Category Archives: social_networking

itp winter 2005 show

New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program recently had its Winter 2005 show. As always, the show was packed with numerous projects and visitors. Some of the work touched upon ideas we think about at the institute.

timescanned.jpgdatacity.jpg

A few projects explored new ways to mediate New York. Leif Mangelsen and Jung Oh, in Time Scanned, created static panoramic images by stitching together slivers of digital video to document New York over time and space. Moving beyond the traditional guide book and map, the augmented reality project, DataCity looked at how we navigate New York. In this case, Shagun Singh, Jon Kirchherr and Saranont Limpananont proposed to layer contextual information on an interactive display system to enhance the experience of traveling through the city.
wasteland.jpg Saiyanthan Sriskandarajah created, The Wasteland, a digital representation of T.S. Eliot’s poem. Each letter is encoded into a binary format and then printed with a large format printer. The end result is an abstracted digital representation of a literary work.
Joshua Knowles, Adam Asarnow, Charles Pratt, and Rocio Barcia created Itp.licio.us which was a new twist to the facebook, and explored folksonomy, privacy, and social networks by asking fellow first year students to tag each other. The successful end result (students received an average of 29.4 tags) also addressed issues of internet mediated social interaction and making public the personal information of what classmates think of others.
Although, the twice a year itp shows can be a bit of an overwhelming experience, they offer a glimpse (albeit scaled down) of emerging applications of technology which are often just around the corner for mainstream use.

yahoo buys del.icio.us and takes on google?

Just as we were creating a del.icio.us account and linking it to our site, Yahoo announced the purchase of the company. This strategy of purchasing successful web service start-ups is nothing new for Yahoo (for example, flckr and egroups.) Del.icio.us’s popularity has prompted lots of discussion has been going on across the internet, notably on slashdot as well as social software.
Del.icio.us started with the simple idea of putting bookmarks on the web. By making them public, it added a social networking component to the experience. Bookmarks, in a way, are an external representation of notable ideas in the mind of the owner.
They also announced a new partnership with Six Apart, who created Moveable Type. Although, they did not purchase Six apart. Six Apart has optimized their blogging software to work with Yahoo’s small business hosting service.
In the end, these strategies make sense for Yahoo and other large media companies, because they are buying proven technologies and a strong user base. Small companies are often more nimble in thought and speed, and then able to develop novel technology.
Interestingly, the online discussion seem to be framing this event in terms of Yahoo versus Google. Microsoft is noticeably absent in the discussion. Perhaps, as Lisa suggested, they are focused on gaming right now. With each new initiative and acquisition, the debates about the services and strategies of Yahoo and Google sound more like discussions about competing fall line-ups of ABC, NBC and CBS.