Future of Web Apps ( FOWA ) is - presence and presentation

The last post of notes from FOWA Oct 07, this one dealing with 2 themes from Day 2 - presence and presentation. Both of these were very interesting as we have recently done quite a bit of work involving them.

Firstly, the Future of Presence - there were 2 sessions here. As always the formidable talents of Suw Charman and Steph Booth - whom I was lucky enough to meet and have my online grammar corrected by - have captured all the talks (see links below), but this is what stood out for me:

1. Jyri Engestrom (Jaiku) and Felix Petersen (Plazes) on the "Future of Presence" - what stood out for me was Jyri noting that Social Nets can be thought of as connecting people to and by objects, and that connections can be temporary - "knots" was the term he used - connecting strings can be tied and untied. This is very interesting, because our analysis is that we need to differentiate levels of intimacy not just between people, but between subjects between people - ie just because you are my parent - and very close - does not mean I want you to know Object X. Being able to have levels of intimacy defined by person and by Object is quite a useful way of doing this.

2. Leisa Reichelt's concept of Ambient Intimacy. We have been pursuing a similar line of thinking with the the thoughts around publication/subscription models for making presence felt, Leisa's talk was interesting as (i) its nice to know other people are in the same orbits and (ii) she pushed our thinking farther along with the concept of 'phatic expression - ie transactions for the specific purpose of being social. Her views on ambient presence - lightweight, out of way, portable etc - match to our view of a pub/sub approach.

What was really interesting though was a long chat to Leisa afterwards about the area we have been puzzling over - ie persistence. If presence data is persistently out there, it means others can potentially see every 'phatic transaction you ever made, a thing which we humans have devised a huge number of routines around keeping fairly private in real life - or at least we have always worked in social nets where it is non persistent so memory fades (so I can't count the number of times Leisa poked Jyri rather than me in the last 10 years, for example) - so making it extremely clear where we stand with each other in relation to others is potentially quite explosive.

Secondly, the Future of Presentation

3. An excellent presentation by Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen Design about data visualisation. This was very relevant to us, as earlier this year we built a "zeitgeist search" engine using memetic theory at the BBC Innovation Labs. We felt rather smug about how clever we were, but were quickly sent packing and told to read Tufte (The Presentation Bible) as our GUI output was seen to be severely lacking (it was in tag cloud style). So, it was very interesting seeing the number of ways they cut similar data (if anyone saw the linkage stuff, a memetic search is very similar to that). It was also useful to talk to Eric afterwards and get some tips and confirmation of ideas.

4. Erica Hall on Copy as Interface (ie Text Appeal). Just a really useful talk about the art of texting up web assets. As a public service, here are the "8 Bads"

- Vague
- Unnatural
- Passive
- Too Cute or Clever
- Don't be rude
- Don't be oblivious to surroundings
- Don't be presumptuous
- Check for silly stuff (tautology etc)

Also went to the Dapper guys talk on Semantic Web, very useful (we've just finished a big project on a "building block" Semantic Web approach, so interesting to see how they had approached it.

On the power of presence, it was amazing what the impact of "being present by just hanging around" during the day and afterwards was like - caught up with a bunch of people, met two speakers I'd foregone for the above talks as they were more work related - Thomas Vander Wal (Infocloud) and Matt Biddulph (Dopplr), and met Ian Forrester (the other half of the BBC Backstage dynamic duo). I actually had an old Alumni dinner to get to so finally tore myself away, but then met Umair Haque on the train

Kudos to the Carsonified team, a good show...I have some niggles about Excel and giving the Developers the big tent, but apart from some of the morning Day 1 stuff I thought it was very thought provoking.