I attended Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this past week.  Brady Forrest (co-chair) invited us to have our H.E.Ai.D. installation (large scale, collaborative play space with lasers, generative sound, and a tinge of augmented reality) in the Expo.  Aside from the joy of watching Tim O’Reilly dance  in our installation, it was great to get up to date on all things Web 2.0.  Here’s my report:

Tim O’Reilly framed the event very well during his keynote speech, essentially giving a report card on the state of Web 2.0 – arguing that the web as application platform should be conceptualized as an information operating system rather than platform of devices or technologies.  See his recent article on O’Reilly Radar to learn more.  The main concern he raised was the ongoing tension between large companies’ desires to dominate the web as an information platform (one ring to rule them all…) versus a more utopian, Internet-style, democratized version where services from multiple providers are “horizontally integrated via open standards”.  Applying this thinking to the social space, he argues that the real power is in developing applications and APIs that allow third-party developers to leverage the social data that companies have produced through years of supporting communication and networking technologies.

Aside:  This kind of thinking is one of the reasons I love the O’Reilly crew and their events.  Because they don’t create their own technologies, but are rather a publishing company specializing in books and events for technology innovators, they are in a unique position to serve as trusted, impartial advocates for a future that best serves the needs and interests of individual users.  I only wish they could run events without any sponsorship at all….I’m sure it introduces some bias.

I was happy to see a lot of the event focusing on the social space – themes included:

• Helping user focus on content they care about.  Users are overwhelmed with a fire hose of information on the Web, so a few talks/technologies focused on how we can help users focus their attention on content they care about.    
  • Social aggregation. that is integrating content from multiple social streams such as Facebook and Twitter is one such method.  Both Spindex.me from Microsoft’s Fuselabs and Strings (presented in the LaunchPad session) had social aggregation tools, allowing users to incorporate their various social streams into one location.  I’m often dubious of social aggregation tools, because I’m not convinced the average user really wants all their content mixed in one place — plus it’s been tried (e.g., FriendFeed, Strands).  However, I thought Spindex.me had a compelling use case: layering smart search over the socially aggregated content to help users find content their friends care about, and focus on emerging trends in their social sphere.  T
  • Social curation.  There were also a couple of social curation projects: that is, allowing users to select the best online content, either your own content (again, Strings), or content around a search theme (Montage from Microsoft’s FUSE Labs) and then share with friends.  Pearltrees.com had personal content management social curation with a network based visualization.   pearltrees.com. 
• Managing user generated content.  User generated content allows technology companies to leverage large amounts of information.  But with the advantages are many pitfalls, because when everyone has a voice, and everyone can share, sometimes they say mean and inappropriate things.  A few talks provided basic “how-to” information, including Randy Farmer’s discussion of reputation mechanisms.  He said sometimes the best reputation mechanisms are not shared:  don’t share negative evaluations publicly, because some people will use them to gang up on others, but rather use them on a hidden level to prioritize content.  At the Web 2.0 Expo/Bay Area Ignite a few talks discussed not abusing social media and user generated content.  Listening to these talks you got a sense of a UGC backlash:  you shouldn’t force people to over share (Avoidr and The Forgiveness Engine by Jesper Andersen) and you shouldn’t waste people’s time with contests (Jen Bekman).
• Building on a culture of social participation and sharing.  A couple of talks explored issues around building large scale pro-social participation and sharing.  See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21842, nothing too surprising here, but if you’re new to using social media a good overview.  Perhaps the hardest lesson for big companies is giving up control and being accessible to community, practicing what you preach with openness/sharing.  A similar theme emerged in a discussion of open leadership by Charlene Li.  (This talk seemed to be more about open, social media marketing than leadership – in the modern web 2.0 world…marketers should engage with consumers.) 
• Designing for rich interaction applications.  A few talks addressed the fact that there are increasingly rich internet applications online, and the existing tools and methods for designing web applications need to be updated to address new online interaction models.  E.g., Chris Griffith argued that you need to actually prototype your more complex interaction sequences as a part of the design process before handing it off to developers — or, he warned, they end up designing for you.

Other highlights:  Location location location was everywhere.   So to was Twitter as a central part of the web 2.0 information operating system, e.g. see bing twitter www.bing.com\twitter.    For a fun example of the power of large scale access to user generated content, see the One Million Giraffes project, where Olla Helland trying to win a bet collecting a million giraffes drawn by 2011 using social media.   Social, casual games and game mechanics were appearing in everything social.    Generally seening people getting increasingly excited about augmented reality, esp. in mobile,  e.g., Microsoft Tag tech embedded in the event:  http://emergingexperiences.com/2010/05/rockstar-on-tour-web-20-expo-san-francisco/

Other cool technologies worth checking out:

Rhomobile – won the launchpad award, converts apps to work on multiple platforms

Ocarina – iPad application  where you could play music, but also see other people playing and *play with them* around the world

HTML5 – everyone was abuzz about HTML5, Alexa Andrzejewski gave an entire talk comparing it to Flash.  I didn’t go to this talk but my developer buddies were all abuzz about it, saying HTML5 web sockets will make the real time web happen by enabling push data that currently web sites inefficiently pull for.  They expect it will replace Flash - companies using Flash are moving to html5.  

Stupeflix – dynamically generated video, they demo’d its use for advertising, showing how you can create a sort of photostory for entire catalogs of ads with updated prices.

What seemed notably absent relative to last years’ web 2.0 events?  Facebook applications.

My new buddies are all the Yahoo communities/social applications –  Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo, Email, Flickr, Delicious, Profiles, Y!OS etc.  There’s a lot that’s social that’s happening here, so I’m pretty excited to sink my teeth in.  I’ve spent the past few weeks really “studying” Yahoo, meeting people from various groups to help shape my research agenda.

What does this mean for Waggle Labs?  Well, with Peter still working full time with Pathable, and me now at Yahoo, we are no longer engaged in social media R&D consulting.  However, the site will live on as the home of our personal projects and blog.  We still have plenty to discuss, regarding social media, community, and technological art.  We’re still working on MyTwee, a twitter visualization/game that promotes green behavior, in our “spare” time, and of course we have our art/geek projects including Steve the Robot Head to talk about.  See http://heaid.com to learn more about that. 

We’re spending most of our time down in the bay area now, so if you are in the area, look us up!

I posted some frayed wire pictures on flickr here.

Introductory slides for Frayed Wire are here, provides some background on who was there and our goals:

We had a *great* set of speakers and workshops, and people had a lot of fun making stuff out of the items from Junque Exchange in the open lab, and there was a very well attended discussion of how to incubate art/technology in the Pacific Northwest.  There were a lot of volunteers to whom I am very, very grateful!  Thanks Dorkbot crew, 911 Media Arts center, Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, and Ignition NW!

Here’s the abstract of the paper described in the talk:

Professional networking is a primary goal of people attending conferences and events. Over the past year we developed a social networking and community tool for events, Pathable, to help attendees meet the right people. Pathable provides an online directory of profiles, communication tools, and a recommendation system optimized to help people meet based on commonalities. We performed a deployment study and found that quality of conversations and sense of community were strong predictors of who said they would return. The more people used Pathable to meet others at the event, the greater their event attachment and sense of community.

It was a great event.  Very academic, small number of attendees, but all first tier researchers in the field.  Had a lot of great conversations.  Using community tech for social participation, civic intelligence, and social advocacy were the hot topics.

My first exposure to differences in attitudes was someone in the hallway saying to me “well, we’re not trying to make money”. Soon thereafter I accidentally stumbled into a rant against the term “Web 2.0”, rendered meaningless, it was being argued, as the new buzz word in the popular media. When I tried to defend the term, clearly defined I thought by Tim O’Reilly and readily available in his blog, my assailant said to me “yes but no one *knows* what it means”. My weak attempt to say “well, I do” were soundly overspoken.

It is true that the majority of the crew at E-tech is comprised of practitioners who work in the context of companies trying to make money. Yet, they have a strong open-source aesthetic, an undertone of the moral imperative that the world is a better, more innovative place when you make knowledge and code freely available. My picture of that crowd is of a bunch of well-meaning technology creatives stumbling over themselves hurtling collectively towards The Next Big Thing.

At CHI, the pace of innovation is more deliberate. They are a solid year behind in awareness of what’s “cool and new”. For example only the younger graduate students are trying to nudge Twitter into the consciousness of their advisors. (Although I am happy to report the emphasis has clearly leapt off the desktop and into more mobile and embedded devices.) Yet, they are making forays in directions not seen at e-tech, because academic research *is* less constrained by the need to make money.

In addition, I have to say I am appreciating the greater intellectual rigor that is here, and this is what I think it comes down to: the main difference is in the measure of quality. At an event like e-tech, presenters are selected based on who’s a prominent blogger, who’s making the most money, who’s likely according to some big picture thinkers to have big picture impact. This makes for flashier presentations that are more entertaining to listen to. At CHI, for the most part presentations are selected by peer review of papers submitted for publication in the conference proceedings. This makes for extremely well thought out work that builds on the twenty years of history in the field, documented across these years through research publications. Everyone here is an originator of new knowledge and/or new technology, no one is rewarded for an ability to synthesize other people’s work. I love E-tech, and I don’t think the academics should dismiss the important role the O’Reilly crew has played in accelerating innovation in their own field. However it’s nice, to be surrounded by people who think more like me, people who are a little suspicious of technology fad-ism, who want to see design grounded in theory, and who want to see the data.

Mostly, though, I’m just amazed there isn’t more cross over…

I think the Northwest is ready to push to the next phase of community and collaboration around art and technology. Frayed Wire is meant to help that process along.

Based on our study results of BarCamp Seattle (only just now posted on resources.pathable.com), here’s my answer in seven words: professional friends and a feeling of community.

Cheesy, I know. You don’t tend to think friendships and sense of community really matter in a collegial, professional context, but you know what? They really do.

Here’s the longer story:

We created Pathable because, in our own experience, meeting people at conferences is hard. Sure, you can start up a lot of random conversations, but it’s hard to find those five people at the event who have the same passion you have, who can really geek out with you on some topic. I’m one of those crazy, hyper-social people who love conferences, and even I find it difficult walking into an event with a totally new crowd.

Still, where else can I go to find a whole group of people with the same passion for social technology as me, who can talk about it for hours and hours on end into the evening over wine? Where else can I go, see the bigger picture of my field, find out what’s hot or not in the industry, and be totally inspired when I come back home to my day-to-day job?

Nonetheless, being the social scientist that I am, I felt we needed to do a real study at an event to test some of our assumptions. How important is networking at events? What are people *really* looking for? What makes them want to come back year after year? And, can Pathable really help?

Last summer, we sponsored BarCamp Seattle by providing Pathable for free. The attendees were mostly people in the technology industry in Seattle. The BarCamp organizers were a very friendly group of folks and were amenable to our sending around questionnaires at the event and online afterwards. We asked a lot of questions assessing various features of the event (quality of session, quality of conversation) and then included some standardized measures (from social science literature) adapted to assess networking and sense of community.

The results surprised even me.

Of these variables, what was the #1 predictor of people intending to return the next year?

- The quality of their conversations.

What was the #1 predictor of people saying they would return year and year?

- Their sense of community.

That’s right! At a professional event where people were meeting to talk about technology, the top predictor for returning year after year was sense of community. We similarly found that our sense of community measure and our event attachment measure were very strongly correlated (r = .81).

We also found that Pathable helped: the more people used Pathable, the more “professional friends” they had at the event, and the higher their sense of community and event attachment. They felt the more they used our matchmaking feature, the more valuable Pathable was in helping them meet others. See Figures below.

What does this all mean?

Well, it indicates to me that people really do seek out “professional friendships” in their work life. These are people who share your passion for what you do, can really provide a lot of knowledge and support in helping you be effective at what you do, and will collaborate with you in what you do. These are people for whom sometimes you have to travel far and wide across the globe to find them at conferences — and to participate in that community feeling around what you do.

[post cross-posted at blog.pathable.com]