SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

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 gmail + followers, ...

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" space in general.Talk is a difficult t...

On social interaction design and the detective

I have a thing for British television. It's from having grown up in Edinburgh, I'm sure. But it is bolstered by the fact that some British television is in fact really good.One of my favorites is the crime drama "Cracker," which features Robbie Coltrane (whom you might know as Hagrid of Potter fame). This three-season gem is a masterpiece of the form. In it, Coltrane plays a hard-drinking, hard-living forensic psychologist who is called in by the police to help solve particularly nasty crimes.Th...

The socially-mediated NYTimes: What would interest the reader?

The New York Times has just published an interesting piece on why readers email articles. The research (Social Transmission and Viral Culture) was conducted by Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. In the Times article, Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It's Awesome, author John Tierney summarizes some of the study's surprising conclusions.According to Tierney, the study examined reasons behind which articles are emailed most by readers. It ad...

SXD: The construction of objective relations and operations

This piece has been adapted from a white paper I have in progress on the social web and social media. The paper concerns the deep relationality of social media. This is an excerpt on the construction of relations.ConnectionsThe world of the web is built on data that has neither fixed position nor place in terms of physical reality, but which exists by dint of its accessibility. This world of information available as you go, on an "as needed" basis, is constructed out of links. Because it depends...

Algorithmic authority: critical reflections

In a post late last year on algorithmic authority, Adina Levin compares and contrasts the relevance of social selections and recommendations made in Google and Facebook. She raises the question of the algorithm's capacity to approximate human preferences.On Facebook's Friend recommendations and use of social algorithms to surface relevant news, a topic of discussion at the time, she writes: "Louis Gray writes that this approach caused him to miss the news that his sister, who'd been regularly po...

On the private/public distinction, publicy, and sociality

I am late to the discussion about privacy sparked by Facebook's decision to go public (so to speak). A good many points have been raised by Zuckerberg's claim that times have changed, including reflections on privacy, identity, publics, and sociality. Stowe Boyd has a new term for this: publicy. Tim Leberecht's reflection on sociality is worth note. And Adina Levin points out some of the points raised by Stowe in a post on boundary formation. But rather than offer my position on privacy, I'd lik...

SxD: Primary and Secondary Frames

I wrote several times last year about frames and re-framing the approaches to social media design. The concept of frames is borrowed from Erving Goffman's analysis of face-to-face social interactions. In brief, frames are how we know What's going on, and consequently, How to proceed. In Goffman's analysis, frames permit a vast number of opportunities to change and shift What's going on by means of what he calls keyings, reframings, cues and more. It's by means of the concept of frames that a com...

Broken social (online) scenes

I've just gotten off a skype call with friend and colleague, and fellow sxdsalon member Thomas Vander Wal. Thomas and I pick up the virtual phone about every month or six weeks to tie up loose conversational threads. We usually manage to get into a two hour tangle, after which we have new threads to tie up, half of which are actually knots.I enjoy talking to Thomas in part because there simply aren't that many social media theory and concept geeks out there. Thomas' experience and history in the...

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...