SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

The Like as interest and social gesture

I have been meaning to write about Likes and users interests for quite some time. But the matter is complicated. So rather than wait to write the perfect post, I’m going to lay down some cornerstones, sketch a few concepts and maybe develop some key arguments. I’ll begin with a bit of the raison d’etre. Likes are not just the core social gesture on Facebook. They are a one-click sign of interest used on many kinds of social services. Likes are like social bookm...

From followers and game mechanics to more valuable social functionality

Some interesting perspectives appeared this week on game mechanics in social media and the corrupting devaluation of social systems, user experience, and metrics that seems to accompany follower counts, foursquare check-ins, and other numerical incentives to use. I just want to throw in my two cents from a social interaction design perspective. I agree that the simplicity of incentive models predicated on growing your numbers (and status) exist. (What I’ve called the appar...

When social search gets personal: ChatRoulette, Peerpong, Aardvark

A couple of items in the news this week got me thinking about the social search space. But not from the usual angle. We have all heard about ChatRoulette by now, and of the random acts of human exhibitionism that take place there. Well, apparently some of those random encounters were too good to let go of. And so some visitors have taken to the a new Missed Connections to find people they met on ChatRoulette. Cue “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for....

ChatRoulette, I’m watching you (watching me)

Thus at bottom the message already no longer exists; it is the medium that imposes itself in its pure circulation … the universe of communication … leaves far behind it those relative analyses of the universe of the commodity. All functions abolished in a single dimension, that of communication. That’s the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information. That’s obscenity. The hot, sexual obscenity of...

ChatRoulette, hall of mirrors

I told myself that I would refrain from posting today, having perhaps posted too much last week. But sometimes a post simply gets stuck, and like a ditty on spin cycle, begins writing itself. There’s naught then to do but wring the thing out. Alongside buzz on Buzz last week there was also the much less polished but in ways more magnetic attraction of tiny video phenom ChatRoulette. There’s little to say about the service itself, for it’s really just a couple w...

There’s Gold in that Heather: my Tummelvision video, and gratitudes

My appearance on last week’s live Tummelvision show with Heather Gold and Kevin Marks is up. We talked about Google’s Buzz, which at the time was only a few days old and not yet “fixed,” and social interaction design applied to conversation tools like twitter. And we took a pre-recorded question from fellow tummler Deb Schultz . I had a blast. Unfortunately, I only barely touched on social interaction design in general. But we applied it in principle to ...

Social and conversational implications of cross-referenced activity streams

Efforts are currently underway to link up @names and @replies in Buzz and make them share-able across networks using activity streams. If successful, this would mean that naming a user in one service would surface the message elsewhere. A buzz post containing an @twitter_username would resolve to the user’s twitter profile. And the mention could be surfaced within that user’s twitter stream. At this point in time the technical challenges are not simple. So the scena...

Google Buzz v twitter: more on micro-commentary

I wrote recently about the differences between twitter and Buzz, conjecturing that perhaps Buzz is micro-commentary. I have had a few more thoughts on this that I would like to share. I wrote in that post that communication in twitter is improbable, given its immense volume of flow. And I noted that calling out another user by name, or by RT, was one way to get their attention. Given that tweets are not addressed unless the user does this explicitly, there’s no other way t...

If twitter is micro-blogging, is Buzz micro-commentary?

After spending more time in Buzz I thought I would share a couple observations on the sociality of Buzz in comparison to that of twitter. Notable, and obvious to Buzz users, will be that Buzz is more conversational. It has a lot in common with Friendfeed, in that threaded comments accrue to popular posts in a self-reinforcing manner. The more commented the post, the more attention it gets. This is interesting in that the sociality in Buzz, which is based on the social graph of g...

Breaking down the Gbuzz

I am aware of the irony of posting about the the buzz on Google Buzz this week. But there’s no other way to contribute than to heap yet more on the pile. I’ll skip over the many good points that have been raised this week within buzz and alongside it. If you are reading this, you have probably read them. I want simply to make a few observations about the Buzz user experience, some of which are simply unavoidable, and many of which belong to the “conversation...