Adrien’s blog
Stuff I like, stuff I do, stuff I make

Adding cameras to our mobile phones made people want to capture every moments, mostly for sharing it with friends (e.g. with MMS and/or Social Networking Sites).

What if we could capture these moments with public cameras that are spread all around our cities?

I could buy a picture of me driving on the highway, thanks to speed cameras, without exceeding speed limits (and pay expensive fines).
I could watch and share the video of myself falling on the pavement, as I did this morning, thanks to CCTV.
I could make a low-cost (and low-burden) music video (like did The Get Out Clause band), thanks to underground and other urban cameras.
…

Your ideas could make cameras more “social” as you could use them for fun (and thus more sympathetic), and it could also generate some revenue.

I think that, in our transition from hierarchical structures to folksonomies (tags) for indexing our stuff (e.g. videos, bookmarks, songs…), we might have forgotten something important: the control of visibility of our stuff. Let me explain my thought.

Let’s say you have a photo which is very personal and that you only show to very close friends and family only. Will you put it in your main photo album? Maybe not… Instead you would probably hide it in some secret place which is hard (or at least not obvious) to find (e.g. in an enveloppe inside your drawer, under your bed…).

Let’s move to the digital world, before the flickr and the web 2.0, we used to store our photo files in hierarchical structures: folders and sub-folders which most file systems rely on. This structure was efficient to organize your photos with a personal indexing scheme. For example you could decide to make one folder per event. For each event you would make one sub-folder per person who took the photos. This is a two-degree hierarchical structure. One characteristic of hierarchical file structures is that it’s easy to lose files, by not remembering where we had put it. This characteristic also applies to your appartment (or your bedroom) because it contains several objects (pieces of furniture) that can contain objects and so on… This makes it easy to hide stuff, and to make some stuff more visible (by not hiding them).

Now, by using tags (like on flickr, delicious, and other “web 2.0″ sharing platforms), we’re flattening our indexing structure, we cannot hide stuff inside other stuff. Instead, we just put sticky notes on a big mess of objects that have the same level of visibility. It’s like if we put all our photos on the ground, there is no furniture nor photo album to hide them.

Some intuitive way must exist for us to make our shared stuff more or less visible… For me, manipulating “privacy settings” is a brutal function for end users. Any thoughts?

Today’s thought: How to keep the context of a URL shared by a contact when bookmarking this URL? By context, I mean: meta-information that describes why you might be interested by the shared URL, who sent it to you, when, and also gives you a way to reply/annotate/comment this sharing after consumption.

Confused? Okay, let me give an example use case (which happened to me this morning):

1. A friend sends you an email saying “you must watch this amazing documentary, it gives constructive criticism of your research approach i think: http://youtube/giheughe, what would you reply to the question at minute 16.22?“
2. You already have several emails in your inbox with links to lengthy videos to watch. You would like to make some space in your inbox, but you don’t have time to watch these videos right now.

…and possible solutions to clear your inbox and keep a reference to URLs for later consumption:

1. Solution 1 (no context): you “bookmark” these videos in a personal “todo-playlist” in order to watch them later. But if you do that, you lose the context of these shared URLs (i.e. for the definition of context, read above). Thus you don’t know in which mindset to watch the video and where to put feedback responding to your friend’s email.
2. Solution 2 (webmail): if you use a good webmail (i.e. each email has its own URL, e.g. gmail.com), you can bookmark the email of your friend. This solution makes it possible to archive the email to make some space in your inbox, and to keep the context of shared URLs.
3. Solution 3 (social-networking style): you bookmark the videos’ URLs in your “todo-playlist” (which you could also call “TV” btw), and, when you watch them, the user interface shows you the context of this shared video. E.g. the web page that embeds the video displays a frame with the name and photo/avatar of the friend who sent you this video, along with his recommendation message (e.g. the content of his email), and a link (or even a textbox) to respond. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Just a thought I wanted to share: have you ever been frustrated of not being able to bookmark a file of your computer on delicious? …to find the URL of a file (e.g. an image) you downloaded, in order to share this URL instead of sending the file? … or event to be able to work seamlessly on any document from any computer, with or without installed software? and I won’t even talk about synchronization of files between people, computers and devices… (is that the actual last version of the document?)

If feel so, you’re just like me! Wouldn’t it be nice that we only work with URLs instead of OS-specific and computer-specific local file paths? That way we could leverage thousands of cutting-edge tools available on the internet, in order to better manage, annotate, visualize, share and thus better browse through information!

Of course putting everything on the internet is scary because we’re not always online, and because some stuff sometimes disappear from the web (e.g. older versions of software which are not free anymore)… But what if we “cache” our web-stored information on our computers instead, and assume that the web-hosted version is the reference of the resources (with an Unique Resource Identifier… URI!). This URI could lead to several hosting spaces, including private storage (e.g. computers, devices, portable hard drives), that would keep synchronized.

I promise that, if such a system exists (and works well of course), I would never have to keep downloaded research papers on my computer any longer!