Social networking software such as Diaspora‘s Aspects and now also Google+ Circles is becoming aware of users’ social contexts. Contextually-aware social networks understand, adapt to, and ideally leverage the information which humans use to relate to one another. Because humans often interact via ad-hoc channels of communication, it’s often valuable for software to adapt to these dynamic channels which have been recently created or destroyed between communicating humans. By abstracting application logic and narrowing the scope of data queries, software controllers can present more relevant views to a user based on dynamic user input or system intelligence. Often, for mobile users, social contexts are geographically based. Without requiring manual user input, software can behave more intelligently in cases where the geographic context narrows or broadens the scope of a dataset.

Is Context King?

A global positioning system in a networked mobile device can provide a narrower data scope (based on coordinate tracking) to an event handler or software controller which queries a cache of temporal data or even a larger set of persistent data. When focused views of user defined human-relational data sets intersect dynamic geospacial coordinates, systems can more efficiently learn how to provide more relevant information about changing social contexts. Moreover, this process can be done with less manual input by users. As a mobile user moves through geographic space, his or her social context may change based on the absence or presence of other people. As distributed systems and social networks become more aware of frequently changing, subtle, geographic social contexts… it becomes increasingly possible (assuming the information is shared with users) for users to find places and people based on their interests. From a social perspective, it’s really quite empowering to have this much abstraction between a venue and a place. There are a lot of “cloud” companies around these days, but in order to really specialize in abstraction one must understand what becomes the focus instead of that which we abstract. The focus is where the actual power (value) comes from. In this case the power is in the ability to become less reliant upon physical, geographic constraints and more focused on social interests (whether more or less sophisticated) and more focused on relateable interactions.

For example, if Barack Obama is in town, perhaps I’d like to invite him as a guest to an upcoming local or regional event. If not, perhaps I’d like the system to invite the next person who might be interested (in this example… Tom Anderson, my first Myspace friend). The system can know (often based on what’s probably voluntary user input) that Rick Perry isn’t as interested in this particular event (perry-wink)… even though both Rick Perry and Barack Obama may exist in the same or similar regional space at the same time. But fortunately I still have my friend Tom. The converging technologies (big/aggregate data abstraction, mobile computing, geospacial contextualization, and social contextualization) are not so new when standing alone, but when integrated support a trend of social sophistication which is more agnostic of physical infrastructure and places where it exists. If I had to summarize this sophistication in one word it would probably be “freedom.”

Skeptics might argue that they don’t like the idea of software or systems knowing more about them. Skeptics might also argue that they don’t like knowing << unpleasant fact(s) >>. Often, an unpleasantness (fear) is associated with aggregation of knowledge within a technological or otherwise sophisticated framework. You could call it a “fear of singularity” or “fear of robots taking children somewhere else” … but this year and probably next year I’m likely to be more afraid of ignorance than artificial, collective, or social intelligence. Knowledge is power, computers are tools, and the more they know about us the more we can know about ourselves. Privacy is important and made possible if encryption and private ownership of data is made possible. You are free to navigate your social context. Is your data? Is “your” data your data?

Peep the Context.

The following is part of a diaspora-dev discussion:

I’ve had difficulty quarantining the feature-itis, because I can’t stop dreaming about integrating Twitter and Facebook differently.

What I envisioned in these dreams (which I hope you won’t call nightmares) is something I’m calling an ‘integration aspect’ which would display the contents a Twitter account, Facebook wall, etc. This would be different from the way it is now: limited to a single Facebook wall or a single Twitter account only accessible as write-only when posting to the world. I think it would be useful to read and write to ‘integration aspects’ which are Twitter accounts, Facebook Walls and Facebook Page Walls, and whatever API hackers deem hackable in their integration adventures. ‘Integration aspects’ would become part of the ‘all aspects’ aggregation and who knows, maybe even serve as a way to drag and drop share invitations from Diasporans to Twitter and Facebook, et. al.

You might be asking yourself, “Why do we need to support multiple Twitter accounts?” Perhaps we don’t NEED it, but many people have at least two accounts, especially for business purposes. In some ways, these multiple accounts are their attempt at ‘aspects’ in the world of Twitter.

You might be asking yourself “Why do we need to support more than one Facebook wall?” Facebook pages have their own walls which are manageable under one account.

The presence of SaaS dashboards which already integrate these social network features… and the fact that some of them charge $5 to $15 per month per user… perhaps indicate demand.

You might be asking yourself “How on earth and in Diaspora would we execute these features without causing API drama?” That’s a good question. We would most likely need to heavily cache the results from querying these social networks at large. It’s doable and others have done this with their integration platforms.

The value proposition is that these features would create a multi-threaded integration environment which is consistent with the aspect-driven, contextually-aware user experience we have already instigated.

- Asher Bond
asherbond@joindiaspora.com
https://convore.com/diaspora/ui-ux-uask/

A step-wise approach to changing the world of social networking forever and ever:

1. Go to https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
2. Click “Fork this.”
3. Sign up for access to a pod and provide alpha feedback
4. Push your secret sauce to master if you’re dev savvy.
5. Merge updates from the main project and others if you’re dev savvy.
6. If you’re design savvy be providing lots of feedback via getsatisfaction and via Github issues”
7. If you’re a social butterfly invite 25 high attenders to your Diaspora aspects
8. If you’re a deployment butterfly (lol you’re a moth) then make sure the chef recipes are in good alpha health?
9. DiPaaSpora shall be upon you.. heroku tonight.. tomorrow THE WORLD of Open PaaS.
10. If you’re a maker… make some cheap pods under your desk and see if you can move your contacts… soon you will be able to move (import+export) all of your data
11. Join the mailing lists. There is one for dev, one for services-integration, and of course the standard user group for everyone.
12. Go to the diaspora meetups… when people ask you when Diaspora is going to launch or take off..

Here it is:

Finally a social media dashboard that integrates your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Tumblr, and other social networks et. al. into one mobile-friendly platform that let’s you sign on once and manage many social media campaigns and social media teams. Multi-tenant and multi-platform? Yeah.

Social Media Analytics in Hootsuite

HootSuite Social Analytics from HootSuite on Vimeo.

(Music: Salteens / Grey Eyes – Everything They Know About Us)

Elastic Provisioner is proud to announce that we are now a HootSuite Pro Solution Partner.

HootSuite is a social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard. Key social network integrations include Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, plus a suite of social content apps for YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and more.

Earlier this year HootSuite hit 3 million users with over 700 million messages sent through over 6 million unique social profiles. Along with HootSuite’s web platform, 20% of users access the dashboard through their mobiles including iPhone, Android, Blackberry and iPad. HootSuite also offers localized versions of their dashboard in six languages – English, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese.
There are many benefits to HootSuite Pro

Engage: Optimize your audience engagement by creating search streams, scheduling messages and monitoring all of your social network profiles from one customizable web and mobile dashboard.

Collaborate: Invite clients and colleagues to participate in your social media management. Assign messages for follow up and share streams, helping you increase efficiency.

Analyze: Measure your efforts using over 40 social analytics modules to build and share custom reports. Or select from one of our pre-made templates for quick and easy reporting.

Secure: Share access with team members without compromising security. The team permission levels and advanced sharing options ensure you remain in control of your valuable social profiles and accounts.

Sign up for a 30-day free trial of HootSuite Pro now: http://ow.ly/3C8qv

Facebook released the Beta version of Facebook Lite recently. It loads a lot easier than the normal facebook pages. The “heavy” full version of Facebook loads an extra small profile picture next to each person’s sub-comment. The lite version only loads the thumbnail of the person’s profile picture next to wall comments. Sub-comments in Facebook Lite have no picture, which saves a lot of memory and bandwidth.

The ajax behind the scenes is a lot more streamlined as well because apps and other notifications don’t have to load in the background every time you click something.

Help!! I can’t get my Applications! How do I turn off Facebook Lite and go back to the normal Facebook?”

Don’t panic. Just type “http://facebook.com” into your address bar and you will go back to your normal Facebook with your Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Friends for Sale, and other useless applications. To get back to lite mode, type the URL “http://lite.facebook.com” into your address bar again.