SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

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...

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 ...

Social media, converging streams?

One of my favorite books about community is a work by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti called Crowds and Power. It's a beautiful and thoroughly insightful study on people assembled in different ways and for a kaleidoscopic set of reasons. I turn to the book often when thinking about how social media both separate and connect us, using it as an imaginary frontier of sorts for what mediated crowds might or could do.A piece by Tim Leberecht reminded me of Canetti this morning. Got me thinking about...

Activity Streams: Realtime and Streamtime

The realtime web is living on borrowed time. Not in the sense that time's running out on realtime. But in the sense that the realtime web actually involves two kinds of time. One is the time in which information is delivered. We call that realtime. The other is the user's time, which I'm going to call streamtime.Realtime is immediate, streamtime is borrowed. The realtime web operates immediately. The streamtime experience is immediacy.A lot has been said about realtime and our immediate access t...

Activity Streams: Content and Flow

The realtime trend continues unabated, with presentations at TechCrunch50, Facebook's recent updates, and next-generation newspaper designs all extending the impact and value of the stream in social media. Disaggregation begets reaggregation, as demonstrated by the newcomer threadsy this week. As client applications and new services add organization and structure to activity, news, status, and twitter streams, we see hints of what is likely to come in the months ahead.I think there are two disti...

Structured Tweeting?

Adina Levin of Socialtext posted recently about Tags for ActivityStrea.ms. I've been enjoying online conversations with Adina quite a lot of late; there's a constructive Venn overlap between our approaches to design for social media and social interactions.Given the amount of time we all spend skimming through Facebook status updates, twitter, and blog posts and comments, the idea of tagged activity streams has a strong appeal for me. But without going into detail into the proposed architecture ...