Lehrblogger

From the syllabus – Reading: Find and read descriptions of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and how it relates to time. Describe it in your own words on your blog and post a link to it on the wiki. We’ll go through your descriptions in class. How would you describe it to a 5 year old or your grandmother?

Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, and this restriction applies to influences (such as the force of gravity) between massive elements (planets, particles, people) in the universe. It is these forces that determine the movement of objects, the swinging of a pendulum in a clock, the workings of our consciousnesses, and the travel of light.

When the objects in question are moving with respect to some other perceiving entity, the things traveling between the moving objects have to travel slightly further because the destination object will have moved further away from the original point of the source object by the time the things moving between them can arrive. It follows that those things then have to either travel faster or take longer to get there. If those things are already traveling at the speed of light (such as influence due to gravity), then they cannot go any faster, so they must take longer, and the interactions between the moving objects slow from the point of view of the outside observer.

The moving object, however, still behaves just as it did before, albeit slightly more slowly. Because the workings of its own ability to perceive time – either with a clock, or with a human consciousness, or with something else – have all slowed down in precisely the same fashion, the moving object experiences time just as it did before.

Particularly useful sources:

1. http://www.physics.fsu.edu/Courses/Spring98/AST3033/Relativity/GeneralRelativity.htm – “When later it became clear that influences travel at finite speeds it was reasonable to suppose this true of gravity also.”
2. http://www.squidoo.com/relativity_explanation

wanderli.st – wander the internet, bring your friends

I have 787 friends on Facebook. On Twitter I am following 216 people and am being followed be 285 people. I have 1,190 cards in Address Book, all of which are synced with my Google Contacts and my iPhone. I have 49 friends on Foursquare, 33 connections on LinkedIn, 18 friends on Goodreads, 8 contacts on Flickr, 1 contact on Vimeo, 0 friends on Yelp, and 146 buddies on AOL Instant Messenger.

If I want to sign up for some new website, it’s not at all easy to re-use these existing relationships: I can go through and add people individually; I can ignore the security risk, enter my Gmail login information, and selectively choose which (or all) of my 1,190 Google Contacts need an email invitation to the website; I might be able to connect with my Twitter account, but the nature of the information shared on Twitter results in the people I’m following being a strange subset of my social graph; I might be able to connect with my Facebook account, but I rarely want to publish a summary of my activity on the new site in the news feed of every single person I know on Facebook.

My social life on the Internet is somewhat of a mess, and it’s becoming increasingly unmanaged and unmanageable. Social networking websites are not going away, and I want better tools to consolidate and manage these myriad representations of my real-world relationships as I wander the Internet…

(photo of me at the xkcd book party by insunlight on Flickr | CC BY-NC 2.0)

Wanderli.st will be my attempt to solve this problem. I want to take my existing friendships and relationships with me wherever I go on the Internet. I want more powerful tools for managing my contacts, I want this private information to sync with a giant social graph in the cloud, and I want websites to access subsections of this social graph based on the permissions I grant them.

More specifically, I want Wanderli.st to help me organize everyone I’ve ever met using a simple system of custom tags (‘ITP classmates’, ‘bit.ly coworkers’, ‘Scala programmers’, ‘SXSW 2010′, etc.) and lists that are combinations of these tags (‘all of my family and photography friends, but none of my ex-girlfriends’), and then let me use those lists to automatically specify my relationships on social websites. I want an intuitive yet powerful address book application with standard fields for phone numbers and mailing addresses but also with dynamic fields for usernames on social websites. I don’t want Wanderli.st to bother with actual content – let other websites specialize in the sharing of photographs, videos, status updates, long blog posts, short blog posts, and restaurant reviews – Wanderli.st can simply be a social graph provider.

I want my social data to be device- and website-independent, and I want to be able to export all of it to a standardized XML file. But I also don’t want to worry constantly about importing and exporting, and instead I want to be able to make one change in one place whenever I make a new friend, and I want that change to be pushed automatically to all of the applicable social networks.

I’d like to be able to sign up for a new social photography website, assign that site a list (i.e. some combination of tags), and then have the option of inviting friends to that website based on some other combination of tags (perhaps I have a tag named ‘people it is okay to invite to random websites’). If I make a new friend who is interested in photography, then I want it to be sufficient for us to only have a) exchanged email addresses and b) associated our usernames on various photography websites with our Wanderli.st accounts – it will then seamlessly create our connection on those websites and automatically add those usernames to each other’s personal address books, with no “Steven has added you as a friend on Flickr” emails required.

I want to have the option of managing my privacy simply and intuitively at the level of the website, and not at the level of the individual piece of content: you can see the pictures of me drinking in college if we are friends on the site on which they are posted, but if I don’t want you to see them then I simply won’t be your friend on that site, and I can use a second site (or second account on that same site!) to share my other pictures with you.

Wanderli.st will also make it easier for me to move among social websites. Both established and fledgling websites will benefit from this because it will be easier for them acquire new users and provide existing users with the best possible social experience. Furthermore, there have been mass diasporas of users in the past as people have moved on from Friendster and MySpace, and I predict Facebook faces a similar future (more on this in a future blog post). I’m willing to re-create my social network only one more time after I’m ready to move on from where I am now (and Facebook still won’t let me export my data), but after that I want my data to be open and portable and mine so that I never have to re-friend a thousand people again.

I also intend to make Wanderli.st my ITP thesis. I have been thinking about the project for several months, and wrote up and presented an early draft of the idea in Kio Stark’s When Strangers Meet class last Spring. I think that Wanderli.st should be compatible and complimentary with existing standards and upcoming proposals (OpenSocial, Portable Contacts, WebFinger, etc.), but I think it is important that the project be a new site in and of itself that hosts the data and popularizes the platform through actual successful use cases.

I’ve read that the best software is made by people who are building the tools for themselves, and I’m excited to create Wanderli.st and improve how I socialize on the Internet. If what I’ve described here sounds like something you’d like to use as well, comment below – I’ll let you know when it’s ready for beta testing.

Update on 9 Oct 2011: I’m no longer working on the project, so I let the $87/year wanderli.st domain expire and removed those links to minimize confusion.

cross-posted at textonic.org

Cory Ramey has published an article about Textonic at MobileActive.org – we’re excited about the press, and please let us know if you want to help out with the project!

When People, not Computers, Sort SMS Data

The Internet, when I first started using it, felt like a social desert. People had email, instant messaging, chat rooms, and discussion forums, but these channels for communication felt separate from everything else and more like alternatives to existing real-world channels. Communication was isolated from destinations for the consumption of content, from tools for the creation of content, and from platforms for the publishing of content.

Eventually, sites for the social sharing of content appeared, and each of these maintained separate representations of the social graph. Over time people collected contacts on Flickr, friends on Facebook, and followers on Twitter, and such sites became oases of social functionality. At first these patches of green built walls to keep out the marauding hordes of anonymity, but as they grew larger they also grew more open, and they started to trade content amongst themselves.

Each real-world individual, however, was forced to maintain a separate existence in each of them simultaneously. It was difficult for people to travel with various aspects of their digital identities between walled oases, and it was nearly impossible for them to take their friends with them when they did. As a result, people were forced to duplicate their selves and their relationships. Some walled gardens tried to build roads to connect with (and undermine!) the others, but nothing really improved. Everyone had to maintain a copy of themselves in each oasis in which they wanted to produce and share content, and life was a mess for everyone. It was time to build something new, a sort of subway under the blossoming desert, so that every aspect of every person could be wherever it was appropriate for it to be, all the time, all at the same time…

- – - – -

The Internet has outgrown its social infrastructure. It’s becoming increasingly inconvenient and infeasible to create and maintain multiple copies of our networks, with all of their social complexities (friends, family, coworkers, acquaintances, ex-girlfriends, etc), and with all of their nuances of interaction (friend requests, @replies, emails, wall posts, blog comments, etc). Tools such as Facebook Connect are hopelessly hindered by over-saturated social graphs, pre-existing notions of privacy, and misguided attempts to pull content back into single cluttered interfaces. Identity and content aggregators such as Chi.mp, Plaxo and Friendfeed don’t provide the tools for web-wide social graph management. Put simply, we need new tools for the modern social Internet.

What will they be like?
Who will build them?

cross-posted at textonic.org
previously: Design for UNICEF – Detextive*, Mobile Tech for Social Change Barcamp, Design for UNICEF – RapidSMS and Mechanical Turk

Textonic.org is now live!

Recognizing that Textonic was a larger project than I was going to be able to finish in my free time over the summer (or that my group was going to be able to finish in our collective free time), I decided that the project would benefit from a more formal web presence than a handful of blog posts and a GitHub page. I registered a domain, set up WordPress, presented what we had accomplished, laid out what there is to be done, and tried to create a place where people could express their interest in getting involved.

The Conversation page on the new site is of particular interest. I’m using a Twitter search for the term ‘textonic’ as a sort of guestbook or message board. People who find the site and are interested can look to see who else has been there as well as when they expressed interest. Twitter itself can serve as a way for them to get in touch. The intransient* and public (since all of a user’s followers will also see the tweets) nature of these expressions of interest will help to catalyze the formation of a community around the project.

Credit for this idea goes to @n8han (who writes the blog Coderspiel) – I first saw it on his site for Databinder Dispatch. In addition, recent ITP graduate @joshbg2k created something similar for his Überbaster project.

*Note that Twitter’s search API only exposes that last ~3 months of tweets, so at some point I’ll need to archive the messages so that the entire conversation history is displayed.