Transcendant Interactions

Stewart Butterfield, Ludicorp

Ben Cerveny

Eric Costello

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4785

at the

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2004

2-10-04

San Diego, CA

Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

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Transcendant Interactions sounds a little flaky, but here's an
example: I'm friends with Cory, I know him on AIM, we are
Friendster buddies.

We have different relationships in different systems -- email,
AIM, etc. We need a way to combine these contexts.

Manifesto: Don't build applications. Build contexts for
interactions.

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The architecture of entertainment has been shaped by the idea of
immersion.

We try to design places for people to play, but play is about
people, not places.

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Here's an app: The Badge, a way of extending an MMORPG with
simple hacks. It was a simple Javascript include that queried for
your presence in GNE and allowed people to send you messages. You
could include it on your blog and your visitors could pass
messages into gamespace.

Our beta had a lot of geeks and they started scraping the game to
pull data out. A guy who scraped pages (whom we hired) compiled a
very accurate count of the number of players in the game at
different times.

We created groups and scrapers rendered graphs of the overlapping
membership between different groups.

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We launched a tool called GNE Neighborhood Browser that would map
your blogroll to your game buddies and vice-versa. We're giving
away a lot of this sourcecode.

You could put a badge on your blog with Javascript that turns
into a pull-down menu showing the status of your gamespace
neighbors.

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Manifesto:

Not application based computing (completing tasks)

Not document based computing (better understanding of what you
have)

Relationship-based computing (ever-changing view of the docs you
have access to, that others have access to, and your
relationships with people)

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Launching a new product:

Welcome to Flickr

Flickr gives you the buddy-list and your buddies. Drag and drop
interface for creating ad-hoc convesational groups.

This is better than IRC -- you don't need an admin to kick
obnoxious people.

But moreover, you get to share images.

We collect images with cameraphones and so forth, but we have no
good mechanism for advancing them out into the world. Here's a
mechanism for batch-loading them into a locked-and-loaded tool
for firing them into the world.

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In testing we're finding that this is frequently used to store,
share and organize family snapshots and other daily pictures.

You can export your friend-list from Flickr to other social
software applications through an API -- developers are combining
it with the Amazon API to fliter Amazon reviews based on your
friends-list from Flickr. This app has only been in progress since
Dec 8, and there are already third-party apps being built atop
it.

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Applicaitons, like architecture, can shut down possibility.