Social Technology Innovation by Alex Vorbau

Anonymous in a room of friends

Alex Vorbau — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 22:16:00 GMT

"Wait wait, say that again."
"Hey, how's it going?" I repeated, trying not to sound unnatural.
"Ahhh, You're QT1p!"
"You got it ."

I stood in the corner of the room and took in the surreal scene. There were about ten of us and we were just arriving for the party. Halo 3 happened to release on my birthday so my brother threw us an old fashioned LAN party. Most of us have been friends for years and there were a couple of new guys too. Only about half of us had met in person so it wasn't your typical social scenario.

As I scanned around the room, I could read the conversations without knowing what they were saying. One talked while the other person stared in studied concentration or looked away while the other one talked so he could focus on the sound of the voice, trying to guess which friend they were speaking to.

One guy held his hand out flat like he was measuring someone for a roller coaster. I think I know what he was saying. "You're a lot shorter in real life." That was when I noticed what a social equalizer the video game is. In this case "Vegan" (that's his gamertag) was speaking to my brother "Vorb" for the first time, which by itself I found surprising since they've been playing together for years. Vegan is maybe 5' 5" and 140 lbs and has a stylishly studious look, looking every bit the USC film school grad. Vorb is 6' 3", 230 lbs, an all-state high school football player and captain of his college rugby team. In the game, though, they are two of the most formidable players, only distinguished by their texture mapped faces and essentially equals. In fact, if we were choosing a team, I think Vegan would have the edge (sorry Bro) because he communicates so clearly and efficiently, making him easier to predict and coordinate with.

I was also surprised by how little we knew about each other, those of us who only interact online. We talk online, but just not very personally. I think the reason is that the game "lobby" is essentially a big party line so we take turns speaking and only occasionally veer from game-related topics, not wanting to bore everyone with our side conversations. At the party I learned that one of my friends is a cop, which explains his odd work schedule, and that he had his first high-speed pursuit that day. Another friend and his wife were expecting a baby girl (she has since been born).

I suppose online gaming is similar to pickup basketball games, but without any of the side conversations. The gaming service is single-purpose for team and group communication, but limits one-to-one friendship-building conversations. It is technically possible to have a one-on-one conversation, but it removes you from the group entirely. I should say that this observation isn't an indictment of the technology, but an observation of the state of social technology in gaming. In fact, there were a half dozen of our group who couldn't attend the party because they live in far-away places like Orange County, Oregon, England, Switzerland. I probably wouldn't interact with these guys at all if it weren't for this technology.

At a break in the battle we put down our controllers, took a few deep breaths to calm our nerves and shuffled into the kitchen. "Degauss" hoisted up a cardboard box and began distributing mugs he made to commemorate the physical event. On the mug was a list of our names and a snapshot of the location in (the previous version of)the game where the most carnage occurs, dubbed "DeathAlley". It was a nice thing, what Degauss did. It confirmed what I had always felt, a feeling of comradery , despite the lack of intimacy...and the ability to recognize one another.

Thoughts on Anonymous Cowards

Alex Vorbau — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:14:00 GMT

I haven't posted to the blog for a while and I can't say it's because I've been too busy. I had a pretty terrible social technology experience recently. It left me feeling overexposed so I just had to walk away for a while.

Here's the short version of the story. My wife and I thought it would be fun and interesting to run a small online business selling products that she knows about, namely fashion. She scoured the web a for a good distributor and eventually found a reputable importer of Italian handbags. So we started with a small test batch. A big box landed on our porch, direct from Italy, and the bags looked beautiful. We snapped some photos, I created a pretty web page, and we started selling a few on eBay to test the market. It was going ok. They weren't selling for much over our cost but we figured it was because our reputation hadn't been established yet.

One day a nice customer of ours sent us a message saying that our listings were being discussed in the eBay forums and that "lynch mob" was forming. Reading through the forum messages was agonizing. They were saying that our bags were fake and that we were criminals. They said they were reporting us to eBay and to Gucci and that we would be fined and possibly jailed. They picked apart every phrase in our listing, looking for flaws. They declared that because our products were selling so inexpensively that they must be fake! They claimed that our photos were clearly stock photos stolen from the designers web site (an unwelcome compliment, in a way). They had even been sending questions to our listings, posing as interested buyers, and then posting the responses in the forum to mock us.

The worst part of all this was that they pasted text in the forum from my family blog and even posted comments to it with threatening language. It felt like someone had been in my house.

We sat back tried to approach the situation with objectivity. Many of them were probably handbag sellers and not happy to see new competition. And there is an atmosphere of hysteria around designer products because of the rampant fraud. It seemed futile to try to reason with them or defend ourselves so we'd just ignore it and focus on selling products. What could they do anyway? We soon found out. EBay sent us a message saying that our account had been suspended because of the complaints from the forum. Satisfied customers returned to the site to leave us feedback only to see that we had disappeared which made them rightly suspicious. Then they wanted their money back and the whole thing unraveled from there.

This experience left me with a lot of questions. When should people in an online community be allowed to remain anonymous and when should they be accountable by being identifiable? How do we counteract the behavior that results from a lack of personal connectedness?

People are so emboldened by anonymity and transient identities that they say things that would get them knocked on their butts in a face-to-face conversation. Maybe this is what's missing in social technology :) On the positive side, people are much more likely to act decently if they can look you in the face, read your non-verbal communication, and gain a sense of connection with you. Or you will learn that someone seems shifty and perhaps you should not be doing business with them.

This is one of the reason I've a fan of using video wherever practical. I think it can be used to restore a sense of trust and accountability in online relationships. I would expect to see video being applied to online commerce in the near future. It would really benefit sites like Craigslist and eBay where fraud is problem.

Some communities have also addressed the problem of bad behavior by promoting some members to moderators. They have the authority to freeze conversation threads if they become abusive or boot trouble makers altogether. It seems to work well on the UbiSoft (video games) forums where the demographic is especially feisty. It seems like eBay needs this, especially when so much is as stake.

Sharing our lives in little pieces

Alex Vorbau — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:47:00 GMT

I was just thinking about how many technologies we have for sharing bits and pieces of our lives online, what it all means and where it might be headed. Just off the top of my head, here's a short list of them.

Blogs, of course, are used as a chronological journal of news and commentary. They are a general-purpose publishing tool that can be used to publish information from various sources with embedded audio, video, and photos.
Twitter is often referred to as microblogging. Many use it to record momentary glimpes of everyday life and fleeting thoughts, in 140 characters or less.
Digg.com is used to share web links that you think are interesting. You can subscribe to friends' diggs.
Netflix supports RSS publishing of your DVD queue so people can see what you'll be watching in the near future.
Last.FM lets you publish what music you're listening to and in return you can see an aggregated view of what your friends and the world are listening to also. They were just bought by CBS.
Flickr is one of the more popular sites for sharing your photos publically. You can subscribe to friends' photos with RSS.
YouTube is the best known web site for sharing home video.
Google Calendar, Upcoming.org, and 30 Boxes are popular sites for sharing your calendar with friends.
del.icio.us is known best for sharing your bookmarks with the world.
Share.opml.org is a geek-heavy site for sharing your OPML list, which is a list of your RSS feeds.
The new feature on Google Maps called MyMaps can be used to share a collection of locations. A friend of mine who lives in London sent me a "MyMap" of her favorite restaurants in London, which will come in very handy the next time I visit.
With 360voice.com, your Xbox can publish a blog for you! It writes about (what else?) your gaming activity and it talks about you like a dear old friend. Quite amusing. http://www.360voice.com/tag/Major%20Nelson
Have a secret burden to share? Make a postcard and send it anonymously to PostSecret.com. It continues to one of the most popular sites on the web because, as you can imagine, they have very interesting content.

I'm sure there are many more examples like these. The technology industry is in another season of expansion (versus consolidation) and social applications are all the rage. and its seems that every day there is a new startup that enables the digitization and sharing of our lives.

I have three questions about all this: What hasn't been shared yet? What do these technologies really do for relationships? And where is all this going?

It seems like everything that can be shared has been, but if you think for a few minutes you can probably come up with more things. For example, I don't know why there isn't a popular web site where I can publish among my friends the items in my PVR queue. I am always thinking that I'm missing something on TV and I would like to see what my friends are watching.

I would like to know where my (guy) friends buy their clothes. This may sound strange, but it's purely practical, I promise. I don't like shopping at malls one bit, but I also like to dress decently. I'm totally content to follow the crowd when it comes to fashion, but I just don't know where to go!

Have you ever tried to search Google for a good credit card to sign up with? Pure crap. These are the kinds of things you really need to ask friends about -- contractors, babysitters, etc.

Does all this sharing help our relationships? I'm sure there are papers on the subject (I need to look that up) but I will speak from personal experience. On the good side, I once received a Twitter message (tweet) from a friend who was disappointed about not getting a job he interviewed for. I would not have known otherwise -- it's just not the sort of news you send in a mass email to people -- and I was able to call him and offer some encouragement. I've felt more connected to people who live far away. In fact, I've interacted more, through blogs, with my friend who moved to Hungary than I did before he left.

On the other hand, there are bad people in the world and we have to be careful what we publish so it's not used against us. My theory is that I'm flooding Google with the content that I have intended to be public. I'm controlling my internet image. There is also the argument that these "light" social interactions give us an illusion of connection and encourage shallow relationships. I've also found that there is less to conversation-starting material when I do see people in person. I start to tell them something and they stop me with "Oh yea, I already read that on your blog".

Where is all this going? That's THE question, isn't it? I think we'll see a consolidation of these technologies so the information isn't published to several different sites. The may already be happening. Here's what TechCrunch said recently about Facebook being a magnet for all social-based services:

LinkedIn helped define the professional networking space, and yet today it faces the real risk of long term irrelevance as Facebook becomes the social networking platform of choice for professional networkers. Like Nick O’Neil, nearly all my professional networking requests lately have come through Facebook

The success of Facebook's Platform technology is motivating other social technologies to build on it. Although, I like having more control of my internet persona and I prefer to host my own custom page with links to the various places on the internet that I've published my life. This could be an area of opportunity -- a site that is the glue among the various places on the internet that you publish yourself to.

I also think we'll see more intelligence in how we manage our social networks. As I said in my previous post Friendlists are so 1997, our social relationships are much more complex than the way the are modeled in software today. For example, the company Grand Central, which is rumored to being acquired by Google soon, simplifies one's social life with regard to phone calls. They give you one phone number and you create rules that tell the system which friends have access to what numbers at what time of the day. This is the sort of intelligence that is needed with the rest of the information we publish on the web. Technology should help me direct information about me to the right people. Again, Facebook is well-poised to address this, but they're not the only game in town.

Tags: Social technology, social sharing, blogs, HP, HP Labs

Comments aren't working

Alex Vorbau — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 17:55:00 GMT

Updated: Comments are working again. Post away!

Comments don't seem to be working on this blog right now, so my apologies to those who have tried to submit them in the past few weeks. I know a blog with without comments sort of defeats the purpose of blogging so I'm emphatically encouraging the support team to fix the problem.

Some people have emailed me their comments which is totally cool with me. I really enjoy hearing from you, where you agree with what I say or not. My email address is alex dot vorbau at hp dot com. If you email me, I'll then be able to email you back when the comments are working again.

And in news that I assume is related, there was a technical glitch that prevented me from logging into the blog software last week. As you can see, that has been fixed.

Sigh. Thanks for reading...

Alex

Mobile web sites get no respect

Alex Vorbau — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 23:19:00 GMT

A friend of mine describes his life as a firefighter as "hours of boredom interrupted by a few seconds of terror". That's what my life is like, minus the terror :). I find myself in situations where I'm waiting for something or someone and the only entertainment within reach is my mobile phone. You know what I'm talking about. We wait for planes, trains, spouses, lattes, mechanics, and barbers. You can either stare into the distance and think deep profundities or check the latest sports scores.

I've also been in some situations where the need to use a mobile browser wasn't just for entertainment. Once my mortgage broker called me while I was driving to LA and said he needed information that I could only retrieve from my bank's web site. Another time I was checking into a hotel in France and was being told I didn't have a reservation. So out came the mobile phone and after a few minutes of sweating, cursing, waiting for large images to trickle down and panning around the page with my 176 pixel-wide screen, I produced the confirmation they had sent me.

Mobile web sites get no respect. I asked some friends of mine who recently launched a site for mobile media experiences if they planned on making a mobile version of their site. They sort of tilted their heads and shrugged and then explained that demand just wasn't there for it. I suppose that's the problem. Most people probably don't even know that they exist and perhaps, as a result, companies don't bother to make them. Well maybe we can change that.

It's interesting to see what a company chooses to put on its mobile site. They must dramatically prioritize their content because space is limited. For example, PayPal tells us what their most important functions are with four links: "Send Money", "View my balance", "Buy Something", and "Set/change my PIN". Netflix only has two things on it's mobile home page: a search box so you can search for movies a link labeled "View Your Queue". They want you to find and queue movies. The ratings and social stuff come second.

My mobile web experiences have given me a appreciation for companies that publish versions of their web sites that are formatted for mobile phones. So this post is my way of saying thank you to those who have them. Here is a list of the most useful mobile sites I have discovered, bookmarked, and used in my mobile browser. They are sorted by priority (which is always changing)

Yahoo! [m.yahoo.com]
I use a lot of Yahoo!'s services like Mail, News, Bookmarks and Yellow Pages. Yahoo!'s mobile web site is well organized and easy to navigate. I use it primarily to check my email and to read news articles. I wish the mobile version of their MyYahoo news reader was better designed -- it requires too many clicks (and waits). This is at the top of my list because it's the first site I go to when I pull out my phone. BTW, I don't use the mobile version of Yahoo Local search because it's faster to send a text message to the Yahoo SMS service and then click on the link they send back. See the Yahoo! mobile site for details
Google [google.com/xhtml]
Need I explain? Good: simple, easy to input a seach query and all the goodness of Google results, well formated for the phone. Bad: if you want to click on a search result, you still have to deal with web pages formated for desktop screens. Bad: the mobile version of search doesn't seem to support conversions like "quarts in a gallon" which I've needed at times.
NPR [thin.npr.org]
A surprisingly good mobile site. No frills here, just basic text and blue links, and that's a good thing. Totally Rad: you can browse all the NPR shows we know and love and the click the [LISTEN] link and the show is streamed right to your phone. Perhaps the link is pointing to an MP3 file which my Windows Mobile media player is then streaming, but whatever, it works.
MSN Driving Directions [m.live.com/Search/RouteSearch.aspx]
Directions are a handy thing is you don't have a GPS on you. I found the MSN driving directions to be better than Yahoo's. Easier to input (fewer clicks) and better looking results. I should mention that the way for mobile directions, short of a GPS unit like the HP Travel Companion (sorry had to mention that) is the Google Maps mobile application. I don't list it here because it's not a mobile web site.
Digg [mobits.com/digg]
Browse Digg news. Clicking on a link still takes you to a desktop-formatted web page.
PayPal [paypal.com - auto-detects a mobile browser]
Flickr [m.flickr.com]
A nice feature is the "Recent activity" link which lists all the comments and new photos your friends have posted. You can also upload photos or alternatively send photos via MMS.
Flight Status [mobile.orbitz.com/mobile/App/ViewTravelWatchHome]
This is actually a link off of the Orbitz mobile site, but it's so valuable in itself that I've bookmarked it separately. I use it frequently when I'm traveling or when picking people up from the airport.
Orbitz [mobile.orbitz.com]
I haven't traveled on a ticket purchased via Orbitz so I haven't used this mobile site to it's full potential. I often use Orbitz to book personal travel so I'll let you know how that goes.
Netflix [netflix.com/Mobile]
Search for movies, add them to your queue, view and edit your queue. The essentials.
Vox [vox.com - auto-detects mobile browser]
Vox.com is the site that I recommend to friends when they're interested in starting a blog. They do the basics of a personal web really well - blog posts, photos, video, audio, and books. A few friends of mine have their blogs on Vox and I like being able to leave comments on their posts from my phone.
Facebook [m.facebook.com]
This would, of course, be at the top of the list for many people, but I'm not a heavy Facebook user yet. I could see this being a very useful mobile site for those who are addicted to their Facebook mini-feeds.
PopUrls [popurls.mobi]
PopUrls aggregates all the popular news articles. This is the mobile version.
Cnet News [mobile.news.com]
Fandango [mobile.fandango.com]
Purchase movie tickets online. Use the mobile site to do it from the theater parking lot.
eBay [wap2.bonfiremedia.com/ebayserver/...]
I use this site a lot when I have a listing on eBay, especially as the auction is nearing the end. Once I sold a car on eBay (and old BMW 323i I drove in college) and Kristin and I were at a friends house for dinner. I checked the status of the auction every minute from my phone under the table.

Honorable mentions:

Kayak [kayak.com/moby]
Kayak is the unofficial Web 2.0 travel web site that people seem to like. And they have a mobile site. I haven't used it.
SeatGuru [mobile.seatguru.com]
Another travel site for picking the best seats on airplanes. Especially useful for those international trips.
Edmunds [pda.edmunds.com]
Look up used and new car prices. I've had friends call me from the dealer lot, since I'm the "car guy" and ask me if xxx dollars is a good price for the car their thinking about buying. I don't know, dude. Didn't you look it up? Now I can say pda.edmunds.com.
Amazon.com [http://www.amazon.com/...]
Books and stuff. I've never used it. Not even sure if you can make a purchase on the mobile site.

Some of these sites I discovered by looking at a compilation list of mobile web sites at Cantoni.org. A great place to start looking.

Finally, this is obviously a very incomplete list. What do you recommend? What have been your top three most useful mobile sites?

Facebook's most popular apps so far

Alex Vorbau — Tue, 29 May 2007 20:52:00 GMT

The horses are out of the gate. so to speak, and we have a report on the most popular applications being used on Facebook, as enabled by Facebook's new platform technology. Steve O'Hear of ZDNet has a post about the five most popular applications.

iLike integrates the music social network and recommendation service into your profile (see my previous coverage of iLike). Adding music-based social networking to Facebook makes perfect sense, and is something they could have easily done themselves. That’s what makes the company’s Platform strategy so intriguing. Mike Arrington (over at TechCrunch) also notes the omission of Last.fm which is arguably the best-of-breed of music-based social networks.
Horoscopes (by RockYou!) adds twice-weeky horoscope readings to your profile.
The Compass (by the Washington Post) involves taking a survey that determines your political compass. The results are then displayed on your profile. It’s a fun idea, but hardly qualifies as an ‘application’.
Games adds multiplayer web-based games to Facebook: “Play games and meet new people in your networks! Add the Games application to get access to a constantly changing selection of fun multi-player games, all right in your browser.” Pretty obvious but neat idea that has the potential to take traffic away from dedicated web-based gaming social networks. If the games are any good that is.
Picnik adds basic photo editing functionality to Facebook. Considering that the social network has been reported as the largest photo-sharing site on the web, giving users the ability to re-size, crop, and enhance their photos without leaving the site is a smart move. Although again, it seems like the kind of thing Facebook should have done themselves.

The social gaming one is interesting. I wonder if that is popular with both men and women.

I'm also seeing my own friends on Facebook sign up for Last.FM and Digg.com plugins. Last.FM is a social music site that shares with your friends what music you're listening to, despite what music player you're using (Windows Media Player, etc).

Tags: Facebook, Social Technology, Social Media, HP, HP Labs

Facebook Platform: Social OS or unwanted clutter?

Alex Vorbau — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:37:00 GMT

Big news from Facebook yesterday at F8, their large press and developer conference. They announced the official launch of Facebook Platform, which enables third-party developers to create applications that run on the Facebook network. Users will be able to browse a library of applications and add them to their profile. Users' feeds will notify them if their friends are using new applications, possibly resulting a viral spread of services across the network. Also announced was a surprisingly commercial feature that drew the biggest reaction from the crowd as described by GigaOm's live blog:

Now [founder Mark] Zuckerberg says you can serve ads on your app pages and keep all the revenue, sell them yourselves or use a network, and process transactions within the site, keeping all the revenue without diverting users off Facebook.

Facebook is in a unique position. They've achieved the goal of every social network based service - attracting loyal, young, and well-educated users. They have the allegiance of nearly every young adult in the land and the demographic is broadening upward. Zuckerberg listed off some impressive stats about the company in his presentation:

They are the 6th most trafficked site in the U.S.
They have more page views than eBay
Their photos app is by far the number one photo site on the internet.
Three times more people are invited to events through Facebook than Evite.com
The fastest growing demographic is the 25 and up age group.
50% of registered users come back to the site every day

On Wednesday I attended a panel discussion on Teens and Tech. It included representatives from Facebook (their product manager), Microsoft, HP, and two well known venture firms. One panelist made an interesting statement - that for any social network to win over new users of college age students, they must sustain popularity for at least three years because freshman entering college will choose whatever network is popular with the older students at their school. Facebook may have a firm grip on it's position.

The Facebook Platform is the company's first big move to leverage their enviable "social graph". If the applications integrate well they could add value to users and attract more developer partners. But if the applications don't fit with the sites clean and simple user experience, then users may revolt. A point we heard repeatedly from Facebook users at the Teen Tech seminar is their preference for Facebook's "Apple-esque" style as opposed to the cluttered and ugly MySpace look.

So this makes we wonder, how insistently will Facebook enforce a clean and attractive user experience with it's partners? We all know Apple accomplishes this because Steve Jobs is the one to say "That's crap, do it again" if something doesn't meet Apple's high standard for style and simplicity. On the other hand, Microsoft's Media Center interface could be an example of what to avoid: weak developer APIs and guidelines yield cheesy and useless third-party apps.

Perhaps Facebook will succeed in smoothly integrating these applications by working closely with the partners versus what we've seen from MySpace. As M. Arrington at TechCrunch said:

Facebook’s strategy is almost the polar opposite from MySpace. While MySpace frets over third party widgets, alternatively shutting them down or acquiring them, Facebook is now opening up its core functions to all outside developers.

Facebook has one thing going for it: partners are probably very motivated not to mess this up. Open APIs plus motivated developers could equal some very cool social technology innovation. Let's keep an eye on this one.

Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Social Technology, Facebook Platform, HP, HP Labs

Conversa: Mobile video conversations [video]

Alex Vorbau — Mon, 21 May 2007 23:47:00 GMT

I'm giving you access to a state-of-the-art video streaming technology that enables playback and recording to and from a 3G mobile phone. Think of something interesting that uses this technology and have it ready to demo at a wireless conference in six weeks.

That's essentially the challenge we were given about a year and half ago. What would you do with this challenge? While you're thinking about that, I'll tell you what we came up with.

At the same time we were pondering this challenge, April and I were conducting a user study on mobile video and we knew that people think video formats are confusing and frustrating. Video needs to be simpler.

So, we created a mobile video conversation system which we later called Conversa.

Consider your typical online discussion group - like a Yahoo! Group. You create a social group, invite your friends to join you, and then start posting text-based messages to the group and creating threads of conversation. It's a proven and effective way to collaborate and share thoughts "asynchronously". We used this familiar discussion forum model, but we implemented it purely in video.

The video streaming technology I referred to is the HP OpenCall Media Platform (OCMP). It's a product that our telecommunication business unit sells to mobile operators around the world like O2, Telecom Italia Mobile, and Cingular, etc (that's not necessarily a list of customers, but a list of well-known operators). Basically it enables customers to dial a number on their 3G phone, make a video phone call to a service, and play and record streaming video. This might sound foreign to Americans but it's pretty familiar to Europeans and Asians.

What we created is a hybrid of a Web 2.0 web site and a streaming mobile video service. Users can use both the videophone or the web site to browse conversations and record responses. The web site has all of the features we've come to expect like RSS video podcast support, video playback in the browser like YouTube, and an open HTTP API to support creative developers.

This may seem like a no-brainer combination, and we would agree, but it's new territory for the telecom industry. Think about it for a moment. What mobile services does your operator offer that integrate the mobile phone with a modern web site and aren't simply a partnership with YouTube or MySpace? The telecom industry is struggling to reconcile the web with mobile technology and they are hungry for ideas.

Conversa is running as a limited pilot in France and our European friends are happily conversing with streaming 3G video. We also recently launched Conversa in the US at http://conversa.hpl.hp.com. It's currently an invitation-only beta as we work out some bugs, but stay tuned. Since our young 3G infrastructure doesn't yet support video phone calls, we have created a client for Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphones. See http://conversa.hpl.hp.com/mobile for details.

Check out the (low-budget) video I created for the HP Shanghai Mobility Summit last week. It will give you a quick overview of what the service looks like.

I asked the question earlier about what you would do with streaming video and I sincerely would like to hear what you think. This technology will be coming to the US in the near future and we're always searching for creative uses for it.

P.S. Keep in mind that this is a research project and not a product. There are no specific plans for productization.

Guitar Hero, Wii and social gaming

Alex Vorbau — Fri, 18 May 2007 00:02:00 GMT

I had lunch with a couple of friends this week who both were raving about the newly released Guitar Hero II game for the Xbox 360. This really had my attention because these guys are pretty seasoned first-person shooter gamers and they almost apologetically explained why they loved this alternative gaming style.

If you're not familiar with Guitar Hero, it's similar to Dance Dance Revolution -- you've seen those kids at the mall dancing around on the colored mat to match to the cascade of instructions on the TV screen. In Guitar Hero, you also have a constant flow of instructions on the TV screen, but in this case you are holding a plastic guitar with colored buttons on the stalk. But don't let that make it sound simple. It's difficult to master so they start off with the simpler songs. When you're hitting all the right notes, the crowd cheers and music really starts flowing, but when you mess up it kills the buzz everyone falls silent.

The stories my friends had to tell were similar to what we've been hearing from Wii users.

Chris is married to a wonderful lady who happens to despise video games. I know, it sounds like an impossible contradiction, but it's true. This last week I saw that Chris had some new photos in his Flickr account, one of which had the title "No...It CAN'T be...can it?" and photo was of his wife holding that white plastic guitar grinning like a little girl and watching the TV screen intently. I would love to link to the photo but I would like to see them stay married :). The photo truly illustrates that this form of social gaming is different and appeals to a new class consumers.

My other friend is Kurt. I actually had to pause to remember his name because we usually call him by his gamertag "Vegan". Yes, very nerdy, I know. Vegan is a hip guy in his 20's, a recent grad of the USC Film school, and he often joins our Xbox gaming sessions after returning from partying with his other twenty-something friends who probably listen to "The Shins" and wear their dad's 80's clothes. He was telling us about a party he went to in LA last weekend where Guitar Hero was the center of attention. They were using two guitars and the game would lead each of them in alternating solos and then bring them together for a duet. The (physical) crowd was really into it, he told us with amazement. The really interesting part of his story is that he owners of the house also had a Wii running and it was largely ignored in favor of GH2.

It's great to see the gaming industry adapting. The common knowledge has been that 18 to 35 year old males dominate gaming, but it's not exactly true. Stats have shown that up to 76% of casual gamers are women and we're finally seeing products that meet this need in the market.

So if you were to follow the path that the Wii and Guitar Hero have taken, what would you create? I really like these games that use 3D accelerometers to approximate real life activities, especially ones that require the development of technique. I could see these games improving my golf swing or volleyball approach.

The vision of virtual reality from the 80's never happened. Will that vision be re-implemented in this decade using large flat-screen TVs and motion-sensitive accessories? It wouldn't be the first time that a grand futuristic vision was made real in a simpler and more practical way. If you haven't used a Wii-mote, try it. I could well be a glimpse at the future of human-computer interaction.

P.S. The ultimate combination is coming. Wii+Guitar Hero

Should innovation be bottom-up or top-down?

Alex Vorbau — Mon, 07 May 2007 23:42:00 GMT

Continuing on the topic of the Pew Study that categorizes Americans by their technology use...

I've been thinking. Should we be tailoring technology for the "lacklusters" or for the "technical elites"? Maybe you think I'm flip-flopping because of my earlier post about how we can create technology to connect Grandma to the internet. But this recent post by Seth Godin made an interesting, however unscientific observation:

Most people in the US can't cook. So you would think that reaching out to the masses with entry-level cooking instruction would be a smart business move.

In fact, as the Food Network and cookbook publishers have demonstrated over and over again, you're way better off helping the perfect improve. You'll also sell a lot more management consulting to well run companies, high end stereos to people with good stereos and yes, church services to the already well behaved.

Should technology be driven by the trickle-down model? Should we target technology for the Omnivores, see what catches on and then adapt what's popular for everyone else, assuming that Omnivores are the canaries in the mine and the ones who will spend money? You could probably argue that this is what's already happening. Consider how difficult it was to think of products for Grandma versus the number of laptops and other gadgets on the market. Remember the internet appliances of the 90's? Were they the equivalent of entry level-cook books?

I hate to think this is true, but perhaps that's just the cold hard economics of the market. Or perhaps the top-down approach is easier to do. I still have hope for entry-level (aka simple and innovative) technology because when they work, they really change the world. They broaden the usefulness and appeal of technology. The Apple Macintosh. The Palm Pilot. The Kodak Brownie camera.

Here's an interesting example I heard last week. I spent much of last Friday at the Nokia Research Center just down the street here in Palo Alto. By the way, it's a very cool workspace; the walls are all painted in the Nokia greens colors and its furnished with a stylish scandinavian touch -- lots of simple bare wood and frosted glass. Our friend at Nokia, Mirjana, had invited April, Kenton, and I to come give our talk on our mobile video user study. Also visiting Nokia was Gary Marsden of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who won the Social Impact Award at CHI this year. His talk was full of fascinating observations from his tour around Africa, specifically on the topic of how (mobile) technology is used. One of his anecdotes told the story of how Motorola had tried to create a mobile phone to market in Africa so they essentially created and marketed a phone for poor people. The problem was the people in the various African nations are much like you and me. Image matters. They aspire to have the coolest, most high-tech gadget possible, despite their modest means. No one wanted the phone that was made for poor people.

You don't want people to mistake simple and accessible for cheap and cheesy.

Trickle-down or bottom-up innovation? Leave a comment and tell us what you think.

What type of Technology Elite are you?

Alex Vorbau — Mon, 07 May 2007 22:43:00 GMT

Have you heard about the Pew Internet study? I haven't read the full report but the overview published by the newswires is interesting and it definitely has me thinking about how to create technology that meets the needs for various types of Internet users (or non-users). The Pew Internet and American Life Project has observed from their phone interviews with 4,000 Americans that adults can be divided into three groups.

Elite technology users - 31%
Moderate technology users - 20%
and others who have little or no usage of the Internet or cell phones

I'm sure many of us will read these categories as

Kids (MySpace! Facebook! iPhone!)
Parents (Email! 5 yr old phone with 120dB ringtone!)
Grandparents (Where's my teeth!)

but that wouldn't be fair or accurate, would it?

Now here's where the study's results get really interesting. They further divide each of these groups into sub-categories. For example:
from Forbes.com (via the AP):

The high-tech elites, for instance, are almost evenly split into:

"Omnivores," who fully embrace technology and express themselves creatively through blogs and personal Web pages.
"Connectors," who see the Internet and cell phones as communications tools.
"Productivity enhancers," who consider technology as largely ways to better keep up with their jobs and daily lives.
"Lackluster veterans," those who use technology frequently but aren't thrilled by it.

Notice what the common thread among all of the Elites is: social communication. I would be willing to bet that the reason the "Lackluster veterans" continue to frequently use technology is because of the need to stay in touch with people. Social connection will always drive innovation in technology.

It's probably safe to assume that if you're reading this blog you're a "high-tech elite". So does one of these sub-categories represent you? Which one and why? What are you needs as an Elite - what's missing? Drop me a comment. I'm sure it's no mystery which slot I drop into - "Omnivore". Munch munch munch :).

Writing from CHI2007 this week

Alex Vorbau — Tue, 01 May 2007 04:47:00 GMT

Today was the first day of CHI 2007, the Computer Human Interaction conference in San Jose. CHI's reputation is very good and it is attended by the best in the business and academia, including researchers from Google, Yahoo, PARC, HP, Microsoft, and the best universities in the world.

CHI is the sort of academic conference that would be interesting to a non-technical person, or at least semi-technical, because the topics typically have a lot of visual interest. The presentations cover the kind of technologies that we often think of when we imagine the future of computing: gesture-driven interfaces, haptics, face recognition and next generation user interfaces (think Minority Report). People who attend are a nice mixture of grad students and academics, designers and engineers, universities and industry. The HCI community is a tight one and people often refer to one another by first name when fielding post-presentation questions.

I submitted a paper to CHI this year with my coworkers Kenton and April and we were very happy to hear that it was accepted. CHI is another conference that is quite competitive. Our paper is an analysis of the mobile video user study I mentioned a few weeks back. Hearing of our paper's acceptance to CHI this year brought to me both disappointment and incredible excitement. Do you want the good news or the bad news first? Don't worry the good news fully trumps the bad.

Ok, the bad news first. This year's CHI is in San Jose. "That's it?", you say? Yeah, considering previous venues include picturesque locations like Portland, Montreal, and Vienna (which I attended). And next year it's in Florence, which is tremendously motivating.

The good news? We won a Best Paper award It's quite a prestigious recognition and I certainly would not trade it for a more interesting city. A special thanks to Kenton who was lead author on the paper.

Stay tuned. I'll be writing about interesting presentations I see this week.

Some jobs are really dangerous [video]

Alex Vorbau — Tue, 01 May 2007 04:21:00 GMT

One night at TechCon, they loaded all 700 of us onto a caravan of buses and drove us into the Texan countryside. The buses stopped next to a small rodeo arena with a wooden stadium on one side and an announcer's platform straddled by bull pens on the other side. The announcer started hollering in a Texan drawl and horses were running around barrels at full throttle with young women struggling to stay in the saddle. Next came the bull riding which I had seen on TV before, but I never had a sense of how powerful these bulls are in person.

The most intense moment came when a bull rider got his hand stuck. He had to run beside the muscular animal trying desperately to extract his hand from the rope handle while the bull bucked and twisted to get rid of him. A rodeo "clown" bounced in front of the bull, trying to distract him from the human attachment. The bull's head dipped down and then quickly bucked up and caught the clown in the jaw with an uppercut-like strike which knocked the poor guy out cold on the dirt. I was watching the rider so closely, who did finally get his hand out, that I didn't see the clown sprawled out on his back. The other cowboys fanned their hats over his face (cowboy first aid?) and the crowd hushed for a very long minute. Finally, he got up and with lots of help from his friends, limped to side of the ring. The announcer resumed his hollering, everyone clapped, and horses started running around furiously again.

Video: Bull rider

At the end of the show we streamed out of the bleachers and shuffled down a dirt path to a huge Texas BBQ to gorge ourselves on some of the best pork ribs I've had. As we made our way down the path I looked over my shoulder at the rodeo ring in the distance and could see the flashing red lights of a fire engine. I felt guilty that the rider was injured while entertaining us, but I suppose he has his job and I have mine. In any case, I hope he is ok.

TechCon, a different sort of conference

Alex Vorbau — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 23:42:00 GMT

Last week I was in San Antonio, Texas for HP TechCon. TechCon is a unique conference. There are conferences in academia and industry in every field that are prestigious and therefore difficult to get a paper into. These other conferences are competitive because they have the attention of the world and are venues for publicizing and receiving credit for your ideas among your peers in the field, worldwide.

TechCon is different because it is very competitive even though it's only for HP employees. Every year many of HP's 30,000 technologists (of it's 150,000+ employees) from around the company and the world submit their three page description of an invention. So many submissions are sent that only a fraction (around 11%) of the submissions are accepted and the authors are invited to a nice resort location.

TechCon is a place for HP's most innovative technologists to share ideas and eat lots of good food. Accepted papers typically 1) are novel and technically challenging 2) have actually been built and 3) can make HP money. I've submitted ideas for three of the last five years and this is my first accepted paper. I think what really made the difference this time around was that our paper was written in partnership with HP's telecom business unit which gave the project some commercial credibility versus just being a wacky research idea. It's interesting that HP can continue to motivate so many people to take time from their busy schedules to write up and submit their ideas every year. There is an element of prestige associated with attending and the pampering doesn't hurt either.

Some highlights from the week:

Poster session. A very large room was filled with several rows of poster stands with HP engineers standing nearby. Security access to the room is considerable. It's a great opportunity to walk around and informally talk with people, especially when you can find something to collaborate on. It's amazing how much world-class knowledge and experience is in that room.
Rodeo night. An old fashioned Texas BBQ out in the countryside. Bull riding, barrel racing, pork ribs, ping-pong, and peach cobbler.
Filming an HP commercial. A handful of the projects were selected for a professional video that will be used for interactions with customers and analysts. First they sent us to the makeup artist who made us look tanner, smoother, and less shiny than real life. They sat us down on stools in front of a big green screen with indirect florescent lighting shining on us. The interviewer sat out of sight but we could see her face on the lens of the video camera, sort of like a teleprompter but with video. She asked us to explain our project in really simple terms and we could tell she was probing for good sound bites. At one point I used the term "fragile" to describe something and she had me restart because the word didn't sound good. Man, public-facing communication isn't easy. It was hard to maintain a sense of passion and excitement when I talked and still think about each word I used.
Filet Mignon, lobster, and dessert buffets

Looking forward to (the food and conversation at) TechCon 2008...

Time flies when you're changing the world

Alex Vorbau — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 22:57:00 GMT

Hi I'm still here. Just wrapping up a week of furious coding. So not much else got done including blog posts.

I've been writing a client for Windows Mobile phones for our project called Conversa and I was trying to finish it in time for the HP TechCon conference. I would describe Conversa for you but it really deserves its own post so I'll save that for later. Basically it's an online discussion forum in which users interact solely with video, either from the web or from the mobile phone. I think it's pretty cool.

Something funny happened while I had my nose in the keyboard this week. I'm careful to balance my youthful demeanor (aka video gaming , fast cars, wearing shorts when everyone else in the room isn't) with sufficient adult-like professionalism. But that sort of went to heck the other day when one of HP's CTO/VP's stopped by. He saw me standing in my office which is near the Halo lab where he was leading a tour of VIP visitors. He called out "Hey, I didn’t know you sat here" and walked in. I sheepishly surveyed the stacks of Mountain Dew cans, candy wrappers, and an open box of pizza, looked at him, and laughed.

I love writing software. It's probably the best part of my job. Time evaporates and when I look at the clock I often realize I missed lunch. By three hours. Building an idea into reality, for me, is the reward for the pain and suffering of writing conference papers and patents. Well that and actually traveling to the conferences (especially the ones with water slides!).