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If you are frustrated with Twitter mobile, then you’ll love Slandr.

What’s missing in Twitter mobile?

Choosing a page

They recently blogged about having 10 tweets per page…but I want more usability, I left this comment:

“At the end of a page instead of just older and newer, is it possible to get “previous 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 next” type of thing.

Reason being is if I’m on page 4, and decide to tweet, it takes me to the front page again. Then I have to click through 4 pages to get to where I left off. Instead all I would have to do is click page 4.”

Replies

Apparently coming soon, as per the end of this post.

Direct Messages

No go.

Favourites

No go.

SLANDR

Choosing a page

Slandr wins hands down with every feature, except probably the most important function…

You can only read one page of feeds (20 per page), there is no “next” or “previous” button

From their site:

“No ‘OLDER’ button:
Browsing back ‘with friends’ history is currently disabled per Twitter API. It will return when the API is updated.”

This makes it a shop stopper for reading your stream.
But I do visit it anyhow to check out my direct messages and replies…read on.

Avatars and Icons

You get avatars (not just a name like m.twitter) and icons for other functions

Replies

There is an icon next to each tweet to quick reply
There is a reply tab to see all your replies

Straight off this makes it a winner.

Direct Messages

There is an icon next to each tweet to direct message
There is a direct message tab to see all your messages (view both inbox and outbox)

Straight off this makes it a winner.

NOTE: the icon is still there for people who don’t follow each other, and if you try and send a direct message it won’t work.

Favourites

There is an icon next to each tweet to favourite.

How often am I on the train and I want to flag a tweet for later action…well now I can.

Only thing is that there isn’t a tab to see all your favourites

Search

Via Summize…how neat is that

Users

In your tweet stream you can click on a user next to a tweet to go to their stream, but there is also a Users tab to find your friends.
- type in friends name (this is not search, you need to know their name…darn!)
- a tag cloud of the most recently active 100 friends…neat!

Location

Change this via “settings”

Change this through the regular status update field
eg. L:Perth
This will not post as a tweet, it will just update your location profile

Geo

You can also change your location here.

More exciting than that is you can see the locations of your last 20 friends who have tweeted (but it does’t display their names)
- it also plots this on a map (click each location to get an exact location)

Not bad hey
- if one of my friends are travelling to my city they could change their location profile easily from the update status field
- next time they tweet I could see who’s around
- other option is to check Twitterlocal

Apparently there is more to come.

Brightkite

The other day I posted on Brightkite, which is a location awareness presence service (geoloco) ie. people check-in to places, so at anytime you know where your friends are located.
Once you are checked-in you can also upload photos and text, this is called placestreaming.

On thing they do is allow your check-ins to change your Twitter profile location setting
- with another option to also publish this as a new tweet (which Slandr doesn’t do).

I wonder what’s going to happen in the geoloco space.
Slandr is using Twitter for very primitive friend location awareness, I wonder if this can soon match the awesome features of Brightkite.

Twitter also has Twemes for hashtags, which is like on-the-fly Placestreaming, only a tag can be about anything, not just a place.
And then, as mentioned there is Twitterlocal for placestreaming based on location profile setting.

Do people use both Twitter and Brightkite, or would it be easier to have just one service for all this?

UPDATE: there is now a mobile web version of Brightkite.

It seems Brightkite is gaining a community for location based awareness, I’ve posted on this before including a list of geo-loco services, but none of these have really been on my radar as much as Brightkite. I’m sure some of these other services are doing great, maybe it’s just that my social graph has gravitated to Brightkite.
Just to note so far “The Swarm” is my favourite concept in intimate location awareness.

Twitter has the micro-blogging/presence/conversation community, and FriendFeed has the lifestream/watercooler community, so will Brightkite be the geo-loco tool of choice.

Check-in

It’s main deal is that you can text (email or web or mobile web) to “check in” to a location (just like Groovr and FireEagle)…manually letting others know where you are.
By doing this you can see who else is there, or nearby, or has been there.

So all you have to do is manually tell Brightkite where you are and it will display your peeps who have checked-in to locations closeby.

You can even get your check-ins to change your Twitter location on your profile, and further to this it can auto-tweet your check-in location in your twitter stream.

You can even make Placemarks, which are terms for common check-in places
eg. instead of always texting your work address you can text, “@work”, this will check you in to the location you have entered for your work.

Once you have “checked in” you can upload photo’s and micro-blog to your stream. If you don’t have much of a community at Brightkite, well then your check-in’s and posts can be re-syndicated to your Twitter stream.

There is also an option to hook it up with FireEagle which has a GPS option to auto-post location every so often. Not sure what other plans Brightkite has for GPS or cell tower triangulation.
Fireball is similar but different, it’s a mash up of FireEagle and Twitter.

Place micro-blogging

Once you have checked-in to a location you can blog text and photos, this adds to the “Placestream.” Basically each location has a stream, kind of like using hashtags for Twitter. A place can be anything, a city, state, country, cafe, library, exact address, etc…
Just like your check-ins your posts can also be re-published to your Twitter stream.

Place blogging is not new, check out: Outside.in, Placeblogger, Socialight, Flagr, PlacesToDo, etc…
Slightly similar are the various barcode services that provide information about a place via scanning a barcode.

Put it all together

1. You check-in
2. You see who’s nearby (Around Me)
3. You see a friend is at a location nearby
4. You browse to that placestream and see the activity stream (an archive of content your friends have posted at this location)…it also has a list of visitors and a map.
5. You see texts and photos describing a fun time, so you click on your friends avatar, which takes you to their profile page and send them a private message or nudge them

This is great to see what’s going on and to hook up, I wish it was around when I was a teenager.

You don’t necessarily have to follow these steps to know where your friends are at. Your homepage (What’s happening) has a stream called Me & My Friends. This is your main stream where you see all the latest check-ins and posts from your friends.
And your friends tab will list all your friends telling you their latest check-in location.

Interaction

The idea of Brightkite is to use it on the go, and you can certainly do this:
- SMS
- email
- mobile web

Here is a list of the SMS commands (PDF), the main three are:

Check in - @address,city state
Example: @2911 Walnut St, Denver, CO

Post a note - ! message
Example: ! best coffee in town

Note: photo’s are posted by email
You can also use this email address to blog posts and for checkins.

Message a friend - m username message
Example: m abby where you at?

Notification

Then there are SMS or email notifications.

You can get an SMS, email or both for:

- friend request
- direct message

You can get an SMS, email or both for:

- check-ins
- posts

This can be further limited to:

- friends/everyone
- a radius of 4000 metres, 2000 metres, 200 metres, 20 metres

This doesn’t have to apply to all your friends. For each friend you can change the friendship settings for notifications.
eg. you may want check-ins from all your friends SMSd to you, but not from 2 other friends.

Friends and Privacy

The network settings are quite good, when you add a friend, you have the choice to further cement the relationship by checking a box making them a trusted friend…you can edit these controls later.

More from Read/Write Web on this:

“There are also two modes in which you can post updates to Brightkite - public and private. Public mode is ideal when you’re out and about and looking to meet new people and private mode is for when you want to restrict your activities to only being viewed by friends. By default in private mode:

Strangers see your checkins at the city-level, and don’t see your posts
Friends see your checkins and posts at the city-level
Trusted friends see your checkins and posts at full accuracy
However, all those settings are easily editable.”

As mentioned you can edit these settings, at the moment I have:

EVERYONE
Check-in (hidden)…I’ve changed this from the default city/suburb
Posts (hidden)…I’ve changed this from the default city/suburb

FRIENDS
Check-in (city/suburb)
Posts (city/suburb)

TRUSTED FRIENDS
Check-in (exact)
Posts (exact)

Strangers (Everyone) won’t see what suburb/city I’ve checked-in to, and they won’t see my posts
- this means my check-ins or posts will not appear in my Twitter stream even if I had the setting on

Reason being is I don’t really want strangers to know where I am located, I probably wouldn’t mind that they saw my posts depending on the nature of them.
If I set “Everyone” posts to city/suburb these would appear at Twitter (where a whole lot of other strangers can also see them).

Settings I would consider changing depending at the time:
EVERYONE - change posts to city/suburb (so they can appear on Twitter)
FRIENDS - change posts to exact and change check-ins to exact

Or maybe if I’m feeling in a general type of mood, I’d just switch on to public mode.

I really don’t know why “The Swarm” hasn’t taken off, this blows away all geo-loco services.

Check out their blog for all the lastest features.

Just finished listening to an interview with Peter Evans-Greenwood from Capgemini on Des Walsh’s Social Media Show.

Peter talked about a plain and simple bottom-up innovation by workers on a Toyota production line.
When an item came down the line they had to grab various parts, but they sometimes did not grab them all or the right ones. They went to the shop and bought some coloured bins…now when an item comes down the line, they go to the corresponding bin which will have all the parts for that item. [UPDATE 15/04/08: read this in the blog post, Change Me]

To me this is a classic In-the-Flow (Directed) way to get your work done, as it’s part of your workflow.

In an earlier post I mentioned how wikis can be used In-the-Flow.

The difference between the wiki and a bin is that bin is serving one function, whereas a wiki can be used for other things.
Eg. give a knowledge worker a wiki and show them how to use it for meetings.
With this same tool they may decide we can use it for gathering ideas for a proposal…then with a wiki again they may decide to draft the report in the wiki.
Later on they may decide to use a wiki to make a best practices page, or an ideas page…this example is when it gets interesting as this use case starts having less to do with functional duties and more about volunteered Above-the-Flow stuff.
What once started as using wikis to get your tasks done is now being used to volunteer tacit know-how.

But what I get from this is like email and blogs, wikis are free-form unstructured tools, they can be used in a bottom-up way just like the Toyota example to solve a workflow problem. But even better it’s a tool that can be used again and again to solve or assist in other problems.
My point is a wiki is more than that bin solution, I won’t even say re-usuable, it’s moreso a tool that can be many solutions.

Peter also talked about getting wiki usage by integrating it with other tools, making it a part of the current lancscape, rather than only being a standalone tool…perhaps this is the similar thinking behind Wetpaint wikis as widgets.

He also mentioned deploying social tools as a way to solve issues, rather than calling it Emterprise 2.0, call it “email overload solution”, “work around solutions”, etc..for others see Mike Gotta and James Robertson.

When implementing social tools, they may be deployed with the message that conveys:

- As we all know email overload is slowing us down and causing much frustration
- We have a solution to relieve at least a quarter of your email overload
- Communal webpages (wikis), and news channels (blogs) will be used rather than email for particular types of communications
- Wikis will now be used to set up meeting agendas, and to house minutes
(you can set up a webpage and everyone can edit it, subscribe to changes, leave a comment for discussion)
- Blogs will be used for broadcast email eg. announcements, news
(publish an entry and peope who subscribe to that blog will receive that new entry)
(you can also publish a post by sending an email to the blog email address, if there are people who don’t subscribe to the blog, but you want them to read this entry, then put their addresses in the cc: field when)
(you may want to put a link to the blog home page on the end of your email-like a blog post footer-so hopefully the people in your cc: field will subscribe to your blog)

Generally, it’s:

- Blogs for news
- Wikis for meetings
- Forums for discussion

All types of managers can reject an email if it’s sent for one of these reasons above…people need to get into the habitual routine, and a little discipline helps.

It would also be mentioned all the various other ways you can use wikis and blogs, especially to get the flow of tacit know-how moving.

Other social tools would be social networks, bookmarks, podcasts, micro-blogging, etc…

More

While I was writing this post I read Abbie Lundberg’s, The business value of Twitter…it triggered some thoughts that seemed to weave into this post.

Something interesting would be internal micro-blogging like Twitter, but it could be called “watercooler” or the “listening ear”

This is to be used rather than email, blogs, wikis, and forums; if it’s brief (a couple of sentences), more immediate and conversational.

The watercooler is most commonly used to post a couple of words or sentence on a thought, idea, insight, question…

Eg. if you have an excel issue with forumla’s, post a one liner question or frustration, someone may be listening, and give you an immediate answer.

In this respect I think Twitter is more prone, easier, less commited than blogs to express tacit know-how, and to offer help which also shares tacit know-how. Actually conversation is where it’s at, and an internal Twitter marketed the right way will be the optimal example of what we want out of KM 2.0 (conversation exchange).

I expressed this in my Tumblr a little while ago:

“Twitters value contribution to the knowledge flow-spontaneous, unpolished, work in progress, thinking out loud-lends itself to this type or quality of participation due to its brief, immediate, and intimate publishing format…let’s hope internal blogs generate the same calibre of tacit value without being hindered by their format.”

The only internal uses or developments of Twitter like services I know of are IBM’s Bluetwit, and Janssen-Cilag’s Jitter.

NOTE: Capgemini have a paper called Enterprise 2.0 for the Rest of Us. You need to register, I couldn’t be bothered, but if someone else has please send it my way.

Thought I’d share my research on finding the right photo blog/stream for me.

That most important features I’m looking for is a mobile version, email upload, and auto-tweeting…plus a community interaction would be good, and another thing is a simple experience and look, just like Google, Twitter or del.icio.us.

Auto-tweets is essential as the service I use may not have my community, I can get my stream to auto-tweet so my Twitter community can click to Twitxr to see the content.
It’s a pity Twitter doesn’t show thumbnails of images like del.icio.us, it doesn’t have to host images, all it would do is show thumbnails (that goes for video as well).

Email upload is probably the most important feature as it’s so quick and easy to snap and send.

NOTE: There are loads of mobile social networks that allow you to have an image collection as part of it’s many features, but I’m looking for a service that is more focused on a photo stream/blog.

I’m listing a few features, but it’s not a complete analysis, most of these services have tags, rss, private mode, widgets, msgs, groups, etc…and I need not mention they are all social networks.

Twitxr - most like Twitter, more of a blog feel than a social network
- images
- no video
- no audio
- replies
- location
- mobile site (even iPhone)
- email upload
- no MMS
- auto-tweets (an more like Flickr and Facebook)

Radar - more of a blog feel than a social network, it’s differing feature is that it’s private
- images
- video
- no audio
- comments
- email upload
- mobile site
- MMS
- very private
- no auto-tweets

NowThen - more of a blog feel than a social network, only issue I had was you have to give your phone number to join up, I guess part of the reason is the email upload address is not unique.
- images
- no video
- no audio
- comments
- email upload
- mobile site
- MMS
- no auto-tweets

Tumblr - a micro-blog network, but I’m already using Tumblr for something else…and for some reason my email attachment won’t upload (Sony-Ericsson k610i)
- text
- images
- video (via vimeo)
- audio
- comments (via disqus)
- MMS/SMS
- email upload
- mobile site
- auto-tweets

Mobypicture - looks most like a blog, but I couldn’t see a stream view
- images
- video
- ringtones
- comments
- MMS
- email upload
- auto-tweets (actually this re-blogs to heaps of services)

Mobicue - nice and clean social network
- images
- video
- text
- comments
- email upload
- MMS/SMS
- mobile site (also download version)
- no auto-tweets

I really like the simplicity of these 6 services, they are all worth using.

Radar may be a bit too private for my use, and MobyPicture didn’t have a streamed enough feel.

Tumblr, Mobicue and NowThen are excellent, but Twitxr just seems to take the cake at the moment, maybe because it’s most like Twitter, and has the most simple interface…only thing now is to get my network going.

One thing I’m weary of with Twitxr is that it hasn’t been round for long, I’m not sure of it’s future, look what happened to Yappd.
This is a problem with web 2.0 services these days, it’s so easy for people to create apps (it took Twitxr 2 people in 3 weeks), they are flying at you left right and centre, and most of them are clones that won’t last long, or really just small projects…so you gotta choose wisely.
From the creators website:
“As far as data is concerned we are getting around 5000 uniques per day 2 weeks afer the launch. The cost of developing Twitxr was around $10K and it will cost us around $1K per month to maintain.”

Only thing with Twitxr is it doesn’t have audio bytes or video, this is something I may want to use oneday…

In saying all this, I could just email posts to a blog platform like Blogger, but I do like the potential of a community within the network environment.

My current photo micro-blog - Twitxr/johnt

More

I’ll just briefly list these services

VisualTwitter - images…more a fun service

Hictu - a mixed-media Twitter clone

Utterz - too feature rich, too daunting to work it all out, they just weren’t intuitive enough, but maybe the younger market like all the bells and whistles.
- multi-media streams (even mashup into multi-media clips)
- even ring a number to leave an audio byte or to listen and comment
- lots more, go check it out if you dare

Yodio - similar to Utterz, it’s more about mixed-media mashup clips

Soup.io - a Tumblr clone

[ADDED 8/03/08: I forgot to include Zannel
- text
- images
- video
- comments
- SMS
- email upload
- mobile site
- auto-tweet]

A couple of days ago I posted on the various micro-blogging services, but I still have more to say…this post is more specifically about how the various services deal with conversation.

Like blogs, micro-blogging is about publishing, only more spontaneous, and usually within a social network. Sometimes this limited publishing space is called presence posting as you only have enough space to say something like: where you are or what your doing or will be doing…but really this space can be used for any type of content. What makes micro-blogging so spontaneous is that it is mostly coupled with mobile access, whether that’s mobile web, SMS/MMS or email. This mobile access is why it was perhaps first talked about as presence posting…when you are on the go, you can publish your agenda and availability.

Micro-blogging is not only about publishing, it’s also about people, and just like the blogosphere, there is conversation.

Let’s examine some brief differences and how each service presents conversation.

Jaiku

LIFESTREAM
Jaiku has profile aggregation which sets it apart from Twitter and Pownce.

You can make a spliced feed from all your profiles using FeedDigest, and then use Twitterfeed to enable Twitter to lifestream like Jaiku, but I prefer keeping up with friendstreams and microblogging apart. Reason being is I find it hard enough keeping up with my Twitter stream, and if these included content from elsewhere it would just get in the way.

In saying this, Twitter is an excellent candidate for lifestreaming, if they implemented it, we could have another tab in the user page:
- My Twitter stream
- My Twitter stream with Friends
- Friends
- Replies
- My Lifestream
- My Twitter stream and Lifestream
- My Friendstream
- My Friendstream and Friends Twitter stream

It would be good if Jaiku could separate the profile aggregated content into a separate lifestream, or if we could at least see just micro posts in one stream.

ICONS
Jaiku has icons for each post…this gives more context of presence or location.

CHANNELS
Jaiku also as a channels feature where you append your post with a (#) tag and it will also appear in a channel.

LOCATION AWARENESS AND AVAILABILITY
If you use their download phone app:
- it can even locate your current location using cell towers
- locate closest friends using Bluetooth
- share your calendar
- share your ring profile availability

So as we can see Jaiku is about profile aggregation, micro-blogging, channel chat, and I can see with Google’s help it’s really going to differentiate itself in the presence/location awareness game, for more see:
Mobile presence : Iotum-Talk Now and “The Swarm”
Mobile motion presence and location awareness

I can see greatly why Jaiku can still do well against the Twitter darling, as it has some different uses that Twitter doesn’t offer.

CONVERSATION
Every item in Jaiku has comments, even the lifestreaming items.

When you make a comment, this also becomes a post in your stream, this means comments appear in two spots, under the original post and also in the stream.

Jaiku user page
- displays a users posts and comments
- doesn’t display content from their contacts (this is called “Overview” in the dashboard view)
- doesn’t display comments made to your posts as posts themselves, you have to you click under each item to see comments

In all your public page when seen by others doesn’t give a clear picture of conversation.

Dashboard view
- displays a users posts and comments
- displays content from their contacts (Overview)
- displays as a new post in the stream when someone leaves a comment on one of your posts or someone else’s post

The dashboard view gives much more of a notion of the conversations taking place…not sure why the public user page can’t be the same.

Another thing I like is, not only do you get the benefit of conversation in the stream (as a comment is also a post itself), but comments are also aggregating under the initial post…others can catch up on the conversation in a tidy thread.

What would be good in the dashboard view is to have a tab to another stream to just see a list of comments people have made on your posts. This is a good idea incase you haven’t used Jaiku in a couple of days, and want to catch up with what people are saying to you. Then again this is what email alerts are for, just like when you get new comments on a regular blog.

Is this really conversation at it’s best?

I’m not too sure, in this instance conversation happens around objects (posts)…unless you post something, no-one can comment you.
Conversations thrive when it’s people to people, which is lacking ie. in Jaiku you cannot post and push it to someone (like IM, SMS, email, etc…).

With Twitter you can ping another user with a private or public post, this is what makes Twitter conversations more thriving as it doesn’t have to be based around objects (posts).

Twitter

Twitter has two differentiating features: replies and direct messages.

As mentioned Jaiku does not have private messages, and it does not have public messages either, if you want to ping a person, it has to be in the context of one of their posts (leaving a comment), so this really makes Jaiku more like blogs, only micro-blogs within a network of friends. And the stream is kind of like an RSS Reader river of news as you can see your friends posts streaming past.

Another difference with Twitter is besides your contacts (friends or people you follow), you also have people who are following you, kind of like seeing how many times you are subscribed to within the Twitter system.

Twitter user page
- updates (your stream)
- with others (your stream and your friends stream in one stream)

NOTE: replies appear in your “with others” stream

Dashboard View
- recent (your stream and your friends stream in one stream)
- archive (your stream)
- replies (public tweets sent to you)

NOTE: replies also appear in your “recent” stream, as well as replies your friends make to their friends (you can limit this to just mutual friends)

CONVERSATION

Twitter has a feature called direct messages, this is kind of like email or private messages in most social networks, it basically enables you to send a friend a private message, these are read in your sent box and inbox.

First I’ll make it clear, Twitter posts don’t have comments!

Twitter’s winning feature is @replies…this is the public messages feature. I don’t know why it’s called replies, as it’s not only used in a reactive way, you can use it to initiate a shoutout.

This feature really makes Twitter a conversational tool, just as much as a publishing tool.

If you want to send a message to another user (whether they are your friend or not), you just append the message with “@name”
eg. @abby are we going to yoga tonight?

This will appear in your “you and others” stream or as Jaiku calls it “Overview” (as mentioned this view is not available in the public user page).
It will also appear in another stream called “replies”, this displays all tweets with @yourname in it.

Now, coincidentally if you see a tweet you want to comment on, you just send an @reply post.
This could be a tweet that has caught your interest or it could be a shoutout (reply) tweet that someone has sent you.

What happens is that tweets that begin with @name have a link at the end of the tweet labelled “in reply to”, clicking this will take you to the initial tweet that is being replied to.

But this is really not so all the time, any tweet that begins with @name will link to the last tweet of that person.
If I send a @name tweet as a shoutout
eg. @abby are we going to yoga tonight? the end of this tweet will have a link to abby’s last tweet which may be eg. what a great sunny morning. This really has nothing to do with my tweet I’m sending her, they are not related whatsoever.

The other problem is even if you are replying to a tweet, what happens when the user makes more tweets before you get to reply.

I say eg. @abby are we going to yoga tonight?, then I make another tweet eg. people talking loud on the train. Then abby tweets @johnt yoga sounds good. The end of abby’s tweet will link to my tweet about people talking loud on the train…this just isn’t right.

Twitter’s initial focus was command posting by SMS, problem is you can’t send a reply targeted to the ID of a particular tweet, and a shoutout isn’t targeted to anything, it’s an initiator post.

So 3 things:
- @name can be used for shoutouts and replies
- a @name post will link to the last post of the person you are replying/shoutout to
- Twitter replies/shoutouts seem to be more progressive chat (like IM) rather than just object focused comments.

Sure the conversation can be easily followed as it happens, but you can’t really look at past conversations as there lacks a threaded feature.

CHANNELS
Like Jaiku Twitter has a 3rd party service called hastags that enables channels.

Pownce

FILES
Pownce is not just text you can also send files

CONTENT TYPE
Pownce has templates for content type eg. text, links, files, events
- you can later filter content by type

CONVERSATION
NOTE: comments you make, and comments others make to you, appear as new posts of their own, as well as appearing under a post…this is like Jaiku.

NOTE: Pownce doesn’t have lifestreaming

Pownce User Page
- user (your stream)
- user with friends (your stream and your friends stream in one stream)

Dashboard View
- default setting is “all notes and replies”
(your posts, your replies as new posts, your friends posts, your friends replies to you as new posts)

What Pownce has over Jaiku is:
- in the public view people get to see your content, and friends content in one stream…this is only available in the Jaiku dashboard view.

But the issue with both Pownce and Jaiku is:;
- comments you make, and comments others make to you don’t appear as new posts in the public user view, this only happens in the dashboard view
- in saying this, in the public view, you can still read comments by clicking the comments link that live under posts.

What Jaiku has over Pownce is:
- comments your friends make to others, doesn’t appear in either view (dashboard view only for Jaiku)

But where these two services shine is that the comments are also accumulated (just like a blog) under a post, this way a conversation is all neat and tidy…as mentioned Twitter has a problem with distilling conversations around an object.

But Pownce is different…

You can group your friends into sets so you can just post to a set of people, you can also post to individuals…your public page will only show posts that you have made public.

When you post in Pownce you have a choice of audience:
- public
- all my friends
- a set
- private (an individual)

This means you can send a shoutout to one person, but it’s not in public, it’s more like Twitter direct messages. This lacks the conversation market effect of Twitter, but nonetheless you can shoutout.

Your public user page will only show posts you and your friends send as “public”

Within your dashboard you can filter for content:
- all notes and replies
- notes
- replies
- private notes (can’t specify an individual)
- non-public notes
- sent by me
- sent to a set

You can also filter below, but you can’t do something like show me all events posted by me:
- messages
- links
- files
- events

This is what really sets Pownce apart, the fact the you can have content aimed at all different people and groups within the same filtered stream. With the same service you can engage in both a formal (public, all friends) and informal (sets, individuals) network.

Conclusion

Twitter is a conversation market, whether you’re in your dashboard or your public page, anyone can see a stream of the conversation, items you see:
- your posts
- your friends posts
- your replies/shoutouts
- your friends replies/shoutouts to you
- your friends replies/shoutouts to friends you have in common (you can even set this to include friends you don’t have in common)

Pownce and Jaiku have these 5 features above (excluding replies for a comments mechanism) only in the dashboard view (exception is that Pownce doesn’t show comments your friends make on their friends posts).

But the main reason that makes Twitter more of a conversation market is that conversations can be more like chatting, they don’t have to be in the context of an object (commenting on a post), instead it’s more person to person, kind of like a chat room or a public IM conversation.

Whereas with Jaiku and Pownce conversations are around an object (the micro-post), this is just like the blogosphere.

As mentioned Twitter is replying or shouting out to a person, whereas the others are around an object, Twitter also has direct messages so you can chat in private.

In saying this Pownce allows you to send a post to an individual or a set of people, and that individual or someone from the set can send a post back or reply, so this makes it both a conversation around an object or a person (or set of people), only it’s not displayed on the public user page, in other words you can’t have a conversation with an individual in public…I like that you can do this in Twitter as it makes it viral, you can jump into conversations.

But then Pownce is the tool of choice for trust based informal networks, the fact that you can use the same system to post to: public, friends, a set of friends, or an individual makes it very versatile.

The “set” feature (organising friends in groups) is not really that much better than email conversations.
When you post to a set, each recipient will see who else got the post. When a recipient replies, all initial people get the post. This is exactly like email (to: field, reply to all).
At this stage I don’t think you can include others in the conversation, the post can only be forwarded (just like email). Reason for this is the recipients are based on the initiators set of friends, it’s not a communal channel.
But the good thing is that the conversation is archived.

More

Tumblr falls into a similar category as Jaiku:
- profile aggregator
- friend stream view
- upload files
- 3rd party comments
- re-blog posts (unlike Jaiku)

Plaxo Pulse seems to be a combination:
- profile aggregator
- friend stream view
- comments
- re-share posts
- post and filter stream by contact sets (like Pownce)
- private messages
- comment wall
- status update (like Facebook)

As far as conversations go Plaxo Pulse is more similar to Jaiku and Pownce than Twitter.
But, unlike Jaiku and Pownce comments are not shown as new posts in Plaxo Pulse.
You can filter a stream by content type, but since comments you make are not posts of their own, this means you can’t filter content by comments you have made. I would like to be able to collect comments in a stream, just like Pownce, or Twitter for that matter (Pownce doesn’t further filter to “replies just by me”, instead it has both; replies others have made to me, and replies I have made to others).

Plaxo Pulse has status updates (like Facebook), but unlike Facebook people can leave comments on Plaxo Pulse status updates.
But you can’t filter by this content type, ie. see a stream of just status updates.
Similar to Facebook you have micro-posts (eg. notes, posted-items), Plaxo Pulse calls them (Messages, Links, etc…)

Plaxo Pulse also has lifestreaming.

So what are posts in Jaiku, Twitter and Pownce more similar to:
- the Plaxo Pulse posts or the Plaxo Pulse status updates

Other conversations

We have been talking about explicit conversations, another perspective is keeping up on a conversation about a topic, where people are not directly having the conversation with each other.
An example of this is Twitter tracking, where you can track occurrences of a word/s eg. california fire.
Several Twitter search engines have a word burst type feature to see the latest posts with the term eg. “fire”.

Then, as mentioned we have Channels, in Twitter’s case a service called hashtags…now this is posts about the same topic, not just posts that have a word in it, it’s more about aboutness. But still this is not explicit conversation, it’s stuff on the same topic.

Trackbacks

Coming back to explicit conversation…what is a trackback or inlink in micro-blogging?

In the blogosphere you can leave a comment on a blog post, or publish your own post and ping (trackback) the blog post you are talking about, so the person you are pinging is notified that you are contributing to the conversation from your own blog. The person you pinged will have a link to your post in the comments section of their blog post, it’s almost like leaving a remote comment.

If you don’t ping that person (trackback), they may still find out you have talked about them, as you may have linked to their blog post. If this person organises themselves to be notified whenever someone links to their blog, they will see your post and read it as part of the conversation.
I posted on these distributed conversations a long time ago…the main deal was being able to distill this stuff.

The other thing is because the blogosphere is not a social network where you add friends, or just look at the public page, you won’t really know these conversations are happening. The blogosphere is distributed, but let’s see if we can make it into a distributed social network.

How do trackbacks relate to microblogging?

JAIKU
- there isn’t a way to write a post and ping another post, to let them know your post is conversing with them.
- there is no way for someone to know if someone is trying to converse with them
- the only way is leaving a comment (I suppose when you leave a comment, it also becomes a post…it’s like doing a trackback the other way around)

POWNCE
- same as above
- after I write the post, I could use the “forward” feature to forward it to the person I’m talking about, but only if they are on my friend list
- instead I could write the post, and just send it to them, instead of making it public, but then the public is out of the loop in this conversation…and again the person must be on my friend list.

TWITTER
- this works more like trackbacks
- I can write a post eg. @abby is a cool dancer too - and abby will be notified I’m talking to her or about her
- I’m not really pinging one of her posts like in the blogosphere, instead I’m pinging her

Once again Twitter shows that it is an all round conversational tool, as much as it is a publishing tool…it really blurs the boundary of status, blogging and IM (chat).

Related

How I use the various micro blogging services
FAQ: Is decentralized Twitter just IRC?
Prologue - WordPress based distributed Twitter
The Evolution of Personal Publishing

First I’ll say that most micro blogging services are within a network environment and are set up to not only publish but to also converse, and some even are profile aggregator streams or lifestreams.

There is also a blur on what micro blogging actually means…other terms used are status, and presence.
eg.
Plaxo Pulse and Facebook are more about status.
Twitter and Jaiku are more about presence.
Tumblr and Pownce are more about micro-blogging…but then Pownce doesn’t really look like a stand alone blog. Actually I can’t define Pownce…you are publishing, and the posts can be longer then Twitter, but they are usually not too long like Tumblr, you can also send files, and posts can be directed to different sets of people. I see Pownce more of a sharing service, rather than publishing, even though it still is publishing. Most of the time these days you don’t have to push too much sharing, as people can just tune into your flow.

Just to confuse both Plaxo Pulse and Facebook have messages/notes and links/posted items, which is basically micro-blogging, in addition to their status feature.
And just when you thought lifestreaming was a standalone type of service, we have Jaiku, Tumblr and Plaxo Pulse each with a profile aggregator stream feature.
Some of the services above like Plaxo Pulse and Tumblr allow you to reblog stuff into your stream.
Then we have lifestreaming services like Ziki and others that enable you to post inhouse content into your stream.

When you look at it Plaxo Pulse has lifestreaming, re-blogging, micro-posting, and status.

Maybe mobile web or SMS/MMS has a role to play in the definition.

I think the level of context (and content) goes like this:

Online indicator (availability)
Status
Presence
Micro-blogging
Blogging

First some more traditonal methods:

Email
- more personal or private correspondence
- the sender and receiver don’t need the same email client to correspond
- Gmail has great search features

I used Twitter to ask if anyone had an invite to a new service, the first question was, what’s your email address, and I’ll send you an invite.

In saying all this, I really don’t use email much, it’s becoming more my central notification spot
ie notifications for new friends, comments, etc…also see Fuser.

People can send you messages many other ways, but most of the time they have to use that same system, and they figure that you would check your email more frequently than the 10 social networks you’re in.

IM
- private chat (one or multiple people)
- not published (only Gmail archive)

Other options:
- Meebo rooms
- Tangler
- Chinswing

Blog
More editorial based, I don’t just publish a post in a split second, it’s more thorough.
Still converational based via comments, but in a distributed network.

Lifestream eg. Ziki
- Profile aggregator or lifestream
- social network (add and msg friends)
- friendstream
- publish ziki blog posts into your lifestream

People really don’t add me as friends here, or message me.
My RSS Reader is more my friendstream…most people splice their feeds with content from other services…also see Spokeo.
In saying this I’m going to check out FriendFeed, to see if that’s where the community is at.

I just used Ziki as an example of a lifestream service, check out the list here.

MyBlogLog
I don’t use this at all, no-one messages me.

MICRO BLOGGING

Pownce
I find this an awesome service, but it’s just not where the community is at for me.
But still I have found a use for it, how it differs is that you can have sets of friends and publish content to everyone, a set or an individual.

How I’m using Pownce mostly is a text, link and file sharing model between me and a friend, if one day others want to join our informal network, then they can easily be included. We trust each other and have a private place to share stuff. Plus we can use comments for discussion.

What I need is to get into my database a bit more, I can see all my posts sent to a set of people, but not individuals.
I can see all posts a person has sent by going to their profile (of course I will not be able to see non-public posts, unless I was a chosen recipient), but what about posts that were just sent to me, and could I do this from my profile.
I’d like the freedom to say “show me all my posts that Gerry is allowed to see, and show me all Gerry’s posts that I’m allowed to see, in the one archive”…or “show me all posts Gerry has just sent to me, and vice versa in the one stream.”

I think Pownce would really suit the enterprise, a knowledge worker can publish their thoughts, others can subscribe to receive content, they can leave comments for discussion (a comment by default becomes a post in your stream).
What I like mostly is that it’s great for trust models of informal networks, the fact you can share information with a closed set of people within the same system.
With Pownce you have a formal and informal network occuring within the same system.
All they need to do is add expert tags, and a content tag cloud.
I suppose they could also have formal groups.

Right now I can share with the world, a set of people, an individual, but there are no formal groups.

In another post I will look at formal groups (CoPs) and see how useful they still are in a world of social networks.

Check out more on Pownce from my post: A quest to discovering a private text and link sharing service

Tumblr
The link above also describes Tumblr…again this is micro blogging as well as the option to automate content by aggregating or re-syndicating feeds into your Tumblr stream. In other words you could use Tumblr as a lifestream and never actually directly publish in it.

Tumblr allows you to add friends, this allows you 2 streams, just my posts, or posts from me and all the people I follow.
You can also filter posts by content type: text, images, audio, video, etc…

I like the idea of reblogging posts into your stream, and if a post has been reblogged it will show the who has reblogged it and their post content.

There are various ways to post to Tumblr which helps
- web, bookmarklet, IM (Imified), jott, desktop widget, and email.

Since I use Twitter mostly as my presence posting, I thought I would have no use for Tumblr, as it’s similar…but is it, I don’t quite see the conversation aspect of Tumblr.

I actually think Tumblr is more what Twitter was initially about, but more of a blog feel, slowly I think Tumblr will become more conversational, only I still think it won’t be as chatty as Twitter, it will still be focused on blogging…you can now add a comments module to your Tumblr.

The way I use Tumblr is more non-tech focused stuff, it’s more by thoughts about life, whatever I see on the street, etc…me and my phone. It’s more my moblog (text, photo, video), more fleeting and spontaneous blogging about anything in general.

Twitter can be used like this, but it is not as blog like, I wouldn’t ask a question or chat on Tumblr like I do in Twitter. Twitter is on the pulse of what’s happening, it’s breaking, it just 140 characters compared to Tumblr’s 500…when I think of it my tweets are so disposable or temporary like chat, whereas my Tumbl’s are still spontaneous, but more thoughtful.

A description of the Tumblr features.

Here is a way to see followers/following via your tumblr homepage.

You can also get a list of the URL’s following and followers

But what about when I’m on another users Tumblr, how can I see who they follow. By clicking on people I follow and being able to inturn see who they follow is discovery via my social filter, what more than this do you want these days when you have to choose from a sea of a million sources.

Also we cannot see someone’s dashboard stream of tumbls with others (and RSS version), it also doesn’t have favourites.

Tumblr resources, and more…including the Ning Tumblr community, and Tumblr Universe (Google CSE), which allows you to search the Tumblsphere.

I also found a hack to reblog your own post into a Tumblr group.

Two things I want to see are posting by Gtalk and mostly posting by mobile web (so far they only have a read-only mobile version, here’s an example.)

Jaiku
- presence blogging with comments
- profile aggregator stream (like Tumblr)
- channels

So far Jaiku is the most like Twitter, it doesn’t have the blog feel like Tumblr, and it doesn’t have the selective trust based posting features like Pownce.

I find that I don’t use Jaiku, as it is not unique enough, so I use Twitter instead…who knows in the future, Jaiku may fill a unique need if it gets into status networking like “The Swarm.”

Facebook
- status (via web, email, SMS, IM, etc…)
- also post notes, links, photo’s etc…

This is very unlike the others, this is just one feature of a greater service, it’s more simple, there is no conversation, there is no real promotion of a stream, etc…

The reason I use it is because my messages are for a different audience, these are mostly people I actually know. My Facebook friends don’t use Twitter or any other presence services, so this is all I’ve got with them.

I’ve mentioned presence posting before, and no one is interested (they said that’s such a stupid idea), yet now they are doing it, and not even realising.

Twitter
- presence posts
- replies
- follow others stream

Need I say more.

I haven’t talked about groups:
Twitter has hashtags, Jaiku has channels, Tumblr has more formal groups, and Pownce doesn’t have groups.

Plaxo Pulse
Plaxo Pulse is a combination of a few things, it has profile aggregation or lifesteaming, and like the regular lifestreaming services eg. Ziki, Wink, Dandelife, Profilactic, it also allows you to post content, but with Plaxo posting content is just as big a feature as lifestreaming.

Lifestream
- aggregate your profiles to your stream
(when you add each feed you choose which set of people to share with eg. friends, family, business, nobody, public)

Connections
- when you add a contact, you choose which stream you want to see their content in eg. friends, family, business

Plaxo posting
- when you publish content (message, link, video, note, etc…) you choose which stream/s for this content to appear in eg. friends, family, business

So…
- When you add a connection, you add them to a stream
- When you add an outside feed, you add it to a stream
- When you post content, you add it to a stream

This is great as now you have different variations of your lifestream depending on the audience it’s intended for. For example you may only include your Tumblr feed into your Family stream, and you may post Plaxo content (photo’s links, etc…) for your family eyes only.

This means when you look at your family stream it will have content just intended for that set of people, and when your family members look at their family stream they will see your family oriented content.

BTW, when you look at your family stream, you will see their content as well as yours.

I can filter my family stream to just look at photo’s, or video’s, etc…

Filter
- Me (just my stream)
- Family
- Friends
- Business
- Starred
- Everyone

Status (presence posts)
- leave a comment (a combination of Jaiku and Facebook)

Connections (contacts)
- send message
- comments (public profile comment wall)

Each item in your stream has
- comments
- reshare
- favourite

Other features
- address book
- calendar
- tasks
- notes
- photo album
- groups (you can also post content to a group)

Issues
- how do I share Pulse content like a link or message with public (everyone)
- lacks individuals or create your own sets like Pownce
- everyone is the whole of Pulse…I also want to see a stream of all my contacts
- status is not a content type filter, I’d like to see status archive and a status archive for each of my connection sets (family, friends, etc…)
- when I visit a contact I can only see their stream, I can’t see what their contacts are sharing with everyone ie. a with others stream
- when I visit a contact I can’t filter by content type
- lacks following/followers (just connections)
- I can only notify my own items (I can’t reshare them)

I’m not using Plaxo Pulse, but as you can see it really blurs the lines, it’s basically Facebook with out the crap. It’s a social network (private/public messages, friends), it’s got status, you can post content, you can lifestream, you can have content in different contact streams.

If Plaxo Pulse came earlier in the scene it could of been my main tool.

Both Jaiku and Tumblr are similar, yet Plaxo Pulse also has a status feature, and a more robust friends feature…so I see it most similar to Facebook. If POwnce had a status feature then this would similar, although Pownce does not have lifestreaming…BLUR BLUR BLUR!!

NOTE: Lifestrea.ms allows you to create different profile streams. I’m guessing if someone requests a friendship you can choose which stream to give them…in the end this is similar to Plaxo Pulse (Lifestrea.ms is more complete as it has actual different profiles).

More

Soup.io
- is the same as Tumblr, it’s uncanny
- good thing is that for a given user you can see a stream of their friends stuff and even friends friends stuff, see here for more

Hictu
- similar to Jaiku (aggregation, posting, comments, friends)
- also includes audio and video posts
- started off as an IM status network

MySay
- audio presence

Yodio
- audio/visual mashup presence

Utterz
- post text, audio, photo, video
- audio/visual mashup presence
- post to other networks
- channels
- see more

NowThen
- photo presence
- also see Radar, Flukiest, mobypicture (also post to other networks), cellblock, pixpulse, Yappd

ShouldDoThis
- not really micro-blogging, but I’m addicted
- I wish I could post by email or it had a mobile web version

Seesmic
- video presence and conversations…see more.

Plazes
- a geographic (physical) presence network

Moodmill, lifemetric, iratemyday, emotionr

Blabto, Podobo, Yurbo

Recap

There is an overlap with the terms - presence, micro-blog, status

TWITTER
- presence
- replies as posts
- with others stream
- followers/following
- direct messages
- hashtags (channels)

http://twitter.com/johnt

FACEBOOK
- status (not the focus of the service)
- no replies on status
- private messages
- comment wall
- content publishing (notes, posted items, video, photo’s)…is this micro-blogging?
- news feed stream (similar to following or lifestream)

POWNCE
- micro-blog (also links, files, events)
- comments (replies)…also become posts
- with others stream
- followers/following (fans/friends)
- private messages in the same published content stream (permissions based)

http://www.pownce.com/johnt/public

JAIKU
- presence
- comments
- with others stream (overview)
- contacts (not followers/following)
- no private messages
- channels
- lifestream (feed aggregation)

http://johnt.jaiku.com

PLAXO PULSE
- status
- comments on status
- re-share (reblog)
- private messages
- comment wall
- content publishing (messages, links, video, photo’s)…is this micro-blogging?
- lifestream (feed aggregation)
- additional (tasks, notes, calendar, address book)

http://johntropea.myplaxo.com/

TUMBLR
- microblog (also images, video, audio, etc…)
- comments (via disqus)
- reblog
- with others stream (but only visible to owner)
- followers/following (but only visible to owner)
- no private messages
- groups (member based, this is different to Jaiku and Twitter)
- lifestream (feed aggregation)

http://johntropea.tumblr.com

I wish the social graph portability was here now so I could run my Twitter friends through Tumblr.

For now I’ll rely on a shoutout, If you’re on Tumblr drop a comment!

Conclusion

Micro-blogging services are not all the same, I use:
- Pownce for informal private groups
- Twitter for blabbing
- Facebook for close friends (real friends dare I say it)
- Tumblr for spontaneous blogging

I’m already traditional blogging, collecting bookmarks, podcasts, video’s, etc…yikes!!

Hellotxt is a lovely little nugget, it’s a multi-posting micro-blog service.
Quite often when I post on one of these four services, the context overlaps with the other
eg. I may post on Tumblr, and feel that I’d like that item also on Twitter, Facebook, and Pownce

Just like social networks, I think presence of some iteration is becoming a feature of most apps these days…whatever service comes on the scene, it will always benefit from adding friends and messaging, and seeing presence, these are all interactive, social, and immediacy type features.

As we see in Plaxo Pulse, they have status, but you can also post content…this really blurs the line on what we mean by status, presence and micro-posting…and also lifesteaming.

There are lots of these presence type services out there, but as you can see they are not all the same, I’m using 4 of the main 6 services for different reasons:

Facebook - status and micro-content for my old school friends
Twitter - presence and conversation for my tech friends
Pownce - micro-posts for trust based groups (I use it more for direct sharing, than publishing)
Tumblr - a simple micro-blog as opposed to a more serious traditional blog (I don’t make use of the lifestreaming feature or friends feature at the moment…re-blogging looks fun)

Plaxo Pulse would be an alternative for Facebook, but my network is already on Facebook.
It could also be an alternative to Pownce if it had one to one content sharing…let’s not forget it also has lifestreaming.

Jaiku is like Twitter without the conversation and community for me, but it does have lifestreaming…let’s not forget Twitterfeed.

Related
Mobile presence : Iotum-Talk Now and “The Swarm”

There are a few ways to interact with “presence”, some are triangulating or motion via cell towers, others are GPS location, and then there are explicit ways by presence-posting your location.

Motion and “location aware” methods are seen by some as too intrusive; it is found very handy, but at other times invasive, so it has good and bad points.

In contrast posting your availability is you letting others know…without you telling them they will not know where you are or if you are available. Since this is a push method it is not intrusive at all. The difference here is also that you’re not trackable (location aware), your recent locations are as frequent as you like to post them.

This method could be annoying as you are often having to update your availability/location settings…if you don’t update your availability often it may be out of date.
A way around this would be to have a few programmed day sequences
eg. choose “work day” setting, this will program your availability and location for the day (like auto pilot)
- 6am wake up (unavailable)
- 7am train (available)
- 8am work (unavailable)…you may want to manually override at this point
- 1pm lunch (available)
- 2pm work (unavailable)…you may want to manually override at this point
- 5pm train (available)
- etc…

Or perhaps it could be a little less programmed eg. set availability to lunch (available), and ask the phone to revert this back to work (unavailable) in 1 hour.

Examples

Cell tower - Motorola, Google
GPS - Loopt
Presence - Groovr, TwitterWhere

NOTE: Meetro is an IM client that is location aware on your PC, also see RadiusIM (requires no download)…this post is focusing on mobile communications.

Iotum Talk-Now (mentioned before) is a little different as it allows others to visit your profile to see what your status is, and leave a message, and this is what “The Swarm” (mentioned before) is all about, as well as being a virtual room.

Iotum Talk-Now

Specifically for the Blackberry, this is a product that augments the availability scenario and hopes to end phone tag ie. leaving messages/voicemails on each others phones. If we could just see the availability of the person we are calling we could save a lot of time and messiness. Also since we know availability and status we may choose not to call as we don’t want to interrupt.

From their website:

“SHARE your availability without losing control.
SEE who is available and who wants to talk with you.
NOTIFY people you need to talk to and be notified when they become available.”

SHARE - personalize your availability (similar to Instant Messaging status) and calendar…you can also show different availability to different people

SEE - able to see at a glance who is trying to reach you and who is available to talk with you, right now. No need to call someone just to ask if they have time to talk or if you are interrupting them.

NOTIFY - If you visit a contacts profile and they are unavailable, put them on a To-Call list, and Talk-Now will let you know as soon as they become available.

You can also leave a message, the receiver logs in to see this, it’s not pushed or interrupting like usual voicemail/SMS.

They have also teamed up with JahJah for VOIP calls.

Talk-Now is now integrated with the phone address book, so you don’t have to go to the application to find availablity of a contact, also some icons have been revamped…see more changes.

The Swarm

“The Swarm” by Christine Satchell is based on a similar way of dealing with presence/status/availability.
The idea is a way for your contacts/network to see your availability from your profile page and choose the lowest form of interruption.
Instead of ringing/VoiceMail/SMS’g a friend, first check their availability, depending on what their icon and/or text note describes, you may decide to leave a note for the next time they login or check in again later…or their note may be detailed enough to follow without having to explicitly contact them.

So right off the bat you can see how this is built off the IM status idea, and augmented into a more detailed status indicator and profile page.

There is also an element of publishing content, which hearing these words one would assume a social network akin to Facebook mobile, but it’s more about decorating your virtual room with media.

So it’s a way to avoid unnecessary contact and yet still be connected to availability information, and also a way to spontaneously form a group or hook up.

www.pixelshifter.net/client_login/swarm_2007/

The Study

Nomad
Contextualising Mobile Presence with Digital Images (PDF)
ABC Radio National: The Buzz 8 January 2005 - Swarm Phone

In true research methodology a design and test study was set up to deliver a useful product…these days you would probably have a more marketing 2.0 style and give your test users a social network for feedback.

THE NOMAD

The youth culture are always on the move, and don’t often have regular meet up places, it’s more a individual centric lifestyle, very busy, not always at home, on the go, just hook up as it happens…

The idea of a mobile phone and “The Swarm” is a virtual home, no matter where you are physically.
An avatar in your virtual home will represent what you are currently engaged in.

SELECTIVE CONNECTIVITY

A need to be connected without being contacted.
The ability to not be contacted is as important as the ability to be contacted…with the virtual home, this has an improvement on current mobile phone communications, as contacts can see your profile availability without having to disturb you. This is solving an etiquette issue, knowing whether your call or SMS is going to disturb someone before hand is a handy thing to know for both parties.

COMMUNICATE VIRTUALLY AND IDENTITY

A way both sender and receiver can communicate a message without pushing an SMS/VoiceMail/Ring.
This is the main feature of “The Swarm”, the owner of the phone has a choice of avatars to indicate their presence (activity), you can use different avatars for different people (hmmm, us humans are deceiving), and further to this you can leave a message (voice tags) on your avatar, and even push a message to a contacts profile…when the contact will login to their profile they will see the message.
There are also exploding avatars, which revert back to default mode so the user is not constantly updating their status/availability.

In a further design the avatars were replaced with colour coded icons, the coloured bar reveals a mode (status) of the user. eg. choosing the orange coloured bar represents “social”, it displays all the contacts that this user is conveying this status to.
As seen in the screnshot this user is indicating this mode to Ben, Darren, and Vicki. At this point in time this user may be displaying other modes to other people…if we clicked on green for “work” it may display contacts who think this user is at work.

At this stage it seems a bit time consuming to not only remember to set your availablity, but the fact that you can have multiple availability indicators at the same time. I assume there is a “clear all” button to reset your availability to the same for all contacts…maybe organising people in groups would help.

Here’s another screenshot showing what the users contacts are up to now…in this example the contacts (tiny person icon) are coloured, representing status.
Besides the standard colour bar, users can also overlay extra images over the icons to convey more context.

We can see Kym is “asleep” as her avatar is blue, and we see Ben’s avatar as orange, meaning “social” and is overlayed with a “martini glass”, meaning he is having drinks.

Another screenshot of what your contacts are doing now shows the extra images eg. martini glass, plus also user generated images such as photos, etc…

Kym is blue, meaning she is “asleep”, and she has a camera icon “picture” that brings more context to her current activity. Hmm, Kym is saying to this user she is asleep, and pimped up her presence with a photo (as seen below) of her socialising and having drinks during the day…maybe this represents what she last did before going for a long long sleep

Anyway this visual enhancement describes her activity more vividly, perhaps motivating others to join her, those that cannot can see the great time they are missing…all this without explicitly talking to each other.

This is about logging in to communicate and be connected or in the loop to see the latest, you don’t have to be interrupted in the way we currently use our mobile phones.

From this last screenshot we also see that status and availability have been augmented with more context via user generated content such as photo’s, given more of a presence feel…not just an indicator of your presence, but a contextual publishing of presence, similar to the effect of Twitter…I guess you could even use this feature to ask a question.

PUBLISHING CONTENT

Text, images, video can be posted to the walls of your virtual room where others can visit to see, basically a social network type thing like Facebook (but more decorative).

The Scenario

Jade is always on the move….. - Swarm scenario

A mobile phone owners “virtual home” is always on.

- Jade looks in her room
- there’s a note from Sarah
(Sarah would have seen a lecture avatar, signifing that Jade was in a university lecture)
- Jade clicks note and sees a business avatar of Sarah
- Sarah’s avatar has a note tag for Jade
- Jade selects a shopping avatar of herself
- Jade attaches a note tag for when Sarah logs in to “meet her on Collins St”
- Jade then pushes this shopping avatar and note to Sarah’s room
- Jade leaves a lecture avatar in her room, so when others visit her profile they see she is busy

At this point if anyone visited Jade’s room, other than Sarah, they would choose to not bother her as her avatar signifies she is busy in a university lecture.
But Sarah has been pushed a message by Jade, so when Sarah logs in to her own room she will see this note from the Jade shopping avatar…if Sarah looked at her contacts list she would also see a shopping avatar for Jade.

cont…

- Sarah rings Jade to get the exact location
- later on Jade logs in to her room
- 3 friends have left notes

I really like this idea of a non-interrupting type of SMS, only it’s web-based…ie. you login to see your messages rather than be interrupted to view the message.

- Jade clicks on her friends avatars and reads that they want to party.
- Jade changes her avatar to “party” so whoever visits her profile knows her status
- Jade notifies friends she really wants to see by pushing her party avatar and note tag ” come to amber bar” to her friends rooms.

During the night, from what I can gather, Jade is looks at her phone and see’s visitor’s in her room, she is able to hang out with them virtually.
She also decorates her room with pictures and video’s stored in her phone.

Questions

What about inviting contacts into your room for a virtual synchronous chat.

What about if one of your contacts is ringing from someone else’s mobile phone or what about if someone who isn’t your contact rings you…would it be possible to set your phone to not answer and instead send an automatic SMS availbility report. The caller would have to pay for this.

I wonder if a contact has a news activity feed of what their friends have been doing…not only for their publishings, but also a log of their avatar status…at a glance you know what activities your contacts have been doing.
If your contacts are doing something to you, then this would also appear in a Notification stream, a la Facebook.

Instead of SMS/ring them, could I poke/nudge/buzz them to look at my profile, as in Facebook, Twitter, Nimbuzz. But then if I’m nudging them (vibrating their phone to get their attention), I might as well SMS, as this communication costs money just the same.

What about being able to check a profile from the web, so you can check or set availability, send or set a note tag…and also be able to VOIP call from web to mobile phone.
Further to this, what about a web widget, so I can use either of these services in Facebook, or elsewhere.

The way the icons augment presence reminds me of Jaiku…as well as a micro-post you can add an icon to the post to enhance your presence.
Hmmm, what’s Google up to with Jaiku, perhaps a presence network with an availability or status component, just like “The Swarm”.

How is “The Swarm” (TS) different to Facebook mobile (FB), and Instant Messaging (IM)?

Availability indicator
- IM yes
- FB no
- TS yes

IM can only have a colour that says “yes or no”, accompanied with a status message that is “one to many”.
TS has a choice of colours to cover varied availabilties and also an accompaning icon and message, plus you can set multiple statuses at the same time to apply to different people.
FB has a status message, but this is more like a micro post or presence post, it’s not specifically an indicator for availability.
The regular FB on the PC does have a “friends online now” feature, this could be applied to the mobile version and turned into an availability indicator.

Interrupt
- IM no
- FB no
- TS no

IM and TS can first see availability before interrupting.
TS and FB can leave a message without interrupting (FB has both private and public messages).
FB has a “poke” feature which is very non intrusive.

Profile/Publish
- IM no
- FB yes
- TS yes

FB is more about publishing.

Notifications (must look at your profile to see if you have any)
- IM no
- FB yes
- TS yes

TS profile page may show an availability icon and message pushed to your profile by a friend.
TS contacts page allows you to see latest availability of all your friends.
FB home page will list notifications of what people have done to you eg. public or private message, message blasts.
FB Newsfeed informs us of what our friends have been doing to each other, TS could do this with a virtual room update, telling us what friends have published text or media to their room, and what friends have done to each other (not sure if this last one could be applied).

More on presence
Social Presence: Time To Push The Reset Button
Proximity dating is HOT!
Fluc: Put Your Mobile Phone to Work For You
Otetsudai Networks
Mobile motion presence and location awareness
The Mobile Phone as the Globalizing Icon of the Early 21st Century
CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems
3G Multimedia Content Production as Social Communication
‘Sharing Places’, Digital Content and Lived Life

[ADDED 7/2/08: From the Jaiku website:

Jaiku Mobile works like the phone’s regular phone book, and enhances the standard contact list with presence information. It displays the buddy icon, availability, latest Jaiku message, and location for you and your Jaiku contacts in your contact list. It enables you to:

- Browse and post Jaikus
- Add comments
- Share your availability based on your ring profile (green light = ringing, yellow light = vibrate, red light = silent)
- Share your location (neighborhood, city, country) based on cellular network towers
- Share your calendar events (if you don’t want to share your calendar, Jaiku only displays your status as “busy” when an event is active)
- Share who you’re with based on nearby Bluetooth devices]

Just read a great paper by Motorola on mobile motion presence, using your mobile phone to keep track of when a friend is stationary or in motion.

There are lots of way you can do presence, Twitter for example is on the onus of a user to publish their presence, followers are pushed an SMS, etc…another service Groovr, is well into location presence a similar way by using check in/out commands.

Then we have GPS location tracking services where you can exactly know where a person is located, this is no messing around.

Motorola could offer anything, but this study is careful, it’s testing different types of users: couples and friends, and how they feel about different types of presence methods.

There was a general feeling that full on GPS location tracking was a bit intrusive, I tend to agree.

Anyway, their idea is motion presence using cell towers, if you are on the go, you pass different cell towers, if your phone registers passing these towers, then it means you are moving…they are kind of like check points.

When your phone passes 2 cell towers within 5 minutes that were not visible within the previous 15 minutes, it is considered “moving”.

The updates are passive meaning you don’t have to ping to find out, or you don’t get notifications, basically it’s always on (it works by SMS which lives in a log)…just check your phone to see your list of friends and next to each friend there will be a status “moving” or “not moving” and also a number denoting how long they have been in this state.

I tend to agree, in my opinion this is the most non-intrusive way for this type of information, but then Motorola want to know if it’s too far removed and useful at all.

Usage

I know my wife is sick at home today, but I see she has been in motion for 30 minutes…aha what’s the bet she’s shopping again.

My friend has a meeting but I can’t remember the exact time and I don’t want to ring him, but I see right now he is “moving” so here’s my chance.

My wife doesn’t need to ring me to see if I’m on the way home, or how far I am, as she knows I have been “moving” for 45 minutes, and I usually take 60 minutes to get home from work, (this gives her time to do her own stuff before I get home) if I’m still moving at 75 minutes she’d probably call me.

It’s 2.30pm and my husband should have picked up the kids and be on the way home, but he’s “not moving”, turns out he was asleep.

We have a sick child at home and my husband went to pick up some medicine, it’s been 15 minutes and I see he is “moving”, I can infer that he’s on his way home.

It was also documented that some people checked the log frequently for something to do or as a habit, but on busy days they may never look at it…thanks to no notifications it doesn’t bother you if you choose not to care.

In all these examples motion doesn’t really have any context itself unless you know the person, or their plans for the day, in this light you may be able to infer location or activity.

Some particpants wanted a little more information, like if they were waiting for a lunch meeting, knowing the person was “moving” was not enough, they wanted to know how far way they were.

Others wanted a history of motion, like todays motion of person A so far is:
not moving 60
moving 10
not moving 120
moving 10
not moving 240

From this a person can infer that my partner has gone for a 10 minute drive to her friends house, stayed 2 hours, then drove back home, and has been home for the last 4 hours.

Others stated it would be useful to check up on their kids “hmmm, I dropped them off at their friends house, so why have they been moving for 30 mins, what are they up to?”

Motion presence could still be seen a bit intrusive, depends on the situation, I guess you have to weigh up if it would be more useful than not, and put up with the nots, in the end you have to infer, it’s not telling you direct stuff.

Here is the paper.
Here is the slide deck.

More on Social Presence

Social Presence: We Need To Push The Reset Button
New Presence

List

Here is a list of location-specific presence services I know of, as you can see presence location is a hot space.

The Swarm
iotum Talk-Now
Jaiku
Groovr
dodgeball
mycitymate
buddyping
WhoAt
FriendsTribe
Socialight
Flagr
Earthcomber
enpresence
mysaki
playtxt
Jambo Networks
Mates
mobiluck
SLAM
Loopt
helio
ContextPhone
Reno
WatchMe
Plazes
Dopplr
Meetro
RadiusIM
GyPSii

[ADDED 6/12/07: Google Maps pinpoints your locations by triangulating between cell towers (for those without GPS)]

[ADDED 7/2/08: Companies Betting on Location Based Mobile Ads]

[ADDED 7/2/08: Mobile presence : Iotum-Talk Now and “The Swarm”]

[ADDED 12/2/08: Path Intelligence Monitors Foot Traffic in Retail Stores By Pinging People’s Phones]

[ADDED 5/03/08: JotYou: Location-Based Mobile Phone Messaging]

Related:
A list of SMS groups and services and mobile social networks