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 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...

2010: The start of a new decade

Really, this post is a reflection on 2009 and a look forward to 2010. 2009 was a strange year for me—it was like the growing pains of your teenage years. I started the year as Ph.D. student at UC San Diego. That sounds benign, but in fact, I was facing a department that set me up to fail, with what felt like mile-high walls that I had to climb over. I was placed on academic probation by my advisor who, instead of writing an email or telling me to my face that he didn’t like the direction...

Rybczynski’s chairs – on architectural layers in social design

One of my favorite pieces of writing on design is the section in Witold Rybczinski’s Home on the history of the chair. Comfortable, cushioned sitting tools are a relatively recent development in human history. Chairs didn’t start with the goal of comfort. In ancient times, rulers sat upon thrones, and “during the middle ages, the prime function of the chair was ceremonial. The man who sat was important – hence the term chairman.” Comfortable chairs, says Rybczin...

FB new privacy settings – a contrarian positive view

Facebook’s privacy changes are drawing a lot of fire, but they work pretty well for me, and are at bottom a positive change. But the way Facebook presents these changes is untrustworthy, and makes the company seem even more untrustworthy than they are being. Facebook now makes it easier for you to share information with the world, and to make that choice on a post-by-post basis, and to share posts with a specific set of people. In the past, I didn’t share much on Facebook because ...

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...

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...

Topical social filtering – how to create a tag-filtered twitter list feed

Twitter lists are a handy way of paying attention to a group of people with a common interest. But the trouble with using lists to focus attention is that people often tweet on more than one subject. When following a list of people interested in “government 2.0″, the list stream will include a lot of posts on other topics. But if you filter the stream on a hashtag, you now have a stream, with posts by interesting people, only about the topic you care about. Topically filtered li...

In praise of semipermeable social boundaries

In recent weeks, a number of folk have been writing in praise of Facebook’s closed-ended social model. Dare Abasanjo and Robert Scoble write that they prefer discussion threads that are not polluted by the unwelcome voices of strangers, as they are in FriendFeed and Twitter. I’d like to take a contrary position in favor of a more open model of online social interaction. The Facebook model is biased against getting to know new people. The Twitter model is biased in favor of gett...