Chat Room Comeback?

So earlier today, I found an article on the New York Times entitled “Online Chat, as Inspired by Real Chat“.

The article begins with this quote

Compared with other forms of human interaction, online social networking is really not all that social.

It is true, online social networking is simply not as good as face to face social networking. There will be no replacement for the FtF communication that can only be imitated online to a certain extent.

The author presents the following analogy to online social networking on popular SNSs

People visit each other’s MySpace pages and Facebook profiles at various hours of the day, posting messages and sending e-mail back and forth across the digital void. It’s like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator.

It’s true, most of the communication done on popular SNSs is asynchronous, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing. I think there is a reason why chat rooms have not reached a massive popularity amongst internet users since the days of AOL’s prime. For one, most chat rooms can become very overwhelming with several conversations between several groups people at once, in the same chat room. Let me put it this way, have you ever sat in a small room with more than a few groups of people, with several conversations going on at the same time? Not only is it hard to hear the person you’re talking to (as they try to raise their voice over the other conversations in the room), you might become distracted with the current conversation as you listen in on the other conversation. This is the dilemma that online chat rooms face if they adopt the same simple text based model.

There is promise in the use of chat rooms besides being just a chat room embedded on your Facebook/MySpace profile. For example, imagine watching a TV show on Hulu, or a clip on YouTube (both are streams that usually asynchronous/not live), but inviting your friends online to watch the show with you. Instead of everyone watching asynchronously, the show is synchronized to start and playback at the same time as each user is connected to the stream. As the show or clip goes on, the viewing experience becomes shared and comments/links/reactions can be distributed within a chat room that is overlaid or positioned alongside the video stream. This is analogous to sitting in your living room watching TV with your friends, or even watching a live TV show while chatting with your friends via IM.

Another idea I have deals with proximity. What if there was a way to filter conversations depending on your interest or location? This might be hard to understand so I’ll provide a brief example. What about a dynamic chat room that followed your browsing and reading habits online in a specific website (not the entire web, just one particular site)? Let’s take ESPN.com for example. You start off by looking at the front page, and your chat room is currently loaded into the Top Stories arena, but then you navigate to the NCAA Basketball home page and then your chat room dynamically shifts to a different room whose primary focus is with College Basketball. The conversations are moderated to make sure topics continue to be relevant, as well as being linked to your friends who may be browsing the same section on the site. Imagine discovering that your friends are also looking at the NBA Standings, a conversation can be triggered as each person debates why their team isn’t number 1.

So yes, chat rooms can make a comeback… so long as their implementation is more than just a 3-d avatar embedded in a web browser, or a chat box with no dynamic functionality.

Hallelujah, granularity is here! (Facebook)

So if you’ve logged onto Facebook this morning, you’d find out that Facebook has changed their Privacy controls quite a bit by adding more granularity. Here is what they posted at the top of my News Feed,

We’ve added more privacy options.

Now you can use friend lists to control exactly who can see what. We’ve also added the option to share information with “Friends of Friends”. For more details, check out the Privacy page.

So what does this mean? Let me take a look at all of the different areas we can now tweak, adjusting the visibility of a Facebook user’s account.

• Profile
  • Before, we were limited to creating only one list of people called the “Limited Profile” where users could select portions of their profile to be shown, and the rest hidden to select Friends. In the previous system, it was an all in, the limited profile view, or a complete block of a user. This was limited because most users in the real world have multiple subsets of friends, that could be categorized under “Work/Professional”, “School”, “Family”, and more. These different subsets would only be allowed certain bits of information, such as pictures/videos, what you were doing exactly, or even who your other friends are. Now a user’s profile can be tailored exactly to how they specify them to be. For example, you may not want your professional friends to see any videos or pictures of you so you can create a “friend list” for them, and add that list to a limited group who cannot access those areas of your profile. This is powerful because it enables the Facebook user to more clearly define the offline groups in their Facebook network.
  • On the opposite end of the spectrum, it looks like Facebook has also allowed users to open up their profile more if they choose to do so. They have added a new grouping of access called “Friends of Friends”. This can be enabled for the different areas of the profile to make it easier for second degree friends to access certain bits of your profile, such as your contact info and basic information. This is good for those who have a small Facebook network of people and are willing to give more information out to more friends of friends that will help make more connections possible.

All in all, this is what I have been waiting for. I haven’t found any real faults with the addition of more advanced, granular customizations to the Privacy area of my own Facebook account. I believe it can only improve the usability of Facebook. In my first module paper, which I have attached here Facebook’s Pattern for Privacy Concern, it looks as if Facebook has answered my plea. Thanks Mark and Company!

iPhone as a Software Platform

If you haven’t heard already, Apple this past Thursday had just announced their software roadmap for the iPhone (and iPod Touch). If you haven’t seen the event, follow this link to go watch it. If you don’t want to watch the hour long presentation, or if software development details sound boring, a summary of what I want to discuss can be found here.

So what does the release of the SDK mean? Well for me and other current iPhone users, we will soon have an official method for developing and using 3rd party software. Previously, the only way a user could use 3rd party software on their iPhone was if they performed a “jailbreak” on their phone. In a nutshell, this is an unofficial way for users of the iPhone to gain access to run applications not created by Apple directly on their phone. This was in response to Apple’s request that all iPhone applications be created for the iPhone’s web browser in the form of web apps. Web apps were limited because they essentially did not have access to any specific iPhone functions such as the accelerometer, and even basic things such as read and write access to the iPhone itself. Additionally, it required that the iPhone have some form of internet access (cellular or wi-fi). Sometimes both might not be available, such as when you are on a plane, in a hospital etc. With the SDK, developers are allowed access to do all of this and more.

What’s most exciting about the SDK though is what developers discovered about making applications for the iPhone. As a prior user of a T-Mobile Sidekick (which runs Danger’s proprietary OS, has its own SDK and application delivery store, similar to Apple’s, but a closed and heavily protected architecture), and a Windows Mobile Smartphone (a completely open architecture, developers distribute the software themselves), Apple is not alone in terms of software development on a mobile device. What’s different about developing about the iPhone, compared to say a Blackberry or a Windows Mobile phone? It’s all about the operating system and the development environment given to you. From what I’ve seen during the keynote this past week, and the types of software that companies have developed and demoed, I am very excited. Unlike most other mobile phones, the architecture of the iPhone allows for a much more robust development environment that is much more similar to a computer desktop operating system than a mobile phone operating system. Because the difference between the iPhone and desktop like computing is blurring, the scope of development will follow.

Imagine the ease of use of a fully integrated Flickr application on the iPhone. The ability to take photos from the camera, upload them to Flickr, tag your photo with the multi-touch interface, or even edit and crop the photos within the iPhone itself without going to your computer. Or how about a version of Delicious Library for your iPhone that leverages the camera and intuitive interface to help you catalog your growing collection of physical music, movies, and books. How about games? A few games were shown during the event this past week, so this will obviously be a huge focus for developers. By having the ability to directly develop games for the iPhone, we will start to see much more engaging forms of gaming. Should the Sony’s and the Nintendo’s of the world be scared… I think so, why you ask? Let’s not forget that the iPhone has one thing both the PSP and the Nintendo DS don’t have. An always on internet connection through your wireless provider. They all have a wi-fi card, but you’re not always in range of a wi-fi access point. Can you say networked gaming on the iPhone?! Not only networked gaming, but can you imagine a Second Life client for the iPhone? Technically it might not be possible to run it all the time with the speed of the cellular data connection in the 1st generation iPhone, but I won’t completely rule the possibility out.