Customization of services, user devices (e.g. cell phone), and user interfaces seems to be a mandatory feature these days. We have come to expect it everywhere, and even this blog site (blogspot.com) gives me powerful tools to customize the layout and behavior of my blog. It is not a novel idea, but a human need to express individualism that has come to "Web fruitation". A need to be an individual within the group. Customization by the end-user of a web service (e.g. GMail) or of her cell-phone theme are examples of features provided in order to meet this need.
It seems to me that this customization trend gained momentum hand-in-hand with the rise of social networks. As if the more we exposed ourselves to the community, albeit virtual, the more we wanted to express our individuality within this community.
These two (customization and social networks) are manifistations of a more general trend of increased web-presence of common folk. I see two forms of Web presence: "passive" and "active." Passive Web presence is bestowed upon us, most likely by our friendly neighborhood web crawler, search engine. If you search the Web you may find several research papers I wrote as part of my undergraduate assignments. Somehow they made their way to the Web. Active Web presence is created when we actively publish on the Web (like this blog). Sometimes we may participate in this active publication process w/o realizing it. Again, if you search for me on the web, you may find emails I have posted to some IETF working group email discussion list several good years ago.
Returning to the subject of social networks and individualism: if I examine the social networks terrain, it seems to me that the next winning feature-set for social network services will be customization and more advanced methods that will let us express our individualism. Google knows this and you can see this in the latest Gmail Themes (http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/gmail-themes.html) feature. The ever so simple feature in Gmail Chat that allows you to set your status to any string of your choosing, packs an amazing individualization power punch. I've loosley tracked the status sentences that my team members have regulary published in GMail in the past few months and it was a great source of information about the team. It was easy to identify the comedian, the cynical, and the artist in the group. Sometimes I knew if someone had a good or bad day, just by looking at their GMail Chat status string. And there were also some interesting patterns in how the group evolved their status string over time. I could definitly identify a loose "nano" social network which communicated using the status-string. Sometimes it was reminiscent of the Twitter format.
There is much more to say about the GMail Chat status message and "nano" social networks (a term that I think I have identified here first), but these subject deserve a blog entry of their own.
It seems to me that this customization trend gained momentum hand-in-hand with the rise of social networks. As if the more we exposed ourselves to the community, albeit virtual, the more we wanted to express our individuality within this community.
These two (customization and social networks) are manifistations of a more general trend of increased web-presence of common folk. I see two forms of Web presence: "passive" and "active." Passive Web presence is bestowed upon us, most likely by our friendly neighborhood web crawler, search engine. If you search the Web you may find several research papers I wrote as part of my undergraduate assignments. Somehow they made their way to the Web. Active Web presence is created when we actively publish on the Web (like this blog). Sometimes we may participate in this active publication process w/o realizing it. Again, if you search for me on the web, you may find emails I have posted to some IETF working group email discussion list several good years ago.
Returning to the subject of social networks and individualism: if I examine the social networks terrain, it seems to me that the next winning feature-set for social network services will be customization and more advanced methods that will let us express our individualism. Google knows this and you can see this in the latest Gmail Themes (http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/gmail-themes.html) feature. The ever so simple feature in Gmail Chat that allows you to set your status to any string of your choosing, packs an amazing individualization power punch. I've loosley tracked the status sentences that my team members have regulary published in GMail in the past few months and it was a great source of information about the team. It was easy to identify the comedian, the cynical, and the artist in the group. Sometimes I knew if someone had a good or bad day, just by looking at their GMail Chat status string. And there were also some interesting patterns in how the group evolved their status string over time. I could definitly identify a loose "nano" social network which communicated using the status-string. Sometimes it was reminiscent of the Twitter format.
There is much more to say about the GMail Chat status message and "nano" social networks (a term that I think I have identified here first), but these subject deserve a blog entry of their own.
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