Over on Conversation Agent, Fast Company’s Valeria Maltoni touches on something worth noting.

She discusses the controversial Motrin ad, an online video promoting a pain medication product that sparked uproar last month.

Maltoni connects the outburst to anguish Americans who’ve lost their savings, jobs, and homes are feeling this holiday season:

“The Motrin ad became the catalyst for these sentiments, the social object for people to come together and talk about how badly they felt.”

Bingo.

The most disruptive social objects articulate something masses of people urgently feel, but lack a way to express.

The Motrin ad became symbolic. Like making salt, shoe throwing, and un-pimping autos.

Unfortunately, in Motrin’s case the feelings were fear, anger and despair. The ad was pulled, along with an apologetic email from the company.

Ads are not about products. They’re social objects in themselves.

It's been a little over a year since the Jaiku team and I joined Google.

My time has mainly been spent building infrastructure that makes it easier to share social objects on Google's Web and mobile services.

Some of the pieces of this infrastructure are really basic. For instance, I've worked with the team that built a profile page for Google users (mine is here). If you are using google.com in English, you can now access your profile by clicking on My Account.

For more on profiles, see Duncan Riley's recent post on TechCrunch.

Another piece of the puzzle has been to enable people to share social objects with the contacts in their address book. Gmail now lets you organize your contacts to Friends, Family, and Co-Workers. You can then share items on Google Reader with your Friends group. You will see these same groups in various Google products that let you share information with people. If you own a G1 phone you know those same contacts are also synced to the mobile phonebook.

I also helped Brad Fitzpatrick launch the Social Graph API. Although this API is not a visible product, it powers many services such as the suggested links on your Google profile. Collaborating with Brad has been one of my delights of the year, since I had wanted to work with him on the social graph problem already before either one of us joined Google.

Jaiku has been a 20% project, meaning it has been getting about one day a week of my time.

Over the last few days a conversation about the future of Jaiku has been taking place on blogs (relevant posts in English here, here, here, and here) and Jaiku (current active threads here, here, here). I regard the Jaiku community as friends, and your concern about the future of the service is legitimate. It warrants a response. What follows is my personal angle.

We announced this spring on the Jaiku blog that Jaiku will be ported to Google App Engine. Since the porting has not been a full time project, and development involves working on a still maturing new infrastructure as well as maintaining the legacy site, its velocity has not been as high as I had hoped. That said, we're on schedule and expecting to ship in the new year.

Google isn't staffing up Jaiku.com. But we love the product and plan to open up its development to the user community more in the future. I'm not ready to talk about the details yet, so stay tuned for more news about that in the new year on Jaiku.

This is a step in the direction we all want to go: away from the
tyranny of silos towards freely interoperable social
networks. People should be able to post and follow status updates across servers just like they send email. No single service, no matter how large and powerful, is the platform. The Web is the platform.

In spite of the decision to not throw resources at building Jaiku into an independent Web brand, recall that the acquisition announcement stated that "Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users." Of course this statement still holds true, and you can bet your Android that there are completely new Wow!'s in store.

I hope that after reading this you, like me, are getting more and more tickled by what 2009 has to bring.

And now that Ulla and I are done having kids for a while, my new year's promise is to also return to blogging.

Yesterday the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium ran a session on social objects. It was chaired by Tom Coates and included great talks by Matt Webb (Schulze & Webb), Kati London (Botanicalls), and Rob Faludi (ITP).

I talked about some less explored aspects of objects, about which social theory has interesting things to say.

First, how entrepreneurs build power relationships by turning their object into an obligatory point of passage. This is a way to deconstruct what sustains an existing service and what changes could possibly disrupt it.

Second, how objects make us come back to them, and how this cycle is based on incompleteness and wanting. This is a more philosophical take on what Web developers mean when they talk about stickiness.

Third, how meaningful human relationships are built around a renewing of oneself and the object, and how standardization can step in the way by limiting richness of expression across the board. This links to challenges services have sustaining growth and providing value to users over extended periods of time.

Reboot has now published the video of my talk on social objects, social peripheral vision, and nodal points. I gave a slightly developed, much condensed version of the same at PICNIC08 last week. Below’s the blurb from the Reboot site. The length of the video is 33 minutes.

Activity streams are turning social services into a flow of updates, filtered through people. Mobility is introducing new types of social objects that change the nature of the update streams both into something more frequent and more ambient, but also more vulnerable to noise. In this world the capability to aggregate updates from across the Web and and filter out noise becomes a key problem. I’ll demonstrate how the concepts of social objects and social peripheral vision can be applied to make sense of this shift in the locus of innovation on the social Web, and share some personal war stories along the way.

Update: the video used to be embedded here, but the embed code is no longer working. click here to see the video on the Reboot 10 web site.

This week Google Reader updated its Shared Items so users can share them with a hand-picked friend group. Up until now sharing on Reader has bee limited to Google Talk chat contacts.

From the perspective of object-centered sociality it’s easy to understand why many Reader users asked for a separate list. On Talk, people connect with folks they want to chat with. The social object there is the chat conversation. Reader took a different object, a blog article, and made it shareable. Many people’s chat networks didn’t map perfectly to their blog-reading networks, which the Reader team recognized.

A part of my job has been to make it easier to share things on Google, so it’s been great to work with the Reader team and see them launch this update. It gives users greater control over the audience they share with and consume from.

By the way, one of the details worth noting is that sharing on Reader can be asymmetrical. That is, you can let someone see your shared items without necessarily having to subscribe to theirs. Personally I find this really useful. I’m fine sharing articles with a broad audience, but following everyone back would be drinking from the firehose.

I prefer to follow a smaller group of people who are good at picking up things in a space that I’m interested in. That tends to change depending on what I’m working on, so it’s useful to be able to update subscriptions without affecting who can see my shared stuff.

Congrats to the Reader team!

Here’s a video of the social objects & nodal points keynote from The Web and Beyond: Mobility conference:

The busy folks at SPRXMobile also published a video of the talk on their site today. The audio isn’t quite as good in that version but the slides are easier to read.

Copenhagen’s Reboot is one of a few conferences I would not miss.

This year was the 10th anniversary of the event, and true to the spirit of its theme ‘free’ it ended with a self-organized beer-sharing huddle on the street in front of the afterparty venue.

The town being Copenhagen, and the crowd being Rebooters, the huddle swelled into a full-scale street party that didn’t stop until the police arrived on the scene. (Here’s a video from when it was still relatively early in the night).

In my talk I discussed how activity streams are turning social services into a flow of updates, filtered through people, and tried to show how the concepts of social objects and social peripheral vision can be applied to make sense of this shift.

Reboot is reportedly going to post a video of the talk online some time soon. In the meanwhile, here are the slides:

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As usual, the conference was packed with interesting speakers and I didn’t get to listen to half of the people I would have liked to hear. Some highlights included David Weinberger on Babbage, Chris Messina on ‘Free to migrate‘ and Eric Wahlforss and Alex Ljung on their startup Soundcloud.

Also, the talks from Reboot 9 were recently posted online – here’s mine about microblogging and tiny social objects.

Tonight we demonstrated Jaiku running on Google App Engine, a new development environment that enables anyone to develop Web services that can scale up to millions of users using Google’s massive server infrastructure.

The announcement was made a short while ago at a campfire event here on the Google campus in Mountain View. Robert Scoble broadcasted live video from the event using his Nokia phone; a production-quality video will be posted in a few hours on the Google App Engine site.

Jaiku will be fully deployed on Google App Engine in the near future. More details on the Jaikido blog.

Joe has been working on something I like a lot, the OpenSocial Foundation (opensocial.org). It was announced this morning (there’s a press call starting in about an hour). It’ll be jointly founded by Yahoo MySpace and Google. The current estimate for bootstrapping the entity is July.

Here’s a quote from him the release:
"The formation of this foundation will ensure that [OpenSocial] remains [a community-driven specification] in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open."

The three key points are as follows:

• all specifications are available under a Creative Commons copyright license
• public community involvement shapes the specification direction
• an open source reference implementation called Shindig is being created and developed as a project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator, available at http://incubator.apache.org/shindig

The jury’s still out, but OpenSocial could become an important creative enabler as a significant distribution network for social apps. If that’s the case, having the spec under the management of an independent entity is not a bad idea.

The wedding outfits I mentioned in the previous post were released at the Paris Fashion Week on Tuesday. The dress, a flat hexagon that opens up into a complex, delicate form, is called Kide; here’s a photo and reportage. 

Which brings me to the title of the post. Today’s our wedding day.

Ilkka Suppanen, a founder of the acclaimed Snow Crash design collective, had earlier formulated an idea he called “a beautiful day” as a challenge to designers. It is a call to act on the future of a world deep in the grip of change that could wipe out much of what people everywhere hold dear. The wedding is part of Dai Fujiwara’s answer. He sees in it birth.

I think of the beautiful day notion simply in the context of relationships. We can make each day a beautiful one to those we love.

We’re living a time when it is radically easier for people to come together than it was just ten years ago – like with these leading designers’ collaboration around the wedding. This is no doubt a good thing. But there’s another side to the growing intensity of interaction. People are also dropping relationships on a whim. According to a study by Rutgers University, only 63% of American children grow up with both biological parents – the lowest figure in the Western world.

Happiness requires longetivity. That you stick around in a relationship. But sticking around is hard, because you’ve got to keep changing yourself to renew it. A wedding makes one face this fact, I think. There are other ways to face it too, of course. But that’s what this wedding and all the wonderful activity around it is really about: facing oneself without false presumptions, naked. Acknowledging that if love and happiness are what we desire, then making each day a beautiful one, that’s what it’s going to take.