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Come say hi at CHI

The “Month of CHI”, as our own Peter likes to call it due to the excessive number of CHI-related events, continues! After a well-attended CHI Sampler workshop yesterday at Y!RB, we are moving on (as Colbert would say). The CHI2007 workshops have started today. Rahul Nair of our lab is one of the organizers of today’s Mobile Spatial Interaction Workshop - I can’t wait to hear about it.

Other than that, we are presenting two full papers at CHI - come see us at these sessions (I almost promise that this is the last piece of CHI-related shameless self-promotion):

• I will present “Over-Exposed? Privacy Patterns and Considerations in Online and Mobile Photo Sharing”, Monday 16:30-18:00, “Photo Sharing” session, ROOM: A4 & A5 (I am still trying to figure out how am I expected to present in two rooms at the same time)
• Morgan Ames will present “Why We Tag? Motivations for Annotation in
  Mobile and Online Media”, Wednesday 11:30-13:00, “Tags, Tagging & Notetaking” session, ROOM: B1-B4

I wrote about the “Why We Tag” paper here before - and will try to post a synopsis of the other paper here soon.

Throughout the conference bunch of us will be bumming around the premises. You can recognize us by the Nokia phones running ZoneTag. Or follow us on Flickr to see where we are, real time. Or just look for name tags that read “Yahoo! Research Berkeley”, and hope that it’s not an imposter.

Why we love Upcoming.org

Our good friends at Upcoming.org have just launched a re-vamp of their site. To me, Upcoming.org has become one of the top four cannot-do-without web services - together with Flickr, Y!Mail, and a certain other web-based mail program.

So here’s one small reason why I love Upcoming: because it recommends the Red Elvises (event link) when I look at the upcoming Y!RB Brain Jam event.

The reason, of course, it that Upcoming is a social app. My friends work at Y!RB. My friends like the Red Elvises. Therefore, if you happen to go to Y!RB events, you are likely to want to see the Red Elvises.

This also reminds me what I like about Y!RB. But that’s a different story. Check out the new Upcoming - today!

Nokia N95 - The one phone to save us all?

Last friday the mailman brought us a great present - a production Nokia N95. Nokia refers to it as a ‘multimedia computer’ and it is by far the most eagerly anticipated Nokia phone in recent memory. The specs promise a GPS enabled, ultra-connected, super imaging, number crunching mobile device - could this finally be the ultimate phone that the geohacking community has been waiting for? After unboxing the phone I spent the last few days playing with it (It’s a hard job but someones got to do it ). Here is a my quick review:

Reasons to buy one
1) GPS with FREE maps: I can’t empasize enough the significance of the free GPS mapping software on the phone. Unlike other phones which levy a monthly charge, Nokia has commoditized GPS by giving you the basic location services for free and only charging for the premium voice directions. You can now navigate the world for free and it’s only a matter of time before more and more software and services start making use of the available GPS information.
2) 5 megapixel camera: The camera quality is excellent and takes very clear images both indoors and out. The auto-focus is pretty good and you have plenty of controls to fine tune the white balance, ISO, etc… There is some noise if you view the pictures at their full resolution but there is more than enough quality to print on the screen. Video is recorded at 640 x 480 resolution and can easily replace many cheap camcorders. The camera startup time is also much better than it was on the N73.
3) Music player: The dedicated music buttons, LOUD stereo speakers and built in headphone jack make the N95 an excellent music player. It can play several different audio formats and you can load music onto it using the Windows Media Player. The super quick startup on the player is another plus.
4) ZoneTag: The ZoneTag client takes advantage of the built in GPS to provide you with even more accurate tag suggestions and gives you 2 click upload of you cameraphone pictures (The 3rd edition client I used is still under development and we should be releasing shortly).
5) Connectivity: The WiFi is especially easy to use and active standby screen has been updated to show WiFi status. The HSDPA and Bluetooth make it one of the most connected devices out there.
6) Design: The phone feels great in my hand and is surprisingly light. The keypad has large keys and is very good for text messaging. The dual slider is a great idea and its a great way to switch modes. Full marks to the Nokia Industrial Design team.
7) Screen: The screen is bright, wide and high resolution - the landscape mode is excellent for both video and web browsing.

Reasons to pass
1) Terrible Battery Life: This one seems to be an issue that everyone is running into, the battery life on the device just plain sucks. I was getting just 6 hours of battery life when the GPS was on. People are trying to justify it by saying that bleeding edge features are power hungry - I don’t care, the battery just isn’t good enough.
2) 2 GB memory limit: The 2GB limit on the MicroSD is ridiculous. A device with such excellent music capabilities should be able to hold more than 2 GB of music at a time. Even the camcorder functionality is compromised because 2 GB will barely hold 90 minutes of video.
3) Price: $750.

In the end I must say that Nokia has hit it out of the park on everything except the battery life. I can’t understand how they could have failed so miserably on the one thing that is most important in any mobile device - mobility. If I have to use the phone tethered to a power cable all the time I might as well buy a laptop for the same money. If they were to triple the battery life and drop to price to $600 it would fly off the shelves, but right now, I think most people are better off waiting for the iPhone - hopefully that will live up to some of its hype.

Why We Tag?

When ZoneTag was released early last year, we made it easier for users to tag Flickr photos directly from their phone. An incidental test, for example, quickly showed that on average, a public ZoneTag photo has twice as many human-entered tags (2.2 tags when we checked) as a public photo from another uploader running on similar phones (0.9 tags).

It was also immediately clear that, even with ZoneTag, many users do not tag their photos before upload, and some users never tag their photos at all. In fact, even in Flickr, most users do not tag their photos. Presumably, tagging is something to be encouraged because it makes the system more usable for each individual user, creates more information for the community, and so forth. Let’s imagine for now that tagging is indeed a behavior to be encouraged.

As a first step, we set out to understand the tagging behavior and motivations of people that do tag in ZoneTag (and Flickr). In a retrospective study led by Morgan Ames, one of our “rock star” interns, we conducted a series of interviews designed to extract this information. The study will be presented as a full paper in the upcoming CHI2007 conference.

The primary interview method we employed in our study was “photo elicitation”. This method is borrowed from anthropology — the idea of using photos (sometimes taken by the interviewee) to trigger and frame the discussion. Professor Nancy van House at UC Berkeley’s I-School has adapted this method for use in cameraphone studies: use the photos the interviewees have taken to trigger discussion about the circumstances of the photo capture and other information around the photos (in our case, the photo’s tags). The cameraphone study of Tim Kindberg, Mirjana Spasojevic, Rowanne Fleck and Abigail Sellen also had a foundational impact on our work - read it! We were lucky to have Mirjana comment and suggest improvements for our paper before submission.

To summarize the main findings in our work, we believe that Flickr is a vibrant, successful tagging platform because tags on Flickr have multiple, pervasive benefits. The interviews surfaced a taxonomy of motivations for tagging, which every single participant in our study had multiple motivations from the taxonomy come into play for every photo they have taken. And I will explain.

Here is a figure that illustrates the taxonomy developed by Morgan:

The taxonomy is broken into two dimensions, functionality and target/sociality.

• The Organization/Self square (upper left) is the classic reason for labeling or tagging any type of content: being able to find the content later. This is the primary reason why people (should) label their photos on Picasa or iPhoto, but rarely do.
• The next square, Communication/Self on the upper right, is akin to the reason you write notes on the margins of your printed photo albums: to help yourself recall the context of capture, or the non-obvious details about the content of the image like the names of the people in it.

The bottom (social) part of the taxonomy figure is where Flickr makes a difference.

• The Organization/Social square (bottom left) reflects the motivation of people to tag their photos so that their photos will be discovered by others. When discovered by others, the photo gets more views, maybe even “favorited”, and the photographer gets some good ol’ vibe. Now, why would people need that vibe? This question edges into social psychology and is out of our scope for today…
• The Communication/Social square (bottom right) identifies the motivation to tag in order to communicate information about the photo or its context to other people. For example, a benefit of adding the “Red Elvises” tag, to a picture taken at their concert, is that my friends would know what the picture is about, and that I attended said concert.

An interesting point is that our interviewees often discussed aspects related to Communication/Social in terms of known others (family or friends), while aspects related to Organization/Social often referred to the general public. In other words, they didn’t care much about explaining their photos to strangers, and on the other hand, also didn’t care much about helping their friends find particular photos…

You can refer to the paper (on our our publication page) for more details about the methodology; reflections on the effect of suggested tags; and implications of our work for designers of tagging systems everywhere (briefly: make sure your tags “go a long way” and serve a number of purposes). If reading is not your “thing”, come to Y!RB’s Brain Jam on April 13th to see Morgan presenting this work (our other CHI paper on privacy will also be presented), or just catch the presentation on Wednesday, May 2nd at CHI 2007.

Things You Can Do on the New Jersey Turnpike, Chapter 1: Checking In

Another technology barrier was broken, at least for me. I was able to use my Nokia N80, while driving (ok, riding, I was not actually driving, or at least won’t admit to have been driving) to check in for my Continental flight.

I used the phone’s built-in MiniMap web browser (presented at CHI2006) which, although still not quite perfect, is quite an improvement from previous web browsers on Nokia phones. Mobile and small-screen browsers have certainly advanced since Orkut Buyukkokten (yes, that Orkut) was working on the PowerBrowser in the office next to me in late 2000.

In 2007, within a few minutes, I was able to navigate to Continental airlines website, log in to my account, find my recent reservation, view its details, refresh the reservation page at 5:40pm sharp (exactly 24 hours before my flight), click through to start the check-in process, and change seats(!) using the seat navigator on the Continental site. I was able to do everything but print the boarding pass, which I easily obtained from the machine at the airport. By 2009 I expect to be able to do the security electronically and print my boarding pass from thin air.

I wonder if this little success (as you may have noticed, I was pretty happy about the experience) was due to a particularly powerful mobile browser, an all-browser-friendly Continental web site (Windows IE not required!) or both. Has anyone tried the same feat with different airlines websites or mobile browsers?

This post was brought to you from the leg-roomy 8A exit-row seat I scored on the New Jersey turnpike. Now, if only I could publish the post from this seat…