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Jyri Engeström

Social objects, power, stickiness, and loveOctober 15

Yesterday the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium ran a session on social objects. It was chaired by Tom Coates and included great talks by Matt Webb (Schulze & Webb), Kati London (Botanicalls), and Rob Faludi (ITP).

I talked about some less explored aspects of objects, about which social theory has interesting things to say.

First, how entrepreneurs build power relationships by turning their object into an obligatory point of passage. This is a way to deconstruct what sustains an existing service and what changes could possibly disrupt it.

Second, how objects make us come back to them, and how this cycle is based on incompleteness and wanting. This is a more philosophical take on what Web developers mean when they talk about stickiness.

Third, how meaningful human relationships are built around a renewing of oneself and the object, and how standardization can step in the way by limiting richness of expression across the board. This links to challenges services have sustaining growth and providing value to users over extended periods of time.

Nodal points video from Reboot 10September 29

Reboot has now published the video of my talk on social objects, social peripheral vision, and nodal points. I gave a slightly developed, much condensed version of the same at PICNIC08 last week. Below's the blurb from the Reboot site. The length of the video is 33 minutes.

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.

Objects and asymmetrical sharing on ReaderAugust 15

This week Google Reader updated its Shared Items so users can share them with a hand-picked friend group. Up until now sharing on Reader has bee limited to Google Talk chat contacts.

From the perspective of object-centered sociality it's easy to understand why many Reader users asked for a separate list. On Talk, people connect with folks they want to chat with. The social object there is the chat conversation. Reader took a different object, a blog article, and made it shareable. Many people's chat networks didn't map perfectly to their blog-reading networks, which the Reader team recognized.

A part of my job has been to make it easier to share things on Google, so it's been great to work with the Reader team and see them launch this update. It gives users greater control over the audience they share with and consume from.

By the way, one of the details worth noting is that sharing on Reader can be asymmetrical. That is, you can let someone see your shared items without necessarily having to subscribe to theirs. Personally I find this really useful. I'm fine sharing articles with a broad audience, but following everyone back would be drinking from the firehose.

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Nodal points videoAugust 3

Here's a video of the social objects & nodal points keynote from The Web and Beyond: Mobility conference:

The busy folks at SPRXMobile also published a video of the talk on their site today. The audio isn't quite as good in that version but the slides are easier to read.

Reboot 10 talk on Nodal PointsJuly 10

Copenhagen's Reboot is one of a few conferences I would not miss.

This year was the 10th anniversary of the event, and true to the spirit of its theme 'free' it ended with a self-organized beer-sharing huddle on the street in front of the afterparty venue.

The town being Copenhagen, and the crowd being Rebooters, the huddle swelled into a full-scale street party that didn't stop until the police arrived on the scene. (Here's a video from when it was still relatively early in the night).

In my talk I discussed how activity streams are turning social services into a flow of updates, filtered through people, and tried to show how the concepts of social objects and social peripheral vision can be applied to make sense of this shift.

Reboot is reportedly going to post a video of the talk online some time soon. In the meanwhile, here are the slides:

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As usual, the confere