by Evan Prodromou, Kevin Marks, Monica Wilkinson and Dan Peterson
Federating social networks means people on different networks following each other. It's driven by the growth of private social networks for businesses; the development of new Open Source tools for social networking; and concerns about privacy and control of your brand in consumer sites.
The panel will discuss advances in the federated social web and the technologies that are making it possible. We'll cover who's implementing it today, and what kind of control a federated model gives companies and individuals. We'll give first steps on what you can do to weave your company and your social media presence into a federated social web.
LEVEL: Intermediate
by Ben Werdmuller and Blaine Cook
The big players in social networking are setting a plodding pace of innovation. New startups, keen to offer useful and exciting new means of communication, have migrated wholesale to platform-based approaches. Constrained by what it means to be boxed into 140 characters or Facebook's vision of a lifestream, we're left without a compelling view of what "social" means on the web.
It's time to take back our identities, and with it the web. We'll discuss examples of how the web is more Awesome when people are a part of it (and not just a layer on top of a few companies' databases). We'll talk about what kinds of approaches make sense in this new world (and which don't), and discuss some successes (and failures) that have happened along the way.
Parts of this discussion will be technical; you can't build the web without some HTML, and we can't build a social web without getting our hands dirty. However, tech is boring. You can always look up how to do something - knowing why you want to do something is the hard part. We're going to look beyond the modern gold rush, and talk about ideas that have lasting value for content providers, producers, and consumers, and why you should care.
LEVEL: Intermediate
The social web is now a teenager –awkward, arrogant, snarky, fearless, experimental and open. She is shaking things up and having a major impact on our culture, social dynamics and etiquette. What are the new social dynamics and cultural impacts of all these tools and technologies?
This session will explore the emerging etiquette issues of our participatory hyper-connected world. What are the new rules? How are our relationships, culture and business assumptions changing? Do we understand the impact of this new relationship persistance?
- Do I have to ask before I post a photo of a friend online? Who has editorial approval?
- Am I required to respond to every inbound communication I receive or is “ignoring” an accepted response?
- Where is the line between encouraging participation and being just plain annoying?
- What are you doing mucking up my activity stream?
- What the heck is a “friend” anyway?
How do we design, build and manage these new spaces? What are the new rules of the online commons and the associated appropriate etiquette? This participatory session will ask attendees to contribute their own real world examples and will lay out a new framework for a new social contract. It’s our job to decide what we want our web teenager to be when she is all grown-up.
LEVEL: Intermediate
by Gavin Bell and Jyri Engestrom
The internet is now social, but the tools and theories we use to understand it are rooted in a pre-social past. Much of the psychology inspired interaction design draws on information processing models from desktop application design. Perfect for shopping carts, not so good for understanding the social web. Newer psychological theories like Activity Theory or Actor Network theory can help us understand our need for tools like Twitter and Facebook. This world of post-cognitive theories understand social relationship and move beyond the simple world of goal directed tasks with neat closure. The social object is a great framing device for current applications, but Activity Theory has more to offer us. Every act is social in nature. Using this as a starting point this talk will explore how relationships form and how our interactions with each other on the internet form part of our wider experience. Learn how to pick the key objects and actions for your application. Understand the important social aspects of the interactions you support and how privacy affects these exchanges. The coming distributed social web are based on social objects, activity streams plus much protocol glue to connect them. These post cognitive theories are the framework from which they were derived, but there is much more to them that you can apply to your own projects.