Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

Just a few notes about the very inspiring Mediamatic Hybrid World workshop a couple days ago. We’ve talked a lot about (and tried out) various location-based and presence services like Twitter and Jaiku and I’m beginning to see what the real benefits of those might be. I’ve actually started to use Jaiku (plugimi.jaiku.com), especially because I was very impressed by the aggregating-features that the service offers. By fetching one’s different traces (ie. RSS-feeds) from blogs, Flickr, etc. and contextualizing it with time and location-information from Plazes, it really succeeds in creating a kind of presence of that friend. The only downside is the fact that you still need a special Nokia phone and a data-flatrate to really use it the way it’s supposed to work. But, that’s probably a question of time and it’s easy to imagine how well it would work on Apples upcoming phone.

What needs to be stressed is the fact that the usual argument against Twitter and its likes (”And then I get messages from random people writing that they sit on the toilet, right?”) has very little validity since it’s actually your friends streams which you subscribe to. And, having an idea what they are presently doing might vastly change interpersonal relationships because the stream of information/awareness (ideally) is near-permanent (or, as permanent as the participants want it to be). Challenging to tell what the further implications of wide-spread use of such technologies will be. Jaiku’s Jyri Engeström argues that it would ultimately lead to greater honesty of such a Hyper-connected generation, bold statement.

What it certainly does is bring people closer together. In roughly two weeks of using it, it made me aware of two friends being around. Maybe we would have bumped into each other anyway, but the awareness that Jaiku created certainly made it more likely to happen. Connected to that are some thoughts from the workshop about how to deal with technology and serendipity. While thinking with Katharina about her project, it occurred to us that one of the things that especially location-based technologies do is to facilitate serendipity by creating awareness of friendly people spatially somewhat near. Question is of course, if we really want that.

One idea that came up was to use a phone (such as the Nokia N95) which would usually display the information on a map with you as the focal point as a kind of compass to visualize it in a more ambient and fuzzy way. When someone friendly appears in one’s vicinity, the phone would start to vibrate and turn until it is pointing in the friend’s direction, much like a compasses’ needle would point north.

This way, it would take some cognitive load off the user (currently, Jaiku-users are pretty focussed on their phone’s screen) but still facilitate serendipity to some extent. Unfortunately I missed the end of the workshop, but, awesomely, Katharina actually managed to build and present a prototype (see video!)