Interesting if absurdly huge slideshow from Paul Adams of Google, talking about our different overlapping networks. This very closely mirrors and supports what we are doing on the Landing, where we have been developing a context switcher to enable people to present different facets of their identities to different groups of people (as well as switch personal contexts for different needs).
Address of the bookmark: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2
Familiarity vs similarity as means of providing social recommendations
Address of the bookmark: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1639714.1639725
Eexcellent Post by Ben Werdmuller (of Elgg fame) suggesting a place for both distributed and centralised social network architectures because the use cases for each approach are different.
Address of the bookmark: http://benwerd.com/2010/06/building-a-distributed-social-network-youre-doing-it-wrong/
actually, I think that facebook does many things well, though I think they are a deeply awful company and will ultimately fail unless they embrace openness and a distributed model
facebook understands parcellation, presence, collectives, networks, rich connections, diversity, the need for population density, the need for evolvability, the importance of adaptation and much much more in a way that puts most other social systems to shame. They really don’t get trust at all, and they probably know that a centralized model will ultimately fail, but they are probably happy enough that they are going to get huge amounts of money for at least a couple more years before the penny drops and the weaknesses of their centralised approach allow a better system in. Or that they figure that out. Or that Hell freezes over. Whatever comes first.
Address of the bookmark: http://mashable.com/2010/06/22/what-facebook-gets-right/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29
I like the notion here that Facebook fails to bring people close because vulnerability cannot safely be shown in such a one-dimensional space. That’s why our new context-switching functionality (due on the Landing fairly soon) will be so important, allowing us to display different facades to different people.
Address of the bookmark: http://mashable.com/2010/06/17/facebook-connect-fail/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29
Obvious really – the more we connect the more we communicate through whatever channels are available.
Address of the bookmark: http://gorumors.com/crunchies/more-social-networking-means-more-time-spent-on-email/
Interesting discussion of the strength of social ties in social software systems by Paul Adams. He talks of strong, weak and temporary ties and notes the design issues are different for each (and provides some useful insights on ways of trust-building for those temporary ties, many of which are collective-based).
The strong vs weak/temporary separation maybe reflects the division of groups and networks that some of us like to use, but the weak/temporary is a useful further subdivision of networks. It may be that some groups, especially in education, might fall into the ‘temporary’ category too, which suggests that we might have some interestingly different design problems if we try to form strong but temporary formalised groups.
Address of the bookmark: http://boxesandarrows.com/view/designing-for-social
An intriguingly designed (and stupidly named, bearing in mind the popularity of SmartFM for listening to music) adaptive learning tool that attempts to improve the effectiveness of self-paced learning by reminding you about stuff relating to your learning goals at the right point on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. In essence it’s a sequencer for memory-based learning. Purportedly based on brain science and using a very strongly cognitivist approach, this actually looks like quite a useful way to remember stuff if you use it in a disciplined way, although the effort and hassle of actually using the application may limit its utility for many people.
Address of the bookmark: http://smart.fm/tour
A fascinating search system that uses semi-structured searching of Wikipedia (in this demo – the method is generalisable) to graphically show links between two different concepts. It’s quite beautiful to watch the concept map grow. A potentially very valuable tool that can provide a rich overview of a subject area using crowd-sourced knowledge to abstract a collective view of connections between topics.
It has some notable interface issues (it appears to use Silverlight 🙁 ) but it’s an extremely promising approach to mining for and visualising something akin to collective wisdom, with a clear focus on generating something of value to learners.
Like the vast majority of systems that look at knowledge structure as a means to organise information for learners, it is worth observing that knowledge structure is far from equivalent to the best pedagogical structure so this is not a means to establish a learning path. However, to provide a useful top-down overview of an area of interest and its connections to other things, as well as to draw attention to the crowd-perceived importance of particular aspects of an area, this is pretty cool.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.conceptlinkage.org/clink/
Call me a geek, but I want one of these! It’s not quite Avatar yet but it’s a pretty good start. A robot that can be controlled by thoughts transmitted over the Internet. Who wouldn’t want one?
The Rovio itself is a mighty cool device at a very reasonable price (its main competitor is the Spykee, which is natively controllable by SKype, and both are obtainable for well under $300) which lets you do online video conferencing while your robot avatar wanders around the remote location, controlled by you. Both are clever enough to find their own charging stations when they run out of juice. Sadly, neither Rovio nor Skypee yet includes a front-facing video screen – just camera and microphone – so the people at the other end have to stick a picture of you on the device with a bit of blu-tack if they want that Avatar-like realism,
Address of the bookmark: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/27/rovio-robot-controlled-via-skype-with-emotiv-brain-reading-heads/