Social Software for Set-Top boxes...

You can download the core part of the material that follows as a PDF presentation entitled Social Software for Set-Top Boxes (4Mb).

A buddy-list for television:
Imagine a buddy-list on your television that you could bring onto your screen with the merest tap of a 'friends' key on your remote control. The buddy list would be the first stage of an interface that would let you add and remove friends, and see what your friends are watching in real-time - whether they be watching live television or something stored on their PVRs. Adding friends would be simple - you could enter letters on screen using your remote, or browse your existing friends' contact lists.

Being able to see what your friends were watching on television would remind you of programmes that you also wanted to see, it would help you spot programmes that your social circle thought were interesting and it could start to give you a shared social context for conversations about the media that you and your friends had both enjoyed.

Obviously there might be some programmes that you might wish to view with a significant other, but wouldn't necessarily want to advertise to the rest of the world that you were watching. For this reason your personalised settings would have to have all kinds of options to help you control how you were being represented to the wider world that were as simple to use and unobtrusive as possible. Primary among the tools at your disposal would be your ability to tell your set-top box not to advertise that you were watching any shows marked as for adults only and to mark certain channels as similarly private. These settings would obviously be on by default.

Presence alerts:
One of the core functions of a socially enabled set-top box would be to create the impression of watching television alongside your peer group and friends - even if you were geographically distant from one another. One key way to do this would be to create a sensation of simultaneity - to remind you that there are other people in your social circle doing things at the same time as you. This would allow you to create a mental impression of what your friends were doing.

Here are two versions of an alert that could fade up gently onto the screen when someone on your buddy list changes channel. These alerts would work in two ways - if the person was changing channel and landed on a station as a programme was just about to begin or within the first three or four minutes of a programme, then the alert would be immediate. This would give you the opportunity to change over to that channel as well without missing too much of the show. If - however - they were changing over to a channel in the middle of a show or they changed the channel again within ten seconds, then the alert would not be sent. They would have to have been watching the new channel for a few minutes before an alert would be sent. There would be nothing more intrusive and irritating than watching someone compulsively flick between channels at a distance (except perhaps being in the room with them as they did so).

The most important part of all these alerts is that they provide you with the option to join the person concerned in whichever programme they happen to now be watching...

Watch with your friends:
Now we have the concept of joining a friend to watch a show, we have to ask what should that experience be like? How should your parallel engagement manifest itself. Traditionally, net-mediated social spaces have tended towards text as a communicative medium. But this would seem like an enormously clumsy way to interact during a television programme.

Television is an audio-visual medium and there's no reason why your engagement with your friends shouldn't also be audio-visual. For this reason a simple high quality webcam above the television would help you see how your friends were responding to what was on screen - it would help you feel an experience of shared engagement without there being a need for overt discussion. By default your conversations with your friends would be muted, and you could - of course - minimise their images if they started to get annoying, but if you wanted to shout and scream alongside your friends, then you'd simply turn the sound back on. This would be the perfect form of engagement around certain sporting events, or for making a well-known television programme or film just the backgrounded context for a shared conversation.

In the mock-up below, you can see the cameras of three of your friends on the right. One person has wandered away from their TV...

Chatting and planning:
If your friends were in the room with you during an ad break, you might chat about the programme you've just been watching or bitch about the adverts in front of you. You might turn the sound down low for a few seconds and talk about something else completely. There are lots of contexts where the programme on television might not be the main focus of activity around the television. These might be times when it's still important to have a sense of what's happening on the screen, but where the social activity has been dragged to the foreground.

Set-top box social software would have to support such engagements. So how about a second view when you're in one of these social situations? From having the programme in the foreground, one simple switch of the button could drag your friends into the limelight. The programme could be fully or partially muted, and your friends automatically unmuted. Then you could chat to each other about the programme you'd just watched, or wait for the adverts to end together. You could even use these opportunities to plan what to watch next. If this was handled in a similar way to group formation and parties in online gaming structures like Halo 2, then perhaps one person could even set up the next programme and stream it to everyone else, or cue forward to show their friends the best part of a particular dance sequence or the key quote from a political interview.

Choosing channels and playing games:
Having this technology in place under your television could create a tremendous platform for all kinds of other applications or games to be layered on top of your television experience. And these could be equally usable with people in the same room as yourself. If you gave everyone a personalised remote control (or installed universal remote control software in something like a mobile phone) then people could propose changing channels but be over-ruled by other people in the room. The wonderful browsing experience of flicking through music video channels could be turned into a game, with each song being rated on the fly by everyone present or telepresent and records kept of channels and songs that people tended to enjoy. The same controls could be hooked up to other forms of interactive television or to net-enabled functionality on the boxes themselves...

Sharing a social library:
And finally, to return to the idea of media discovery and regenerating a social context around television programming, how about if the shows that many of your friends had decided in advance to record were automatically recorded by your device too. How would it be if you never missed the show that everyone was talking about? And if you had - your box could ask its peers for some kind of swarmed download if anyone still had a copy and it could appear in your local library overnight.

All this of course, is just the very beginning of the kinds of things that you could create with a socially-enabled TV set-top box. It's all basically just extensions of stuff that we're already doing in other media. There are still technological barriers of course - bandwidth and synchronisation being core problems. But we're gradually on the way to solving them.

To repeat - If you'd like to download this piece as a simple to read and print PDF presentation then you can do so here: Social Software for Set-Top Boxes (4Mb).

Addendum:
Here are a few related links that people have brought to my attention since posting this stuff up or since I finished work on the presentation and illustrations. I'm a little cross with myself for not posting this stuff up before, but hey...

• A post on Corante on the subject of social television - infuriating how bad my timing has been...
• PARC to make TV watching more social - yet another thing posted within the last twenty-four hours
• Ivrea project on circles of care includes 'TV together' - thanks to Molly for digging this one out
• Tryst - software based on VLC designed to let people watch movies together. I couldn't get this to work very well, so I can't comment on the experience.

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Professional social software

Via D. Keith Robinson, LinkedIn is a social software system that works kind of like Friendster but is targetted at professionals. You sign up, create a profile that includes your industry and geographical area and it provides you with a number of tools to find other people with similar interests. More importantly, it lets you build up a network of contacts through which you can access other people. If nothing else, it's a great way of maintaining your CV.

Keith says he's had a few leads for freelance work from it so it appears to work. I've created an account; if you sign up, drop me an invite (my email address can be found via my contact page) and provided I have at least a vague inkling of who you are I'll add you to my immediate network.

Incidentally, the most connected member is currently one Joi Ito with 493 connections. I'm guessing LinkedIn follows power laws just as much as the rest of the web does.

Shel on Social Software

Shel Israel: Automating friendship with social software. "For me, there’s a sense of déjà vu. VCs are ponying up investments apparently without much sense of history. The business plans often emulate the worst thinking of the Dot Com Era and VCs, burned once seem undaunted by the experience."

Social Software for the Deads

Yesterday, I dreamt that my father died.  So I woke up upset and disturbed.  Disturbed because my father is going to Paris today, a trip I have a bad foreboding about.  Chewing bad mojo all morning led me to think about using blogs as a memorial of sort and then spilled out into thinking about dead people in social networks.  Here are some notable pieces from that trail:

Rewinding a blog back in time

I thought it might be neat to have a blog that moves backward in time with posts sorted in reverse order.  So when I die, my blog will show posts from the day before I died and then the day before that and so on.  There will be blog comments by visitors before and after I died.  There are problems with this idea but is worth savoring to look for hidden passages to new ideas.

Blogging from the Grave

It would also be interesting to turn my blog into a wiki-ish blog after I died so that my friends can post to my blog for one reason or another.  In a sense, 'I' continue to live within the mind of my friends so 'I' am still blogging from the grave.

The Dead as a Party Host

I mentioned before that a 'center' of a social network doesn't have to coordinate or even be aware of the synergy he or she creates.  Come to think of it, the center doesn't even have to be alive.  For example, people who met each other at a funeral forms a social network around a dead person.

Zombies in Orkut

What should happen when a member of Orkut or LinkedIn dies?  It's bound to happen or have happened already.  Should his node disappear?  That doesn't make sense.  Two people having a friend in common is relevant even if the friend happens to be dead.  But if the node is left within the network, what are the downsides other than having to add a gravestone icon to the profile?

Lycos does some me-too social software

Blogs, Wkis and Social Software

Some friends asked me why we weren't mentioned in this article in CNet. I guess I have to go schmooze up the writer - Josuhua Jaffe.

But I wonder - why Joshua didn't mention 1Up, Tribe or aSmallWorld or Yahoo 360? He also didn't mention LinkedIn, MySpace or hi5. I guess there's allot going on - and the focus of this article is on corporatioons doing work - not individuals finding jobs or having fun.

But one thing it implies - is that the COMBINATION of blogging with something else! Perhaps now folks will see that it's time to move beyond thinking of blogging as some stand alone activity and see it as a natural form of expression and feature - that then gets applied to EVERY kind of activity.

This is at the essence of DLAs. An integrated, aggregated and highly customizable experience that combines social networking, blogging, media and communications with whatever the focus constituency, company assets, positioning or approach calls for. Oh yah - and mobile too (thanks Russ!)

We've been getting allot of great reception from our DLAs ideas - so we'll have plenty of examples to show and talk about in the near future.

Final note: I can't wait to see what 6A comes up with - and what Micahel Sippey is all about.

Many-to-Many: Is Social Software Bad for
the Dean Campaign?

corante.com/many/archives/2004/01/26/is_social_software_bad_for _the_dean_campaign.php
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Blog aggregator and social software

The Social Impacts of Software Choices

Social Software and the Politics of
Groups

An addendum to a definition of Social
Software

I'm loath to wake the old evil beastie of definitions of social software, but I came across some old notes that I sent off to someone in October and I'd like to keep track of it for later. Basically the question was could you produce a short and pithy, mostly accurate short-hand description of social software that mostly worked. I came up with:

Social Software can be loosely defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking.

I slapped a lot of examples in there because it seemed to clarify the issue a bit. Note, this is a shorthand, and nothing more - my fuller posts on the subject include: My working definition of social software but I think maybe I prefer this shorter, rotted-down and composted version.

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Mobile social software privacy

Another method takes advantage of "the natural incentives that occur in peer communities, as manifest in things like Napster and Gnutella," says Canny. "It does seem within a community you have a few altruistic people who will, for whatever reason, help the community by providing the service, and from a privacy perspective you can do a lot if you can identify some users who are willing to leave a machine online that provides some privacy protection. The rest of the people in the community can use that machine. They don't have to trust the owner of the machine because the algorithm is set up so that the owner of that machine can't get access to that machine anyway, but if they provide this service, they can protect their peers' information from the service provider."

Social Software needs to show the seams

Although I think the "socially awkward" and the "what's the point" problem of some social networking sites is a problem, I think the "suck up your email addresses from outlook" and the one click "spam all of my friends" features are the most troublesome. Stowe Boyd talks about his accidental "spam my friends with one click" episode with Zero Degrees.

Actually, what I find scarier is the way Spoke which takes all of your email address from your headers and makes a network out of them. So even if you don't "join" Spoke, if someone who you exchange email with joins, you're actually already in Spoke.

I think the key is user control and a clear interface of what is happening. I think UI used to be a lot about making things "seamless". I think when you are dealing with sensitive privacy related information, your UI has to make it very clear where your data is, when it is going to be transfered to another machine, and what the privacy policy of the said machine is. Every time data moves across a boundary, the user should know this an be provided a choice. UI's that deal with personal information should be about showing the seams, not being seamless.

Ross and Ju dith also chime in.

The Social Software Patent Mess

Gender, personality, and social software

"I feel like I'm at a Microsoft monastery here," wrote Rory Blyth from the most recent Professional Developers Conference. "I think I've seen about 2.5 females ... it's like they're an endangered species." The observation holds equally true for open source conferences.
...
If we expect social software to help rewrite the productivity equation, social skills and protocols become critical parts of the game. How can social software succeed if, in its development, half the population is so poorly represented? [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

Berkman Audio on Social Software

Moible social software applications

From Clay Shirky via ElasticSpace.......

Coolio list.....

Is Social Software Bad for the Dean
Camapign?

Emerging Internet Technologies - the
Semantic Web - has massive business,
technology, and social applications.A
Workshop in NUI Galway on 1-2 September
will address some of these issues.

Found objects: Social Software
Mind-map...

I've not got an awful lot to say about this this fantastically interesting mind-map of social software, but I think it's slightly too important and interesting to be left loitering in the linklog.

Preamble towards a post on Social
Software for Set-top boxes

The following post contains some of my thoughts about Social Software for Set-Top Boxes. But before I do so, I thought maybe I should write really briefly about some of the context. I've been thinking around this stuff for a very long time now, but I've been too disorganised and busy to put any of it out in public. The last thing I wrote around this area was several months ago, and was in fact entirely an attempt to set the scene a little for what I'm going to write next. It was about conceptualising how a connected media hub might operate in the home. For more background on that, you should read the three posts I wrote back then, the last of which has enough pictures to give a sense of the whole concept without the effort of ploughing through my clumsy inarticulate prose:

• Media Hub Proposal (Part One)
• Media Hub Proposal (Part Two)
• Media Hub Proposal (Illustrations)

I started writing this post and the following post immediately after producing the pieces above, and the illustrations and design work you'll see were well on their way before Christmas. I decided to postpone publishing it for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I felt it had a certain amount of synergy with the paper that Matt Webb and I were going to be presenting at ETCon with Paul and Matt Biddulph on "Reinventing Radio". But with that paper now out of the way (and available here: Reinventing Radio: Enhancing One-to-Many with Many-to-Many) I think it's probably the right time to launch into it. So with no further ado: Social Software for Set-Top Boxes.

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"plasticbag.org | webl0g | Social
Software for Set-Top boxes..."

Social networking software continues to
grow

Social software, applications which enhance human collaboration, continue to spur new software . Projects including Friendster , Tribe.net , Ryze , and Eliyon are populating and connecting users into social networks . FOAF develops a standard for networking, while Microsoft is considering a move in this area.

The popularity and perceived efficacy of social software is perhaps part of a patent drive to claim the six degrees of separation as intellectual property , or small world theory, which supports many of these collaboration engines. This interdisciplinary theory, perhaps most powerfully developed in social network analysis , has been applied to a variety of fields, including internet structure and security .

(thanks to Clara Yu!)

Google launches social software tool

Google, the world's leading search engine, has quietly released a social software application. Orkut is invitation-only, and represents a potentially significant intervention within that new, burgeoning field.

(via OLDaily )

Social Software ideas A Whole Lotta
Features

a.wholelottanothing.org/features.blah/entry/007633
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Learning plenty with Facebook

Facebook Online College Community

College Facebook Mugs Go Online

302 Redirect Hack Fastly Becoming Most
Infamous SE Listings Hack Ever

Hack . . . hack back . . . repeat

Email Privacy Hack

Core Hacking Forum Created

Net cafe users nabbed for hacking into
online bank account

Dating site hack suspect arrested

Electronic Voting Firm Site Hack

Man Sentenced for Hacking Into Web Site

Man Sentenced for Hacking Al-Jazeera
Site

Man sentenced for hacking Al-Jazeera
site

Computer professional held for hacking
into web site

New Windows Hacking Site Opens by
~cuttheredwire

Police cyber crime pin-up girl busted
for hacking site

Just Hack

Reminds me of the time the Malaysian government sent a software team to Canada to do technology transfer for a flight simulator system. After spending 2 years in Canada, they returned, and i asked one of the team members how the Canadian coders designed this powerful and complex system. I was expecting some detailed software methodology involving multiple phases. He told me, "they just hire a bunch of talented programmers, teach them the physics, and tell them to hack!"

PS2 Eye Toy Hack

AIM Ad Hack 3.60

Aim Ad Hack 3.63

Hack yourself

AIM Ad Hack 3.59

Hack Your Car

Just Hack It Again

I posted this comment a few weeks ago, but i never clarified what i thought of this quotation - until now...

Let's say you learnt a subject really well, and were asked to teach others. You enjoy teaching and others admire your teaching style. Then one day, you throw away all your notes and teach off-the-cuff, from memory. You have to really know your stuff before you'd dare do that.

We'll that's what I think George Carrette meant by "Just Hack". If you don't know your stuff inside-out, upside-down and every-which-way, "Just Hack" is probably not for you.

How to hack your new PSP

Aim Ad Hack 3.67

Aim Ad Hack 3.62

A third css hack

Hack Your Keyboard

Hack the universe

Read this Scientific American piece. Short version; the universe is actually a two-dimensional plane packed with information, and the three-dimensions universe we perceive is nothing but an expression of that information. Matter and energy and life are, in fact, holograms. It leaves something very very interesting open for the future. If the universe is a vast two-dimensional plane of information -- then it can be hacked.

Social Issues Surround Social Software