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Re: [silk] "smart mobs" ? (fwd)

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-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 11:04:33 +0530
From: Udhay Shankar N <>
Reply-To: 
To: 
Subject: Re: [silk] "smart mobs" ?

Udhay Shankar N wrote: [ on 08:07 AM 7/3/02 ]

>>I can't see the site www.rheingold.com from here.
>
>The site certainly exists.

Yup, just saw it. Also read a fantastic piece on mobile virtual communities 
by Howard linked from there. The link only appears to work if the referrer 
ID is Howard's site, so here it is:

http://www.thefeature.com/index.jsp?url=article.jsp?pageid=12070

Mobile Virtual Communities
By Howard Rheingold, Jul 09 2001

Five years from now, the innovations of today's early adopters could become 
part of the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people:

Jyri Engestrom is opening a social club [1]in the middle of downtown 
Helsinki that combines physical location, virtual community, and sms messaging.

In Stockholm, Styrbjorn Horn [2] has created a mobile chat platform for 
teenagers who already use sms to "swarm" as social groups in the physical 
world.

Last Monday,  Rickard Ericsson's "Lunarstorm," [3] a virtual community that 
has captured the attention of more than 60% of Sweden's 15-25 year old 
population, added a mobile extension to its web-pages, bulletin boards, and 
chat  rooms. Lunarstorm now provides its own SIM cards to enhance its 
mobile services in ways they couldn't with traditional operator agreements. 
LunarMobil works like an ordinary mobile operator with one important 
difference; the company provides you with a unique "remote control" for 
your Lunarstorm-presence and activities. Anything you could do on 
www.lunarstorm.se, you could do from your mobile phone using standard 
SMS-messages.

During the 1990s, people socialized by way of new forums made possible by 
the Internet and accessed through their desktop computers. Millions of 
people worldwide projected their interpersonal communications into a 
nonphysical cyberspace where disembodied personalities shared knowledge, 
waged flame wars, conducted business, created industries, gossiped, 
organized, plotted, collaborated, conspired, invented, and amused: virtual 
communities. If you know where to look, it is possible to detect the first 
signs of virtual communities moving off the desktop and out of cyberspace.

It is too early to paint a detailed portrait of the social technologies of 
2010, but a look at the past and a peek at what today's earliest adopters 
are doing reveals a few hints about the general shape of the future 
mediasphere.

Social cyberspaces have been growing and mutating for a surprisingly long 
time. In the 1960s, even before the antecedent of the Internet was born, 
the experimental PLATO timesharing system included an early form of online 
message board. As soon as the ARPAnet, ancestor of the Internet, was 
invented in 1970, the programmers who built it started electronic 
distribution lists to argue about their favorite science fiction authors.

In the 1980s, people who didn't have access to the Internet invented 
PC-and-slow-modem-based BBSs - at one time, their were over 50,000 
BBSs    in North America alone. Usenet and Fidonet facilitated online 
discussions by hundreds of thousands of people long before the Internet 
became a household word.

Technology facilitates community growth

Social communication drove the growth of the Internet for two decades 
before the Web transformed the Internet into a mass medium in a matter of 
months.

Email, listservs (automated mailing lists), BBSs and Usenet newsgroups 
(online message boards that enable groups to communicate asynchronously via 
public writing over long intervals), chatrooms and IRC 
channels      (realtime  synchronous text communication among groups), 
instant messaging (one to one synchronous text communication), MUDs and 
MOOs (multi-user environments in which players socialize, build fantasy 
worlds, and engage in elaborate role-playing games) were used by hundreds 
of thousands of early enthusiasts for years before the Internet started 
growing to include millions of mainstream participants.

The Web brought an easy to use visual interface to the Internet in the 
1990, similar to the way graphic user interfaces made PCs useful to the 
non-geek masses in the 1980s. Mobile communication during the first decade 
of the 21st century will bring non-geek masses to virtual communities ý 
people who would never use a PC, but are sophisticated texters or mobile 
game-players.

When the Web brought Internet to the masses, online social communication 
platforms mutated into new forms. Now that the Net is mobilizing, expect 
virtual communities to evolve into new forms yet again.

Virtual communities and mobile communications each have their own uniquely 
powerful characteristics. When those characteristics combine, powerful 
hybrids are likely to emerge, just as the merger of the PC with the 
telephone network created a wholly new medium, the Internet.

Before speculating about the characteristics of mobile communities, it pays 
to start with the separate characteristics of virtual communities  and 
mobile communications.

Virtual communities are:

Organized around affinities, shared interests, bringing together people who 
did not necessarily know each other before meeting online. Teenagers in 
Pasadena and Osaka communicate about their shared passion for a television 
show, or a shared worry about a disease.

Many to many    media. Unlike few-to-many (broadcast) or one to one 
(telephone or SMS) media, virtual communities enable groups of people to 
communicate with many others. Every desktop, every wireless device, is 
becoming a printing press, broadcasting station, and place of assembly (as 
well as a computer and telephone).

Text-based, evolving into text plus graphics-based communications. For 
decades, online communities were built with nothing more than unformatted 
text. Web-based media bring inline graphics, animations, video, sounds, 
formatted text, links into the conversation.

Relatively uncoupled from face to face social life in geographic 
communities. People communicating worldwide about shared interests most 
often do not live close enough to meet regularly face to face.

Mobile communications   are:

Organized around known social networks. People call and message people they 
already know. Most often, you communicate with people who are already in 
your address book.

Acessible anywhere, anytime, are always on. The Internet, and all it 
affords, is no longer tied to the desktop computer and wired network, but 
has diffused into a freefloating wireless datacloud.

Text-based evolving to text and sound and graphics-based communications. 
Customized ringtones and cute graphics for SMS messages are only the 
beginning. Cameras and telephones are merging.

Closely coupled to the behavior of people in physical space, and have 
strong effects on how small social groups coordinate activities in 
geographic communities.

Mobile virtual communities are:

Many to many, desktop and mobile, always on. Virtual communities and the 
resources of the Internet are instantly available to people and their 
software agents wherever people are located - at their desks, in transit, 
at home.

Used to coordinate actions of groups in geographic space - teenagers swarm 
in   malls, young adults club-hop, activists mobilize on the street.

Game environments, social arenas, artistic media, business tools, political 
weapons  - like other virtual community media, mobile virtual communities 
will start with young people as means for entertainment and light social 
interaction, then diffuse into other institutions.

Aula

I met 23 year old entrepreneur Jyri Engestrom in a small L-shaped room very 
near the center of Helsinki, a couple of blocks from the Parliament. 
Although the all-important electricity and information conduits had been 
laid, and a floor was down, the rest of the interior space was under 
construction.

Outside the window a panoramia crossroads of buses, cars, and pedestrians 
is visible. Engestrom and his associates seek to build a social-technical 
crossroads in this place and in cyberspace, linking groups of people 
together through on-site media in the face to face place, through mobile 
communications among community members who are not physically present, and 
through a new kind of cyberplace that links the virtual and physical parts 
of the community. They call their physical and cyberplace "Aula" and are 
more focused on social experimentation than profit.

The community is starting with around 150 members who have begun to meet 
face to face and online while the physical space is under construction. 
They plan to grow by invitation and word of mouth (or word of SMS) and are 
deliberately leaving room for the community members to help design the 
communication space.

Each member keeps a tiny chip in his or her pocket, purse, or shoe, a Radio 
Frequency Identification (RFID tag) that makes information accessible to 
the mobile devices of others in the physical nightclub. Projections and 
monitors will mix virtual communication with the conversation in the club. 
I plan to revisit Aula again after it opens.

Mgage
Styrbjorn Horn, who I met in Stockholm a few days after I first visited 
Aula in Helsinki, is a generation older than Jyri and his friends. Horn is 
in his thirties, with a baby at home, and although he is also focusing his 
efforts on social innovations online, he is definitely an entrepreneur of 
the traditional business variety.

His business, mgage.com, is based on the social revolution that has swept 
through the teenage milieu of Scandinavia, UK, Japan, Korea, and 
Philippines - the use of SMS messages, hundreds a day, to weave together 
ever-changing social groups. His system makes it possible for teenagers to 
maintain continuous presence in their virtual worlds, moving to SMS from 
online chat, and back.
Lunarstorm
Another entrepreneur I met in Stockholm, Rickard Ericsson, has been 
building virtual communities for nearly a decade, and he's still in his 
early 20s.

A year and a half ago, he decided to turn his passion into a business and 
teamed up with Kjell Sallein to create Lunarstorm, an online community that 
enables its teenage members to build their own web pages, post pictures of 
themselves and their friends, create their own message boards and chat 
rooms, and to rate each other's pages for coolness.

Lunarstorm was instantly successful, reaching over one million members in 
less than a year. More than ten thousand people are online at one time. 
Almost all of them high-school students - the same group that builds 
rituals and customs around SMS. This summer, Lunarstorm is adding a mobile 
component, so that community members can remain linked to one another 
mobile devices when they are away from their PCs.
Hints of tomorrow's lifestyle
What do these early adopters and intersecting trends portend for the future?

First and foremost, new mobile forms of virtual community will generate an 
enormous amount of traffic and revenue: around the world, billions of SMS 
messages already are transmitted every day, and this is just the beginning 
of the hockey stick growth curve.

Most important for the emergence of a services industry that could be more 
robust than Internet-based business models, mobile telephone and SMS users, 
unlike Internet users, are already accustomed to paying small amounts for 
each message. Any new social communication medium that can piggyback on 
telephone billing ("Botfighters," the mobile, location-based game from It's 
Alive [4] in Stockholm, or the Bridget Jones messages from Riot-e [5] in 
the UK are early examples) has a chance to win big.

Second, it will mean that participants in online communities will remain in 
continuous contact over multiple platforms on desktops and in mobile 
devices, and will be used to coordinate group activities in the geographic 
world, thus blending affinity-based and local-acquaintance-based social 
communication. If the adoption patterns taken by PCs and by SMS messaging 
are any clue to future events, expect the first communities to be built by 
12-25 year olds.

Third, vendors and operators can create tools and platforms, but the killer 
apps are going to be social, not technical, and will be invented by the 
users on the street, not engineers in laboratory.

Therefore, the future of mobile online communities are more likely to be 
discovered than designed, detected than deployed. Enterprises that hope to 
compete in this space must direct constant attention to tuning their 
antennae to what is happening on the streets. Emerging social customs in 
real populations, not laboratory R&D, will drive the growth phase of the 
mobile virtual community era.
With a background in technology writing, Howard Rheingold is the world's 
foremost authority on virtual communities. His 1988 article in Whole Earth 
Review, titled "Virtual Communities," contained the first-ever published 
reference to the concept. His 1993 book, The Virtual Community, was the 
first work on the phenomenon of social communication in cyberspace.

Howard served as an online host for the Well since 1985, and sat on the 
Well Board of Directors. In 1994, he  was the founding Executive Editor of 
HotWired, the first commercial  webzine with a virtual community known as 
Threads. He now runs a private  community, Brainstorms.

[1] http://www.aula.cc/pdf/aula_eng.pdf
[2] http://www.mgage.com/
[3] http://www.lunarstorm.se/
[4] http://www.itsalive.com/
[5] http://www.riot-e.com/

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