Toy Camera Phone Available in Japan

"Toy Camera Phone Available in Japan:
Just in time for the holiday season, Japanese toy manufacturer Tomy is unveiling a line of toy mobile phones, including ones with built in cameras. The toy devices cannot connect to a wireless network, but users can exchange photos via an IC card. The toy comes with a 64×48 pixel 100K CMOS camera and costs approximately $55.00. (Source: Cellular-News.com)"
I find it interesting that toy manufacturers are just now starting to catch up and come out with fairly realistic, almost functioning phones. Its amusing since this market niche is somewhat obvious, I would think. Reports of parents giving their phones to their kids as toys have been coming in for a few years now. My cousin's wife works for motorola and routinely brings outdated phones for her toddler to play with.
Here though, its something that looks like a phone but is, in actuality, simply a cheap camera. Which brings me to another point. Cell phones are first and foremost mediums for communication (dyadic communication especially). Every application so far that has had reports of high use has been some kind of augmentation to such communication (SMS, MMS, push-to-talk). Each with its own drawbacks and advantages, stuck together in a little piece of plastic that fits into a pocket or a purse. Yet cellphone manufacturers and providers seem to have all but forgotten about the social-network aspect of the phone - its essential and primary purpose. Instead they put myriad of options and function on the phones that have nothing to do with sociability: your calendar, to do list, games, video, camera...

Camera... in a way it IS a social technology, yet its marriage with the phone is a difficult one - its hard to use, the pictures are poor quality, its a toy, less functional than flashy. Then why is it that this new Japanese toy phone is essentially just a camera? I wonder what age group would be into using those? and why.

On the other hand, why is it that despite all this development of new hand-set options, so few of those options are social-network driven? At most, the new things are merely integrations of already exisitng technology into a more mobile device. Maybe desinging social technologies is too expensive and not always viable? hmmm curious.

Boston Globe Online / City & Region / For teens with cellphones, an instant party

Boston Globe Online - For teens with cellphones, an instant party An artcile that talks about teenage use of wireless technology to maintain their social networks and to make house parties get out of control. Certainly, this is not a new concept - letting people know about the parties has always been the bane of law-enforcement. Vanessa Manceron in her paper "Get Connected - Social Uses of the Telephone and Modes of Interaction in a Peer Group of Young Parisians" (originally in French, but translated for the Blurring the Boundaries book) talks about french teenagers using landline telephones in people's homes in order to ping each other about parties. The cell phone has created a way to make this type of interaction mobile, convenient and totally on the fly. The party flash mobs :).

Source Keith Hampton

State of the Art: Where Thanks Are Due

State of the Art: Where Thanks Are Due - a little funny article from the times that has some on-the-point lines about the concept of state-of-the-art vs. actually working :) made me smile.

The Mood of LiveJournal

The Mood of LiveJournal is a project-child of Mark Handel and I somehow ended up with a possibility to contribute (we have been chatting about things for ages over IM. I bet if we were to go over those logs there might be a paper there somwhere hehehe). I find this particular project completely fascinating though. The circadian rhythms of the live-journal users are distinct. I am wondering if imood is incorporated into livejournal now or not. If it is, then imood would be a better thing to browse, since it would aggregate all kinds of other users (although i think you have to have an account on imood to connect your livejournal to it). I believe danah mentioned that LJ used imood (either ideas or code) in order to create their mood indicators.

Ok so for the livejournal idea - I am not sure what we can expound about if this were to become a short paper or a poster.

1. It is possible to illustrate the circadian rhythms of the livejournal (since most members are in the NorthAmerican region, the aggregate of the moods follows this regions' time and habits).
2. I was fascinted to watch what happens around holidays. ThanksGiving was spectacular in its consistency. (happy,hungry, thankful, full, bored, sleepy).

So what does it all mean? Well, for the users of livejournal, about half of them use the stock moods provided by live-journal and the other half comes up with their own which end up in singletons and can't really be analyzed except by hand i guess. I am curious what would happen if we were to use content-analyses software to analyse for mood in the posts themselves and then compare (although I am frightened to think how much time and resources that would take). For now, here are some things I shouldn't forget about:

Neel Bubba's LiveJournal stats and analysis is full of really interesting and useful links. DeadJournal is pretty cool too. Also there an aggregate of blogger demographics but this is only for the UK and I am not sure exactly how representative this is of the blogger population in general. I should dig up blogger stats.

More thoughts on this later...

Nielsen/Netratings report on Friendster

Nielsen/Netratings has finally released a report on Friendster. Here is the pdf. I find it curious that Friendster was classified as "Member Community" and then compared with "Dating Services" like Yahoo personals, match.com, etc. If the original idea behind Friendster was dating, then Nielsen/Netratings denied it that classification. The report discloses that Friendster has smaller user base but more devoted users who spend on average about 2!! hours using the system. I am wondeirng how many just have it running in the background and periodically hit reload just to see if they got any personal messages. Although I suppose profile editing takes time.

I wonder what it is that users DO on Friendster since there isn't that much to do once the novelty of browsing your friends' friends wears off. For the most part (before the critical mass on friendster reached the point where people were discovering they were already connected to friends) my informal interviews returned that users found friendster intriguing and mostly useless. The most common question was - so what the hell is this thing for? I don't think most people can answer still, but the visualisation of the architecture of the social network is very interesting. (it would have been more intersting if it were possible to see how many of your friends are connected to each other as well).

I am curious to see what will happen to Friendster (and the associated researchy broohaha around it) when it goes paid and tries to make money on its subscribers. If the majority of users still perceive it as an ingtriguing but largely useless way to waste time, things might not be so chipper. Although, who knows... arcades used to do pretty well in the old days :).

connected selves

danah of connected selves has been profiled in this NYT article a few days ago on the front page of the Circuits section. Its a beautiful piece of advertisement for one of the more bizzarre and soon-to-be (if not already) influential characters in the world of social network and technology research (and strange blends of science as toys to play with.) I am sure many sociologists (and researchers and people in general) will not be particularily thrilled with the article for various reasons (jealousy, misunderstanding and the like). I think, though its intersting to have a very young researcher gain such a high profile early on in her career. She is poised to do some great things, now lets see how much ass she can kick in the next few years :).

I am very happy media is turning to this strange blend of researcher (the kind that I seem to be part of as well) and popularizing the mix of interests and abilities. Who knows, might affect the job market in a more positive way... hehe :)

Love in the Time of No Time

Love in the Time of No Time: "The city is full of people we can't reach" says Jennifer Egan in her NYT article this Sunday. This long piece is a good bit of work on online dating that echos many of my own suspicions (both from my own bouts with online dating and experience with meeting people online in general). Yes, this city is full you people we can't reach, or maybe this world. But despite the wonder that online dating inspires because of its famous erasure of geography, the accident of meeting remains just that - an accident of meeting. Something that can occur in any space, including the Internet, which has long been a social space.

AT&T Wireless: mMode update clips clicks | CNET News.com

AT&T Wireless: mMode update clips clicks | CNET News.com: "Although a secret word offers protection if a handset is stolen, it's otherwise unnecessary, because 'we can read directly to the device. We know exactly who you are" says vice president of mMode about its service overhall. While the overhall itself - focusing on eliminating large numbers of keystrokes - seems like a great idea (very much an HCI concern I suppose) - I think I would rather commit to typing in a password every time rather than having them read to the device. My typing in a password is a form of opting in - I am identifying myself to the company. Them knowing its me just because its my phone - that's unsettling. If you think of a social situation - introducing yourself to a stranger is a normal process, but if a stranger were to walk up to you and address you by your name, you might find it a bit more unsettling, wondering if you are being stalked...

This directly translates into privacy concerns and the idea of comfort and ease of use in exchange for giving up ever more private information, opening yourself for more unwated scrutiny even if that information is of no cost to you initially... But more on this later. Alessandro's paper has made me think (and rant) a little bit.

Congress Poised for Vote on Anti-Spam Bill

Congress Poised for Vote on Anti-Spam Bill. Hmm... so the spammer (oh wait, no, the direct marketing association, yeah, that's more politically correct) lobby won that one it looks like. They will still be able to bombard your inbox with messages. Just imagine the amount of time you will have to spend unsubscribing yourself from these things. At least with the junk mail, you can, in fact, mail a letter of request to be taken off the junk mail list to an assocation that will stop junk mail at your address for three years. (of course once the three years are up you will have to do it again). Sigh... it would be interesting to see whether this will make imporvements, but I doubt it, since most spam comes from overseas at this point anyway and that is not under US legislature.

A Victory for Gay Marriage

A Victory for Gay Marriage I believe Mr. Bush stated that he will work to "preserve the sancitity of marriage" to his ultra-conservative constituency like the Christian coalition that keeps demanding that marriage is only legal between a man and a woman. Now please, someone tell me why is that?

It will be curious to see how this game plays out since a decision like this will be a thorn in the backside of both the republican and the democrat presidential nominees... Go Mass!

Blackout Report Blames Ohio Utility

Blackout Report Blames Ohio Utility
Houston we have an answer... So finally, months later, the comission has found a few scapegoats and tried to explain the human factors behind the blackout. I remember that day very well. I was in Ann Arbor Michigan and we had lost power too.... only we didn't konw since the school generators kicked in seemlessly so that our class could end at a regular time. Then a man with a slavic accent came in and said sometihng about terrorists. There were about 15 people in the classroom, more than half foreigners. We laughed at the supposition assuming that perpetual Ann Arbor construction was too blame... And it turns out, it was the Ohio Utility instead... intersting.

After much deliberation, some years of browsing weblogs and leaving posts here and there, some pressure from friends and colleagues, and repeated loss of the notebook that contains my random musing, I have succumbed and started a blog.

This is a temporary location. This will move soon to miswritings.com - the name being a reference to a book and an author and the semiotics of meaning of course.

This is research space. Thought space. Ideation space. Maybe even, at some point, interaction space.