Our friend Takashi Matsumoto, (who built the Post-Bit system with us here at FXPAL) built a cubic display called Z-agon with colleagues at the Keio Media Design Laboratory. Takashi points us at this video of a very nicely realized cubic display (well, five-sided, but still). It’s called pCubee: a Perspective-Corrected Handheld Cubic Display and it comes from the Human Communications Technology Lab at the University of British Columbia. Some of you may have seen a version of this demoed at ACM Multimedia 2009; it will also be at CHI 2010. Longer and more detailed video is here.

I’ve been using TweetDeck for over a year now, both on my laptop and on my iPhone. It’s a great tool for managing a moderate stream of tweets. The columns offer a convenient way to segment and organize tweets, and its display of certain media in-line is convenient. In the spirit of constructive criticism, I would like to offer a set of suggestions (some obvious, some maybe not) on how its user experience might be improved.

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Daniel Tunkelang wrote about Herb Simon’s attention economy and ways to measure the way people allocate attention. His example of attention-switching and interruptions with e-mail made me think about individual differences. People differ in the willingness to engage in an activity, and self-interruption is a common practice. You can measure time on task, but for complex cognitive tasks it is not clear that time is a good predictor of performance. The problem of measurement is more complex than simply aggregating times or counting switches.

In HCI, we have a notion of the fallacy of the average user — the notion that if you design for characteristics averaged over a large number of people, there may not exist a single person for whom the design is ideal. This due to the fact that certain phenomena have bimodal distributions rather than those with a central tendency. For example, Hudson et al. found that individual preferences in interruptibility suggested a bimodal distribution.

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Social computing is the future of interaction, explains Michael Bernstein, and he has a point. Leveraging the work of others rather than recreating it is the way civilizations are built. But that is not the whole story. There are instances when leveraging the work of others is the right thing to do, but there are also many situations where it is undesirable for moral, aesthetic, and practical reasons. The moral side is obvious — the undesirability of appropriating others’ work without their permission isn’t that controversial — but the aesthetic and practical aspects of reusing others’ content bear some additional scrutiny.

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In the spirit of Many Eyes, Jeff Clark has been developing visualizations of various kinds, including those of various Twitter collections. For example, his Twitter Venn diagram looks at intersections of tweets with three user-specified terms to help understand something about the way different concepts co-occur. Other visualizations look at word distributions associated with pairs of terms, and term use timlines.

The graphs are pretty and, perhaps, informative. His goal is to visualize complex data that don’t lend themselves to standard bar and pie charts. When these visualizations are effective, they can reveal insight that textual representations fail to convey, but the trick is to understand what is effective when. Tufte‘s design guidelines are a start, but one based on a rather static notion of data visualization. Apparently Bertin was more attuned to interaction, but was still trapped in a static medium.

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Last week I saw a BayCHI talk by Elaine Wherry of Meebo, in which she used the history of classical music as an analogy for the evolution of user interface and interaction design of web-based user interfaces. The parallels she established between the Baroque era and what we have experienced in the last decade of “Web 2.0” interfaces are compelling.

Baroque music arose during the Renaissance as a reaction to the impoverished musical forms characteristic of the middle ages, an era dominated by monastic chants and songs of Troubadours. The Renaissance brought a revolution in music-making technology with the invention of a range of musical instruments. Unlike the sparse music that preceded it,  Baroque music is characterized by a profusion of notes that, while initially interesting, tend to overwhelm and can render the composer’s melody unrecognizable.

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I wanted to clarify the point I tried to make in my blog post about Bobo and LinkedIn’s use of faceted search. I ended that post with a confusing question about faceted search framework in Lucene, and was quickly reminded by Bob Carpenter and others that Solr provides that capability. My comment was poorly made.

My comment about facets was related to programming the interface rather than to retrieval algorithms. It seems to me that a good, interactive interface for faceted browsing is every bit as complicated to build as a  good engine for finding the facets in the first place. Lately I’ve been messing around with Javascript programming, and am getting frustrated by the seemingly unnecessary complexity of building web user interfaces that are both efficient and effective.

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Last week Jeremy and I attended the SSM2010 workshop held in conjunction with WSDM2010. In addition to chairing one of the panels, I got an opportunity to demonstrate an interface that I built to browse Twitter search results, to which Daniel alluded in his summary of the workshop. The system is described in a position paper (co-authored with Miles Efron) that has been accepted to the Microblogging workshop held in conjunction with CHI 2010.

The idea behind this interface is that Twitter displays its search results only by date, thereby making it difficult to understand anything about the result set other than what the last few tweets were. But tweets are structurally rich, including such metadata as the identity of the tweeter, possible threaded conversation, mentioned documents, etc. The system we built is an attempt to explore the possibilities of how to bring HCIR techniques to this task.

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Last Wednesday Jeremy and I participated in the SSM2010 workshop organized by Ian Soboroff (NIST), Eugene Agichtein (Emory University), Daniel Tunkelang (Google), and Marti Hearst (University of California, Berkeley).  It was a full day of panels, discussions and poster presentations on a variety of topics related to search, to social media, and how to combine the two. In an earlier post, I wrote about one way that we can characterize the space, and Daniel did an excellent job of summarizing the workshop, which was also cross-posted  at BLOG@CACM.

I am still trying to digest all that I learned during the day, but I can say that one of the challenges was live-tweeting the event. I was one of several people who tweeted about what was happening in the panels and about the issues that were raised. Over 500 tweets were sent and resent with the workshop’s hashtag by people at the event and elsewhere. It was interesting to see other people pick up some of the topics and comment on them. In particular, several of my twitter friends who are not part of the SSM research community had commented on the tweets, and retweeted certain aspects of the discussion.

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The third workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM2010) will held in conjunction with WDSM 2010 in early February. The workshop, organized this year by Eugene Agichtein (Emory University), Marti Hearst (University of California, Berkeley), Ian Soboroff (NIST), and Daniel Tunkelang (Google), will bring together academics and people from industry (including the major search engines). The keynote will be given by Jan Pedersen, who is now Chief Scientist for Core Search at Microsoft. It will address issues of what the big players are doing, what the more specialized social media companies are up to, and will also tackle important research problems in the field.

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