Online social networks are a part of our lives in a big way. They have been for years however the pervasiveness and rate of adoption of these networks has reached a level where almost everyone and their dog has a Facebook or other online social profile. Facebook alone has an active membership now larger than the worlds 4th most populous country. I feel like I should say that again. Staggering. What’s more is that it’s not inconceivable that this figure will rise to a 1, particularly if it is able to spread into China.

What all of these sites have in common is a profile. A projection of yourself to the rest of the network, written and edited exclusively by you, the user. So now we’ve all become self publicists, blogging our life under the umbrella of social networking; marketing ourselves to faithfully represent who we are and commonly what we do. It also suggests as Fred Vogelstein, observed in an excellent Wired article that the famous adage “on the internet no one knows you’re a dog” is resonating less strongly.

Role play

The plethora of services I use (or have accounts with) means I also have many associated profiles. Maintaining these can be a pain although in some cases a funny excursion into the past where monikers of our previous online selfs echo in the past having not kept pace with our evolution (RIP Dil8ted, RIP BillBeef, RIP TonyTonieTone, RIP Marquess541…).

This way of speaking about the self may sound a little strange, as they are I, not entities in and of themselves surely? The point being that we can name ourself and assume a character and as that character participate in the online space. As Sherry Turkle pointed out way back in ‘95 “Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system…The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered self that exists in many worlds, that plays many roles at the same time.” Sherry Turkle has researched and written about identity and our online self in great depth and is recommended reading.

With this ability to assume names and personas comes the implicit recognition that we are role playing. Taken to hideous extremes people commit cyber-crimes but more commonly it is the nuances in our interests that separate and motivate us to form groups, in the same way Paul David Hewson goes by the name of Bono. We like to role play whether we think we are doing it or not, if we’re online we have a username, it is expressive and allows us to communicate and connect with people in ways we might not otherwise.

Facebook makes it hyper real(!)

That is of course until we revealed our RL self and got proof about the dog. “Internet users behaved differently on Facebook than anywhere else online: They used their real names, connected with their real friends, linked to their real email addresses, and shared their real thoughts, tastes, and news.” Fred Vogelstein, Wired

This creates an environment of accountability. One expects more of a user, potentially imbuing them with greater trust, e.g. Amazon “real name” reviews, if they can be placed in the real world than an abstract transient moniker and arguably most significantly this changes our expectation when we leave the domain. Facebook Connect makes it easy for their population’s “Real Identity” to persist elsewhere as their blog announcement outlines, “Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.”

So now it is reasonable to expect to find John Smith and Jane Doe all over the web instead of Sureshot and Rach2k. What would the complexion of this evolved real-virtual-web be like and how will we choose to interact as a result? what implications for designing social proof into applications does this present? What risks to identity theft arise? What happens when your namesakes comment, post, flame..?

The other weekend was a beautiful Spring day. Sun in the sky, warm and perfect for browsing a local second hand book sale taking place in something that resembled a scene from Miss Marple. Among the jostling grannies were some fantastic finds from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” to “The Seven dials Mystery” by Agatha Christie and Vigina Woolf’s “The Common Reader.” All original Pelican classics, dusty and yellowing from the hours.

Permanence

In amongst the jumble I discovered an old jewel, a 1945 impression of “A Book of English Poetry - Chaucer to Rossetti” which had secrets hidden between the covers.

A small black and white passport photo was attached with a short inscription on the first page inside the cover. A man in his 30’s or 40’s sat in what I guess is his front room, the edges of the photo faded away over time, give a glimpse into the books history and sets the imagination off into other lives and eras. What was the connection between him and the Jannice to whom he gave this book? How did the book come to be here? Which poems did he read to her?…

^ Inscription found on the inside cover

As a designer I’m well aware of the gradual erosion of the printed medium in communication. This book however reminded me of the wonderful quality of print. The tactility and substance of the object. Something that changes with age as the pages begin to yellow and the smell of life permeating its leaves…we imbue it with character through ownership. The ability to alter it and eventually its fragility.

Digital products with Soul

It makes me wonder what would it mean for digital products to take on some of these characteristics? There is a soul to this book. Meaning conveyed through design, smell and touch but what marks this and some of the other older books out is the aging process itself.

Could time affect and enhance the emotional response of users?.. I think it could as within the fabric of social interaction people embed personality into systems that remember, that connect. It is the ability of a site to reveal, enable and promote this exchange that engenders its digital soul.

Finding the right page

The other delight was the way the book dealt with navigation. At the back of the book are two look up tables; an “Index of authors” and an “Index of first lines.” I love the way the latter is defined. It considers the perspective of the reader and how they may know only a snippet of a famous opening to a poem but not who it is by. In much the same way that I remember a song lyric but not the band who sang it and punch the line into Google, this indexing system addresses the reader’s mental model and provides a way for them to navigate the information.

^ UCD indexing

^ UCD indexing. [+] click image to enlarge

The other day I read an interesting article about the NetFlix challenge that is very much the Zeitgeist for me so I thought I’d put it out there…net enabled recommendation engines will become critical to our everyday life activities. Your chosen engine’s result set / ‘suggestions’ will become as valuable as a good friends’ opinion when searching for that thing.

The engines

You might have heard about the NetFlix $1m recommendation engine challenge. No-one has won it yet, two years later. One of the stumbling blocks are films like Napoleon Dynamite which are proving to be very hard to predict preferences for. All good personalisation services out there have some kind of recommendation engine. I’m thinking about Apple’s Genius feature in iTunes, Amazon’s people who bought this…, Gmail ads, Last.fm’s musical neighbours..the list rolls on. In fact even Ocado just mailed me saying they have launched a service of this ilk. Awesome. I can offload a bunch of thinking.

Give and take

What these engines / algorithms are doing is taking search on a step from that of a generalist aggregator - if we both type “Palmer Eldritch” into Yahoo the same set of results come up. In fact Google, as usual, are leading the way in Search with their SearchWiki by allowing users to personalise the results using the ‘Remove’ and ‘Promote’ controls added to each result item. Over time actively helping Google learn what I think of the results will generate a set of preferences that enable it to bring me more appropriate results. Nice.

^Personalise your search engine

This type of exchange is uncomfortable for many people. It necessitates that we submit our personal choices and preferences to a privately held company, often times one that it relatively unknown to us. It raises questions such as; how will this data be used? who else will access to it? is it secure? what are the ethics of the aggregating company?

In light of this there is certainly a measure of trust that must be apportioned to the aggregator and as a consequence the residual benefit that it provides must be perceptively higher. As these services become more common the threshold for concern is likely to reduce as people become more used to deep mined personalisation in much the same way as online shopping has become ordinary.

Connected services

Facebook. The monolith. Launched Facebook connect last summer, its version of OpenID. This service lets you log into multiple disparate site with one central universal login. The idea is to wave goodbye to a plethora of passwords, which is potentially great for the user experience too.

So Facebook collect and post your activity to your wall – privacy setting permitting. This is great for the uber social sharers and also enables Facebook to start to mine your personal preferences even more so than before, supplementing their currently already abundant social graph. This gives them a great opportunity to fire content and services directly at your cerebral cortex however, given its central aim to connect people, the way they have implemented this data is still rudimentary. Speaking to friends who are daily users the adverts are often not relevant and the “People you might know” are generally people they don’t want to know.

As noted with Last.fm this kind of thing is already happening and dating sites make their living from it although Facebook (and BeBo, FriendFeed et al) have the opportunity to do it better as their data sets traverse many facets of a persons character and interests.

Interestingly this thinking has been applied to Twitter, with the recent Mr. Tweet service although i’ve not spent much time with him yet.

Speak to me like you know me

It’s out there, it’s happening but the software still feels like an algorithm. The successful service must be smart although it shouldn’t pertain to know it all. It should allow the user to amend returned suggestions and learn from these. The suggestions should be timely and have at its core appropriateness. Appropriateness of context and goal. It needs to know about the user, what mood they are in, what’s coming up on their schedule and how that could impact their preferences. It needs to be sensitive to the things the user finds offensive and talk to them as their friend might.

If anyone has used a great recommendation service or is creating one I’d be love to hear about your experience.