Phil Wolff: Skypememe

Dinner with Dina and Friends.

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 18:05:27 GMT

It felt like an acid trip and swings in blood sugar and the five seconds of a family reunion that are sheer delight.

Stuart Henshall, always gracious, hosted Dina Mehta at Boobo di Beppy where staple busting portions stun you with their fat content. More on the restaurant later.

We talked about Skype, blog uptake, and other things until I realized that I was at the social scientists' table. Michele Chang is an ubicomp goddess researcher. Dina is a behaviorist. danah boyd (no caps for typographical balance) is getting doctored in social network behavior. Denise Cheskin comes at behavior from a marketing view, and I'm a demoblographer (I blog demography) and labor market analyst. Clynton Taylor is a full tyme ethnographer for business (from where do I know him?). And Stuart has x-ray vision when it comes to models, business and management models I mean.

We were a worldly bunch. Dina from India. danah originally from England but sans accent? Stuart from NZ but with a courteous American drawl. I'm from New York but work has taken me to strange places like Houston and Lausanne. Liz Goodman's from the Big Apple too, an ~~actress~~ artist become ubicomp sociologist en route to Oregon. Denise went to grad school in France. It felt so cosmopolitan to be in such a faked up Italian joint.

More topics:

Dina thinks technology diffusion will be slow in India, to the point where Dean-like campaigns may take 15 years to work. I'm betting on five years, optimist that I am. I think some will do it just to get a better return on money, faster cheaper to reach the small middle class online. imho, the magic will happen when (a) we figure out how to run a Dean campaign via SMS, increasing reach and (b) when we build the social software and cultural models organizing the middle class to reach out to the offline masses, something the Democrats are attempting to do in the US. But I'm an ignorant slut when it comes to the subcontinent and am likely wrong.

Business cards. Mine with Google keywords. danah's in black so nobody can write on it. Clynton's with a form on the back for notes: event, date, was wearing, talked about, follow up with call/email/visit.

Dollars are the universal currency, you can use them in Costa Rica and almost anywhere interchangeably with local coin and paper.

Fun stories of interviews with gay men about their computers, including the minimalist who hides it behind the clothes in his closet, the pious who adorn their technology with icons of angels and saints.

How men worth anything will follow their women from state to state as they pursue their careers.

Being neither fish (academe) nor fowl (one of the kidz) at one of danah's dance parties. If you haven't met her, danah lives both in her body and her mind, and her parties reflect that. Oh to be younger again, but I was never that cool.

How kids who've grown up with the Internet only use email to communicate with parents or other adults. They use IM (meaning AIM) among themselves and will jump to MSN for private conversations. What happens when non-email kids grow up?

danah who monitors her self-monitoring started us on how many bloggers write with purpose instead of just uttering. Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? Aware of consequences now and maybe in the future. My thinking: The reemergence of Google and the Wayback machine as our Permanent Record casts a chilling effect on personal disclosure. Will I share that cute story about the cat's claws coming too close to the vibrator and clit if it might affect a future relationship, job or political office? Or will I censor myself? LiveJournal shows the way: controlled layers of disclosure let you write to the world, your friends, a friend, or just to yourself.

The restaurant was all about experience marketing. Sculptures of popes, photos of Frank, bottles of chianti, meals served family style. Appealing, satisfying. And contrived by marketing folks at the chain's corporate headquarters. Their business relies on the illusion of the place, on customers suspending disbelief enough to enjoy the space, service, and food. They are careful to hide everything that might break that illusion. Kitchen stuff, admin staff, computers, break rooms. And they are not alone. Hotels depend on you accepting the illusion that no one ever slept in that room, in that bed before. Theme parks don't let you see characters slip out of costume or see staff lectured on crowd control. This conflicts with the marketing blog meme of letting the world see what goes on inside your enterprise, see how the sausage is made. Are the benefits of having a large choir of voices singing to the Internet, bonding to customers with sincerity, are the benefits worth your customers' lost innocence?

The GoGame, that builds new teams independent of prior rank or status by forcing people to notice their urban environment in great detail (phone powered scavenger hunt). Teletwister, a game of twister where a community votes on the players' moves.

That of course the lessons of emergent democracy and the Dean campaign (putting the tail of the power curve to work) can work inside organizations, but not at my company.

How the power to read more people (newsreaders are TiVos of the blogosphere) means everyone is becoming more like Oprah. Oprah's shields manage her 20 million "personal connections" rising from her broadcast media (tv, books, magazines). Setting expectations so people don't feel I'm rude when they get a form letter, a challenge, or a request for references.

Blondie's big gulp martinis. And then it gets fuzzy.

Skype and social networks.

Fri, 17 Oct 2003 03:38:18 GMT

Danah Boyd asks a few questions that Stuart Henshall answers with verve. My own answers to Danah...

"Skypememelogo"Danah: I’d really like to understand the excitement of social software enthusiasts. What is it about Skype that motivates you?

Skype engages people who believe their ears more than their eyes. Give Skype to someone in the music business. Or to a dyslexic or someone with ADD. Or to someone who listens to sports or talk radio. This is their linear, visually simple medium. Things should fit people.

My Skype addressbook is local. It's unmediated by a third party (unlike my AOL buddy list) and lives on the edge of the cloud, not on a server. This means my addressbook is private. It also means that software/network extensions to my addressbook can scale well and be diverse. My contacts are mine.

I can call anonymously. Just log out as me, log in as Mary Had A Little Lamb, and call someone. Then log out and never use that ID again. Unless they recognize my voice, I'm safe. Anonymity (or at least pseudonymity) is vital in larger communities. This assures that 911 calls are made. That whistleblowers reveal secrets. That journalists get tips. Anonymity enables individuality and civility.

Skype recognizes the social importance of privacy. Not only is my data kept locally, I control my profile, I control who can see when I'm available, and my conversations are encrypted from my headset to yours. IM, especially at work, is often monitored; phone calls less so. Skype creates a more trusted room in which to talk. Privacy leads to stronger community.

Skype moments are exposed by the software. Those user moments are your impulses to use yellow pages, white pages, caller-ID, call waiting, and file sharing. Those moments can be perceived and aided by programmers. So you will shortly be able to leverage your existing online social networks to find a relevant stranger to call, to populate your address book, to see a thorough profile of the stranger calling you (including whom you know in common), to have a side chat explaining the purpose of the call, perhaps to charge the caller for your time, or to securely share that song you're teaching them to sing over the phone. Skype informs phone calls with everything we've learned about software and the web.

Skype makes calls more like SMS and IM and less like One Ringy-Dingy, Two Ringy-Dingy. Multimodal, contextual, and soon with time shifting.

In short, Skype promises to bring everything I love about my TiVo to my phone.

Danah: Do you think that its popularity will be limited to specific communities?

No, but some communities will come first.

Early adopters will be computer users. Millions of us.

As people buy smarter phones and POTS-to-Skypenet gateways arise, everyone who has a mobile will use Skype-powered services.

If Skype was just the conversation triggered by your connection in your online community, that would be nice.

But it's more.

Skype's address book and phone logs can inform community. How about if people I Skype show up higher in my friends list, or get promoted from my fans list? What if recent frequent callers in my work-related address book show up in my intranet blog's Skyperoll?

I'll always take tacit data from user behavior over expressed content when understanding social networks. For the first time, my telephony behavior becomes useful as a sociocultural informant.

Danah: My skepticism increased dramatically when i read that Skype thinks it’s better than IM clients "Because it works!" What on earth does that mean?

It works as promised. Ummm, that's novel. Exceptional, even. Especially considering that it works over dialup, with encryption, on pretty average machines. Lots of geek cred under the hood to instantly replace hundreds of billions of dollars in telephony infrastructure with a 3 minute download, a headset, and an Internet connection.

From an industrial engineering and user experience view, they slashed the distance from thinking about calling someone to talking with that person. Skype cuts the number of tasks, clicks, typing, memorization and thinking that lead to the call. If both parties have Skype, you can even "Skype Me" in one click.

Skype also helps with discovery. Can you imagine looking for books if Amazon only took ISBN codes? Skype's lookup works well when the other party is online. And this will only get better.

About IM, when you're talking to someone, Skype lets you IM them using its own chat client. A personal backchannel, great for passing urls back and forth.

Assuming you're running Windows, please try it. Get the feel for it. Skype me or look up someone in a far away city and just ring a stranger to say "hello, how's the weather?".

skypememe: multiple users per device.

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 19:26:18 GMT

"smlogo"This means two things. First: I want multiple user profiles stored, login/addressbook/logs and the like. Second: I want to be able use them simultaneously. No reason two people can't be sitting around a computer

skypememe: Record a call.

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 02:22:03 GMT

I want to use Skype to record interviews. In twenty years I may have half of Lydon's skill. We can always do analog recording, but the client (or programmer's interface) should allow all parties to save the conversation to disk. MP3, cvp.

I should be able to initiate or stop this at any time before or during the call.

Either party should be able to block recording. The Veto button.

Indicate the call is being recorded by at least one party.

Permit routing of the audio stream to a third-party recording service. "akasig"

skypememe: Whistle-blower proxy.

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 02:06:00 GMT

"smlogo"I call Mary by looking up her profile on the network. When Mary's "Skype" rings, she sees who's calling. I want anonymity or pseudonymity. I need the freedom associated with calling from a pay phone or blocking caller ID.

A privacy proxy will hide my profile (until I'm ready to reveal it) and hide my IP address.

building on the Skype moment: Start a call : Calling . "akasig"

skypememe: Skyperoll.

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 23:26:38 GMT

Skype knows when I'm available to take calls. Let me share that.

Expose user status to other programs.

Ehanced blogrolls, showing not only who's posted lately, but who's online.
Newsreaders that show author status next to the posts I'm reading.
An near-realtime status icon on my blog, so you know if I'm available.
Integration with IM clients, so we can see if buddies are skypeready.

Skyperolls should be sharable. I'd want to be able to merge skyperolls.

Make available Skyperoll Me links: click to add a person to one of your skyperolls.

skypememe: RSS to MP3 to iPod

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 22:59:59 GMT

"smlogo"As long as we're talking about sound, I want scheduled text-to-speech conversion of pre-selected RSS feeds. Speak them into an MP3 file. Automatically download them to an iPod for offline listening at the gym or during a commute. Feeds become folders, posts become files, to help with navigation.

While you're doing it, check the RSS feeds for audio enclosures. Download those too. "akasig"

Six Skype Moments.

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 16:45:53 GMT

This is the first in a series of posts about "Skype". This one owes a huge debt to Stuart.

Skype is a telephone system that, at the moment, runs through the Internet. You access Skype through your computer. What are the elements of user experience? First, let's start with six choices, six user behaviors.

Start a call
Answer the call
Bring in another person
Share something
End a call
Add a friend to your address book

Much of the product and business analysis will cluster around one or more of these moments. There must have been prior art on telephone consumer behavior, so research will follow.

Start a call

Includes:

Recognizing the need to talk to someone
Choose to talk now
Looking up or remembering their phone number
Going to the phone
Calling

Answer the call

Be alerted (ring ring)
Choose to answer
Go to the phone
Answer

Bring in another person

I'm on the phone and recognize the need to talk to another person without hanging up the existing call
Choose whether to create a second call, bring the next person into the existing call, or to merge two ongoing calls
Make a call or merge two calls

Share something

"Oooh, you gotta (see / hear / play with / click on ) this!"
Send it

End a call

Recognize the need to end
End it

Add a friend to your address book

Think of it
Add
Organize

How are these behaviors different with Skype than POTS? than with mobile phone? What are the opportunities to redefine how you experience these moments? to create new value or cut time or effort?

Theme of the week. "akasig"

Skype tonight: 6pm Pacific Coast Brewing Co.

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 17:36:18 GMT

How could Skype transform your industry? Your favorite tools? What would a Skype-enabled newsreader look like? Does WiFi + Skype = POTS? What social network analysis would you like to pull from the Skype network? How much money can we make in Skype ring-tones? What commands could we stick at the end of "call://userid/"?

Now add beer.

Wednesday, 24 September 2003
6pm

Pacific Coast Brewing Co.
906 Washington St. (in Old Oakland, a block from 9th and Broadway)
Oakland, California 94607
Yahoo! map

New! Guest caller: The Skype team all the way from Denmark (2-3 in the morning Copenhagen time).

Call me at 510-444-8234 or Skype me.

Skype Dinner: Wednesday, 6pm-9pm, 20 Sept, Oakland.

Sun, 21 Sep 2003 20:17:15 GMT

Stuart Henshall and I need to talk. We talked on Skype. Now we're going to talk in person. Join us for dinner in Oakland this Wednesday. On the agenda:

What are the traditional business opportunities for Internet telephony?
What are the non-traditional, blog and social software -based business opportunities?
What would we ask Skype to open to independent developers?

So:

Wednesday, 24 September 2003
6pm
Oakland
we're still looking for a venue: quiet, WiFi, BART-friendly.
I'll broadcast the location here, and by email if you write or Skype me.