Tag: Friendfeed

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A funny thing happened on the (way to the) forum

I love Stephen Sondheim musicals. In particular I love the way he can build an ensemble piece in which there can be 10-20 people onstage, apparently singing, shouting, and speaking complete disconnected lines, which nonetheless build into a coherent whole. Into the Woods (1987) contains many brilliant examples of the thoughts, fears, and hopes of a whole group of people building into a coherent view and message (see the opening for a taste and links to other clips). Those who believe in the wisdom of crowds in its widest sense see a similar possibility in aggregating the chatter found on the web into coherent and accurate assessments of problems. Those who despair of the ignorance of the lowest common denominator see most Web2 projects as a waste of time. I sit somewhere in the middle – believing that with the right tools, a community of people who care about a problem and have some form of agreed standards of behavior and disputation can rapidly aggregate a well informed and considered view of a problem and what it’s solution might be.

Yesterday and today, I saw one of the most compelling examples of that I’ve yet seen. Yesterday I posted a brain dump of what I had been thinking about following discussions in Hawaii and in North Carolina, about the possibilities of using OpenID to build a system for unique researcher IDs. The discussion on Friendfeed almost immediately aggregated a whole set of material, some of which I had not previously seen, proceded through a coherent discussion of many points, with a wide range of disparate views, towards some emerging conclusions. I’m not going to pre-judge those conclusions except to note there are some positions clearly developing that are contrary to my own view (e.g. on CrossRef being the preferred organisation to run such a service). This to me suggests the power of this approach for concensus building, even when that concensus is opposite to the position of the person kicking off the discussion.

What struck me with this was the powerful way in which Friendfeed rapidly enabled the conversation – and also the potential negative effect it had on widening the conversation beyond that community. Friendfeed is a very powerful tool for very rapidly widening the reach of a discussion like this one. It would be interesting to know how many people saw the item in their feeds. I could calculate it I suppose but for now I will just guess it was probably in the low to mid thousands. Many, many, more than subscribe to the blog anyway. What will be interesting to see is whether the slower process of blogospheric diffusion is informed by the Friendfeed discussion or runs completely independent of it (incidentally Friendfeed widget will hopefully be coming soon on the blog as well to try to and tie things together). Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation comments in his post of today that;

There’s a good deal of discussion about the post in Cameron’s FriendFeed. (It’s slightly annoying that the discussion is somewhat divorced from the original blog post but I guess that is one of the, err…, features of using FriendFeed?) [Andy also goes on to make some good point about delegation – CN]

The speed with which Friendfeed works, and the way in which it helps you build an interested community, and  separated communities where appropriate, is indeed a feature of Friendfeed. Equally that speed and the fact that you need an account to comment, if not to watch, can be exclusionary. It is also somewhat closed off from the rest of the world. While I am greatly excited by what happened yesterday and today, indeed possibly just as excited as I am about yesterday’s other important news, it is important to make sure that the watering and care of the community doesn’t turn into the building of a walled garden.

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The failure of online communication tools

Coming from me that may sound a strange title, but while I am very positive about the potential for online tools to improve the way we communicate science, I sometimes despair about the irritating little barriers that constantly prevent us from starting to achieve what we might. Today I had a good example of that.

Currently I am in Sydney, a city where many old, and some not so old friends live. I am a bit rushed for time so decided the best way to catch up was to propose a date, send out a broadcast message to all the relevant people, and then sort out the minor details of where and exactly when to meet up. Easy right? After all tools like Friendfeed and Facebook provide good broadcast functionality. Except of course, as many of these are old friends, they are not on Friendfeed. But that’s ok because I’ve many of them are on Facebook. Except some of them are not old friends, or are not people I have yet found on Facebook, but that’s ok, they’re on Friendfeed, so I just need to send two messages. Oh, except there are some people who aren’t on Facebook, so I need to email them – but they don’t all know each other so I shouldn’t send their email addresses in the clear. That’s ok, that’s what bcc is for. Oh, but this email address is about five years old…is it still correct?

So – I end up sending three independent messages, one via Friendfeed, three via Facebook (one status message, one direct message, and another direct message to the person I found but hadn’t yet friended), and one via email (some unfortunate people got all three – and it turns out they have to do their laundry anyway). It almost came down to trying some old mobile numbers to send out text. Twitter (which I don’t use very much) wouldn’t have helped either. But that’s not so bad – only took me ten minutes to cut and paste and get them all sent. They seem to be getting through to people as well which is good.

Except now I am getting back responses via email, via Facebook, and at some point via Friendfeed as well no doubt. All of which are inaccessible to me when I am out and about anyway because I’m not prepared to pay the swinging rates for roaming data.

What should happen is that I have a collection of people, I choose the send them a message, whether private or broadcast, and they choose how to receive that message and how to prioritise it. They then reply to me, and I see all their responses nicely aggregated because they are all related to my one query. As this query was time dependent I would have prioritised responses so perhaps I would receive them by text or direct to my mobile in some other form. The point is that each person controls the way they receive information from different streams and is in control of the way they deal with it.

It’s not just filter failure which is creating the impression of the information overload. The tools we are using, their incompatibility, and the cost of transferring items from one stream to another are also contributing to the problem. The web is designed to be sticky because the web is designed to sell advertising. Every me-too site wants to hold its users and communities, my community, my specific community that I want to meet up with for a drink, is split across multiple services. I don’t have a solution to the business model problem – I just want services with proper APIs that let other people build services that get all of my streams into one place. I hope someone comes up with a business model – but I also have to accept that maybe I just need to pay for it.

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Convergent evolution of scientist behaviour on Web 2.0 sites?

A thought sparked off by a comment from Maxine Clarke at Nature Networks where she posted a link to a post by David Crotty. The thing that got me thinking was Maxine’ statement:

I would add that in my opinion Cameron’s points about FriendFeed apply also to Nature Network. I’ve seen lots of examples of highly specific questions being answered on NN in the way Cameron describes for FF…But NN and FF aren’t the same: they both have the same nice feature of discussion of a partiular question or “article at a URL somewhere”, but they differ in other ways,…[CN- my emphasis]

Alright, in isolation this doesn’t look like much, read through both David’s post and the comments, and then come back to Maxine’s,  but what struck me was that on many of these sites many different communities seem to be using very different functionality to do very similar things. In Maxine’s words ‘…discussion of a…paricular URL somewhere…’ And that leads me to wonder the extent to which all of these sites are failing to do what it is that we actually want them to do. And the obvious follow on question: What is it we want them to do?

There seem to be two parts to this. One, as I wrote in my response to David, is that a lot of this is about the coffee room conversation, a process of building and maintaining a social network. It happens that this network is online, which makes it tough to drop into each others office, but these conversational tools are the next best thing. In fact they can be better because they let you choose when someone can drop into your office, a choice you often don’t have in the physical world. Many services; Friendfeed, Twitter, Nature Networks, Faceboo, or a combination can do this quite well – indeed the conversation spreads across many services helping the social network (which bear in mind probably actually has less than 500 total members) to grow, form, and strengthen the connections between people.

Great. So the social bit, the bit we have in common with the general populace, is sorted. What about the science?

I think what we want as scientists is two things. Firstly we want the right URL delivered at the right time to our inbox (I am assuming anything important is a resource on the web – this may not be true now but give it 18 months and it will be) . Secondly we want a rapid and accurate assessment of this item, its validity, its relevance, and its importance to us judged by people we trust and respect. Traditionally this was managed by going to the library and reading the journals – and then going to the appropriate conference and talking to peopl. We know that the volume of material and the speed at which we need to deal with this is way too fast. Nothing new there.

My current thinking is that we are failing in building the right tools because we keep thinking of these two steps as separate when actually combining them into one integrated process would actual provide efficiency gains for both phases. I need to sleep on this to get it straight in my head, there are issues of resource discovery, timeframes, and social network maintenance that are not falling into place for me at the moment, so that will be the subject of another post.

However, whether I am right or wrong in that particular line of thought, if it is true that we are reasonably consistent in what we want then it is not suprising that we try to bend the full range of services available into achieving those goals. The interesting question is whether we can discern what the killer app would be by looking at the details of what people do to different services and where they are failing. In a sense, if there is a single killer app for science then it should be discernable what it would do based on what scientists try to do with different services…

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BioBarCamp – Meeting friends old and new and virtual

So BioBarCamp started yesterday with a bang and a great kick off. Not only did we somehow manage to start early we were consistently running ahead of schedule. With several hours initially scheduled for introductions this actually went pretty quick, although it was quite comprehensive. During the introduction many people expressed an interest in ‘Open Science’, ‘Open Data’, or some other open stuff, yet it was already pretty clear that many people meant many different things by this. It was suggested that with the time available we have a discussion session on what ‘Open Science’ might mean. Pedro and mysey live blogged this at Friendfeed and the discussion will continue this morning.

I think for me the most striking outcome of that session was that not only is this a radically new concept for many people but that many people don’t have any background understanding of open source software either which can make the discussion totally impenetrable to them. This, in my view strengthens the need for having some clear brands, or standards, that are easy to point to and easy to sign up to (or not). I pitched the idea, basically adapting from John Wilbank’s pitch at the meeting in Barcelona, that our first target should that all data and analysis associated with a published paper should be available. This seems an unarguable basic standard, but is one that we currently fall far short of. I will pitch this again in the session I have proposed on ‘Building a data commons’.

The schedule for today is up as a googledoc spreadsheet with many difficult decisions to make. My current thinking is;

  1. Kaitlin Thaney – Open Science Session
  2. Ricardo Vidal and Vivek Murthy (OpenWetWare and Epernicus).  Using online communities to share resources efficiently.
  3. Jeremy England & Mark Kaganovich – Labmeeting, Keeping Stalin Out of Science (though I would also love to do John Cumbers on synthetic biology for space colonization, that is just so cool)
  4. Pedro Beltrao & Peter Binfield – Dealing with Noise in Science / How should scientific articles be measured.
  5. Hard choice: Andrew Hessel – building an open source biotech company or Nikesh Kotecha + Shirley Wu – Motivating annotation
  6. Another doozy: John Cumbers – Science Worship / Science Marketing or Hilary Spencer & Mathias Crawford – Interests in Scientific IP – Who Owns/Controls Scientific Communication and Data?  The Major Players.
  7. Better turn up to mine I guess :)
  8.  Joseph Perla – Cloud computing, Robotics and the future of Science and  Joel Dudley & Charles Parrot – Open Access Scientific Computing Grids & OpenMac Grid

I am beginning to think I should have brought two laptops and two webcams. Then I could have recorded one and gone to the other. Whatever happens I will try to cover as much as I can in the BioBarCamp room at FriendFeed, and where possible and appropriate I will broadcast and record via Mogulus. The wireless was a bit tenuous yesterday so I am not absolutely sure how well this will work.

Finally, this has been great opportunity to meet up with people I know and have met before, those who I feel I know well but have never met face to face, and indeed those whose name I vaguely know (or should know) but have never connected with before. I’m not going to say who is in which list because I will forget someone! But if I haven’t said hello yet do come up and harass me because I probably just haven’t connected your online persona with the person in front of me!

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Science in the YouTube Age – introductory screencast for a talk I’m giving at IWMW

The UKOLN Institutional Web Managers Workshop is running in Aberdeen from 22-24 July and I am giving a talk discussing the impact of Web2.0 tools on science. My main theme will be the that the main cultural reasons for lack of uptake relate to the fear of losing control over data and ideas. Web2.0 tools rely absolutely on the willingness of people to make useful material available. In science this material is data, ideas, protocols, and analyses. Prior to publication most scientists are very sceptical of making their hard earned data available – but without this the benefits that we know can be achieved through network effects, re-use of data, and critical analysis of data and analysis, will not be seen. The key to benefiting from web based technologies is adopting more open practices.

The video below is a screencast of a shorter version of the talk intended to give people the opportunity to make comments, ask questions, or offer suggestions. I wanted to keep it short so there are relatively few examples in there – there will be much more in the full talk. For those who can’t make it to Aberdeen I am told that the talks are expected to be live videocast and I will provide a URL as soon as I can. If this works I am also intending to try and respond to comments and questions via FriendFeed or Twitter in real time. This may be foolhardy but we’ll see how it goes. Web2 is supposed to be about real time interaction after all!

I don’t seem to be able to embed the video but you can find it here.

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Friendfeed for scientists: What, why, and how?

There has been lots of interest amongst some parts of the community about what has been happening on FriendFeed. A growing number of people are signed up and lots of interesting conversations are happening. However it was suggested that as these groups grow they become harder to manage and the perceived barriers to entry get higher. So this is an attempt to provide a brief intro to FriendFeed for the scientist who may be interested in using it; what it is, why it is useful, and some suggestions on how to get involved without getting overwhelmed. This are entirely my views and your mileage may obviously vary.

What is FriendFeed?

FriendFeed is a ‘lifestreaming’ service or more simply a personal aggregator. It takes data streams that you generate and brings them all together into one place where people can see them. You choose to subscribe to any of the feeds you already generate (Flickr stream, blog posts, favorited YouTube videos, and lots of other services integrated). In addition you can post links to specific web pages or just comments into your stream. A number of these types of services have popped up in the recent months including Profilactic and Social Thing but FriendFeed has two key aspects that have led it to the fore. Firstly the commenting facilities enable rapid and effective conversations and secondly there was rapid adoption by a group of life scientists which has created a community. Like anything some of the other services have advantages and probably have their own communities but for science and in particular the life sciences FriendFeed is where it is at.

My FriendFeed

As well as allowing other people to look at what you have been doing FriendFeed allows you to subscribe to other people and see what they have been doing. You have the option of ‘liking’ particular items and commenting on them. In addition to seeing the items of your friends, people you are subscribed to, you also see items that they have liked or commented on. This helps you to find new people you may be interested in following. It also helps people to find you. As well as this items with comments or likes then get popped up to the top of the feed so items that are generating a conversation keep coming back to your attention.

These conversations can happen very fast. Some conversations baloon within minutes, most take place at a more sedate pace over a couple of hours or days but it is important to be aware that many people are live most of the time.

Why is FriendFeed useful?

So how is FriendFeed useful to a scientist? First and foremost it is a great way of getting rapid notification of interesting content from people you trust. Obviously this depends on there people who are interested in the same kinds of things that you are but this is something that will grow as the community grows. A number of FriendFeed users stream both del.icio.us bookmark pages as well as papers or web articles they have put into citeulike or connotea or simply via sharing it in Google Reader. Also you can get information that people have shared on opportunities, meetings, or just interesting material on the web. Think of it as an informal but continually running journal club – always searching for the next thing you will need to know about.

Notifications of interesting material on friendfeed

But FriendFeed is about much more than finding things on the web. One of its most powerful features is the conversations that can take place. Queries can be answered very rapidly going some way towards making possible the rapid formation of collaborative networks that can come together to solve a specific problem. Its not there yet but there are a growing number of examples where specific ideas were encouraged, developed, or problems solved quickly by bringing the right expertise to bear.

One example is shown in the following figure where I was looking for some help in building a particular protein model for a proposal. I didn’t really know how to go about this and didn’t have the appropriate software to hand. Pawel Szczesny offered to help and was able to quickly come up with what I wanted. In the future we hope to generate data which Pawel may be able to help us analyse. You can see the whole story and how it unfolded after this at http://friendfeed.com/search?q=mthkMthK model by Friendfeed

We are still a long way from the dream of just putting out a request and getting an answer but it is worth point out that the whole exchange here lasted about four hours. Other collaborative efforts have also formed, most recently leading to the formation of BioGang, a collaborative area for people to work up and comment on possible projects.

So how do I use it? Will I be able to cope?

FriendFeed can be as high volume as you want it be but if its going to be useful to you it has to be manageable. If you’re the kind of person who already manages 300 RSS feeds, your twitter account, Facebook and everthing else then you’ll be fine. In fact your’re probably already there. For those of you who are looking for something a little less high intensity the following advice may be helpful.

  1. Pick a small amount of your existing feeds as a starting point to see what you feel comfortable with sharing. Be aware that if you share e.g. Flickr or YouTube feeds it will also include your favourites, including old ones. Do share something – even if only some links – otherwise people won’t know that you’re there.
  2. Subscribe to someone you know and trust and stick with just one or two people for a while as you get to understand how things work. As you see extra stuff coming in from other people (friends of your friends) start to subscribe to one or two of them that you think look interesting. Do not subscribe to Robert Scoble if you don’t want to get swamped.
  3. Use the hide button. You probably don’t need to know about everyone’s favourite heavy metal bands (or perhaps you do). The hide button can get rid of a specific service from a specific person but you can set it so that you do so it if other people like it.
  4. Don’t worry if you can’t keep up. Using the Best of the Day/Week/Month button will let you catch up on what people thought was important.
  5. Find a schedule that suits you and stick to it. While the current users are dominated by the ‘always on’ brigade that doesn’t mean you need to do it the same way. But also don’t feel that because you came in late you can’t comment. It may just be that you are needed to kick that conversation back onto some people’s front page
  6. Join the Life Scientists Room and share interesting stuff. This provides a place to put particularly interesting links and is followed by a fair number of people, probably more than you are. If it is worthy of comment then put it in front of people. If you aren’t sure whether its relevant ask, you can always start a new room if need be.
  7. Enjoy, comment and participate in a way you feel comfortable with. This is a (potential) work tool. If it works for you, great! If not well so be it – there’ll be another one along in a minute.
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Bursty science depends on openness

An example of a social network diagram.Image via Wikipedia

There have been a number of interesting discussions going on in the blogosphere recently about radically different ways of practising science. Pawel Szczesny has blogged about his plans for freelancing science as a way of moving out of the rigid career structure that drives conventional academic science. Deepak Singh has blogged a number of times about ‘bursty science‘, the idea that projects can be rapidly executed by distributing them amongst a number of people, each with the capacity to undertake a small part of the project. Continue reading “Bursty science depends on openness”