XMPP.fm

The latest announcement of an XMPP based tool to support music fans communities got me thinking how easy this can be implemented by putting together the proper XEPs. Let us consider how to implement an XMPP internet music radio similar to Last.fm. Obviously we would want to put some "social" focus into it. So the scope is simple:

• Broadcast music to anyone joining the service, even on a temporary basis.
• Provide a music recommendation system.
• Provide discussion spaces amongst listeners.

From a protocol standpoint, the basic extensions we would need to provide this type of service are MUC for the community part, and PEP for the announcement part, obviously complemented by the user tune extension.

A very straightforward implementation route would be to create a presence enabled service to which any users could subscribe. The service will expose a number of "stations" implemented as MUC rooms corresponding to musical subjects of interest for the en users. So you may have rooms such as acoustic, alternative, ambiance, classical, dance, dark, experimental, folk, funk, groove, hip-hop, instrumental, jazz, lounge, metal, pop, punk, rap, reggae, rock, ska, techno, world, [add your own genre here]… To add the required "social" trend, one can imagine a system where users are able to tag and rate the music pieces and rooms are automatically created and added from these user preferences.

…kind of a lite social network system, featuring chat and commenting throughout…

The service "identity" is provided through some kind of DJ bot. End users subscribe to the presence of the bot, and are also automatically subscribed to the bot's personal eventing notifications. The bot also request to be subscribed to the user's tune events. Whenever a user come online, then it will receive XEP-0118 notifications from the bot describing what is currently playing in each active room. Obviously each notification will be augmented to include the URI of the corresponding room, to allow creating a "stations" list for the user to choose from.

Tuning to a station boils down to joining the associated MUC room, providing instant conversation between music lovers with similar tastes. These MUC room are augmented to allow direct presence subscription in the case end users prefer to tune directly to specific musical genre. Every "station" has its own DJ bot to which participants in the room can make suggestion as to the next piece of music to be broadcasted. The DJ bot is also in charge of notifying the room participants of the currently playing piece. It does it by simply posting notification to the room and relies on the standard MUC mechanisms to take over the distribution. This has the advantage of having the "station" past program automatically handled through the room history. The notification will be extended with the information about the physical connection URI in order to enable listening to the current track using the user’s workstation features.

Scrobbling tracks is directly available when the user set's its own user tune state. The notification is sent to the service DJ bot for collection and update of the appropriate statistics.

Additional “social” features could be implemented at each “station” level through the appropriate use of mood and activity publications and notifications. If participants are also able to publish their current room information through XEP-0194, the service could be enriched to provide what Wikipedia describes as:

The most-used community feature within Last.fm is the formation of user groups between users with something in common (for example, membership of another internet forum). Last.fm will generate a group profile similar to the users' profiles, showing an amalgamated set of data and charting the group's overall tastes.

I have already mentioned the lack of interest by the web 2.0 crowd in leveraging XMPP killer features. As one can see from the above quick jotting down, many of the puzzle pieces are readily available. In addition, they can be used from standard XMPP clients supporting MUC and PEP, which will be mainstream this year end. Those wanting to add all the bells and whistle of a multimedia UI can do so by building a flash based client with embedded audio and video players, and they will be ready to compete in the Media 2.0 broadcasting space without much technology investment. XMPP has reached a stage where a large number of applications can be built from its existing features set. It is still just a matter of imagination and creativity…

Technorati Tags: XMPP, Jabber, Chat, Flash, Publish subscribe, Social network, Antecipate

Visibility, Awareness, and Accountability

I have already presented the concept of "social translucence" while discussing the benefit of adding "place" based information to presence for a better regulation of mediated communications. A "socially translucent" system enhances two important dimensions of communications. First, by making social information visible it enables participants to be aware of what is happening, and to be held accountable for their actions as a consequence of public knowledge of that awareness. Second, the fact that the real world is translucent to social information, and that people have a sophisticated understanding of the consequences of the visibility of their social interactions helps structuring interactions in a mediated communication.

While the "social translucence" perspective is unique, it is not the only concept to be concerned with making the activities of communication systems' users visible to others. Since ten years, a considerable research work has been targeted at video-mediated communication (Finn et al., 1997), and has led to the concept of "awareness". A number of researchers have constructed systems attempting in various ways to provide cues about the presence and activity of their users (Benford et al., 1994). These researches have highlighted three design approaches to representing social cues in a digital system: the realist, the mimetic, and the abstract.

• The realist approach tries to project social information from the physical domain into or through the digital domain. This work is exemplified in teleconferencing systems and media space research.
• The mimetic approach tries to reproduce social cues from the real world as literally as possible in the digital domain. The mimetic approach is exemplified by graphical games and virtual reality systems. It uses virtual environments and avatars to mimic the real world.
• The abstract approach involves portraying social information in ways that are not closely tied to their physical analogs. It could uses abstract sonic cues to indicate social activity, or abstract visual representations. This approach also includes the use of text or simple graphics to convey social information.

Large deployment and adoption of systems based on the realist or mimetic approaches have faced substantial pragmatic hurdles, such as their cost, the required infrastructure, and the constraints of users support. On the other hand, I believe that the abstract approach has not received sufficient attention, particularly with respect to graphical representations. Text and simple graphics have many powerful characteristics: they are easy to produce and manipulate; they persist over time, leaving interpretable traces; and they enable the use of technologies such as search and visualization engines. In this last category we find "social proxies" such as those depicted here.

A social proxy is an abstract dynamic graphical representation that portrays socially salient information about the presence and activities of a group of people participating in an online interaction. It is one technique for providing online, multi-user systems with some of the cues so prevalent in the face to face world. Social proxies are intended to be visible to all those portrayed in them, thus providing a common ground from which users can draw inferences about other individuals, or the about the group as a whole.

Typically, a social proxy shows participants in a particular "place", as well as some of their activities in that "place". The choice of which aspects of activity are visible, and which remain private, depend on the particular context. Social proxies have four basic characteristics:

• A social proxy typically consists of two components: a large geometric shape with an inside and an outside that represent the online "place", and much smaller shapes positioned relative to the larger shape that represent participants.
• The presence and activities of participants in an online "place" are represented by the location and movement of the smaller shapes relative to the larger one. The relationships and movements of the visual elements have a metaphoric correspondence to the position and movement of peoples in a similar face-to-face situation.
• Social proxies are public representations, and everyone looking at a social proxy for a given "place" sees the same thing. It is not possible for participants to customize their views of a social proxy. This is important because I know that if I see something in the social proxy all other participants can see it as well. This is what supports mutual awareness and accountability.
• Social proxies are represented from a third-person perspective. Looking at a social proxy, every participant sees itself represented in it in the same way other participants are represented. This enables learning. A participant can see how its actions are reflected in its personal representation, and thus begin to make inferences about the activities of others.

The shared nature of a “social proxy” is critical. The knowledge that activity depicted in the social proxy is visible to all participants makes it “public”, and transforms it into a resource for the paticipants. It is this visibility that supports people accountability for their actions, and underlies the social phenomena, such as feelings of obligation, peer pressure, and imitation, that enable coherence in groups interactions.

On the Internet we are socially blind, and our attempts to communicate are often awkward. Even when others are clearly present, as in a chat room or on a conference call, it is difficult to see who is present, who is paying attention, or who wishes to speak. Things that require little effort in real world "places", such as taking turns when speaking; noticing when someone has a question; seeing who is responding to whom, require a lot of effort in online "places", when they at all are possible. I think introducing "social proxies" in widely used presence enabled applications, such as IM or VoIP clients, would allow us to progress on the way of a better sensitivity to the actions and interactions of those around us in virtual "places".

Technorati Tags: Conversation space, Presence, Instant messaging, Social network, Antecipate

Presence and going places

Mike Gotta has jotted down a series of notes about his trend of thoughts regarding presence technologies. In my opinion, his segmenting of the subject strongly reflects the constraints of an analyst work, but he nevertheless brings up many interesting points. I like in particular the way he widens up the scope of the reflection beyond current implementations

... food for thought and for consideration as to how some of these items relate to assumptions currently made around presence systems. How many assumptions based on instant messaging, IP telephony and so on will get in the way of a more expansive view of presence?

From his points, I would like to focus on presence relations to "location", "environment", "activity" and "role", what is often refered to as parts of a context. In that respect, because of their strong relationship to the physical reality, the use of spatial metaphors and spatial organization to model context have been favored by many mediated communication and collaboration systems. I believe this approach does not properly capture the complexity of real human social interactions. In real life, we are located in "space", but we act in "places". If the structure of a world is spatial, by comparison a “place” is a space invested with social meaning, such as behavioral appropriateness or cultural expectations. Furthermore "places" are valued "spaces". The distinction is like between house and home: a house is where we shelter, but a home is where we live. In order to get contextualy closer to the complexity of social communications, integrating “place” based information would greatly improve presence technologies.

Presence technologies make applications augments physical reality rather than replaces physical reality. Current implementations fall short in adapting to the vast variety of social communications contexts any human being is experiencing in real life. For example, the nature of relations and interactions with one's friends and family differs significantly from the nature of relations and interactions in the workplace. Even these simple differences are only superficially addressed by today's presence enabled applications. As a matter of illustration, we can cite:

• The way of establishing trusted presence relations scales poorly. To establish individual full trust between 10 persons, 10×9/2=45 bilateral agreements need to be established. Trust groups would scale much better and be easier to manage.
• The availability status does not provide much added value. Many community systems provide a list of who is on to the community website, using a group-based trust model where presence information not only indicates "who is online" but also "who is here". This model may work well when using a community’s website as primary shared resource. However, many groups and communities in workplaces often use a variety of shared resources. In such cases, for example when co-workers are always online at the same time, more detailed presence information than just online/offline status is needed.
• The trust model is very crude. Either one establishes a trust relation and can always observe other's presence information, or one does not establish a trust relation, in which case one can never other's presence information and cannot engage in conversations. This might not be problematic when dealing with friends and family, with whom you expect to resolve unwanted interruptions easily. It becomes a problem when dealing with a larger set of co-workers in a multi-project environment.

Presence technologies need to be augmented to provide information not only about people but also about “places”. Unlike what is currently offered in IM and VoIP applications, more advanced presence mechanisms must allow exchange of information only with a certain subset of people, not always but sometimes only, depending on real-time context information that can be derived from the virtual or real “places” people visit. Today, ordinary presence systems only give answers about person oriented questions:

• Who is online, or is this person online?
• What is this person doing?

Advanced presence systems will have to provide answers and notifications about “place” oriented questions, such as:

• Who is here?
• Who is near?
• Where is that person?
• What is that person doing there?

It happens these questions can be answered by combining different scoped attributes of presence infomation, including the trust relation between parties, their real or virtual locations, activities at these locations and presence and awareness scopes.

Trust scope. Some presence systems allow anyone who has access to a presence server to see presence information of others, other systems are more restrictive. The establishment of trust is distinguished by four model aspects:

• Opt-in / opt-out / managed: In an opt-in trust model, others can only see presence information if you explicitly give them permission. In an opt-out model, others can see presence information, unless you explicitly denied them permission. In a managed model, a third party instead of the users determines who can see presence information.
• Individual / group: In a individual trust model, each person rights to presence information are managed separately. In a group trust model, rights to see presence information are managed for an entire group.
• Reciprocal / non-reciprocal: In a reciprocal trust model, if A has the rights to presence information of B, then B also have the rights to the presence information of A. In a non-reciprocal trust model, this may not be the case.
• Permanent / blockable / contextual: In a permanent trust model, presence information is available as long as the rights to do so exist. In a blockable trust model, presence information can temporarily be denied. If the rights to presence information are based on location or place the trust model is contextual.

Location scope and virtual distance. When users browse the web, edit files from a shared storage, or read or post in blogs, they are present at a "location" in cyberspace. That said, many characteristics of physical space, such as being aware of someone's presence, and being able to initiate contact and communicate with that person, do not necessarily exists in the cyberspace.
Location information is expressed by coordinates, but in cyberspace unlike in the real world, users can be at multiple coordinates simultaneously. Place-based presence systems need to answer the question "Who is near?", have to calculate virtual distance between these coordinates. Virtual distance is then used to determine who can and who cannot be seen. To calculate virtual distance, presence location coordinates need to be laid out in a space, such as topology, virtual world or any directed graph. In place-based presence systems, location information constitutes a primary form of presence information. Not only the fact that someone is online somewhere in cyberspace, but also which resource that person is accessing provides presence information that can be made available to trusted parties.

Presence scope. A presence scope specifies the maximum virtual distance at which a trusted party can watch presence information. One may use multiple presence scopes, e.g., "people on the same website can see me, but cannot see the page I am on" and "people on the same web page can see if I am focusing on that page".

Awareness Scope. An awareness scope specifies the maximum virtual distance at which a user wants to get notified of presence information of trusting parties. One may use multiple awareness scopes, e.g., "are there people with me on the same web page?" and "are people with me on the same web page focusing on the page?".

Activity scope. What a user is doing at a location is also presence information. For example, in addition to browsing a web page, this may involve whether the user is actually focusing on this page or not , whether the user is editing this page or not.

Ultimately, by relaying “place” based information, presence technologies will enable three important building blocks of social interaction-- visibility, awareness, and accountability-and thus become "socially translucent" systems. We can illustrate a "socially translucent" system by the following example. Consider a door with a design problem, which is likely to slam into anyone about to enter from the other direction when opened quickly. An attempt to fix this problem would be to place a "Please open slowly" sign on the door. As one might guess, the sign is not a particularly effective solution. But we could also put a glass window in the door. As people approach the door they see whether anyone is on the other side and, if so, they modulate their actions appropriately. The sign is no longer required. While this solution works, it is useful to examine the reasons for the effectiveness of the glass window:

• Firstly, the glass window makes visible socially significant information. As humans, we notice and react to movement and human faces and figures more quickly than we notice and interpret a printed sign.
• Secondly, the glass window supports awareness. One does not open the door quickly because one knows that someone is on the other side. Our social rules come into play to govern our actions, as we have been raised not to slam doors into other people.
• Lastly, there is another subtler reason. Even if one does not care about hurting others, one will nevertheless open the door slowly because one knows that the other knows that one knows it is there, and therefore one will be held accountable for its actions. While awareness and accountability usually occur together in the physical world, they do not necessarily in a virtual context. It is through such individual feelings of accountability that norms, rules, and customs become effective social control mechanisms.

Note that "social translucence" is not only about acting according to social rules, but more about facilitating different types of communication and collaboration. Using presence information it is today possible to observe that another party is likely to be available for communication. In return for giving up some privacy, the other party expects to be contacted at suitable moments, can screen incoming messages, can plausibly deny being present by not responding or responding later, or simply by initiating the conversation at a time of its choosing. With "socially translucent" presence technologies it becomes easier for users to have coherent discussions, to observe and imitate others' actions, to engage in peer pressure, to create, notice, and conform to social conventions.

Technorati Tags: Conversation space, Presence, Instant messaging, Social network, Antecipate

Presence is irrational by nature

Technologies are rational by design, and they tend to rationalize human activity when used. I came across an interesting reading (Luhmann, 1993, 1995) which emphasized the over simplification often introduced by technology. I think this is particularly true in complex human related applications, such as those found in mediated communications.

The flipside of technological simplification is loss of flexibility and contingent response that have to be re-instituted through artificial mechanisms. Technological sequences cannot handle (i.e. absorb, ignore, forget or dissimulate) unforeseen incidents at the level on which they operate, even though technologists currently attempt to construct systems that respond to emergent events on the basis of learning from experience (i.e. neural networks). Such simple behavioral characteristics as forgetfulness, dissimulation and indifference, that we often assume to be part and parcel of the limitations of humans, play an extremely important and adaptive role under conditions of emergence, complexity and unpredictability.

Human communications and interactions are neither rational nor designed. Furthermore, temporal regularity is important in human experience. Communication technologies create perturbations in the regularity of time that characterizes a life made of personal habits and social routines. Habits and routines are more than repetition. They are often unique and spontaneous human experiences, where each repetition is different from the last.
By comparison, immediacy and access, as well as the constant flow of information, command that we attend to whatever is nearest and most urgent. Doing so, we lose a line of continuity to a dashed line of distraction.  In the end, we pay attention, but in spurts of sameness that contribute little to a healthy experience.

The adaptation between the technical and the human takes place at what is called the "interface." In the case of communication, this not just a user interface, but also a social interface. It is social because it mediates communication while facilitating the exchange of interpersonal cues and acknowledgments.

Because communication and presence technologies can stretch our relationships across time and space, they produce proximities involving rhythms of interaction, coordination of activity, ways of communicating, and ways of offering and protecting our availability. They do it creating kind of virtual proximities in which we become "equidistant" to one another. Unlike physical proximity, temporal proximity can be described as having qualities of speed, duration, acceleration, rhythm, and synchronization. Amongst the major challenges for communication and presence technologies we will find

• respect for habits and social routines without reducing them to simple functional repetitions,
• seemless flexibility and adaptability of user interaction,
• mediation of rythms and time, in complement of space, to induce a more human impression of proximity.

Today's communication and presence technologies’ interfaces often create a recurring sameness. The functions codified in the technologies reproduce the same abstracted operation and the same simplified representation with each repetition. This functional repetition displaces the spontaneity of social tradition. And we begin to think that repetition itself is dull, when it is the technical procedure implementation that is dull. Just look at a mobile phone to get a sense of what I am driving at…

Technorati Tags: Presence, Social network, Antecipate

Presence calls out attention

Every new piece of information put on the web becomes available to millions, almost instantaneously. Drawing a parallel with material goods, information production can be virtually infinite, and consequently, be in oversupply. Around ten years ago several definitions started appearing for what is now known as the "attention economy". The main concept was that over abundant information could only get value from the attention anyone of us was willing to devote to specific pieces of information.

To get attention you must emit what is technically identifiable as information; likewise for information to be of any value, it must receive attention. Therefore an information technology is also an attention technology, or in other words, a transfer of information is only completed when there is also a transfer of attention proceeding in the opposite direction.

In economy, property is the ownership of wealth. If attention has become a new kind of wealth, then one gain property whenever one attracts and holds it. One attracts attention by making oneself, and whatever one wants attention for, as visible as possible. Thus one holds best onto this form of property by being most open. In fact, this property is in the minds of one's beholders, and there needs to be as many minds as possible.
If one is good enough at attracting attention, it may create a temporary "enslavement", where those giving attention turn over control of a large part of their mind and even body. Attracting attention also means acquiring recognition, identity, and meaning in the eyes of those around. One's store of attention can sustain spirit, mind and body, in just about any form.
At the same time, those paying attention will also want to get attention for themselves by quoting, citing, criticizing, parodying, gossiping about, or referring to an attention grabber as if a star. In the extreme case which govern fans relationships to their stars, giving attention will take multiple forms such as listening to them, heeding what they say, doing what they ask, waiting on them, waiting for them, serving them, loving them, in short doing anything and everything for them.
In an "attention economy" it becomes possible to benefit from revealing as much as possible about oneself, including weaknesses, and just about anything else. That way, humanizing oneself not only stir up interest, but makes it easier for others to imagine themselves in one's shoes, which means turning their minds to see from one's eyes, a key part of any "paying of attention". Conversely, hiding away will likely turn attention elsewhere and create a risk of losing at least some of one's attention capital.

When they are not in the same place, peoples maintain presence and proximity through communication. Not through images, or appearance, but by maintaining communication. Beyond this, I think that presence technologies influence and enhance our proximity to one another.

Presence occurs when part or all of an individual's experience is mediated not only by the human senses and perceptual processes but also by human-made technology (i.e., "second order" mediated experience) while the person perceives the experience as if it is only mediated by human senses and perceptual processes (i.e., "first order mediated experience).

Early conceptions limited presence to its spatial and physical context, partly because of the technical nature of the mediation. But timing, rhythm, speed, and continuity, despite having a temporal quality that is easily disrupted by technical mediation, are critical to human communication and social interaction. They are more difficult for us to model and render, but nonetheless, I believe that temporal distortions participate fundamentally in one's sense of being on the same page, being in synch, having or sharing time together.
As a consequence, proximity should not only be based on spatial co-presence anymore, but instead tuned to the frequencies of virtual presence. Proximity in the age of its technical production becomes temporal. Proximity mediated through presence technologies produces continuity in spite of physical separation from one another.
In the "social" web, one trades physical presence for virtual presence negotiation in order to get access to people, obtaining their attention, knowing whether a person is there, and there for oneself. Presence technologies provide a temporal continuity through discontinuous participation, creating a sense of being with others who aren't there by projections of oneself in the virtual world. By doing so, presence technologies have the capacity to bring connectedness to people. They help spanning time and weaving a social fabric whose consistency simulate a "being there" for one another in time, but not space.

The real promise of the "social" web is to help satisfy the ever more pressing desire for attention. It's not the associated communication technologies which are important, but rather the individual and social practices into which the technology becomes embedded: messaging, talking, trading, dating, buying, selling, etc… They all participate into how one is perceived as present in the "virtual world". And when everything else has become boring, only "social" presence remains. In this world, I see presence as a social involvement, one that calls out attention, or to put it another way, in the "social" web it is presence that drives the way people trade attention.

In spite of this simple economical equation, none of the so called "social" networks have yet embarked on a re-architecture based on real-time presence technologies; instead they keep using overhauled legacy web techniques.

Technorati Tags: Presence, Social network, Antecipate