Jeremy scooped me in his recent post where he commented on a recent SXSW panel on social search that included Marc Vermut, Brynn Evans, Max Ventilla, Ash Rust, and Scott Prindle. Jeremy pointed out that in addition to asking for help and embarking on a solitary search, was the possibility (discussed many times on this blog) of embarking on (an exploratory) search together. Searching together, collaboratively, is often appropriate when faced with exploratory (rather than known-item, factiod, or trending topic) information needs. Collaboration works best when information needs are shared, and when the results need to be created rather than merely re-discovered.

In an exchange on Twitter, Brynn pointed out that instances of true collaborative search comprised less than 10% of the instances she and colleagues had recorded in their study of Mechanical Turk respondents. But that argument misses the point.

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(Please be aware that some ChatRoulette links may contain mature content.)

Dear me. All those folks doing naughty things on ChatRoulette, secure in their Net-anonymity, may suddenly meet a rude awakening: Chat Roulette Map, a new Google Maps mash-up, maps users’ chat image to their location, based on IP address. Last week, it also showed users’ ip addresses.

Note that Chat Roulette Map has just added a new pop-up window when you first load the page:

Welcome To Chat Roulette Map
(snip)
We’d like to advise maine.edu to stop using
student’s names in their hostnames.

We’ve decided, at least for the time being, to
hide IP & host information as some user-identifiable
information was found in some entries.

No, you think? It’ll be interesting to see how this warning window evolves over the next few weeks.

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.

Michael Bernstein and the usual suspects wrote a nice position paper for the CHI2010 microblogging workshop. They describe Eddi, a system that allows people to group tweets by topic to make sense of large numbers of tweets. In some sense, they are addressing a similar problem to the one that Miles Efron and I tackled in our paper. In both cases, the system uses various sorts of analysis to group and filter tweets to help people understand the collection or the stream.

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Kate Ehrlich and N. Sadat Shami have written a paper (accepted to ICWSM 2010) that compares IBMers’ use of Twitter and an internal micro-blogging tool (with the unfortunate title of BlueTwit). The paper analyzes tweeting patterns of 34 people over a four month period. The authors found that people in their sample tended to use both system more for question asking/answering and dissemination of information than for status updates, which contrasts with Namaan et al.’s finding that “meformers” (i.e., people who tweet about what they are up to) out-number “informers” in the sample they analyzed.

Ehrlich and Shami’s study found that people used these tools to improve the social status: internally to manage their reputation, to be seen as a source of useful answers rather than just of questions, and on Twitter both to promote their company and to develop their professional status.

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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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Marti Hearst gave an interesting talk at JHU on Social Media in which she described some important dimensions of through which we can understand the variety of phenomena that are tagged with that label. She examined expertise, the degree to which data are shared (synchronized!) among the people engaged in some activity, and the degree to which participants are working toward an explicitly-shared goal (even if they approach it different personal motivation).

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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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Yesterday Yahoo! announced that it reached an agreement with Twitter to incorporate the twitter feed into its properties in a variety of ways, including surfacing tweets related to particular topics, return  more tweets in search results, and allow users to read their tweets and tweet directly from their Yahoo! pages. The move is interesting more as another vote for the importance of Twitter as a communication channel than in the value it introduces into people’s interactions with Yahoo!

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