Nick’s Blog

Facebook Page - Darwin

A friend recently contacted me about an idea she had to use Facebook to teach history, by having students pick political thinkers from the enlightenment to today and have them friend each other and talk. This great idea of hers got me thinking about how the temporal- and connection-focus of Facebook could be leveraged to build powerful and engaging activities. While Facebook isn’t the right tool for these activities (due to not being controlled environment, and not having the appropriate teacher oversights), a Facebook app could be. Here is my response to her inquiry–

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I think it makes total sense and your instincts for how to tap into students ways of thinking to make this activity work are right on. I also think participating in and visualizing connections is a really great way to teach otherwise abstract ideas that you refer to. Unfortunately I don’t know of tools that can do this really well, especially the concepts part.

Some things that might be problems–

• defining the connections – you need a way for each student to not only reach out and connect two thinkers, but to define why they’re connect (e.g. the ideals they share). Currently Facebook doesn’t allow any sort of connection metadata like this.
• creating the profiles – Facebook Pages are okay, but not perfect. Has quite a bit of unnecessary overhead just to create things. It’s okay if you’re only making one, but if you’re making a number of thinkers, it’s extra work. Also, duplication is an issue (two people make Obama).
• connecting thinkers to concepts – there’s no straightforward way to have many ideas or ideals connected to users- its just one user to another.

That said, Facebook Pages can work, and to really exploit the value of Facebook Pages, you want students to make good use of the Wall for ongoing publishing activities.

I’m assuming you’re assigning students one enlightenment thinker each, where they will build a Facebook Page for them. From there you’ve got a bunch of activities you can run.

Activity 1- Define Connections

Students should connect thinkers to each other based on common ideals and perspectives. Every time the student connects their thinker to another, the student should post on the other’s wall about what they agree upon (defines why they are connected).

Activity 2- Introduce an Event

Create an ‘event’ (a news article), and have students respond to that event by commenting as their thinker on other thinker’s walls. How would the thinker respond to the event? How would their conversations go with their buddies? Would their ideals be reinforced or challenged?

Activity 3- Post Updates

Have students post the growth of their thinkers’ views over time, using their own walls to post updates. Ask students to start each post with the date and time that the thinker is going through their thoughts. This would be especially great if you selected a period of time and had everyone in sync (e.g. you email students telling them what period of time it is every few hours, and have them post a set of wall posts representing the context and social scenarios of the time).

Activity 4- Find Differences

I believe the most effective way to teach is to have students point out differences (not similarities). Give students a concept and have them seek out a thinker that has a radically opposing viewpoint and a slightly opposing viewpoint. Have the student  post on their wall describing how they are different.

For activities 2 and 4, you should use the ability to attach Links to reference the concept or event you want to have them post on. Post articles somewhere (e.g. Google Docs) and give students the URLs of those articles. Then have the students post on the walls attaching links to those articles, and add their comments along with the posting.

In general, letting students loose to role play a character naturally taps into how we’re wired as social creatures, and as a  learning exercise really has no upper boundary for how creative and involved a student can get. If two students characters get in a ‘fight’ by disagreeing back and forth on their walls, citing their own histories, that’s a fantastic outcome.

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There are probably many dozen activities that can be put together with the tools Facebook has and lightly structured teacher involvement. Assessment would be an interesting challenge, but probably not that difficult.

I think with just a few weeks of engineering time, it’s possible to build an application that supports the above PLUS privacy and tracking. Maybe when I get some downtime

nickpunt Education

Handles, Aliases, Nicknames, Vanity URLs, etc – you know them by many names. They’re our unique identifiers, quick ways to pick each other out in conversation, be it online or offline. Maybe they represent a bit about our personality, or maybe just a shorter way to say a really long name. Whatever the case, people’s unique identifiers are fundamental to our most social of capacities – language – and they live with us wherever we influence conversation.

In the wake of Facebook’s announcement to begin giving ‘Vanity URLs’ for users, it’s useful to look into a few properties that make up these unique identifiers, to determine how this change will play out.

Properties of Names

First, our degree of influence is our uniqueness. The more influential you are, the more unique you are. When we have a nickname, that nickname is known to everybody we carry influence with – but unknown to everybody else.

Second, our influence has many colors – the multiple circles of influence within our various social groups. Each social group may know us by a different name, and perhaps different behaviors. Sometimes these colors overlap – Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie.

Third, our influence changes degree and color over time – different people are influenced by us at different times, in different ways. The most influential capture their uniqueness far beyond their lives – Lucy, Buddha, Caesar.

Fourth, uniqueness is |finite|. Our language can only carry so many memorable identifiers, be they words, names, or made up bundles of meaning that can be unpacked by those in the know. Further, our minds are tuned to remember particular combinations of sounds / letters / numbers better than others, further reducing what is memorable. John is easy to remember. John293 is harder. J3ho9n2 or Ohjn293 are really hard.  These combinations differ across cultures.

Effects of Using Vanity URLs

Given these properties, what is the effect of a Vanity URL on a service like Facebook with 250mm users, expanding by tens to hundreds of thousands daily?

A. It flattens influence. People are no longer nicknames in a community or circle of friends. They’re entering a single, global community, with one color (no dupe accounts!). This washes away any meaning one may have applied to their nickname, and replaces it with the reader’s best guess.

B. If Facebook’s world domination plans succeed, Vanity URLs supersede any other uniqueness one has. In other words, as you continue to be engaged by Facebook’s awesome features and community, this unique identifier is with you forever, and it matters more than any other by orders of magnitude (e.g. it’s your first Google hit).

C. It bumps against finite limits of uniqueness to language. The easy and unique (John) will be replaced by the slightly less easy and unique (John21), then the more obscure and unique (AloofPanda), then the obscure and un-unique (AloofPanda21). The more you go down this road the less likely these names will stand the test of time, and users will be less satisfied with their past choice.

D. Similarly, it draws unnecessary attention to itself. Having the ability to set my name as AloofPanda, or Nickpunt, or just Nick, means that people will pay attention to these, yet they do a poor job of describing me. The details of my profile and the many dimensions, labels, brands, and whatever else that define me are now down to a few letters and numbers that stand out but don’t say anything, or worse yet, say the wrong thing.

An aside: Vanity URLs are Generally Good

I don’t think Vanity URLs are all bad. In fact, Vanity URLs are excellent ways to identify people in small groups or communities, because they function like nicknames, and because people’s influence changes colors over time as they move between groups. They are successful in almost all communities out there.

I’d go as far as to say that most startups doing anything with social networking or online communities should absolutely offer them to users. They’re useful and will attract and engage users, and getting engaged users is the #1 priority for these startups. You have to first build community (who value nicknames), before you can build meta-community (who don’t as much), and frankly the meta-community / digital identity battles are now the domain of massive, established players like Facebook, Google, and QQ, who may likely all go open regardless.

Facebook’s Situation

Right now we have Facebook offering today a global, persistent, and incredibly important online identity around a highly engaging product. Through good timing, properties of their early market, sticking to their design principles, and possibly indifference, Facebook has succeeded despite the value-add that Vanity URLs offer to smaller communities. Yet they’re now at a point of being so ubiquitous that they could conceivably have the digital identity for every person on earth that is online in the next 10 years.

Facebook wants to own your digital identity and build the best services around that identity as possible. To do so, Facebook needs an easy way to find / reference / share people, and provide fully public profiles as well as more detailed private ones with different privacy gradations. All stuff that’s being improved upon every day. So what’s the right move for the next year? Two years? Five years?

My opinion: Stick with the numbers

In my opinion it’s precisely now when using numbers as identifiers starts becoming valuable. Why?

a) numbers are highly scalable
b) numbers are something users are indifferent to (vs worried about)
c) finding / referencing / sharing people is getting better (and URLs are less and less important) as we gain better tech, better data on each person’s social graph, and better interface designs.
d) (Facebook-Specific) it’s the status quo

Given the above-mentioned drawbacks to Vanity URLs, I think that although meaningless and hard to remember, numbers actually make sense for Facebook. Therefore, my big question for Facebook is “Why Now?” At this point, for everyone who is not an early adopter (specifically, in the hours and days following 9:01pm this Friday), you only get the downsides of Vanity URLs – the feeling of being un-unique (John291), the lost-in-translation meaning (PandaMedic), and the following user discomfort and worry (why did I call myself PandaMedic? / I am *definitely* not SxyGirl17 anymore).

Fin

In conclusion, obviously there are many short-term benefits to adding vanity URLs, especially to smaller sites. However, we can never reduce the digital identities of everybody on a global scale into a single string, and doing so carries with it many downsides that get worse in time. If the whole purpose of this is to aid in finding, referencing, and interacting with people, we need to focus on the improved data, technology, and interfaces that will get us there, and worry less how things are named.

nickpunt online communities, product design, psychology, socnet

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nickpunt Uncategorized

Recently, I was complaining to my housemates about how annoying all these bugs were that were flying into our house, and someone should invent a laser that zaps them mid-flight before they could enter. We had a laugh and dismissed it as impractical.

Well, I’m really happy to announce that as of today, someone is doing just that. Scientists who worked on the old 80s anti-missile defense are taking their skills and using them to build high speed lasers, to kill mosquitos and stop the spread of malaria.

I really like this kind of solution because it sidesteps the hazards of traditional solutions like pesticides and genetics, and it doesn’t seem like there’s an easy way for mosquitos to adapt to this new predator. Further, the economics could work in this, as the components are likely available off-the-shelf, and the number of units needed (10 million+) would probably be enough to manufacture nearly at cost. The only challenge would be distribution, an extremely localized problem that is a hurdle to every initiative in the third world. How exactly would you come across to your average tribal leader if you just show up and say this black box keeps disease away? I’m reminded of the Arthur C Clarke quote “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding this project and it’s part of their larger vision to get people out of extreme poverty by solving fundamental needs like sanitation, disease prevention, and basic education. Projects like this show they can really think laterally about problems which is an impressive and altogether lacking capability in many large organizations. Here’s Bill Gates’ talk on malaria at the TED conference in February:
Who knows? Maybe historians will look back and point at a little mosquito laser as being a turning point in the struggle to overcome world poverty. Stranger things have happened.

nickpunt Uncategorized nonprofit, offbeat, stuff that matters, technology

nickpunt culture, online communities, product design, psychology, socnet

Back about 8 years ago when I was in the industry, I really wanted to make a game based on the concept of running around, a race game on your feet with a ton of obstacles. I saw it as a mix of Crazy Taxi (especially the bright colored arcadey look), the movie Run, Lola, Run, and my own experiences nearby at Venice Beach when I had to navigate through a thick crowd to get somewhere fast. The goal would be to race through crowds, ducking and diving, occasionally picking up skateboards or bikes or whatever, in order to meet up with your friends on time.

Although there were shades of it in my design, I never explicitly thought about adding Parkour (free running) to the mix, mainly because it wasn’t really well known at the time. After the awesome chase scene at the beginning of Casino Royale, apparently someone in the industry got on this track.

The gameplay in Mirror’s Edge looks *phenomenal*, running and jumping and using the environment in a realistic way. I love the need to think creatively about your environment in this – in most games the environment is just a set of simple constraints and does not inspire you to pay close attention to it (think about all those invisible walls you’ve encountered in games – ‘why can’t I go there?’ scenarios). Check it out:

In my game, I had thought of navigating in the third person, which would afford you the opportunity to scan the environment and see the cool ducks and dives of your character. However, I’m really impressed with this first person mode – much more visceral and adrenaline pumping.

As a nitpick, it seems like they had to play the usual teenage angst card and make it an action game with guns and some faceless government to rebel against. I would have much preferred an espionage game, because you can layer in some more nuanced plots there.

A preview is available here (thanks Digg).

nickpunt Games

I’ve been waiting for a while for more research to come out like this, describing how thought, ideas, or (in this case) opinions travel between people. I’ve had a project I’ve wanted to create based on these concepts for about a year now and one of the things that has held me back was the lack of research we have in this area. Understanding this kind of transfer of knowledge is incredibly fundamental to community design and education, as much of our learning and motivation to learn is the result of how we organize ourselves around the social environment.

One of my favorite thought experiments is what level of free will, versus environmental condition, make for the integration and acceptance of knowledge one has been exposed to. Why do we reject some ideas and accept others, and is there something completely independent of the idea itself that is driving that process? This question has both an explicit community aspect and an implicit one. Explicitly, we always have our place in the community on our mind – we naturally desire social harmony, and seek to minimize time and energy spent correcting others (as it is a waste of our energy, and we are cognitive misers). Implicitly, we have our super-ego, the internalization of our community experience, as a throttle on how much we entertain ideas in our minds. The super-ego makes sure we do not stray too far in our thinking, which in turn makes sure we do not stray too far from our community.

Another way to put this is the question I ask myself whenever I wonder why people come to conclusions: What is the easiest conclusion one can come to in this situation? These easy conclusions are what sustain us in the short term. Yet, I think it’s the few times that we come to challenging conclusions that we are expressing our free will, which in turn allows us to progress. This process, in the face of more valid opinion, is somewhat akin to the age old question of ‘do you do what’s right, or do what’s easy?’. If you plotted all the different possibilities of opinion v community you would probably find a host of similar axioms.

Another analog can be derived from evolution: gradual change versus punctuated equilibrium. Communities may make the choice to let the larger meta-community affect them as it will (gradual change, external determination), or some members may choose to build islands from the rest and engage in a more punctuated, self-driven change. Some of this probably sounds like regular old decision making, but it’s not a well explored area in the context of communities of learning.

In my opinion, there’s no question we need better metacognitive education: metacognition frames, motivates, and strengthens our learning, and this power of reflection is perhaps one of the few truly human pursuits. It is the best, and only, tool we have to overcome our natural cognitive flaws. In the context of opinion and idea dissemination and adoption, we need to understand how we pick our battles about what divergent information we choose to accept. Now the design challenge: how do we teach people to identify and overcome community bias?

nickpunt online communities, psychology, socnet

The act of mimicking something is interesting. It’s one part empathy, another part motivation.

Empathy is of course feeling what someone else feels, often because we have similar personal experiences. Part of our brain is dedicated to this function, and it helps make us the social creatures we are. One side-effect of this is how we anthropomorphize non-human things, such as animals – essentially we bring the feelings we have of empathy and apply them to other objects or creatures that often have certain features we identify with (big sad eyes, non-scary shapes). We then craft our own little story around them – they’re humans, just stuck in a cat’s body, with all the trappings therein (see my lolcats post below).

Mimicry, on the other hand, is about motivation and action. We see an action that looks fun, something that we want to feel in physical form. Where empathy generates automatic feeling (barring any built-up tolerance) in one part of our mind, mimicry generates the automatic compulsion for a different type of feeling in another.

The motivation that induces mimicry is something about an action we’re perceiving that is alluring to us. Some possibilities:

• We question whether we can do that action ourselves (desire to learn)
• We like the external outcome of that action (sights, sounds, etc)
• We like the internal outcome of that action (desire to feel something)
• The action reminds us of our capability and we have an audience (desire to perform)

What’s most fascinating is that mimicry is not interactive, yet it feels like it is. Much like certain online communities where participation isn’t really (I will explore this in another post).

The impetus for this post is a cute little thing called the Yellow Drum Machine… a robot that exudes a ton of toddler-like personality. When I saw it, I said to myself ‘this thing really nails the essence of fun’, yet it was totally non-interactive. Since I had just read the Theory of Fun again, I had ludemes on my mind… so why not ludemes of mimicry? The attitude could be broken down into just two key systems:

1. move the eyes left and right, and
2. bang on things.

What a simple, elegant system.

Note: Of course it needs locomotion, but it’s not strutting around, so there’s no attitude / mimicry there yet.

Checkkit:

nickpunt Games, online communities, psychology

Arthur C Clarke died today, the last of the big 3. We have him to thank for the idea of telecom satellites, and we’ll still be singing his praises when we finally develop space elevators. In the mean time, people can occupy themselves reading his books, such as 2001 and the Rama series.

nickpunt culture, news

We’re now definitely in a new era of game development. No longer is the games industry languishing in perpetual geekdom – it’s going mainstream in a big way. Investment dollars are pouring in, and the hype dial is cranked up very high. A lot of this money is going into massively multiplayer games, for better or worse, and most of these are fairly undifferentiated clones are coming out. Their failures will help set more realistic expectations, and investors will realizing going after the same users (WoW players) with the same gameplay (Dikumud) and probably worse technology is not a recipe for success. I speak mainly of PC-based 3d MMOGs here, as differentiation along tech (e.g. browser-based) and system (platforms) unlock different users and necessitate different gameplay.

Okay, enough history and predictions – there are enough people who do that on the net more eloquently than I do. My personal touch here is my excitement about two properties in particular:

1. Lego Universe. It’s interesting to read this little piece on kotaku on the development choices behind LU. Two big design challenges in making kids games are stereotypes and conflict. In modern mainstream media, it’s easier to perpetuate stereotypes and memes than challenge them, but for kids there are higher expectations (as there should be). As for conflict, violence is the easiest way to communicate, participate in, and overcome conflict in games, yet again we have higher expectations for kids media.

I’m excited about LU because the IP is very unique and can deal with problems in a very unique way. I grew up with Lego, as so many kids did, and what this IP has come to mean is Lego is a way to interpret the world and change it’s rules. We’ve seen this in previous Lego titles (like Lego Star Wars) as well as the variety of Lego sets (Castles, Town, Space, etc). Lego is about Lego-izing things we know and love, applying a uniform look, allowing mixing and matching, and sterilizing their meaning for interpretation by kids. There is no death in the Lego world, there’s merely the parts bin. There is no improper merger of ideas in the assembly of Lego pieces, anything goes because everything fits. These are how violence and stereotype can be overcome with the Lego IP – what fits together is acceptable together (girly lego-heads can be put on top of any uniform), and anything that is taken apart is just part of creative destruction, not real destruction, and it can always be put back together. Cognitively, Lego just occupies a different space in our mind than other toys and other properties.

I’m not sure if any other IP is about this reinterpretation of things, versus just being things. Leveraging offline products and building connections between the two is a very smart thing, and in the kids MMOG space, toy companies will be the ones that beat out others (WebKinz being the first example). Lego has the added advantage of having a unique brand that is well-suited for online worlds, and therefore if they don’t mess up execution, I think Lego is in for a very bright future.

Unrelated side note: I have this visual of how re-spawns (a staple MMOG action, whereby a previously killed enemy comes back after a certain time interval so that other players may fight them) will work in LU, kind of like Terminator 2’s liquid metal terminator. The bad knight is ‘killed’ and his pieces scatter to the wind. But after 10 minutes… those pieces slowly move back together until BAM! The knight is reassembled and glows and cries out with his arms high, ready to challenge a new adventurer! I hope they do something like this

2. PMOG (or at least the concept it demonstrates). This one’s still under the radar, their public beta just started yesterday. This is a toolbar addition for Firefox that lets players drop quests and level up while they’re going about their normal web browsing. Essentially, it’s using game mechanics to force discovery of new web properties, an extremely smart move if you consider advertising implications (the game essentially holds the players hands and takes them from one property to another, like a guided tour in a museum). It’s also a sign of a much larger concept, which is the expansion and diffusion of game mechanics across daily activities. BF Skinner is rolling in his grave at the concept of being able to enforce behavioral reward structures to daily life – what implications! The game isn’t exactly designed as a psychologists research tool, but functions a bit like it whether or not the authors realize it.

I think this class of applications is likely to grow rapidly in the near future – it’s easy to make, has a huge playing field built in, relies on user-user interaction, and could be damn fun.

Specific mechanics I like about this title are that to level up, you must participate in the creation of content. This UGC angle really sells it for me (along with star ratings), because I’m particularly interested in creation software and inducing people to create. Participation is essential to society, yet the last few generations have grown up used to and demanding passive experiences; an ‘entertain me’ mentality. What’s funny about PMOG (which stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game) is that while it is passive from the perspective of occupying your attention, it is active in the demands for your participation. Very cool.

nickpunt Games, online communities