Category: Social Networking

Socialight hits the Times

Post-Its for Passers-By – New York Times
From the article:
Socialight leaves virtual Post-it notes, called sticky shadows, in specific sites around the city. A text message pops up when a cellphone is carried into the designated space, which is generally smaller than a city block but larger than an intersection. Started last month in a Chelsea loft by two 2004 graduates of New York University, Socialight now has dotted the metropolitan region with more than 500 stickies.

Ninjamonkey on Instant Mobile Social Networks

Ninja Monkey Party 411 : Instant Mobile Social Network Or; Listserv + Email-to-SMS Gateway = LOVE
Ninjamonkey describes a service he setup for his birthday party a couple of weeks ago using off the shelf components. Of course the magic sauce was that his crowd includes some tech savvy and highly motivated social drinkers.
From the page:
Social networks and mobile applications are obvious bedfellows, but aside from a few noteables like dodgeball almost nothing has been done to exploit them. The thing that many people may be missing is that SMS is pretty much like email, except with extreme size restrictions (160 characters/message) and controlled solely by the telcos (which is sort of like having a draconian ISP with terrible, terrible service). This means that as long as you can find a way to translate between email and sms (with, say, a publicly available email-to-sms gateway) you can pass messages between them.

The Participatory Generation

The Lives of Teenagers Now: Open Blogs, Not Locked Diaries – New York Times
NY Times is running an article about a recent Pew survey that is demonstrating that teenagers have embraced publishing media online. From myspace and the like to creating their own websites featuring music remixes, videos and so forth.

They have become the participatory generation.

From the article:
According to the Pew survey, 57 percent of all teenagers between 12 and 17 who are active online – about 12 million – create digital content, from building Web pages to sharing original artwork, photos and stories to remixing content found elsewhere on the Web. Some 20 percent publish their own Web logs.

That reality is now inextricable from the broader social, cultural and sometimes, as in Melissa’s case, deeply personal experience of being a teenager. And it is one that will undoubtedly have profound implications for the traditional managers of content, from big media companies and libraries to record labels, publishers and Hollywood.

[Later in the article]

The Pew survey shows “the mounting evidence that teens are not passive consumers of media content,” said Paulette M. Rothbauer, an assistant professor of information sciences at the University of Toronto. “They take content from media providers and transform it, reinterpret it, republish it, take ownership of it in ways that at least hold the potential for subverting it.”

OMDS Article

TECTONIC: How will you consume your open media?
Michael Sharon has written a nice article summarizing the Open Media Developers Summit.
From the article:
Two weeks ago, on a rainy Friday and Saturday in October, 65 programmers and developers debated these and many other questions at the first Open Media Developer’s Summit held at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in down-town Manhattan.

Group as User

Shirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software

Clay makes a great case against developing user centric software.

A random paragraph:
And yet, when we poll users about what they actually do with their
computers, some form of social interaction always tops the list —
conversation, collaboration, playing games, and so on. The practice of
software design is shot through with computer-as-box assumptions,
while our actual behavior is closer to computer-as-door, treating the
device as an entrance to a social space.