I’m not really very good about blogging my own talks, and people seem rarely to take notes of what I say at conferences, so I’m going to attempt to reverse the trend, starting with my FOWA slides.

I would strongly suggest that you go and read Steph Booth’s excellent notes of my talk alongside the slides – it’ll give you a bit more of an insight into what I said. I believe there will be, at the least, audio being produced from the talks, so if I ever get hold of that I’ll do a slidecast of the whole thing.

I decided a while back that it might be fun to have a 100% LOLcat slide deck, and it seemed that FOWA would be the ideal place to do it. I experimented with a few LOLcats in a presentation I did a couple of weeks ago (which I need also need to put up online soon) to some HR execs, and they seemed to go down ok. So I spent Monday and Tuesday looking at hundreds, possibly a couple of thousand, of cat pictures on Flickr. Sounds like a chore, but there are so many cute ones that I actually found it very soothing and enjoyable. I then used Big Huge Labs’ LOLcat creator to actually make the slides.

(I would really like to see a better LOLcat creator that gives you the ability to scale the photo, adjust the position of the photo in relationship to the text, and give you a bit more control over text size. Other creators I looked at also insisted that you upload the photo first, whereas Big Huge Labs’ gives you more ways to access the photo, including pulling in from an URL. Some of the LOLcats I ended up with weren’t quite as spot on as I would have liked, but I didn’t have time to sit and use Photoshop or something to do a better job. Hm, maybe a job for Moo… then they could let you do your own LOLcat fridge magnets too. I would so totally buy those.)
Giving the talk was slightly strange, because Carsonified, who organise FOWA, had completely the wrong talk title in all their literature, and I hadn’t realised that until the end of last week. I’d spent the last couple of months thinking through stuff about the adoption of social software in business, and to suddenly discover that everyone was expecting a talk on “the future of blogging” was a little worrying. Indeed, I think that a few people at least were disappointed that I didn’t talk about the future of blogging: From the stage, I couldn’t see the whole room, just the front half, and what seemed like a lot of people got up and left in the middle of my talk. That’s disconcerting, to say the least.

That said, I got a pretty good reaction from the people I spoke to afterwards, so that’s encouraging. I had a particularly good chat with Dennis Howlett about how things really haven’t changed much since the mid-90s, when “the ‘new’ was treated with suspicion and where finding champions was a devil’s own job”. In a way, that’s quite depressing, because it means that I am simply re-inventing the wheel. Still, I hope that the people who stayed did get something useful out of my talk, even if it was only axle grease.

Ambient intimacy
Term to describe an experience that she was having online.

Ambient intimacy, dates to Feb or March this year, associated with a photo on Flickr of Andy Budd’s bedroom, when you compare this to other stuff online, that’s not so intimate. We can learn so much about people, much more quickly than we ever could before. So now we’ve got Facebook status, Twitter, Last.fm, Flickr, Dopplr – gives us a huge amount of info about people.

What’s more amazing is that we’re expending almost no energy at all on getting to grips iwth this info, it’s just there to take it all in if we want. These are the kind of things that represent ambient intimacy that are really lightweight powerful ways to communicate: twitter, flickr, facebooks, myspace, lastfm, dopplr, upcoming, skyype status, IM presence, RSS readers, blog posts, comments, Jaiku…

Ambient – atmospheric, part of your environment, non-directed, no specific purpose, distributed. Not one-to-one, not a conversation but also not broadcast. Messages that are going into a sort of defined area and creating this effect. Intimacy, results in some interesting search terms. Wasn’t thinking about that sort of intimacy when coined term.

Japanese mobile phone research looking into teen usage. Discovered stuff about news generation, personal archiving, etc. But also using text messages to create techno-social system to stay in touch even when they couldn’t be in any oother way. similarto the experiences we have now with these social technologies.

Found that teens were using msging to maintain open social channels. Not important messages, just about awareness of location and activity. This research is 10 years or older. But could be talking about Twitter – using Twitter very similar way to way Japanese teens were using texts 10 years ago.

People have been trying to understand this for quite a period of time. Robin Dunbar has worked on this for a white, but focuses on primate behaviour. Dunbar’s number. Also a great book “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language”.

Dunbar interesting re: Twitter because we talk about the human imperative to communicate and create relationships. He says that the reason that our brains are the size they are is to track all our relationships with other humans, so we can outmanouvre them to get food, sex, climb the pecking order.

Grooming, picking fleas, is about forming these relationships. But you can only pick fleas on one primate at the time. Language allows you to “pick fleas” on more than one person at a time. Allows us to keep track of lots of poeple and who knows what and who and how they fit together and how you fit in with them. Explains a lot about why she has the imperative to connect the way she does. But our troupes have expanded, from primates to modern world.

Twitter or Jaiku, use to pick each others’ fleas en masse. Gives phatic expressiveness to a virtual space. Phat expression is speech where the function is to share feelings and be social, not about ideas or information. Hey, how are you? Internet has lots of places for our smart idea, but what it hasn’t had until recently, is a place for “hey, how are you?”. Flickr, Twitter, really amazing in terms of ways that they can transcend time and space to give us micro-insight into people’s lives on a day to day basis.

David Weinberger “continual partial friendship”.

Johnnie Moor” about exposing more sufface area for others to connect with.

About overcoming geographical dislocation that’s part of our lives. But it’s a love/hate thing. Notcied that hte more specifically that an app supposts just ambient intimacy, the more polarised people are. People really do hate or love it.

Kathy Sierra worries that such things are false interaction, that our brain needs a full interaction experience, including body language, tone of voice, etc. but Twitter only does a bit of that, and that causes stress to your brain.

If we thought that ambient intimacy was the only intimacy we would ever need, then there may be a problem. But it’s really part of a balanced diet.

Also an issue of information overload. According to New Scienties, there was an article that said ‘infomania dents IQ more than marijuana’, IQ was reduced by 10 points. Again, Dave Weinberger, says, it helps that hte volume of stuff is to great that there’s 0 expectation that you can keep up.

But all of these things, this possible false connectiveness, and information overload, leads us to think what do we get out of it? Why do we bother?

Small Tom Coates moment, who cribbed it from Peter Kollack:

Why people take part:

1. anticipated reciprocity
2. reputation
3. sense of efficacy
3. identification with a group

List represents great insentives: getting value back from your network, increasing your reputations which helps you get more opportunities, and having a crowd to run with. Crowd you run with online can be more and more valuable as you add to it.

Robert Wright – two types of game, win/lose game, zero sum game where everyone wins. (Also a third game, Test Cricket.)

As you build up the network, the network grows smarter, so you can draw on that network back when there’s osmething tha tyou need. When I need ideas or contacts or experience, and the first port of call is Twitter or Facebook, for both personal and professional stuff. Less about egotistically saying what I had for brekkie, but building a high-value network. Feeding into the network, in ways that can be valuable – it’s not wasting time.

Designers need to take responsibility for designing apps that take into account the fact that we human beings are highly distractable, and to try and reduce congnitive load involved in keeping track of our social networks, and maintaining aareness.

Ambience kicks in again – your app has to be undemanding, but at the same time it does need to be intrusive enough that they are able to pay attention to it, it can’t just ben an app that is installed and forgotten about. Needs to be more like the old-fashioned village green, so you walk through the village green on way to do something else, but on the way will bum pinto people. So needs to support hte people that you see, that your’e waaving to, but without getitng in the way of what you need to get done.

Key principles need to keep in mind. top six: not rocket science:

1. Keep it lightweight – it’ not supposed to be the centre of attention, small footbrint, keep in mind that copious functionality isn’t necessarily a good things, keep it simple.
2. stay out of the way – invisibility, your app is about facilitating a social network, it’s not aobut you or your company or your app, so more you reduce resistance this message being delivered and recieved, the better your app is. So if you send an email to say there’s a message on yoru social network, so you have to log in to see it, then that’s not a good way of staying out of the way. Desktop app that shows me your stuff, that’s better.
3. open your API – not about controlling the way your communication happens. Twitter and Flickr do this, once they opened their API, the innovation that developed blossomed.
APIs support openness between platforms, your app is not an islenad, you are not going to hold people in your space. Need to recognise that people use different apps in a suite, so how can you integrate with that group rather than siilo ourselves off.
4. portable social networks – Think that people use different apps all the time, and i fyou usre more than two or three you know there is no joy in maintaining lots of lists of friends. This isn’t about locking peole in, you are part of a greater environment, so look for ways to make use of other lists, or make your list more portable.
5. use the periphery – small movements, just be there hovering in the background, grab attention only when you need to.
6. allow for time-shifting – whilst its about being in the moment, we do need to be able to go back and catch up on stuff.

Twitterific, designed to use Twitter’s API, so when someone sends a Twitter, it delivers through a little window that opens. Colour is very background, it’s transparent, it’s not demanding and distracting, and f you you don’t interact with it, it just fades away as if it was never there at all.

Refinement of IM, or Growl messaging, and it’s better because of timing – IM messages often flick on and off too quickly. Twitterific have thought more carefully about how long it needs to be there to be useful.

Pretty much all of these are in action, except portable social networks, is being done by Twitter and Twitterific.

Ambient intimacy is more than a passing phenomenon. Can also

Copy is interface
From Mule Design Studio. Take pride in the way that we integrate language in the interface. It’s daunting to come to England to talk about using language, talking about interface language in the wild, mainly from American sites, but not talking about internationalisation and writing for multilingual communities.

Been thinking about technology-mediated communications. The gestural interface used in Minority Report got people very excited. Sort of coming… but not quite. iPhone, though has some interesting things. Designing interface in a forward-thinking manner – you don’t know how people are going to use things. Wifi rabbit that reads your mail to you.

Have to think in a device independent way. Jacob Neilsen said that people don’t read on the web, but really we read differently. People assumed that meant you had to get away from words on the web. But the apps that people really love are made out of text. Even ads are now text based. Interacting with TV using text based systems. When we use a heavy literal metaphor, it seems retrograde, e.g. UPS Widget, it seems heavy-handed and seems more suited to 1996. Whereas a successful app is Craigslist, and it’s hardly a shining example of a lovely interface, but it’s very effective, specially for frequent use.

Language bridges the gap between people and systems.

Looking at a stream of data and wanting to pull out relationships from it. At Dopplr, they have good guiding principles, about simplifying everything and ceding control, and letting people access what they want how they want it. Words are important.

How do users benefit? In our own lives, we don’t priorities a pretty interface as much as we do access to information. The immediacy of having it right there, device independent, is important.

How will the web app developer benefit? You need to get people to find their application and understand what it’s all about. How do you get people to build up a habit about this – if you can use language well, the first experience someone will have of your app is reading something on your site, and that depends on how well you craft it.

There are very strong existing guidelines for using language well. Use a lot of skills, but it’s very easy to iterate through and something that’s interesting, if you’ve done a full redesign, switch the colours and the users freak out, but change the words and no one minds.

Five ways to get words right:
– Authentic: anything you develop should come from a clear principled place, and a desire to do something useful. If you have a strong sense of your service, what you are adding to the world, and everything you write precedes from that, it will work better. In big teams, people go for safe choices, and those are weasely, unclear and vague. But in small teams, you can be more honest in your language. Consumating promising something really real, i.e. find people who don’t suck. Compare to eHarmony which has very generic language, but promises something very ambitious and that’s emblematic of their site. Submit button is a key thing – do not use the word submit, because submitting is not something people really like to do in their lives.

People will also see 404 messages, it’s inevitable. Twitter does a good job, it seems like real people are behind the application. Retain the sense that your app is the means by which you communicate with people. Hero of clear language is George Orwell: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

– Engaging: e.g. School of Everything. Very simple, but very engaging, clear entry point in simple language: What do you want to learn? Another good site that’s got good tone is Virgin Atlantic, they temper the awfulness of booking air travel by flattering you a little bit and addressing you as a human. Citibank’s security question asks “Who was our arch rival when you were growing up?” showing a glimmer of interest in you as a human. Pownce: gender list includes, dude, chicky-oo, bloke, bird, lady, gentleman, etc.

– Specific: Language can offer, which no other interface can, is being specific. You can’t disambiguate in icons concepts like “future”, e.g. forecasting or futuristic. Etsy is good at being a lovely and humane site, even though they have a lot of room for images, they don’t stint on the language, they don’t make the icons do all the work. People have the idea that making people read makes things harder but it’s really sometimes a tremendous cognitive load to discern and differentiate between icons and figure out what they mean. eMusic, has specific button actions, such as “Change my plan”.

– Appropriate: Understand the role of the app in people’s lives. Apps are getting more conversational, but understand that whatever voice you are speaking in is appropriate to what you are doing. Disconcerting if your bank tries to be your buddy. Amazon has a good understanding people’s mindset, with “where’s my stuff?”. Use users’ own terms and concepts to help them find stuff.

Flickr had an Easter egg for Talk Like A Pirate day, and where they changed the language to pirate talk. Many people thought it was fun, but others thought that it had been hacked, so have to consider your audience.

– Polite: Very important. As long as you are considerate and respectful of the people coming to you, they will forgive a lot. But we’ve all had experience of a rude application taking up our time or using inappropriate language. Feedburner is a very polite site, talk about what you can do for the user, helps develop a rapport, and it’s not just that they use very service oriented language, they also try to be helpful, e.g. say “Activate Feed — Cancel and do not activate”, and they change the size of the font so that it’s clear which choice is likely the right one.

Subtraction.com. Generally suggest people who stick with conventional vocab, but Subtraction says “add a remark” rather than “comment” which is raises expectations of standard of discourse.

Particletree, added default text “everyone needs a hug” into their comment box, as they were having major flame problems, but that decreased the flames.

Things people have done wrong, very general, but interesting to take a quick look at some misfires.

8 kinds of bad:
– vague: when “should” should be “must”; Apple saying “some warnings have occurred. Would you like to review them now?” – no one wants to review warnings; a bank that says “expand your relationship” instead of “open a new account”, but it sounds creepy.
– don’t be passive: easy habit to fall into, cos we’re used to “page not found”. Blinksale “Your account has been created”, but could say “We created your account”.
– don’t be too clever or too cute: that language comes from a good place, because people want you to have fun, but there’s a Cornish author who said “Murder your darlings”.
– don’t be rude: If you’re going to be rude, use proper capitalisation.
– Don’t be unhelpful – give useful error messages.
– Don’t be oblivious to your surroundings: people can access your app many ways. CNN “Don’t Miss” section that had “Bodies trapped in wreckage”, should have used “Related stories”; Facebook “is”, in their status, so end up with odd locutions.
– don’t be inconsistent: and this is the ‘my’ ‘your’ one. read your interface aloud, see if you sound dumb.
– don’t presume: USA Today assumed a page for their advertisers wouldn’t be seen by readers

Language is important, but you are still going to need designers because designing something very simple is very, very hard. The way you need to think through application will vary from application to application.

(Sorry, didn’t transcribe the questions.)