facebook, twitter, last.fm, the new york times online, google buzz, the guardian, venturebeat, techcrunch, the huffington post, chatroulette, tumblrs, the myriad of blogs we follow, foursquare, gowalla, and even im, email, sms, calls, have become open channels of data, and their model is that of throwing as many bits as they can physically produce. no wonder people still decide to keep themselves to the outskirts of the web.

it be stated that when i say people i mean all people from all the corners of the world, not the sleeve of internet-savvy geeks or the information-thirsty folks that don’t have a problem being attached to a monitor for hours, perusing screen words and photos posted by others like them.

the web is an overwhelming world of stuff thrown to our faces, and everyone and their mothers are trying to make a living on creating more, or as they’ll say, better content to be hosed to you, every minute of every hour of the live of the servers that will pump the data blood all around the open arteries of the internet.

i’d risk to say that the huge success of facebook was (and might not be anymore in a short while) that of giving a concentrated, aggregated way of consuming that huge amount of information, but even facebook, can becomean unsurmountable amount of other people’s lives.

even with the success of some services like twitter and foursquare can be calibrated against our incapacity to digest more data: the former making that data so ephemeral and transient it does not transcend but the glimpse of casual browsing on a lost, idle moment for one too many a user; the latter promising a physical encounter in the best of cases, or channeling it through the idea of it related to our movement through cities and spaces, thus describing something less ethereal than just a thought.

if that was not enough, recently facebook announced a scheme where it’ll support the totally indiscriminate sharing of everything online. it has received many critics, and most of them of a very high level of harshness. i personally see it as an eye opener: the one fact that will show us one factor, one side, one missing perspective about the web: we own the internet, but it is not of much depth, and sometimes even use for us, as like a tsunami of diluvian proportions it might, it will wash us away from all we could grasp, get, understand and process, and will substitute it with just more status, more quizzes, more lines of shared articles and photos and rubbish and pics of what i’m eating right now; just more information.

i say there has come the time for one thing i’ve been thinking, envisioning for a while, one thought i’m sure i’m not alone in fostering and hatching, one thought that has to make sense for once and for all: the internet of mediation, or much better: the mediation of the internet.

then 45 minutes later, i had the need of a cigarette. i did not have any, so i felt like going out, for one. so i did get out  in search for one. i had to walk 5 blocks since it was past midnight. so i did.

while i was walking towards the convenience store, i thought of convenience. why not, it was a matter of convenience. i thought of the fact that i did not get cigarettes before, and i could have, but i did not feel like. a bad experience.

then i got to the store, got me a nice mozzarella, to go with the convenient vodka i had. and the cigarettes, sure.

on the way back, i thought of a story of a rabbit in a fence that felt alone, and for being alone, without friends, he felt lonely. he decided to have fun by himself. and he did. and suddenly he had some other rabbits jumping outside the fence, asking him to let them in to play. by being alone and playing with himself he attracted all the fellow rabbits, which became friends soon.

the united states are the land of opportunity, sure. but for anyone that has lived here, coming from abroad, and mostly from europe, canada, australia, it is not because opportunity happens. it is because opportunity can happen.

after living in europe, i found myself restrained, constrained, suffocated while being here. recently i discovered it was because my quality of life was inferior to my expectations. how can that be if i was doing the same as before, as when in europe? it happened that when i was in milano, wien, london, i used to do exactly what i do now. it also happened that once out of the door, life would happen to me. any corner hold the fact of a new wonderful experience. no matter what. life in the outside was guaranteed as good, as vivid, as adapted and great.

here in new york city, life is not guaranteed. your pocket is the measure, and your imagination, and search capabilities, the thermometre. life is what you make from it here, in the united states. the land of opportunity is so as long as you make those opportunities happen, every day, every minute, every second. nothing is for granted, and nothing is for free.

i then thought about the whole story, the diatribes i just told you. they made sense on my mind, but once written, it was just pieces, like a giant puzzle in the table, with lovely, colourful pieces around, untied together.

i couldn’t make sense of all those thoughts.

...

once my father told me the quality of a garment is not only on the fabric, but mostly on the sewing, on the seams. it is the seams that make the garment stand well for years, stand against wind and rain, stand against the weather, what a garment is for.

like garments, stories are not only the pieces we all find in life that by themselves make sense and are beautiful. a story is not the happenings, the diatribes of mundane life, the assessments  of now and then on a busy day, no matter how interesting, incidental and colourful they are. a story builds from the seams sewn together among those pieces, those bits of fantasy and quotidian, the chunks of information, of happenings to come and to go.

a story is not the pieces, but also, and foremost, the way those bits are sewn together, patched into a story that transmits the integrity of it, a perception of life, an idea, a moment, a human condition.

a story is not only what happened, but how it happened, and the difference is in the unions. it might be in the details where god is, but it is in the threads where the story of god comes alive, for us.

1. Work harder


2. Work harder


3. Work harder


4. Learn from the masters


5. Stop reading “5 ways to…” articles

I was in charge of designing an interface for a java mobile service called Fluidtime (www.fluidtime.com). I did so and while in the makings I was proposed to explore the possibility of using a then IDII faculty member Casey Reas’ project called proce55ing to deliver a working prototype.

I gingerly and obtusely said “yes”, and embarked on a journey of Java-programming learning, that at the beginning, fearfully daunted but enticed me. As I had some knowledge of the already obsolete-driven Macromedia Director’s Lingo, this was a proper programming language challenge, and I decidedly took it.

Some months after, I was, to my utter astonishment, able to fulfill creating a working version of what later will become a java developer’s proper version of a Fluidtime mobile java applet. It came to life from my tiny prototype, which could humbly run on a desktop and let you be aware of the bus traffic around your location in lovely Torino, Italy.

I can still look back to those days where, thanks to proce55ing (later Processing) I was empowered to create what has became my first Java working application, and the starting point to years of indulgent, delightful programming, the very hands-on base to my Interaction Design passion.

Thanks to Ben Fry and Casey Reas for letting me envision and produce what my designer’s mind created, and for letting me know that I could be part of that previously elusive world of Software Programming that Processing so easily put into my naïve designer’s hands.

1. Helping other people helps me.


2. Having guts always works out for me.


3. Thinking that life will be better in the future is stupid. I have to live now.


4. Organizing a charity group is surprisingly easy.


5. Being not truthful always works against me.


6. Everything I do always comes back to me.


7. Assuming is stifling.


8. Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.


9. Over time I get used to everything and start taking for granted.


10. Money does not make me happy.


11. My dreams have no meaning.


12. Keeping a diary supports personal development.


13. Trying to look good limits my life.


14. Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.


15. Worrying solves nothing.


16. Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.


17. Everybody thinks they are right.


18. If I want to explore a new direction professionally, it is helpful to try it out for myself first.


19. Low expectations are a good strategy.


20. Everybody who is honest is interesting.

i guess it is a good place from where to start, stealing other people’s methods and implement them religiously. eventually I’l find my own, like painters trained by copying the masters, or jamal copying that first two paragraphs to then continue with his own words.

afraid of the increasing num of unread posts, i have been postponing catching up w/ rss for so long, it is 6+ months already, so there it goes.

one not-so-obvious reason is that rss feeds forces us to read all the articles on a writer’s mind, while twitter and other social networks mediate by decanting and broadcasting the best articles, so you just get la crème de la crème. it is similar to getting CDs, which force you to have all the songs, compared to just buying the songs you like from iTunes.

next step would be to delete RSS lnks from our blogs, aintcha freddy boy? hehe

Some complex systems require complex interfaces and steep learning curves for users to acquire an adequate state of mind (air controllers, train controllers and operators, jet pilots), and simplifying them might “seduce users into shallow cognitive behaviours,” but this might not be the case at all levels, where sometimes there’s no need for any learning and fulfilling an activity might suffice.

So for example, the process of sending an email might be enhanced by a step by step wizard experience (reminding the user to select a sender, write a message, append an attachment, etc.) while the driving of a train or an airplane might benefit from a steep learning curve that assures and enhances the attention and modal cognitive approach of the user, as train operators and air controllers can prove.

Learning an interface is a process affected and mediated by context, and so is any cognitive approach, I would argue.

In an interesting article, some time ago (October 2007) Leisa Reichelt talked about trends in Gardening tools for Social Networks.

If you have the time to go through it (it is a lenghty article) it might do for an interesting read. Main points seem to be:

• Social Networks have very few or no tool to trim your contacts.


• Statistics can help you visualise your use of the network and thus educate your decisions on its optimising.


• Tools for building your contact network tend to be a kind of switch behaviour. Either they’re in or out, end of choice.


• That choice, oftentimes, is made in a particular moment which can affect the choice itself (busy vs free time)


• Once commited to a choice, it is difficult or irrelevant for you to revisit it


• Categorising or tagging people might help, but people are not very good at that

I’ve been thinking much about this issue, and I also see the necessity of categorising network assets (contacts, messages, applications, notifications), but I keep finding myself more into the automated side of it.

Lacking of a better word, I have called it ‘mediation’, being it the process of intelligently filtering these channels of communication. It goes much into ‘Smart Agents’ as it might be the system that decides on how to make this filtering for you, educated by some preferred methods or variables by you.

It might sound unrealistic, and perhaps in a near future it might be more convincing. I think some of these networks and the intrinsic statistical-aware condition of the internet can help making those categorising decisions.

The way I see it the system is nurtured by information in the form of your friend’s feeds: photos, music, blogs, you-name-it. All that information then is passed through custom filters, which are nothing else than your own friends. Filtered information then arrives to you.

It is simple: you know your friends, so you know Dave knows the movies you like, and Sarah’s music taste just matches yours so well. So you filter movies by Dave’s Netflix profile, and music by Sarah’s Last.fm selections. Movie suggestions then are matched with Dave’s watched/wishlist/rated movies. Likewise music suggestions are matched against Sarah’s favorited music, or even suggest you new music Sarah has recently liked or added to her profile.

At the end you get only the ones that make it through. You could even add a level of serendipity to your system by filtering “new music suggestions” both by Sarah and Chris, or by adding a metafilter such as Peter’s blog feed, since Peter sometimes blogs about music.

Or better: you create one metafilter that just sends you all the music all Dave, Sarah, Chris and Matt like, and another that is only Dave’s five-starred music, and combine them. I can imagine as much fun here as you can have with playlist creation on iTunes. The upside here is you know your friends, so they do all the work for you. Sweet.

Easier than tagging people or categorising friends of friends, I’d say. Who wants to give it a try?

we seem to still be in the broadcast yourself phase of the internet.

blogs, twitter, feeds, gmail, digg, you name it: think of any of the customary ruling trendy growing online services/apps, they (mostly) all seem to have one thing in common: broadcast information.

email was (and probably still is, beside social networks) the online killer application. its method was simple: send a message to someone, or to many. then there was the blog, which was one message to many, commented, in time. then twitter a short message to as many as subscribed, with multiple channels. then we got the facebook, publish to one, publish to a group, publish to man. then friendfeed which summarises all the stuff your friends are broadcasting. then million mash-ups and hacks to mix them all and have, well, more information per square centimetre.

so now that we know how to broadcast our stuff, why don’t we start focussing on filtering it? mediating it?

it might be the time to build a live filtering system that allows you to get only the information that is relevant: per channel or per situation or per location or per genre or per several other reasons and situations. systems are robust enough to support the load, and there’s enough computing force to make for intelligent systems of processing.

or simpler: we just need to use our peers as filtering profiles: “please just suggest me the posts of this blog that have either been read by my friend john or have been read by most of my network,” or “please suggest me movies seem by most of my network, but don’t send me movies that anna and peter have liked.” simple as a pimple, huh? perhaps not, but it is not impossible, come on.

(not so) long ago, 50 years or so we were already taling about agents and mediation. i guess this is the moment to start shaping those words in to reality.

or die under the weight of thousands of friends’ and foes’ tweets, feeds, posts, photos, books, music, radio recommendations, and emails.