shepard Fairey

Shepard is one lucky guy. His stencil became an unintended phenomenon and he’s gotten to live off of it. He had many interesting things to say about art and the making of meaning. Most interesting were his comments about commercialization of art. Shepard is criticized for now being part of what his Obey campaign critiques. He’s unapologetic and rightfully so. He gets to do the work he wants to do, it has great impact, and it has great meaning.

Favorite Quote: If you’re an artist and people find out you do graphic design, it’s like you work for God and do side jobs for Satan.

The Mill

I don’t care if you’re a multi-national Oscar Awards winning visual effects company. If you come to a lecture series in America and insult the mostly American audience by saying Americans aren’t intelligent enough for “European style” commercials, you should at least leave enough time in your presentation for Q&A so that you may be ridiculed for your absurd statements. Don’t be an ass. The end. I’m not even going to link to them.

Joshua Davis

Joshua Davis, downing a few Red Bulls during his prezo, was the speaker that most resonated with me. I loved that he showed the process of how he developed his signature style. His art is the program he creates, not necessarily the visual result of the program. More information on his code would have been appreciated, but the audience’s consensus was to start the after party. His thoughts on his appropriation of Asian culture being considered new by Asians because they don’t see their own culture was intriguing.

Favorite Quote: You should be pissed off every time you open Photoshop and Illustrator.

September’s Sake

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon

It’s the second September in 19-years where I’m not starting a new school year. September has marked the ending and beginning of so many periods in my life.

I turned 23 shortly after I completed my last class at Emerson and felt old for the first time. It was the first age when I wasn’t necessarily looking for the next milestone. I’m still adjusting to the idea of life not being delineated by semesters.

Remembering where I came from is increasingly difficult. I’m trying so hard to see where I’m going. It’s funny how important certain events seem when they’re happening, which snapshots of those events will become memories, and how those memories will ultimately be compared in importance. When I think about my childhood, it starts with my dad exclaiming, “You’re a big boy now!” on my first day of first grade and then blurs to missing my mom, missing my friends from high school, missing Alan Hankin, loving Arthur, and stops at my dad smiling at my graduation in May.

I wrote my first grade teacher an email last Sunday. I found her address on my elementary school’s website. Email was just becoming popular when I was in first grade and universities were the only education institutions with websites. She hasn’t emailed me back yet. I hope she at least reads it and remembers the kid who loved to walk down the hallways with the murals of famous NASA photographs. He didn’t grow up to be an astronaut, but he hasn’t lost his lust for exploration.

Photo credit: NASA

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