dessalles

Just noticed that I unwittingly linked to the SXSW mobile site in my last three posts. During the conference, I grew so comfortable navigating the mobile site from my phone that I eventually started accessing it from my laptop as well. The URLs to the panels were still in my browser history, so without much thought I ended up using the sxsw.mobi addresses instead of sxsw.com. And I’m sorta glad I did:

As I find myself accessing certain sites more frequently from my phone than my laptop, I’m also finding myself preferring the minimal, ad-free, mobile sites to their overloaded, full-screen counterparts.

That’s not a wealth of possibilities, it’s a tyranny of information…and punch-monkey flash ads. I’m not resolving any sort of paradox of choice as much as I’m reacting to a dilution of value. And as the movement towards hyper-personalization continues, I suspect our web experiences will need to start to looking more like these mobile sites. Because, personalization is just as much a matter of generating personally relevant information as it’s one of filtering out the majority of irrelevant crap. In fact, if I had to choose between one or the other, I’d most certainly opt for the later. continue reading »

[Ghettoblaster for the Commodore 64]

Attended the SXSW session Mobile Phones: International Devices of Mystery today, where Matt Jones (filling in for some absent panelists) discussed his idea of “jealous” devices and expressed frustration with how these jealous, attention-craving mobile phones insist on pulling their owners into the screens – instead of pushing information out for shared, heads-up, social consumption. He also talked briefly about the “annoying” phenomenon of London, bus-riding teens playing hip-hop through the totally unsuitable speakers of their phones. This practice, not unknown to NYC subways, recalls the fabled, 80s past-time of walking down streets with a shoulder mounted boombox. And when I think about it, the boombox may be the only personal, portable device specifically designed for shared, public consumption – and specifically for sharing with strangers. So I imagine Matt’s onto something. Today, there does seem to be an unfulfilled need to more easily pull media out of personal devices for real-time sharing. continue reading »

Been thinking about different forms of digital communication and why they exist. I’m seeing an increasing need, particularly in the design of online communities and social networks, to formalize the conditions under which the needs of a conversation no longer align with the affordances of a particular communications channel – forcing a change in medium. At what point does a Facebook Wall conversation migrate to email? What influences a text message conversation to become a phone call?

Those who’ve held onto their grade school science will remember, in chemistry, a phase transition is the process by which a substance passes from one state of matter to another due to relatively small temperature and pressure changes. I’d like to see a similar mapping between a conversation’s conditions/needs and it’s corresponding medium or “phase”. And some nomenclature would be nice. What would you call the transition from text-messaging to a phone call? What’s the communications equivalent of condensation?

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