SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

Interview on the Well about Designing Social Interfaces

This week we’ve begun a two-week-long interview in the Well’s public Inkwell conference. The interview is being led by Jon Lebkowsky my friend and longtime co-host of the Well’s blog conference. The cool thing about these interviews is that because they take two weeks and are published “live” they can cover a lot of interesting tangents, and so far Jon (along with Well denizens who’ve read the book, such as Brian Dear) has been asking me great, probing questio...

Are Twitter lists the new blogrolls?

Twitter is gradually rolling out lists, which let individuals create sets of twitter users they follow, and allow others to follow lists. I’m looking forward to the adoption of twitter lists, to all users and to clients, because they will help manage attention when following lots of people and find other interesting folk to follow. But I wonder how long the “lists” will last as a social game- will they stay interesting, or will they become 2010’s version of the blogroll?...

Oh for more good social usage research

Pew recently released its study of Twitter usage showing that 19% of internet users currently use Twitter or a similar social messaging service. The study has some intriguing results, including a statistic showing that cyborgs love twitter best – the more internet connected devices someone owns, the more likely to use Twitter – with 39% of respondents with four or more devices. And that Twitter users often come from the population that already uses social networking: “Internet ...

Social search and advertising: Google’s endgame?

A few weeks back, Jeremiah Owyang wrote a piece "Revealing Google's Stealth Social Network Play." In it he detailed the tactical benefits of a combined of Google Reader, Wave, and Sidewiki in a back-door strategy aimed at social networking. And more to the point, to realizing the advertising opportunities around social networking.Google has been neither a leader nor a even a decent case study in social networking. It's home-grown social network, Orkut, is popular elsewhere but not here. Open Soc...

Search the conversation

Now that Microsoft and Google are going to search Twitter, how to make that useful? Social search is clearly part of the answer – filtering results based on social proximity, based on friend/follow lists. There’s another piece that is missing – the context of the conversation. In Twitter, conversations are represented implicitly by a series of replies between users. Twitter itself does not show that explicitly, though there are clients that do so. The thing is, in Twitter...

How Facebook integrates FriendFeed – Discovery vs. Privacy

This week, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit popped up on FriendFeed to let folk know that developers are quietly at work on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. There has been a lot of discussion about the dropoff in FriendFeed traffic since the Facebook acquisition, and the appearance was intended to reassure the community. People weren’t reassured, not only because Buchheit didn’t share any details about what they’...

A time for focus, a time for distraction

Social messaging can quick way for a traveller to find a friend’s recommendation for dinner in a strange city, for a salesperson to get a quick answer to a question when a customer’s on the phone. Realtime communication can enable rapid response, but a constant stream of chatter can be a time-consuming distraction. In a Psychology Today article posted by Linda Stone and retweeted by Tim O’Reilly, a recent study by two MIT neurosciencentists shows that multitasking and distrac...

Designing social interfaces at Web Directions South 2009

I had a great time presenting at Web Directions South 2009. J.J. Halans took some wonderful photos at the event, such as the one showing the Where’s Waldo slide (above) and this one (showing Erin’s awesome visualization behind me): The slides by themselves are only part of the story of course but I’ve just posted them to slideshare (now synced with the audio podcast to make a “slidecast”): Designing Social Interfaces at Web Directions South 2009 View more document...

Diagramming the Social Ecosystem

One of the things we have been doing since way before we started the book, was to visualize the social ecosystem and the inter-relationships between categories, patterns and principles. Back in 2007, when I was still at Yahoo! and Bryce Glass was on my team, we developed a diagram for our general manager to talk about the social platforms we were developing and how they worked together. Christian and I took that diagram and modified it a bit for our Core Conversation at SXSW 09 [pdf] and ha...

Realtime streams: now and then

All social media involve a dislocation that de couples the act of communication or interaction from its artifact, which is a text or recording. This is a shame, in some respects, but one that creates possibilities that wouldn't exist if it weren't for the medium. The medium allows us to be always here and now but visible elsewhere anytime. It has a built in "anyplace, anytime."This anyplace, anytime is brought into focus by each of us when we use social media. For us it's always now. When I use ...