Stuff about technologies, mostly ICT but also other things

Links relating to social software and social media

I was introduced to Viber the other day – a neat and very elegant alternative to some parts of Skype, Google Talk etc, run on Amazon servers, that uses your real cellphone number to make and receive free calls and messages to and from other Viber users (Android and iPhone only, Blackberry client will follow). Incredibly easy to use: just install and go, that’s it, no registration, no noticable setup. It gives excellent sound quality (even over 3G), no ads, uses your existing address book, has a really clear and apparently very ethical privacy policy (except that it is in the US, so suffers the usual serious concerns about US government agencies being able to access data). If the person you are calling/texting is not on Viber, it just falls back on your normal cellular provider to dial the number. It even passes through most firewalls. Seems pretty faultless, as far as I can tell.

Apart from the issue of privacy in the US, I only have one puzzling concern: with no ads, no hidden connection charges, no premium services, no selling of personal data, strong controls preventing release of personal data to anyone at all, indeed no obvious means of revenue generation and some big infrastructure costs, how on earth will they make their money? 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.viber.com/

It’s to be expected. I have what is arguably the best Android iPad competitor on the planet right now and it is not a patch on my iPad 2. Actually, despite neat cameras, the latest Android O/S and theoretically wonderful battery life (reality is so disappointing when a Flash movie is running in the background or Skype it humming to itself, so you pick the thing up after less than a day to find the battery that should last 16 hours is already dead in less than 5), it’s not even close to my old iPad 1. It’s  getting there, but Apple win hands down without having to even breathe heavily. Which is why, in passing, I agree with most analysts that Amazon’s approach that does not seek to directly compete with the iPad is brilliant and might actually work.  

Actually, if this site reveals truth, there is a far more remarkable figure embedded in these already surprising statistics. That 60% of roaming wifi devices (major proviso: those that use Meraki networks) are made by Apple. I’m not sure why I should be surprised because that’s what I see every day when I walk past coffee shops, sit in airport lounges or hang out around open wifi networks. Despite the fact that Apple make well under 10% of the devices used on this planet to access the Internet, they are often the majority that I can see in public places and likely the majority portrayed on the old media like film and TV. Given that, within considerably under a decade, desktop and other tethered devices are likely to recede into a humdrum distant past and have little relevance to most people any more, this is a startling factoid. The only thing that makes me a little reluctant to predict the ascendance of the dark overlord  as a direct result (Apple as a company make Microsoft look like saints, albeit saints with bad taste and poor intellectual skills) is that wireless networks as we know them today have very little hope of survival. In itself and in the long term, this is a matter of minor interest as other more friendly and reliable wireless technologies will supplant the creaking wifi bandwidth hogs of yesterday. But legacy systems have a tendency to hang around for a while so wifi is not going to vanish immediately. And the chances that my 2005 vintage Mac will (without a lot sweet USB loving or some open countryside far beyond a city) still be able to access the airwaves at more than a few bits per second in 2015 are slim. Actually, my 2011 Macbook Air (not the latest model but not an elderly wreck) will have some similar problems. Scrub that, it already does, more than a few feet from an access point. So maybe Apple will choke on its own brilliance, and chance whimsy will determine what we use in a few years to get at stuff that is not on our machines, because Apple could not resist the low hanging wifi fruit when it should have been chasing something else. And the network, as we have always known, is the thing that matters most. Amazon know that. 

Address of the bookmark: http://meraki.com/press-releases/2011/06/22/meraki-reveals-ipads-use-400-more-wi-fi-data-than-the-average-mobile-device/

The emoticon is nearly 30 years old – hard to believe it is that old but also hard to remember a time when we didn’t have them.

Emoticon technology is very soft indeed but it has gained a few tweaks along the way, and not just the classic additions invented by Dave Barry. As I type this I can choose from a load of smarter-looking versions like this 

Address of the bookmark: http://mashable.com/2011/09/20/emoticon-history/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

Critics suggest that the trend towards replacing academic peer reviewed papers with blogs and wikis that bypass that process is a dangerous trend, leading to shallow, unreliable and unsupportable beliefs supplanting rigorous research. Similarly, the relative reliability and accountability of traditional journalism is being replaced by unaccountable, inaccurate and biased reporting by amateurs. On the face of it, there may be some truth in these criticisms: at least, it is harder to distinguish the chaff than it used to be, though there are gains in diversity and timeliness. However, at least in many cases, this perspective is a result of a skeuomorphic failure to recognise that such posts only superficially resemble the publications that they replace. A blog post is not a paper, a wiki page is not a publication, despite their intentional resemblance to those archetypal forms.

Social media such as blog posts and wiki pages do not exist in isolation: that’s what ‘social’ means.  They are surrounded by a web of commentary, dialogue, ripostes and critiques that are as much a part of the ‘publication’ as the post itself. So, if we have cause to criticise an original post or page, so will plenty of others. In fact, we can add our critique as part of that process, and engage and learn more deeply as a result. The outcome is a co-created medium of which a single post is only a part, a dynamic system in which peer review is not the input to improve the original but a part of the content itself. When it works well, with sufficient input from sufficient people, it can be a far more enlightening, rigorous, multi-faceted medium than any traditional forms. Of course, the process can fail: too much input, too little input, too little filtering, too much filtering can make it far less wonderful. And it can fail if we treat it like the forms it replaces: you can easily miss 90% of the value of Wikipedia, for instance, if you don’t read the discussion page that leads to the entry itself. But, when it works, it works brilliantly.

My favourite example of what happens when you rethink the process and move beyond skeuomorphs is the now venerable Slashdot site. It is built for and by passionate geeks so it is not a form that is readily replicable: you have to delve into the complex mechanics of the ingenious use of collaborative filtering, the distributed bottom-up reputation management system, the ingenious checks and balances on bias and mob stupidity, and the management of explciit filters to get the full benefit of the system. Only a geek or a very determined non-geek is going to do that. The reward for those willing to put in the effort (and, despite the barriers, there are many tens or even hundreds of thousands that do) is an emergent literary form co-created by its inhabitants that evolves into an extremely high quality and reliable knowledge source with a richness, depth, creativity and diversity that no single author could hope to match. Or, if you prefer, a shallow humorous take on technology. Or a place to support rabid and improbable beliefs or biases. It’s up to you. Once you start to customise it, it is an  extremely dynamic, extremely personalised, extremely diverse system fuelled by the crowd that can be many different things to many different people. Slashdot is not the defining academic literature or journalism of the 21st century, but it points the way towards something that is potentially far more powerful than the result of the tree-based technological constraints of yesteryear.

Well, that’ll be it for Flash as we know it then. Microsoft are dropping it from the latest Windows Mobile. Not that Windows Mobile has more than a couple of percent of the market, but when Microsoft makes a move like this, people stop treating Apple as simply evil (which they are, but not because of their attitude to Flash) and start to believe what is pretty obvious to anyone who has tried using Flash on an Android device, struggled with a computer that is nearly dead from exhaustion through running a Flash video, or accidentally left a Flash animation running in the background on a machine running on batteries. Flash doesn’t work. It used to be a good idea and a neat solution to a gaping hole in the web, but it is now bloated, insecure, unreliable, slow, keeps rendering historical versions incompatible (I’ve long suffered from running Flash on Linux). It just doesn’t fit any more. And it’s boast about running on more machines than anything else was always stretching the truth way way way beyond credible bounds. Adobe are adopting a sensible exit strategy by making it easier to produce other formats with their flagship tools, including HTML5 and apps that can transfer fairly directly onto iOS. Apparently 68% of video is now free of Flash and HTML-5-ish so, though there is still a niche for simple interactive games etc, there’s not far to go before it has gone the way of ActiveX and embedded Java, ie. largely irrelevant.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/09/no-flash-windows-8-metro/?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

If you are building or designing anything to be used by people, personas are a great invention. If you are not familiar with the concept, then here is the Wikipedia link to get you started, but the idea is at heart a simple one that may be grasped very quickly. By creating a (usually fictional) individual and filling out their life story, interests, friends, jobs, etc, you can more easily imagine how people will interact with your designed object, respond to your marketing, navigate your site, etc. Sometimes personas are archetypes, averaged-out or idealised versions of real people/types of people, sometimes (I’d argue more fruitfully) they are just invented individuals with distinct and believable quirks, likes and dislikes. What matters most is that you can imagine how they would behave. It’s primarily a means of building empathy for end users that allows one to better understand how and why people are going to respond to and use whatever you are designing: a means of both generalising and at the same time relating to target audiences as individuals. Combined with scenarios, in which you imagine different contexts and circumstances in which your personas will find themselves, persona design is a time-tested and powerful tool.

But is there anything similar for groups (and here I am talking about ‘groups’ as being what Terry Anderson and I have described as ‘the many’ for want of a better word, not as a particular kind of collection of people)?

A persona, as generally used, tends to come to represent a group in the sense of being a way of categorising types of people. But that’s not a group as we generally understand it: that’s a set of people with shared characteristics. Groups are constituted by the relationships of their members with each other. They are communities of people who are in some way linked with each other for some kind of shared purpose or reason. People in groups interact with each other and with other groups. And there are many kinds of group. Here are just a few examples:

• gangs
• associations
• congregations
• crowds
• project teams
• classes
• pub regulars
• committees
• communities of practice
• communities of interest
• working groups
• geographical communities
• societies
• clubs
• political parties
• unions
• movements
• companies
• departments
• co-workers
• social networks
• neighbourhoods
• competitors
• organizations
• collectives
• couples
• nations
• partnerships
• etc
• etc
• etc

For almost all of these types of group, each particular group will have distinctive features and characteristics, particular dynamics, means of constituting membership, histories, behaviours, that will distinguish it from every other group. Groups are not, as a rule, the sum of the behaviours of their members – the way that they are constituted in relation to each other and the way the group itself is located as an entity in relation to the rest of the world means that the group is something more and something different. In fact, in many ways it would be reasonable to think of them as distinct agents in the world. This relates back to work that I have been doing for quite some time, including my extension of Terry Anderson’s interaction equivalency theorem in which I posited that the group is itself a first-class actor in a learning system.

In much the same way as there is great value from imagining how an individual will respond to a designed system, what are his or her needs, what are his or her expectations, fears, values and beliefs, habits, we might gain a lot of insights by doing something similar for groups, not to replace personas (which are enormously valuable) but to extend their value. By imagining how our environments/tools/designed objects affect particular groups for better or worse we might, with luck, design places and things that have greater value to them.

What would a group-persona (maybe a ‘groupa’) look like? Well, I guess it would have a name. It would have members (perhaps defined by personas). It might have purposes, values, perhaps a location or region, though it might not (that might be what makes it interesting). It would have a structure of some sort – maybe a network, a hierarchy, a formal set of connections. It might well have subgroups or overlaps with other groups. It may share aesthetics, or ethics, or interests. It may be defined in relation to what it is not or what it opposes, or with what other groups it is affiliated. It would certainly have a size, though that might be a bit uncertain or fuzzy and would be expected on many occasions to change, sometimes considerably. Which I guess implies it would have a dynamic pattern of change – growth/shrinkage, churn of members, changes in patterns of interaction or relationships that constitute the group.

I think there is a lot of scope for this kind of process in social system design.

A great article on the success of Finnish schools. They are doing pretty well:

In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide.

Ninety-three percent of Finns graduate from academic or vocational high schools, 17.5 percentage points higher than the United States, and 66 percent go on to higher education, the highest rate in the European Union. Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States.

What is really remakrable is that , until not so long ago, Finland had a system that failed in the much the same way that most national systems of education fail. But they made an active decision to change it. One side-effect of the change is that there are no mandated standardized tests (it’s up to teachers if they use them), no rankings, no comparisons, no competition between students, schools or regions:

 “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts….It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test”.

This is remarkably clear and sensible thinking. Or, maybe, what is remarkable is the fact that so many educational systems do employ such meaningless and harmful measures and lose sight of the main reason they exist in the first place – to help people to learn.

The reasons for the Finns’  succcess boil down to common sense and a focus on learning rather than assessing. Educators have to know how to educate (all must have a masters level qualification in education). Unusually, this knowledge is actively used and valorised. They have freedom to teach how and, within fairly broad and mostly advisory limits, what they like. And they are systematically encouraged to continue to learn, through experimentation, study and sharing. They spend time with each other, observing each other and talking about what they are doing, sometimes working together, if and only if it makes sense. They do not have punishing goals set by those who do not understand education. They do not make kids compete for someone else’s benefit, nor do they stifle creativity in the name of standards. They recognise that classes are made up of individuals and give the time to those that need it:

“Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers….We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking”

The school day is short and split up with lots of time for play and very little homework, giving time for teachers to assess properly (ie to improve learning, not to filter or judge), give attention to those that need attention, and to plan well. And kids start relatively late in life – age 7. 

“We have no hurry….Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”

Compared with kids in most countries, Finnish kids learn better, learn more, at a lower cost, in less time. And Finland achieved this in the past couple of decades mainly by leaving education to people who know about education and giving them the freedom to exercise that knowledge and educate. That seems like a good idea to me.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html