SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

Lunch for good, food for thought

A post by friend Chiah Hwu today has reminded me of a topic that was on my mind recently. That being both the subtext and explicit goal of a series of well-catered, guested, and hosted lunches organized by the name of LunchforGood. Assembled by Chris Heuer and Myles Weissleder and made possible by Lunch.com's J.R. Johnson, the lunch series kept attendees well-fed in exchange for food for thought. The connecting thread, as drawn out by Chiah: better use of social technologies in support of conve...

Designing for the gut

I want you to watch this video from a recent Sarah Palin rally (hat tip: Marshall Kirkpatrick). It gives us “who” I’m talking about. While you could chalk up the effect of the video to clever editing, I’ve seen similar videos that suggest that the attitudes expressed are probably a pretty accurate portrayal of how some people think (and, for the purposes of this essay, I’m less interested in what they think). It seems to me that the people in the video largely thin...

KA9ETP is now following KA2HNO

On the heels of a Chris Messina’s Status Update from 1940, here’s another story of how ultimately familiar this emergent use of Twitter-as-global-network is. Last week after Web 2.0 I spent a sunny Autumn morning wandering around in Brooklyn, including a stop at a favorite thrift store in Williamsburg. Pouring through their collections of old photos and postcards, a friend found something rather strange. Amidst the christmas cards and “wish you were here” messages from H...

Strategic Social Design & SxD. Some humble thoughts.

(caveat emptor: This is just a draft of thoughts I ran together this morning about some thinking I have been doing. I published it in the blog just to force me to tend to it, edit it, and gain feedback while I think through some of the issues that have been vexing me about designing [...]

Web 2.0 Prezo

I got a chance to speak at Web 2.0 last week about designing social software and the role of anthropology and sociology that process. It’s basically a paired down version of the piece at Core77, so if you read that through don’t expect see anything new The experience was a great one for me personally — I haven’t done many speeches to that size or critical an audience — but I do find myself wondering what the benefits of giving a keynote at a conference ultimately are. I know this is a tr...

A status update from 1940

Brynn and I went poking around Alemeda this weekend and stumbled into Pauline’s Antiques, the kind of place where you can find thick-walled whiskey glasses that were once sipped from by people who wore yellow sweaters unironically. Of course, you can find such yellow sweaters too, but what caught our attention were the unremarkable postcards scattered around the store reminiscent of a simpler time. But one must ask himself: was it really so different then? Superficially of course it certai...

Three Flavors of Social Search: What to Expect

This was originally posted on ReadWriteWeb on November 12, 2009, as a guest author. With Google’s Social Search experiment, Bing’s integration with Twitter, and with Yahoo!’s partnership with One Riot—it’s clear that social search has both potential and momentum. But what will social search look like, and will it help us search better? And if it will, how? I’ve written previously about how social search won’t replace traditional search, how social relevancy rank may b...

Unintended Side Effects

I have been presenting the material from our book over the last several months and have been asked questions about some of the anti-patterns and how we avoid or solve them. Most recently at Web 2.0, I was talking with a bunch of smart, interesting people and a few things have bubbled up that I think are worth poking at that we need to pay attention to as “social” becomes more ubiquitous. Issue 1: Authentication Service Hell The first is the UI and conceptual quagmire we have inadve...

Web 2.0 NY – Designing Social Interfaces Workshop

I attended Web 2.0 NY Expo this past week as a workshop presenter. I took the talk that Christian and I did at IDEA 09 and that I did at IxDA SF and fleshed it out into a 3 hour, hands on workshop. I believe it went well. Here are my slides: Designing Social Interfaces – Web 2.0 NY Workshop Version View more presentations from erin malone. One the new things I did, was take leftover cards from the Social Mania game and use them as flash cards (our original idea). I gave each partici...

On algorithmic authority: depends on the algorithm

Lately, the Facebook “friend recommender” has been making “helpful” suggestions. I should “poke” Josh Silver, executive director of FreePress, an advocacy group in favor of net neutrality. I should “friend” Steve Case, founder of AOL. I should introduce friends to the largest real estate developer in Menlo Park, who clearly needs my help. I should write on my Mom’s wall, since we haven’t corresponded lately on Facebook. Facebook̵...