Bruce MacVarish Notes

Ambient & Incidental Media

“We look at the near future, a universe next door in which media travels freely onto surfaces in everyday life. A world of media that speaks more often, and more quietly..."

“In contrast to a Minority Report future of aggressive messages competing for a conspicuously finite attention, these sketches show a landscape of ignorable surfaces capitalising on their context, timing and your history to quietly play and present in the corners of our lives.”

Media surfaces: Incidental Media from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

It is interesting to think about how ambient and incidental design could improve contextual communication applications that integrate location, social and personal data.

(via Bruce Sterling )

Facebook Phone - A Social Filter Device

(Photo by Lucascepeda and modified with permission)

I believe we will see more and more application specific mobile devices over the next 24 months.  

As both consumers and business users deal with "social exhaustion" and look for help filtering the streams of information coming their way, some will seek purpose built, integrated application + mobile device solutions as their filter.

With all the chatter on the potential of a Facebook Phone, I thought I'd dig around for earlier thinking on the concept and reasoning.  

I found posts by Arrington, Rubel and Sanford helpful.   Some of their key points:

Michael Arrington on Facebook secretly building a Phone:

 

"Facebook is building a mobile phone, says a source who has knowledge of the project. Or rather, they’re building the software for the phone and working with a third party to actually build the hardware. Which is exactly what Apple and everyone else does, too.

Specifically, Facebook wants to integrate deeply into the contacts list and other core functions of the phone. It can only do that if it controls the operating system.

Two high level Facebook employees – Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos – are said to be secretly working on the project, which is unknown even to most Facebook staff.

Both have deep operating system experience.

Hewitt helped create the Firefox browser and was working on Parakey before it was acquired by Facebook in 2007. Parakey, which never launched, was described as a “Web-based operating system.” Hewitt also created all of Facebook’s iPhone web apps and then native apps, but finally quit building for the iPhone in disgust late last year. But he knows operating systems and he knows mobile.

Papakipos also has a perfect background for this project. He was leading the Google Chrome OS project until June. He then quit and went to Facebook. Papakipos is considered a rockstar developer, and there are any number of jobs he’d be able to do at Facebook.

But that doesn’t answer the question of why he’d leave the Chrome OS project before it was finished. It would have taken something really interesting to lure him away. Something like a Facebook Phone, for example.

So what might this phone look and feel like? We don’t know yet. When will it be announced? Don’t know. But I’d speculate that it would be a lower end phone, something very affordable, that lets people fully integrate into their Facebook world. You call your friend’s name, not some ancient seven digit code, for example. I’d imagine Facebook wanting these things to get into as many hands as possible, so I’d expect a model at a less than $50 price. Pay your bill with Facebook Credits. Etc.

As for timing, the holiday season is always a good time to launch new products. But that may be too soon.

All we know for sure is that Hewitt and Papakipos are working on something very stealthy together. And we have a source that tells us that stealthy thing is a Facebook phone.

We’re also not discounting possible partnerships around this. Spotify was said to be working on a phone with INQ last year based on a shared investor, Li Ka-Shing. It turns out Li Ka-Shing is also a sizeable investor in Facebook. So an INQ/Facebook partnership on a phone certainly wouldn’t be a surprise."

 

and Steve Rubel speculated about how Facebook will need to pursue a Facebook Phone:

"...if the desktop was the battleground in the 1990s and the web was in the 2000s then mobile is where the battle for dominance will take place next. 

Consider these three data points, all of which are fresh...

• According to Mary Meeker, more people will connect to the Internet via mobile devices than PCs in five years
• Forrester reports that 17% of US consumers have smartphones. (That means that 83% don't.)
• And Pew says that 55% of Americans connect wirelessly (And 45% therefore don't)

And that's just the US. Combine these three trends on a global level and it's obvious that mobile is the future. Mobile is a far far larger market than mainframes, PCs or even the web. It will have lots and lots of winners in hardware, software and services. This is why I believe Facebook can't sit on the sidelines anymore.

They will be on every device, but they eventually will try to launch their own hardware too.

... and Jamie Sanford outlines why he sees a Facebook Pad / Phone on the horizon:

 

Let’s face it – Facebook is almost a complete OS in and of itself.  With a little development of a Lnux kernel to get a device booted and loading the Facebook environment, you’d be able to simply turn on the phone and be “in” Facebook.  Think about what you use your phone/pad device for now:

Contacts

You already have contacts in Facebook.  They may have phone numbers in profiles (they may have them hidden to you via privacy settings).  So, how hard would it be to simply build off of that for dialing?  Now all of your contact management becomes embedded in Facebook.  It becomes the hub of your human interactions and that is simply used as part of the FacePad.

Location-Based Services

Facebook announced last month that it was going to start integrating more of its location-based services into the platform.  Share your location and now you are leveraging a network of people to find information that is relative to where you are right now.  Did a Facebook friend of yours 'like' a certain restaurant you’re near?  Suddenly, that restaurant review has relevance because it’s not a stranger reviewing it – it’s a Facebook friend who you have some trust with already.  The value of location-based services with friendship affinity tied to it is tremendous in creating weight of a review.

Mapping/Navigation

Remember in June of 2009 when Facebook announced that it would start showing Bing search results in Facebook?  How far off do you think that Bing Maps are from being integrated into Facebook as well?  And what if these maps integrated the results of the location-based services mentioned above?  Yikes. 

Voice Chat

Last year, Facebook announced the Vivox voice chat functionality that was coming to the site.  Think of how this could now integrate into the FacePad.  It would be akin to having Skype built in and could leverage your network connection vs. airtime with the cellular provider.

Once again, why is this important?

I believe we will see more and more application specific mobile devices over the next 24 months.  

As both consumers and business users look for help filtering the streams of information coming their way, some will seek purpose built, integrated application + mobile device solutions as their filter.

Can a Salesforce Phone built in cooperation with RIMM be far behind?

 

UPDATE 9/24 - Om summarizes what he believes will be the user experience on the Facebook (INQ) Phone:

The Facebook layer, as Zuckerberg describes, will run on a thin, stripped-down version of Android. Though, if I’m Nokia, I would be making a beeline to Zuckerberg’s office right about now.

What Facebook has to do is not build the OS, but instead build a user experience based on HTML5. WebOS did a good job of building a mobile experience based on web technologies.

A consumer’s Facebook ID becomes more important than the phone number itself. Login with Facebook ID, and your social network auto-magically syncs up with the phone. (Android users have seen their Google phones do this since day one. Stacey finds it annoying.)

Facebook becomes the address book or the contact list for the phone, giving Facebook users an option to call, IM, SMS, or mail their network via the data connection. Since Facebook already has our phone numbers, it can make it easy to call other cell phones or landlines. (Again, not a big deal for Android users who have this feature at their disposal.)

As Clearspring CEO and one of our readers, Hooman Radfar, so aptly said, “Facebook is effectively a set of applications with an underlying common messaging and authentication infrastructure. So, by definition, Facebook also is a set of disparate applications (photos, inbox, chat) that is connected by a social layer.” That is why you will see Facebook apps will be separated into individual apps and subsumed into the phone experience.

For instance, Facebook photos will communicate directly with the camera and become the repository for photos, with almost no difference in the cloud and the local photo storage. Take a picture and save it to Facebook.

As Liz pointed out, Facebook can give phones presence-based intelligence based on location, scheduled events and meetings, and of course, the time of the day. You’ll see some of that in the new phone.

The news feed, too, will become part of the mobile experience. I’d say it would be a more evolved experience compared to Moto BLUR and other such efforts.

Using GPS chips, the phone will give you the ability to locate your friends. It can help get you discount coupons for local eateries and bars for example.  That is why I think Facebook Places is an important initiative for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, and why it ended up acquiring the Hot Potato team.

 

Sixth Sense - Blending Digital + Real World Interactions

At a Nov 2009 Ted presentation, Pranav Mistry of the MIT Media Lab provided an update on the status of his Sixth Sense Project and his vision for integrating our interactions between the digital and real world.

As you watch this, consider the possibilities of an open platform that changes how we experience and interact with digital information to augment our work and personal transactions, conversations and relationships.

Collaboration Curves, Network Effects and Games@Work

"The more players participate and interact with WoW's knowledge economy, the more valuable its resources become, and the faster players increase their rate of performance improvement. 

Said more generally, the more participants--and interactions between those participants--you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up."  --- @jhagel John Hagel, Introducing the Collaboration Curve

(an interesting follow-up to "The Future of Games @ Work" )

Evolving toward a People-Centric, Real-Time Web

There are plenty of reasons to consider the collaborative opinions of Chris Messina and Jyri Engstrom. Chris is a champion of the open web and leads/contributes to the DiSo Project, OpenID, OAuth, microformats, activitystrea.ms and Portable Contacts initiatives.   Jyri is the founder of Jaiku, one of the first real-time microblogging social / mobile apps acquired by Google.   Both Chris and Jyri have co-authored a post outlining their vision for the next phase of the web and describe it as a "people-centric, real-time web":

"It’s 2009, going on 2010. For the past three years, the web has been morphing into a real-time and people-centric place. We’ve seen this trend among individual users — through their actions and demands for better social experiences — but also increasingly among companies and developers. We want a web that’s more “like us” than the old model was. We want a web where people are as important to the architecture of the system as documents."

Both Chris and Jyri recently presented at Mindtrek where they outlined their perspectives on the value of taking control over our personal identity, our activity streams and social objects as the people-centric, real-time web emerges. 

Chris presented Identity is the Platform with a focus on data capital and social objects centered on our personal identity across the open web:

1. Data Capital - All the data we're creating as personal activity streams has value ... and we should control access / use

2. Social Objects - Activity streams related to our "social objects" are meaningful and valuable too

Jyri presented Snack Size Sociality outlining how the battle for the people-centric, real-time web will focus on 4 important areas:  

1. People's identity
2. Activity Stream Routing
3. The Social Inbox
4. Real-time Search

I think it is valuable to consider both of Chris's and Jyri's Mindtrek presentations together as an indication of how they see the People Centric, Real-Time Web emerging.   They've pointed to key enablers that include:

- Portable profiles means that instead of creating an account on each service you join, you can now host your identity in one place and bring your profile and friends with you to other sites as you surf the social web. Webfinger, OpenID, Portable Contacts, and OAuth all make this possible (and for bootstrapping profiles from the legacy document-web, we have Google’s Social Graph API).

- Distributed Push Publishing means there is no longer a need to rely on proprietary platforms. The emerging standards here are PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud (see comparisons on TheNextWeb and TechCrunch).

- Synchronized Conversation Threads means that users can participate on the same conversation thread across multiple interfaces and services (we are still waiting for a standard, for which various geeks are actively devising a plan). Check out the Salmon effort as an example. 

So you might say that the people centric, real-time web will be based on a stack of building block technologies a la the DiSo Project:

- OpenID
- OAuth
- Portable Contacts / Profiles
- PubSubHub / rssCloud
- activitystrea.ms
- Conversation Threading (example Salmon Protocol)

While it is early days in this next phase of web innovation, we'll see progress and proof points continue to emerge in the consumer space.   So let's say we see the emergence of a people centric real-time web as envisioned by Chris and Jyri.   

What might that mean for the enterprise?  

How and when will this set of building block technologies impact the enterprise space and create new value for business users?

Is it reasonable to think that the enterprise will embrace a people-centric, real-time web, when they've had a hard time embracing the social web?

PS: I'm a big fan of the opportunity and user value to be generated by "conversation threading" and have been pushing an enterprise Sensing, Threading, Sharing strategy for a while now...

Visualizing Meaning and Seeing Sentiment

information aesthetics (where form follows data) continues to provide insight and leadership on information visualization.   I like the current post highlighting Pecha Kucha's presentation at Ignite Salt Lake (see below) with Mattias Shapiro discussing how different data visualization techniques can be used to determine what particular datasets are telling us.

In the Conversation / Attention / Engagement Economy, conversation analytics will become increasingly important.  Being able to quickly visualize meaning and see the sentiment of the conversations we engage will be extremely valuable to users and to brands.

  

 

The Future of Games @ Work

"Applying Principles of Game Design to Engage Business Users"

A recent survey of over 70 Fortune 500 CIO's identified enabling "collaboration across remote locations" as one of their significant challenges over the next 3 years.   Yet, we have seen a number of different applications and technologies developed to address the problem of collaboration across a distributed workforce. Audio Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Video Conferencing, Instant Messaging, Social Software, Mobility solutions and more have all emerged as communication and collaboration apps focused on helping users collaborate across remote locations. 

In most cases, these collaborative technologies have been deployed for some time and are available for today's business users.  But many of these tools are under utilized by enterprise users.   While some business users will never be ready or willing to adopt next generation comm & collaboration applications, I believe that most are ready... they just need to be fully engaged.

Most communication and collaboration applications are on the path to improving the overall user experience, but to engage business users it will take more than just clean interaction design or appealing visual design.   Yes, understanding the job, the needs or behaviors of a business user and integrating that into the interaction flow of a collaboration application is necessary, but it is not sufficient. 

 

To engage business users in a compelling and continuously productive collaboration experience, enterprise apps need to tap the user's individual motivation, unleash the user's curiosity and align the user's incentives, unique skills and social networks.  Are there proxies for this type of engagement?  Yes; in multiplayer gaming applications.  A powerful example of users who are engaged in self-motivated, aligned, collaborative efforts can be found in massive, multi-player on-line games.  

 

Today’s massive multiplayer online (MMO) games provide powerful and engaging collaboration software that appeals to the user's motivation, curiosity and social awareness.  To me, they hint at important design elements for future enterprise collaboration applications. Nick Yee at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Stanford's VHIL has focused his research on social interaction and self-representation in virtual environments.   According to Yee, "..the purpose of of all video games is to train players to work harder while still enjoying it. The success of on-line games demonstrates how seductive and concealed the work treadmill can be."  Imagine if you could get your work colleagues to collaborate at the same level of engagement and collaboration found in MMOs.  It is coming.

Many business users in the enterprise today are playing MMO games and the numbers will increase.   As a result, we should expect to see their impact on the communication & collaboration market.  Just as we're seeing the social / Web 2.0 generation demand social collaboration software at work, the emerging MMO generation of business users will demand that their work experience mirror in some way the engagement and enjoyment of their gaming experience. 

Games at Work are becoming serious business.  A number of academic and industry researchers have been investigating how MMOs deliver both user engagement and collaborative productivity across remote or distributed locations. 

By applying the insights of researchers like Jane McGonigal, Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, Nick Yee, Byron Reeves and IBM, we can draft a set of guiding principles worth considering as we envision future communication and collaboration applications in the enterprise.  Let's take a quick look at the research of Jane, Byron and IBM to highlight the opportunity of engaging users through game design:

Jane McGonigal is a game designer, a games researcher, a future forecaster, and a very playful human being.  Jane's research scope extends from analyzing and forecasting the "Engagement Economy" at the Institute for the Future, to helping create the genre of "Alternate Reality Games" (ARGs) that connect game worlds with the real world.   Her work highlights that collaborative MMOs succeed because they offer clear boundaries, a shared problem and build a community of collaboration.   Jane's vision of the "Engagement Economy" builds on her research of human engagement and behaviors of players in successful, extreme scale collaboration MMOs. Based on her research, MMO games succeed because they fully engage the user by providing: 

(1) Satisfying Work to Do
(2) Experience at Being Good at Something
(3) Time spent with people they like
(4) The chance of being part of something Bigger

Byron Reeves is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and Co-Founder and Faculty Co-Director of the H-STAR Institute (Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research) and its industrial affiliate program, Media X.   He is also on the Board of Directors for Seriosity - a company he co-founded with J. Leighton Reed.   From the Seriosity web site:

Seriosity's mission is to change the way people work together in functions requiring a high level of collaboration, communication, and feedback in today's information-intensive business environments.

Our software products and services improve collaboration, innovation, and leadership by using game principles that create focus and motivation to align personal and corporate goals. Up to now, these design elements have been missing from traditional enterprise software applications.

We combine the best of these principles to create a synthetic economy, tailor-made for today’s information-intensive enterprise. Combined with our applications to support knowledge workers, the Seriosity solution facilitates a dynamic marketplace of ideas, attention, analysis, persuasion, and resource allocation.

IBM and Seriosity have done in depth research to understand how multiplayer online game environments in the virtual world apply to the business world to enhance productivity, innovation and leadership in a distributed world. Researchers studied people who headed up teams in online games and they also sought the insights of gamers who have led real-world business teams at IBM. Their most important finding is that getting the leadership environment right can be as important as choosing the right leader. They point out important aspects of game environments that companies might consider adopting as part of their communication and collaboration strategy.

So, what are the guiding principles of game design that we might apply to improve engagement and productivity of communication / collaboration apps for business users across the enterprise?  The details can be found in the research linked here... and numerous other resources found in the fields of game theory, game design and game psychology... but here's the start of a draft list:

Guiding Principles of Game Design @ Work - DRAFT 

Make it easy for collaboration leaders and business users to:

1. Define clear boundaries, shared problem(s) and a community of collaborative business users

2. Assign satisfying tasks or roles that enable business users to excel and be part of something "Bigger"

3. Build nonmonetary incentives into a game economy to strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.

4. Deliver hyper- transparency of information about users' skills and teams’ real-time performance 

5. Create a virtual economic marketplace for information and collaboration

6. Open multiple real-time sources of information and communication upon which to make decisions

7. Structure as a project-oriented organization that can easily be disbanded and reformed based on tasks and skills

8. Recognize individual, group and company achievements in a clear, specific way

9. Open visibility into all skills / project / social networks of communication across an organization

10. Adapt multiple, purpose-specific communications mediums to improve speed and efficiency of collaboration. 

I'll continue to refine and add to this draft list of guiding principles.  With a little vision, strategy and design, it is not hard to see how game design principles will be shaping the future of communication and collaboration applications.

Augmented Reality + Communications

Nokia has created a short video clip providing a glimpse of what we could expect when augmented reality and communications ( what I've been calling augmented communications ) come together to create a new user experience.

Their vision combines AR glasses, 3D audio, haptic bracelet, sensors and mobile cloud services to create a seamless integration of "mixed reality" communications and media. 

In the last 6 months we've seen the introduction of augmented reality browsers (see wikitude and layar) and a number of AR enabled applications (see yelp) emerge.  While it is still early in the evolution of AR applications and network infrastructure, it is moving forward quickly.  Portions of Nokia's vision are not that far away. 

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb offered 5 barriers to an AR web that is everywhere.  His list provides great guidance for all AR applications.   If I narrow the focus to outline 5 hurdles critical to broad adoption of Augmented Communication applications, we get:  

1. Ensure Augmented Communications must be Secure and Spam-Free
2. Create Augmented Communications Apps that are Social and Real-time (not solitary and cached)
3. Deliver a compelling Augmented Communications User Experience (not just a cool UI)
4. Develop an Augmented Communications platform that interoperates with other AR apps
5. Enable developers to create new Augmented Communication apps from your Open platform

With these 5 guiding principles in mind, take a look at Nokia's video clip and think about the opportunity to create new value for users through Augmented Communications.

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