Activity streams are turning social services into a flow of updates, filtered through people. Mobility is introducing new types of social objects that change the nature of the update streams both into something more frequent and more ambient, but also more vulnerable to noise. In this world the capability to aggregate updates from across the Web and and filter out noise becomes a key problem. I'll demonstrate how the concepts of social objects and social peripheral vision can be applied to make sense of this shift in the locus of innovation on the social Web, and share some personal war stories along the way.

2. This talk is structured around 3 key concepts: 1. Social objects 2. Social peripheral vision 3. Nodal points

3. Mark Sigal: “ There has to be more to the Web 2.0 story than accessorizing my Facebook page with one-dimensional pseudo applications”

4. “ Create a Facebook application like Top Friends, which has almost 3 million active users, and you could be into some serious Internet dough.”

5. “ tendency for individual applications to grow very quickly within the first few weeks, and then to plateau in growth after a few weeks”

7. Social network theory is good at representing links between people - But it doesn’t explain what connects those particular people and not others

8. Another tradition of theorizing offers an explanation of why so many YASNS ultimately fail Pierre Bourdieu Sociologist 1930-2002 Yrjö Engeström Activity theorist 1948- Bruno Latour Actor-network theorist 1947- Karin Knorr-Cetina Sociologist 1944- Lev Vygotsky Psychologist 1896-1934

9. People don’t just connect to each other They connect through a shared object

10. From John Thackara: “In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World.” Used with permission.

11. From John Thackara: “In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World.” Used with permission.

12. Good web services allow people to create social objects that add value

13. Flickr did it to photos Del.icio.us did it to bookmarks YouTube did it to video

14. New objects -> new value

15. Mobile devices make it possible to capture slices of reality that people couldn’t capture before

16. Camera phones -> photos

17. Text messages -> status updates

18. Video phones -> live streams and video comments

19. 2.0

20. GPS & cell ID -> places

21. Bluetooth -> people you’ve met

22. Barcodes/RFIDs -> physical objects

23. Objects are interesting as such

25. Yet it’s even more interesting what other people say about an object and what they do with it

27. Define your verbs

28. (verb) Adam Photo Blog post Video Event Music track Place Favorited Commented Rated Posted Played Visited A B X

29. Actions (Alexei N. Leontiev) Speech acts (John R. Searle) Communicative acts (Jürgen Habermas) Utterances (Conversation Analysis)

30. Actions leave traces on the Web

31. - Some actions we type ourselves - Others are auto-generated

32. Social peripheral vision

34. No awareness of other people’s intentions = Inability to make plans

35. Sites that publish what people have been doing

38. Imagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW From Joi Ito http://joi.ito.com

39. Over the next 24 months many of the services we use regularly will probably become socially aware

40. Not just activity streams Maps - where are my friends Phonebook - what are people up to Email - prioritizing Photos - facial recognition

41. Terminator 2

42. The Daemon

43. Marauder’s map

44. Object lockers Activity aggregators Discovery layer (search actions)

45. People transmit updates, kind of like pulsars in space

46. At Jaiku it felt like we were hacking together a transmitter/receiver

47. Aggregation at massive scale

48. Pattern recognition

50. Detecting nodal points

51. What should I be aware of that’s happening around me?

52. Was what just happened significant to someone on the network?

53. What?

54. Who?

55. Where?

56. Just-in-time delivery

57. Discovery is becoming social

60. Identity OpenID Authorization OAuth Interoperability OpenSocial Own it, port it, share it

61. Ok.

62. 1. What is your object? 2. What are your verbs? 3. What are your nodal points? Quick checklist :