Being Lazy and Social at the Same time

Heath Manning - 40425225

Introduction

I am, as anyone who knows me will happily testify, an incredibly lazy individual. It’s not an uncommon affliction, and history has shown that whenever a significantly faster or easier method for performing a common task becomes available, people are likely to adopt it. In the case of applications, even user preference can easily be overlooked in favor of performance, if the gain is large enough [1]. As such, when I look at social tools and applications, I don’t immediately see the potential for social networking or community, but I have no difficulties noticing how time consuming or irritating they can be.

Background

The most obvious example of a social application requiring significant overhead is Twitter, an application that resembles nothing so much as an annoying five-year old, constantly following you around and asking what your doing. Similar to the five-year old, it also offers the potential benefit of making your answers available to everyone (“Daddy was at da wace-twack today, yellin at da horsies”).

Other applications of interest include Last.FM, Flickr, Facebook, and Google Calendar. Last.FM is a fairly passive music monitor that records the artists and songs you listen to on your computer or ipod, and makes that knowledge freely available to your friends, people with similar tastes, and of course, the entire recording industry, so they know who to sue. It also offers you similar information about other users, tracks the popularity of various songs and artists, and allows you to identify other people with similar musical tastes. It also includes basic community functionality, such as groups, friends lists, message systems, user profiles, and event scheduling.

While Last.FM seeks to add a social aspect to the increasingly individual act of listening to music, Flickr has attempted to add a social element to an online image repository. One such method involves requesting that users “tag” their images with descriptive metadata, allowing interested parties to search by tag to find images of subjects of interest. It also includes basic community functionality, such as groups, friend’s lists, message systems, and user profiles.

Meanwhile Facebook attempts to build online communities around physical proximity, by creating networks of users who study, work, or live in the same place or general area. It also includes basic community functionality, such as groups, friend’s lists, message systems, user profiles, and event scheduling (Notice a pattern emerging here?). It also supports users creating gateways and accessing a large variety of other social applications through Facebook, including, but by no means limited to, Twitter, Last.FM, Flickr, and Google Calendar

Google Calendar, much like Twitter, offers the opportunity to make a portion of your life public, allowing anyone interested to see when your busy or free, or on lower privacy settings, exactly what you have scheduled. While it offers no community tools in and of itself, it is tied into a variety of other google social applications that offer such functionality.

Focus

While exploring the various social tools and applications, I was struck by how similar their community functionality was, how segregated even similar tools seemed to be, and, most of all, how much overhead and effort would be required to participate to a meaningful degree in multiple social tools simultaneously. Stepping back a couple of decades, Weiser described his vision of Ubiquitous Computing as, amongst other things, “doors open only to the right badge wearer, rooms greet people by name, telephone calls can be automatically forwarded to wherever the recipient may be, receptionists actually know where people are, computer terminals retrieve the preferences of whoever is sitting at them, and appointment diaries write themselves.” [2], and yet of all the social tools and applications looked at, the only one that even approaches ubiquity is Last.FM, with its scrobbler passively opening whenever I start to listen to music.

Reflection

In keeping with my focus, I intend to look at two simple, and frequently overlapping questions – how could the social tools and applications be made less obtrusive, and how could the overlap between the various social tools be mitigated, to make for an easier user experience.

Research shows a strong link between user preference and the performance and efficiency of an application, and even suggests that users will happily switch to an application they find more awkward if it offers an increase in efficiency as low as 20% [1]. Perhaps that’s why I dislike twitter, because its hard to think of a less efficient way to gather data on user locations and activities than constantly asking them to input it. In its defense, it does offer a variety of input methods, including web, online messenger, or sms, but all of these require the user interrupt their current activity to update twitter, which serves to decrease efficiency as well as discouraging users from keeping their twitter information up to date. It would a simple enough matter to make the process more passive by scraping information from other online sources to determine activities (e.g. “The user is currently at the dentist, according to their google calendar”, or “The user uploaded an image to Flickr 10 minutes ago”) or using a simple monitor program and ip tracing to determine where the users computer is, what application, if any, is active, and whether or not its being used whenever it was connected to the internet. Admittedly, these add a degree of uncertainty, as it could be someone else using my Flickr account or my computer, but provided they are marked in a manner that identifies them as automatically generated, and as such, less trustworthy, they would still serve to make the application more useful while simultaneously decreasing the overhead for the user. While automated updates will, of necessity, lack the sense of context a human’s would (as even if the system can reliably ascertain that you are performing an activity, it won’t be able to accurately identify why [3]) The only other concern that would arise is whether or not you need the world to know that your computer is presently in Paris and in use while your boss is under the mistaken impression that you’ve come down with a bad case of the flu, but that can be avoided by simply disabling your twitterer, or even telling it to lie for you – after all, the information isn’t expected to be completely accurate.

Another aspect that I found immediately irritating was the initial sign-up process. With the exception of blogger and google calendar, which accepted my gmail login, I was forced to sign up, and then expected to fill out multiple user profiles that asked remarkably similar questions. The idea behind single sign-on [4] is hardly a new concept, and given the predisposition of users to re-use the same login name and password for a variety of web-based applications, the benefits of using an existing account and profile for new applications (such as Yahoo in the case of Flickr, Gmail in the case of Google Calendar and Blogger) make for a simpler and more expedient user experience. I can only imagine how tedious it would become if, as an active member of multiple communities, I was required to sign in to one, check my messages, read up on my groups latest activities, and then open another window and repeat the process for the next tool. While one could, in theory, design a tool capable of integrating their favorite web based applications together, the simplest solution is already partially implemented on Facebook – accept the existence of other social applications, and allow users to interact with them through yours. By using either a single sign-on [4] or alternatively, storing user information for the other applications, you could effectively allow the applications to communicate with each other, allow an event scheduled on Facebook to be added to the Last.FM events page as well by simply checking a box, or allow Twitter to use your Last.FM most recently played list to update itself. The primary concern here is a security issue – if all my applications are linked together, then losing my password or worse yet, having it stolen, becomes significantly worse. A secondary concern is that of accountability and identity – do I want that photo of myself I posted to Flickr, or that time I got into an argument and started posting racial slurs on another site, to be linked to all my accounts on a number of applications?

Conclusion

Social Applications aren’t designed for lazy people so much as for social people, which could easily explain why I don’t see the point in using them. In an ideal world, they could probably be made easier to use and more ubiquitous, but as things stand, they’re frequently competing against each other, working on limited budgets, and worried about antiquated ideals such as privacy. Ideally, at some point in the distant future, they’ll have advanced to the point where I can be social without actually having to do anything – and what a wonderful world that would be.

References

[1] Nielsen, J., Levy, J. (1994) Measuring usability: preference vs. performance, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.4, p.66-75

[2] Weiser, M. (1991) The computer for the 21st century. Scientific American, p.94–104.

[3] Dourish, P. (2004) What we talk about when we talk about context Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 8:1, 18-30.

[4] Pfitzmann, B., Waidner, M. (2003) Analysis of liberty single-sign-on with enabled clients, Internet Computing, IEEE, v.7, n.6, p.38 - 44