One online community that shows how digital media is shaping our lives in both practical as well as social and cultural terms is Craigslist. The service that bears the first name of its founder, Craig Newmark, may not have come so far in terms of its visual look from its humble beginnings as an email distribution list in 1995. But in terms of its influence and reach, Craigslist has grown to a remarkable size, serving over twenty billion page views each month.

With over eighty million new classified ads going up every month, Craigslist has become the host of both good and bad: from apartments, goods and services to finding a date or someone to stalk, to allegations of enabling child prostitution and – ironically, given Craigslist’s own past as a small, local community – crushing smaller, local businesses.

Such a great variety of things can be found on Craigslist that Jason Paul, a young journalist, finding himself unemployed after graduating from college, has decided to live his life off Craigslist for nine months. What does that mean? Here are the basic rules Jason has written for himself:

• “I will start with $2,500 that I’ve saved during college
• I will have a car, a phone, a computer and cameras to document the trip
• I am not allowed to live out of my car
• I am not allowed to live with someone I know for longer than a week at the beginning of each city
• I am allowed one large bag containing clothes and a few staple foods
• I am not allowed to initiate contact with someone unless it is through an online interaction”

So, simply put, Jason aims to find all his jobs, housing, friends, food and other necessities entirely via Craigslist. It’s an idea that reminds me a bit of Morgan Spurlock’s “30 Days“, but times nine, and pulling in the digital aspect. Jason is documenting his experiences on his website, LivingCraigslist.com, and of course, you can follow him on Twitter or become his fan on Facebook.

Would you try the same thing (or have you already)? What sort of things have you looked for, and found, on Craigslist? How do you think this is changing us as people – or is it really?

(this post is also up on ThreeMinds)

Karri Ojanen

Sounds rather obvious, doesn’t it? But Engeström claims that the world’s biggest cell phone maker Nokia may have lost the crucial connection between what happens in the field and what happens in the managers’ world. Where at Google, says Engeström, even the most top level managers are still contributing to the code themselves and monitoring the development of their products first hand, at Nokia the bosses are lost in their own chambers. At Google, the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have even given up their personal assistants because they didn’t want to get estranged from their workers and the people who use their products.

A recent post in the Harvard Business Blog talks about the change we’re witnessing in organizations around us due to the development of networking tools such as Twitter. The writer, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, recalls how America in the 20th century was called a “society of organizations”. Formal hierarchies with clear reporting relationships gave people their position and their power.

In the 21st century, however, the world is rapidly becoming a society of networks, even within companies and other organizations. People with power and influence derive that power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done. There’s a study that shows some of the fastest growing companies realize that, at least on the level of how they use social media in their marketing mix.

But in terms of the organizational structure, I bet that Nokia isn’t alone with its problem. In fact, I think that most companies around the world that were born in the industrial era are struggling to change to become more like Google, a company mostly developed in the networking era of the 21st century, where a less hierarchical model of connecting and sharing ideas comes more natural.

In the advertising world, there is a debate about traditional vs. digital, and how to combine the things we have learned from both thus far to drive the future. The world we work in, in (digital) advertising, is going through constant change at a seemingly increasing speed with every new tool, piece of code, site and platform that becomes somehow meaningful. Maintaining a good connection to what happens on the ground is a challenge, but it’s easier for those who actively network and participate in the discussion, and who are willing to let go of the old hierarchical model of management. It doesn’t mean that everybody needs to be a coder, a director, a designer and a hyperactive, visionary Twitter user all at the same time, but it helps to have done a bit of it all to have experienced it first hand, and maintain that connection to the ground through all the cycles of change.

Karri Ojanen

I spent all of yesterday and half of today at Idea09, then switched to CaseCamp after lunch to check out a couple speakers there. While at Idea, I did what many others were doing – I tweeted quotes, thoughts and comments on what I was seeing and hearing at the conference live on Twitter. In total, I sent 36 updates yesterday and 36 today, the majority of which were from Idea09, sent with the #idea09 hashtag.

Today my tweets from the conference prompted a co-worker, who follows me, to tweet that the constant stream of updates is annoying him and that I should “censor” myself. Meanwhile, there were a couple dozen other people who were actively re-tweeting and following what I had to say from the conference, and I added 35 new followers during the day. So I quickly replied to my co-worker by saying that I understood his personal concern but that he should simply tune out the #idea09 hashtag if he didn’t want to read those tweets.

That prompted Christian Crumlish to point out that there should be a way for Twitter users to mute hashtags they don’t want to follow – an obvious opportunity for Twitter app developers or anybody else who would want to add this simple feature (that should already exist).

In no way do I mean to say that what my co-worker was saying was pointless. But the simple beauty of Twitter is that you don’t have to follow people you don’t want to follow. Among my followers, I understand that I have different people with different reasons for following me. I know that some follow me because of the things I say about experience architecture and design, some others for the tweets about mobile, and then there are others who follow me simply because we’re friends in real life. I know that not everyone was interested in reading my tweets from Idea09 today, and if some of those people stopped following me because of the high number of conference updates, they had every right and ability to do so.

I think what I’m saying here goes back to some of what Luke Wroblewski had to say as part of his presentation at Idea09 yesterday: the connections that people make on Twitter are 1-way, as opposed to the 2-way model on Facebook. If someone decides to follow me on Twitter, they can just go to my Twitter page and hit ‘follow’. There’s no “Confirm” or “Ignore” like on Facebook, there’s no message I need to reply to before they can follow m.

I think that’s something that my co-worker hasn’t fully understood – that and the fact that Twitter is indeed different to full blogs online.

The signal-to-noise-ratio on Twitter is quite low (the higher the ratio is, the less obtrusive the noise is, right?) because of the nature of the service. While I do try to concentrate on just a handful of things, such as UXD+IxD, mobile and sometimes local, Toronto news, in my updates, I don’t tweet about just one topic. If you decide to follow me for just one topic, you’re gonna have to learn how to tune out the rest, or otherwise just stop following me when the topic’s not interesting or the update frequency gets too high. You’re the follower, and you’re in charge of who you follow.

Karri Ojanen

@threefour
@louisrosenfeld
@mmilan
@jeffparks
@martastrickland
@craigritchie
@ericamhc
@emenel
@conej
@mariobourque

You can read the whole article in his GeekMedia blog here, together with his presentation that is also available on Slideshare (the illustration above is my own, but inspired by by Graeme’s text).  As a teaser for the article, here are some of my favorite bits from it:

“The next big development will be the move from the Internet of data to the internet of things – everything can communicate with everything else.”

“We are going to move over the next few years from millions of computers CONNECTED by the internet, to one huge computer that IS the internet. Every device will be a window into it.”

“This will obviously mean that a huge amount of data is flying around, and that where there is more information, there is less attention. So brands will have to work even harder to earn that attention.”

“Remember, the internet is not a medium, it is a way of organising and structuring information. To have more chance of unlocking its potential, we need to think of it in terms of other systems for structuring information. For example, the alphabet. We haven’t worried about relying on the alphabet to store our information for the last 1500 years. And we don’t use the alphabet as an advertising medium. Well, we do, obviously – copy is written in words, ideas are created and sold in words. But it is something so fundamental that it goes on in the background. If we think of technology in terms of media channels like TV and radio, our frame of reference is too narrow.”

I like this post by Jokko, and I’m looking forward to seeing the visualization of this he plans to do. Read the full post here.

First I think the term ‘social interaction design’ is misleading. Of course, in our context, in this industry, it means designing social software that allows users to interact and share data with others. The interactions between users, however, are not designed by designers and engineers – only the software, that facilitates the interactions, is. A discussion between two people is social interaction – any event in which people attach meaning to a situation, interpret what others are meaning, and respond accordingly, is social interaction. Software can be designed to enable, motivate and encourage social interaction, but what users then end up doing (or not doing) with it is up to the users themselves. The further development of the software then needs to follow the users and their interests. Like Adrian pointed out in his article, twitter, for example, is not used just for SMS-Web messaging as its designers originally intended, but for several different things that the users have started to use it for because it enables them to do it.

The need to interact with others is very basic, common to all of us. That explains why social interaction software has quickly become the most popular form of using the Web. I think of my own father, a 70-year old with a PC and a cell phone, who would easily say no to buying flight tickets online. Not because he doesn’t think it’s safe, but because he’s not willing to learn how to do it. He says he’ll rather go to a real travel agent – he actually think it’s easier than going online, and he likes the human interaction he gets at a travel agency. But when I have showed him photos that I share online, used Skype to call him or sent him free SMS from a website, he’s always wanted me to immediately show him how to do it himself. Communication services that the Web has enabled – VoIP calls, email, instant messaging, and now social networking and microblogging – are the digital services that have managed to quickly gain popularity among not just the young and savvy, but also older folk.

When designing software that facilitates social interaction, the basic rules of how to design a usable service still apply. If a program or service is not usable, it doesn’t motivate users to use it, even if it, at first, interests users because it promises to let them do something they desire. After enough people start using software they find usable, they need further motivation and satisfaction that they can get from recognition (status), reciprocity (I share, you share), sense of efficacy, and/or sense of community (Kollock’s framework). In social software, they can get many of those things from other users, but the software system itself also needs to provide them.

Social software design could really benefit from anthropological study that put together what we know now about online and offline social behavior. The behavioral patterns that we see in social software now seem like very basic human behavior, but without the backing of actual studies that interpret the world we live in now, many social software designers are left to come up with the necessary conclusions over time, through trial and error.

And then, with the Fidg’t Visualizer, users could bring together all of their contacts’ media and explore recently posted media files on everybody’s accounts. And with a Fidg’t-supported mobile phone, you could chat, upload photos, and browse through your network.

Sounds great, huh? But a year later, Fidg’t still supports only a handful of social networking services: Flickr, Last.Fm, AIM and MSN Messenger. The list of supported mobile devices is also short, and includes only a couple of Nokia Nseries phones. For users who set up a Fidg’t account but then want to delete it, the only way of doing so is by sending an e-mail to Fidg’t. With a service that looks so undeveloped that sounds a bit dodgy to me, after giving all my user account data to the service.

Too bad. It’s an interesting service that could go much further. Hopefully the development team will still pick it up and and continue their work one day.