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.

I’m off to Redmond tomorrow, having been invited by Marc Smith to attend the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium. Judging by the documentation from last year’s workshop, it promises to be an interesting gathering.

Here’s my short position paper:

The Social Implications of Location Awareness in ‘Third Places’: Learnings from Aula Helsinki

A large part of mobile messaging traffic is about coordinating face-to-face meetings, many of which take place in so-called third places between home and work. A growing number of mobile social softwares (e.g. Imahima, Dodgeball, Plazes, GeoNotes) allow people to define a physical location, announce their presence in that location, and see who else is now checked in, was there earlier, or plans to head there in the future. However, we know relatively little about how these services actually affect the usage patterns of cafés, bars, and other third places. In our research on the use of the Hunaja (Finnish for ‘honey’) system at Aula’s social club in Helsinki, we found that new forms of serendipity, self-promotion, stalking and avoidance emerged when club members used their mobile phones to check who was in the Aula space. The focus of the talk will be on an ethnographic case study of these emerging social uses of the Hunaja system. The case will be related to the broader social implications of proximity and location sensors in mobile devices. The central argument is that location-awareness services can turn third places into physical buddy lists where comings and goings become ways to change one’s status from ‘online’ to ‘offline.’ To the users, such services can function as symbolic instruments for acquiring and maintaining membership in a community and marking territory; practical tools for optimizing paths in the city to initiate and avoid encounters with specific others; and playful objects for expressing humour and triggering creative social mischief. However, they are also a rich source of misunderstandings and afford ways to purposefully stalk and deceive other users.

Here’s a link to my profile at the MSR SCS2005 site.

For a few years now, socially-minded tinkerers have been building various systems for locating friends in bars. The most popular approach to solving this problem technically has been to dump the required computation about where you are to the user (see Imahima and Dodgeball, for instance). The problem is that to shout “Here I am!” users have to learn to input the commands, which is a bit clumsy even on i-mode phones. Another approach has been to use GPS or cellular positioning, but even where the technology is available, it’s not precise enough. A third way is the check-in/check-out approach, where some piece of technology (usually a low-cost card-swiper, infrared beacon, or RFID reader) is installed in the physical setting and users carry some sort of ID tags. There the problem is the cost and scalability. When building the Aula space for instance, we wanted for there to be a graceful way to let other members know when you’re there. After months of negotiations with the building management, wiring the door locks, and scavenging hardware, we managed to get the RFID-based Hunaja system working. But transferring the system to other premises was too costly, and so we had to shut Hunaja down when Aula left that space. The fourth and most recent solution is to do the tracking with WiFi or Bluetooth, although users then need an expensive terminal. Even if no one has quite figured it out yet, there might be a niche for a business model here, because (some) proprietors are willing to pay to attract a community of regulars, and (some) people will pay to publish their whereabouts to their small worlds when they’re out in town. (Although for sure it does have its problems, like stalking.)