Tuesday, February 24. 2009
We’ve noted Facebook’s gradual crawl into the realm of lifestreaming – showing friends’ activities from outside services like YouTube, Flickr, and Delicious in your News Feed. Today, AOL’s $850 million social network Bebo is piling into the space too, with a slew of new aggregation features that build on the additions made back in December.
The big new twist on Bebo’s lifestreaming features is that it will automatically import all of your friends’ activity on the different services you register, even if those friends aren’t Bebo users. This functionality comes by way of Socialthing, the social aggregator that AOL acquired last summer, and is a similar but more automated concept to FriendFeed’s “imaginary friends.”
At launch, Bebo is offering support for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Delicious. That’s a smaller number of services than the competitors, but the company is hoping that with its unique ability to pull in activities from your disparate friends automatically, it can make up ground. Another way the company hopes to do that is by getting celebrities into lifestreaming – they tout the fact that a number of prominent artists like Miley Cyrus and All-American Rejects are already using the features.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Socialthing hadn’t even left private beta when it was purchased by AOL, but it did seem to make social aggregation a lot easier to get excited about, since it leveraged your existing social networks and didn’t entail having to find a whole bunch of new people to follow, ala FriendFeed. There’s also AIM integration coming, wherein AIM profiles become Bebo profiles, which could lure millions of new people into the site.
AOL and Bebo have a huge audience and in many ways a better, more mainstream take on an idea that has proven successful so far with early adopters. Will it be enough to get the masses into social aggregation and prove that AOL didn’t massively overpay for Bebo? Probably only if tens of millions of people cling to it, versus the hundreds of thousands that use existing social aggregators.
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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
Bebo Logo Evolution
FriendFeed and 8 Other Lifestreaming Services
Bebo London Office (Video)
Bebo Partners with Yahoo Search: Acquisition Imminent?
AIM Adds Lifestreaming Features with BuddyUpdates
Current.tv in Bebo Deal
Bebo, Orange to Launch Bebo Mobile
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Via Mashable
Personal comment:
Les liens additionnels de l'article de Mashable pointent vers tout une série d'"aggrégateurs sociaux". C'est évidemment une nouvelle tendance pour tous les réseaux sociaux, nouvellement labellée "Lifestreaming". Toute sa vie, en stream et en ligne, pour ses "friends"!
Monday, February 23. 2009
A new exhibition called Forest, curated by Cécile Martin, opens up tomorrow night in Montreal. For the show, "artists and architects have joined forces to propose a new vision of the forest."
 There are three pavilions in all: "three installations that invite one to penetrate and explore the movements and dangers of the canopy, soil and hidden dangers of the forest." They include the poetically named "From Chernobyl to Montreal, the Incandescent Zen Garden," whose creators note that "the natural phenomena of radioactivity and sound waves are amplified," with part of the installation "illuminated night and day by a red light, the same one that made the forest – the Red Forest – adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor vibrate."
This slightly unclear image nonetheless leaves me wondering what the biological effects might be if you could cause a several-acre test-forest to vibrate constantly: what strange roots and branches would grow? Would constant vibration cause radically new tree structures to grow – or just make for some very happy plants?
It'd be like the sound farm, only more tactile – and far stranger.
A perpetual earthquake as a lab for cultivating the unnatural.
The other two pavilions, meanwhile, are "The Macrocosm of Fiber or the Filtering Pavilion" and "The Mobile Branch, A Forest of Hypnosis and Vertigo." The latter project, a collaboration between architect Philip Beesley – whose work was explored here a few years ago – and artist Patrick Beaulieu, is described a kind of animatronic thicket: "A raised three-dimensional flooring and a cover propelled at 300 rotations per minute form a vibrating dance of branches and twigs, constituting a human-sized space of the in-between from which humans are nevertheless excluded."
You wander into a forest – only to realize that it's not a forest at all, but a vast machine...
There are a series of workshops on Friday and Saturday, as well – so if you're anywhere near Montreal, check it out! Tell them you heard about it on BLDGBLOG.
Implant Matrix, we read, is "an interactive geotextile that could be used for reinforcing landscapes and buildings of the future." It is a responsive latticework that, installed beneath soil, would act as a kind of a terrestrial prosthesis, a local replacement for the earth's surface. An earth surface machine.

The Implant can also be used, however, as a way to treat "an architectural building skin as a responsive textile," facilitating "active exchanges with building occupants." In the process, the machine would exhibit "mechanical empathy."
 
Which means what, exactly?
"Mechanical empathy" is described by the project's designers – Philip Beesley Architect of Toronto – as a kind of architectural eroticism. So if you're lonely... reach out and touch your house: "The components of this system are mechanisms that react to human occupants as erotic prey. The elements respond with subtle grasping and sucking motions. Arrays of ‘whisker’ capacitance sensors and shape-memory alloy actuators are used to achieve sensitive reflexive functions. The interactive elements operate in chained, rolling swells, producing a billowing motion. This motion creates a diffuse peristaltic pumping that pulls air and organic matter through the occupied space."

The assembly, in other words, with its micro-mechanical nerve endings, seems to mimic orgasm... Perhaps giving new meaning to earthquakes. (Read more in this PDF).
Two more, decidely cinematic, views of the Implant Matrix:
 
Of course, there is a bewildering array of other such projects by Philip Beesley Architect featured on their website, including Cybele, a kind of rubberized terrain-machine on stilts –
 
– which, seen from above in this next image, offers its own miniature landscape, another earth surface machine.

Then there's the hypnotically delicate Orpheus Filter, with its shivering infrastructure of virus-like bladders arranged in hanging constellations and blurred carousels (below).
   
But you can also see many, many more interactive machine-sculptures – like the William Burroughsian Orgone Reef, the amazing Hiving Quilt, or even the Reflexive Membrane, which looks like some sort of artificially intelligent alien surgical device – over at Philip Beesley Architect's online gallery. Then you should hire them to design something for you.
(Abstractly related: Strandbeestmovie. With huge thanks to Eric Bury for the tip! And... I just saw that Tropolism also featured the Implant Matrix, so check out their coverage for a bit more).
Personal comment:
Back in 2006 in Montreal, a very strange, intriguing and experimental "architecture" by Philip Beesley architects.

Is there finally a news outlet that steps into the information design terrain, which is seemingly dominated by The New York Times? TimeSpace [washingtonpost.com] is an interactive map that allows users to navigate articles, photos, video and commentary from around the globe. One can discover news hot-spots where coverage is clustered, use the slider timeline to illustrate peaks in coverage, or customize news searches to a particular day or specific hour.
Other news portals with maps include:
- SiloBreaker
- Life24
- What's Up?
- News Attention Map
- Vanishing Point
- NewsQuakes
- Yahoo! NewsGlobe
- TextMap
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Via Information Aesthetics
Personal comment:
Un Google Map mashup et "data design" par le Washington Post: mapping et concentration des news (du quotidien j'imagine) sur la carte mondiale. Petit détail: avec une variation temporelle.
Wednesday, February 18. 2009
That was quick. A day after trying to defend changes to its Terms of Use, Facebook has pulled a 180 and decided to revert to its previous terms.
Earlier today, the company began polling its users about the controversial changes, with only 6 percent supporting them and 56 percent opposing (the other 38 percent simply responded “don’t know”). We posted the same poll on Mashable and the results were far more decisive – 88 percent voting to revert, 7 percent to keep, and 5 percent indifferent (as of 11pm PT).
Once again, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the one breaking the news. In a blog post, he writes, “Going forward, we’ve decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.”
In a smart response to what I’ve previously characterized as a breakdown in communication more than anything else, the company has also established a Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities group, where members are encouraged to “give input and suggestions on Facebook’s Terms of Use.”
Smart move, Facebook. Unlike the breakdown over Beacon, which lasted for weeks, Facebook has diffused this crisis in a matter of days. Of course, it could’ve been prevented in the first place by clearly explaining the changes before posting them, but it appears Facebook has taken steps to ensure that this issue doesn’t plague the social network in the future.
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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
56 Percent of Facebook Users Want the Old ToS Back
AT&T Changing its Questionable ToS
Facebook Search in Your Inbox
Facebook Music?
Facebook Responds to Concerns Over Terms of Service
Scoble Caught Hacking Facebook
What Happened on Friday, May 30th of 2008?
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Via Mashable
Tuesday, February 17. 2009
Today’s hoopla over changes to the Facebook Terms of Service have prompted a rare blog post from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In the post, Zuckerberg falls short of apologizing for the changes, but rather, uses the opportunity to explain why Facebook more or less keeps your content indefinitely.
He writes, “When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.” This is true – without making this part of the Terms of Service, someone could technically claim they didn’t know anyone would see their Status Updates, as silly as that may sound.
Continuing, Zuckerberg explains why the site keeps content indefinitely. “When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work.”
That makes sense as well, but I don’t think it gets to the heart of the issue that has people so concerned about Facebook’s terms of service, as the company fails to answer the question of why this piece of the TOS was removed: “You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”
Ultimately, Facebook’s stance can be summarized as “trust us, we won’t do anything bad.” Zuckerberg writes, “In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work.”
In the end, this fiasco isn’t going to change the way I use Facebook, and I imagine it won’t do much to alter other user’s plans either. Their terms of service, like those of any other company operating on the Web, are designed to put their interests first, and eliminate just about any potential legal risk that their lawyers can think up.
Once again though - like with Beacon and the Facebook re-design revolt - Facebook has done a poor job of communicating the changes, leaving Zuckerberg on the defense instead of proactively keeping users informed on potentially controversial moves the company is making.
Chances are Facebook won’t abuse the privileges they are granted under their TOS. The backlash over doing something insane like using member photos without permission would be enormous and Facebook is smart enough not to do it. But as a user, it’s another reminder that what you do on the Internet is probably permanent, and much of it, probably outside your control.
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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:
The Daily Poll: Will Facebook Cave to Beacon Critics?
Rest Assured, Facebook Looks Out For the Children
Twitter Updates Now Connected to Facebook Status
Facebook Deleting Accounts, Profiting from Tragedy
The Daily Poll: Are You a Fan of Facebook Pages?
Facebook to Offer Block Out Options for Advertisers
Fuser’s MySpace Killer Just Got Meaner
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Via Mashable
Personal comment:
Mais quand même, le "terms of service" de Facebook stipule donc dorénavant que les données ne sont pas effacées lorsque l'on ferme son compte et que, surtout, tout le contenu déposé sur le site de Facebook lui appartient, "pour toujours"! On ne pourra pas se plaindre de ne pas avoir été mis au courant chers "friends"...
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