ConnectingTheDots

Digital Meets Physical Mashups: New Dawn of Sharing

     

After a long posting hiatus, semi-back.  To paraphrase Bre Pattis, "You need to have more than one parent for your digital designs."  I was happily surprised when a series of individuals on Flickr created derivative art from one of my photos.  It was rather amazing to see the creative diversity stimulated from a basic image.  But moreso, there was something special about the social nature of seeing a thread of peoples' derivatives from the same source, and something special about the personal acknowledgements of inspiration. 

 

Similarly, in a fun talk about the future of digital things, Bre shared some anecdotes about the digital to physical mashups (and memes) that he's been noticing on Thingiverse, a place where people can submit and share their 3D designs.  A simple gangsta spawned the Thingiverse community to create  rabbitsta,  yodasta,  ColbertSta,  bobbleheadsta,  chessta -- basically any head imaginable stuck on top the gangsta body to create new sta's. 

Jumping a bit to a slightly different translation of digital meets physical.  Along the theme of thoughts about how we are evolving our culture of sharing, it was interesting to see the story of Jonathan's Card unfold.  It was an experiment in collective sharing of physical goods and virtual currency.  Jonathan made his Starbucks card available for anyone to use or add to for coffee.  Like all things digital and shared on the Internet, unpredictable mashups happened. There was general evidence of generousity as people kept the balance positive, adding and spending $8K within a month. Then came an unexpected mashup, as one individual wrote a script that took and transfered money off Jonathan's card onto his own card (with the intent for the funds to then be donated to a charity, Save the Children).  Unfortunately, the end result was Jonathan's card got shut down, but I suspect experiments in sharing across digital to physical will continue to crop up.      

Microcontracted Life

During a moment of eye-wandering on the subway, noticed an ad for Agent Anything offering any errand, anytime, anywhere (in new york).  Despite the ad and useful matchmaking between busy people with $ and flexible college students without $, Agent Anything's current mission list is rather scant. Perhaps Craigslist already made that market simple enough. Or perhaps the site needs more personal profiles and ratings like the many services popping up to facilitate selling bits and pieces of one's life. From Fiverr marketing things you can do for 5 bucks, to Snapgoods renting your stuff, and Airbnb renting your home, will we soon be able to easily contract out every under-used piece of us? Similar to Kickstarter, Etsy, and Kiva, there is also a refreshingly human feel to some of these 1:1 life marketplaces.  Given its easy to overcook for one, a friend of mine is even building a service, "Kitchen Surfing", where people can find and share home-cooked meals and dinner tables.  E.g. I'm cooking fancy pasta in my east village apartment at 7pm and have room/extras for 2 more.

Gameful Headquarters

My word of the week is gameful.  “Gameful means to have the spirit, or mindset, of a gamer: someone who is optimistic, curious, motivated, and always up for a tough challenge.  It’s like the word “playful”—but gamier."(Jane McGonigal)  It's also the name of a Secret Headquarters for worldchanging games.  I've been among the early backdoor members checking out the loose boards before the public launch yesterday.  

The Secret HQ has various social network features like profiles, groups, activity feeds, a messaging system, community blog, wiki, and classifieds to support collaboration.  What may set it apart is the Game of Gameful.  Its intentional about productive fun and is a case example of using games-based achievement and incentive systems to build a community.  Starting with well-designed rewards for early backers (with titles like Mega Brain Meld, Hero’s 12-Pack, Awesome Circle, Secret Fiero Monster and Gameful Fairy), its Kickstarter page generated over 3000% of its ask.  On the site, everyone gets a virtual pet, a Fiero monster.  Participating in the Gameful community and completing challenges breaks Fiero monsters out of their shells and level up.  A Mayor's Office helps newbies get started with challenges.  Two secret missions are already at play (individual puzzle pieces sent to Kickstarter backers to reconnect in the real world).  With the public launch comes the first official Challenge, enter a "Make Lord Kelvin Proud" game design contest with a $1000 reward (make a game to improve something good that can be measured).  Of course (and potentially most interestingly), Fiero monsters are welcome to create and invite folks to play their own or group-sourced challenges too.  

The meta challenge (how to harness an idealistic community's potential and tap into the 3 billion hours/week we spend playing digital games) is the main storyline I'll be following.  ARGs like EVOKE were a start; let new games begin! 

Inspired by our Social, Emotional Web

I have a minor graphic novel addiction.  Aside from a growing bookshelf, a growing amount of minutes are being sucked into illustration blogs.  The increasingly social and emotional public trails left on the web have been a source of creative inspiration for a number of artists -- from lovely visual interpretations of missed connections posts to a museum of humorous takes on celebrity twitters.  It was also on Twitter that a loose collection of Brits with mutual love for the Magnetic Fields decided to add to the images out there by illustrating all 69 love songs.

Chatfe: Equalizing the Chance for Interest Based Conversation?

Is it more awesome to be a guy or a girl online?  If ideal experience means ease of attracting strangers into conversation, the above graphs (left = guy, right = girl) of a small experiment on Skype suggests that I should be happy I'm female.  But if ideal experience means connecting with someone new for a substantive conversation, maybe its not so great for either (notably most of the dots on the right graph are from the opposite sex). 

Last night, the guys who started Chatfe opened with that idea as they talked about what influenced their user interface design.  Aiming almost to be "the opposite of a social network", the platform serendipitously matches like-minded individuals for conversations.  Instead of making a profile pretty, playing the numbers game of building your network, and updating one-liners, the focus is on adding topics to conversation queues and indicating windows of available talk time.  If two users' topics and time match, after checking that each side is indeed human, the system calls both party's phones to have the conversation.  The voice-centric design (aside from mitigating potential creepy behavior) experiments with the hypothesis that the nature of the conversations will be different from those mediated by text.  Chatfe is in Beta, so whether/how their bar chart will look different from the ones above will soon get a chance to be tested.

Akoha: Seeding Kindness with Social Games

When I first heard about Akoha, I loved the idea.  I eagerly signed up to be a Beta tester and was excited when my set of mission cards arrived in the mail.  Still love the idea, but have been thinking about why instead of being part of the leaderboard, I've only played one card. 

Akoha is a MMP, mixed reality game.  The game centers around accumulating Karma points via real world missions of kindness (for example +125 for "Thank Someone", +100 for "Make Someone Smile", +200 for "Donate an Hour of Your Time") linked to coded cards.  This player probably reflects the ideal user experience and impact Akoha was aiming for.  

What made the game sticky and immersive for her, but not for me?   The primary adjective Akoha uses to describe its game is "social."  Theres two key dimensions to that: the social behaviors required to play the game and the social network of "friends" players accumulate during gameplay.  For me, that second aspect of social was too challenging to help motivate the first.  I felt like a lone player in the social game.  While there were many players in Canada, there were few players in New York.  To play I had to recruit friends or strangers (most missions required physical proximity to complete) - which is also part of the beauty in seeding kindness.  However, when "the work" of finding playmates > the reward of playing it's more difficult to get to the sweet spot (critical mass of friends and missions played to feel the impact, the addictive part of play). 

Since then Akoha has added a dynamic Community Map showing where players and missions are happening.  It's still a little clunky (requires several zoom-ins to find specific locations of interest) and could be more efficient in visualizing search interests, but tools like it are a step towards creating a means to finding friends, feeling connected to the larger community, and seeing impact.  (Looking at other social, location-oriented games like foursquare, one could also imagine interesting ways an Akoha mobile app could encourage play.)

The reward and reputation system also impacts stickyness -- motivates embedding play into everyday social experiences vs. singular novelty play moments (especially for those with busy lives).  What do "Karma points" mean to players?  Is simply accumulating "Karma points" compelling?  Found this interesting thread of user feedback about wanting more of an addictive factor.  The users had quite a few good design suggestions (e.g. adding levels, mastery identities, mission combos, time-based rewards, currency that tied to real world donations).

If the thousands of cards played are any hint, I do think games like Akoha have huge potential.  Influencing behaviors and tapping beyond existing social networks are powerful dynamics, especially for improving global causes.  Bridging the digital and "real" world is also a challenge we are just beginning to tackle.  All said, I'll be staying in the Akoha game and learning from how well people play it forward. 

Making Twitter Meaningful

The viral Twouble with Twitters has gotten some acknowledging laughs.  Funny men Jon Stewart and Colbert have also recently joked about the seemingly useless time suck and stream of information.  But as Twitter grows, so has the number of people experimenting with how to build on top of the simple interface -- creating applications to help filter and facilitate community meaning making. 

For me, some of the more interesting uses of Twitter have been for friend/crowd-sourcing human answers, rapid reporting around an event/emergency, and directing attention towards causes.   Squidoo recently release TwttrStrm to help folks gather answers to one spot.  An example of what that might look like is the summary of Hacking Education Twitters (pulling hashtag #HackEdu).  Focusing on a particular niche, ExecTweets is a new site aggregating tweets from business executives.  And more like a general Twitter search engine, Tweefind pulls tweets about certain keywords according to popularity rank (akin to Google page rank).

Will also be interesting to watch as folks get more creative about designing a "need to follow." In LA, Kogi, a hybrid Korean BBQ/Taco truck, has put a twist to its Twittering.  If you want their taco, to find the van you must follow their Twitter.

ARGs for Collective Innovation: Ruby's Bequest Raising Up 1000 Voices

While slowly attracting participants with hints of whats to come and with virtual coins to begin seeding content, today Ruby's Bequest fully launched with a challenge to players to find 1000 voices to answer the question -- "what are your hopes, your fears about the future of caring."  The new ARG from the Institute for the Future hopes to stimulate some collective wisdom to solve the mystery of who Ruby Woods is, and in doing so, perhaps also about the future of a public good. 

ARGs have been used as successful marketing tools (The Beast for the movie A.I., Art of the Heist for Audi A3, I Love Bees for Halo 2).  In engaging players, these MMP multi-platform, blended reality games have demonstrated the potential collective intelligence and collaborative action that can emerge through game play (interesting essay on the deployment of I Love Bees).  A few recent examples have experimented with the notion that ARGs may also be effective for harnessing collective innovation on societal issues.  Last October, Traces of Hope (sponsored by the British Red Cross) explored the world of a Ugandan refugee and Superstruct (another IFTF ARG) sought to brainstorm solutions to five super-threat scenarios in 2019.   

Net-Map: The Process of Visualizing

Especially for those with 100s or 1000s of "friends", it can be challenging to know your network.  Various visualization tools have been created to help people keep track of their universes: from Vizster (interactive sociogram for exploring the community structure of sites like friendster), to more recent Fidg't (using Flickr and LastFM tags as "magnets" to similar members), and the myriad Twitter visualization tools (exploring networks by tweet geography, topic, volume, etc). 

More often than not, these digital visualizations are ready-made by developers or graphic designers; users view or play with automatically generated mappings of their network.

Net-map is a low-tech tool that focuses less on the end product and moreso on the process of creating the nodes and links of influence.  The interview-based social mapping tool has been used in rural communities of Ghana and Chile to help people understand, discuss, and improve situations with multiple-influencers (netmaptoolbox process photostream).

Whopper Sacrefice: How Valuable Are Your Facebook Friends

WHOPPER Sacrifice was short-lived.  The app let people cash in their FB friends. 10 deleted friends = 1 free Whopper.  Facebook disabled the app after the desire for a free burger proved stronger then 233,906 friendships.  One fan documented his trade, so folks can still watch a profile going under in flames.  Those de-friended can also still send angry-grams.

Some fun valuation methodologies of Facebook were calculated based on the Whopper.  From a social capital perspective, does make you think about the relative values of your virtual connections.  Wonder whether those more liberal with the Ignore button were less likely to sacrefice their friends, than those with 100s of connections.  Or whether people would be as ready to sacrefice their LinkedIn vs Twitter vs ? network. 

Fan & Feedback Networks for Your Imagination

From ffffound to Behance Network to Wordpress to Flickr, I clicked across the sketch trail of a concept tinkerer.  From the comment threads, it seems he has quite a few fans asking where they can buy the depicted mobile devices with double screens and immediate overlay translation and internet search. He says he has no plans to monetize his ideas (already occupied as a graphic designer), but some folks still gave advice and encouragement.  Very Open Source in spirit. 

There are a number of sites aggregating jolts of inspiration and its fascinating to observe how potential fans and feedback can emerge for napkin ideas.  Related, here's a nice video visualization of Python's evolution (part of an experiment called code_swarm visualizing the collaborative creation of open source applications).

Twitter Vote Report

Among the Twitter visualization projects done right, if used, the Twitter Vote Report could be illuminating on Election Day.  Acting like a citizen-driven election monitoring system, voters can tweet their real-time problems (long wait times, broken machines, people turned away) and help make sure others know where they exist (and potentially help out).  Tweet with hashtags (like #[zip code], #wait:120, #machine, and #reg) to add your locations and experiences.

Beyond Ambient Awareness: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr Updates as Game Engines?

Will have to wait a few weeks longer to try PhotoGrab.  The new Facebook game challenges players to match small snippets of photos with the full pictures or build their own photo puzzle games.  WordStream, another game in development from start-up Shufflebrain, will use players' Facebook and Twitter status updates (and test if friends really pay attention and remember what each other are up to).

Akin to how tools like Blogger enabled a legion of less html-savy web readers to also be web writers, there has been a recent burst of tools that may encourage less code-savy game players to become game builders.  (Some especially interesting projects are trying to use game design for fun education -- see Alice, Scratch, Gamestar Mechanic, Popfly, Playcrafter, Little Big Planet; for some theory see Papert, Gee).

Shufflebrain's new games will let people create their own games out of social content.  As quoted in CNET, "They're really a cross between games and Web 2.0."  For those seeking something beyond ambient awareness, there may soon be more opportunities to get creative about making personal content even more social. 

Fame Game

Ended up at a party last week for Fame Game.  Name aside, there is not much of a game playing component to the Fame Game (perhaps the name moreso comments on the nature of today's society).  The site "maps the networks of capital, influence, and attention that drive New York’s cultural economy."  Aside from social network-like profile pages, an algorithm they call ANDY determines connections and identifies the fastest rising movers and shakers.  Weekly changes in "fame" percentile rank are published and displayed like stock tickers.

The idea of understanding degrees of seperation and power structures through visualizations has been around for awhile.  Older websites (albeit with less dynamic data sets) have been mapping connections of influence.  NNDB Mapper allows exploration of over 33,000 "noteworthy" individuals and the creation of maps like "Silicon Valley Boards".  Early in 2002, They Rule was recognized by Ars Electronica for its visualization of relationships between powerful corporate executives. 

Unlike the more educationally driven objectives of past sites, with Fame Game's focus on the structure of celebrity and its dynamic use of the constant media that builds on celebrity, will public fascination and advertisers interact and follow?

Seriosity and Productivity Games

Seriosity is applying video game and economic concepts to solve the common problem of overflowing email boxes.  According to its site, information overload costs companies $588 billion.  It's product, Attent, creates virtual currency to prioritize emails.  Have not tried the service and am curious how they mitigate gaming of the system (people assigning values to get messages opened that do not necessarily correlate to a recipient's valuation).  Also wonder, if most people value average messages similarly, how significantly it improves upon the current simpler filter of "red flags" marking "very important" messages. Perhaps game influenced design elements create the right social dynamics and incentives? 

Game systems have interesting potential when applied to various sectors of the economy (see previous posts on Fold It! and games on gwap as well as posts on Games for Change.)   A recent Google Testing Blog post further discusses (and seeks comment) on the idea of productivity games.