Space for People: Suggested Forms

Do you fill in the defaults only? What does your form-filling say about you, or what it could be made to tell, if measured in great detail? Database philosophers were once deeply concerned about how field character limits – the number of letters that would fit on each line in the electronic form – would impoverish the self, just like bureaucracy turned people into numbers. People could not describe themselves in such short, mandatory lines. Now there are suggested fields, longer character limits, and free text spaces, with prospects for a more expansive self! The database has more memory. ‘Other,’ that last heading available on the form, standing for anomaly, has become ‘add category,’ helpfully offering a moment of self-definition. The database is warmer, reaching out, asking for more of you.

Elfriendo.com

Taking the work out of social networking

Elfriendo is a new MySpace? related service, founded on 30 January 2008, on the occasion of the International Delete Your MySpace? Account Day, as a remedy.

These days one hardly has time to fill in one set of fields before another update request comes in. Elfriendo reduces the number of form-filling steps to a bare minimum, without sacrificing quality or depth. People used to neglect their profiles, leaving them stale and deficient. We offer fresh sets of interests and an active look for your profile.

Our business is profilization - professionalizing, optimizing and automating your profile on MySpace? , the world's largest social networking site. Elfriendo is a service that keeps your profile active fresh.

√ You can have a profile generated for you on the basis of just a few interests.

√ You can create a profile on the basis of another profile, and that person's group of friends.

√ You can tweak your profile by comparing it to another profile's network, raising or lowering your compatibility.

Elfriendo is a Web 2.0 compliant European start-up company, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Yes! Take me there

FAQ

What is elfriendo?
elfriendo is a MySpace? related service. It's designed for people who have no time to fill in a profile, or would like to save time blending in with other fans of a certain interest. You can use elfriendo to measure compatibility of profiles and interests, to make a profile based on your interests, or to have a profile makeover when you feel your profile is no longer properly representing you. The outcomes are suggested fields, ready for you to tweak and customize.

more FAQ http://www.elfriendo.com/faq.php>

Fill Me In

Generate a New Profile - Fill Me In
It's called MySpace? , not EmptySpace? . Since no one is waiting around for another blank profile, and you don't have the hours it takes to list your DVD collection, we'll do it for you. All you have to do is enter up to three interests, or the URL for someone else's page. FillMeIn? does the rest, creating a profile you can be proud of.

Screenshot Fill me in:

Customer testimonial:

Sarah, 23 years old, Junior Public Relations Associate
"MySpace was getting boring! Everyone in my friends list is from school or college, and I was having a hard time meeting new people. Even worse, my friends were no longer checking out my profile page. I'm not much of a photographer, and I don't keep a blog either.

"When I heard about Elfriendo, I thought, definitely! I went for a profile makeover, and now I look so good, better than I expected. I've met some new friends with my new taste in music, which used to be emo : -) But best of all, my old friends were really intrigued by my new interests. They had no idea I was a big fan of Kung Fu cinema, and now I keep getting reactions about it. So... thanks!!"

• Compatibility check on last.fm:
  

I'm Doing What They're Doing

Twitter users must continually answer the question, 'What are you doing?" This project will scrape previous Twitter entries and, using collaborative filtering, suggest 'things to do'. Using a firefox plugin, Twitter users will receive suggestions as they type (similar to 'suggested search terms' in the Firefox Quick Search bar).

Smoke detection

Focusing on the London Underground, Christian Heath, Jon Hindmarsh and Paul Luff analyze work, interaction and technology in a complex organizational environment from a naturalistic analysis approach. Their focus on social pattern detection is of interest for this part of the project. London Underground personnel is trained to focus on cues that render activities visible, such as detecting smokers by looking just above the heads of people traces of smoke. When a trail of smoke is detected, a 'no smoking' message is broadcasted through the intercom. This is not a random repeated message, but a reaction to the detection of smoke.

Are there similar practices and procedures of pattern discovery online?

• last seen online (last.fm, skype)
• log in makes you first in friends list (hyves)

The 'last seen' online Last.fm:

'Last seen' Skype:

Login is top in friends lists Hyves:

Skype status:

References

Florian Schneider: imaginary property: no longer between you and the object, but you and the people you share with. (presentation at Video Vortex, 18 January 2008, http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex)

Pattern recognition in the London underground control room

Heath & Luff: "Analysis of computer supported cooperative work is no longer primarily concerned with the individual and the system, but rather the interaction between different personnel as they coordinate a range of tasks and utilise various tools." 'distributed cognition" (p. 70)

"Social distance is the elbow room with which to fulfill his particular responsibilities" (Hughes: 1956, in: Heath and Luff, p. 76)

Heath and Luff describe how the controllers talk 'out loud,' but this talk is not directed towards a colleague in the same control room. In doing this, they provide colleagues with details. "(...) it is interesting to observe that a great deal more information is made available in this way than the actual reformations."(p. 80)

Christian Heath and Paul Luff, "Collaboration and Control. Crisis Management and Multimedia Technology in Underground Line Control Rooms." Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 1, 1992, 69-94.

To Trace or to Rub

"There are two schools of thought in the social navigation debate on the web, represented by the 'tracers' and the 'rubbers'. The tracers view the surfer as the best guide to the web. Much like nineteenth-century polar explorers desiring to establish whether and how their compatriots before them actually found some sense of 'the Pole', the tracers seek evidence of previous surfer presence and pathways to determine whether and how they found some sense of 'artificial intelligence', 'botany' or whatever other topic they were researching.22 F. Spufford I May Be Some Time London 1996. Tracers look for vestiges of how surfers have found what they were after. They then plot these pathways through the sources, and search for meaning." (...)

"Rubbers look for meaning given not by the surfer routings, but by webmasters' markings, i.e., the text and hyperlinks on the sites they administer. To find the meaningful stories, the rubbers take out their white paper and black crayon, and 'rub' the markings on the stones, and in the yards. Storylines of, say, 'Global Positioning System' are found within a certain set of sites, demarcated by occurrences of links between the sites writing about gps."

Noortje Marres & Richard Rogers (1999). To Trace or to Rub: Screening the Web Navigation Debate. http://www.mediamatic.net/article-5726-en.html