Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

20
Jun

Do We Live In Cities?

   Posted by: Adam   in Uncategorized

As many of my classmates move away to other places to begin their careers, several have expressed either happiness or sorrow at moving to a “big city.” Some enthusiastically embrace the idea of city life while others dislike the lack of a strong community. One common thread is that they all note the “size of the city” and worry about how many friends they’ll have and how many hangouts. After a lot of thought, I’m not sure these criteria are really what people are concerned about. Instead, I think they are dummy variables, used for self-justification and explaining to others.

Wherever you live, you have a circle of close friends and a wider network of acquaintance friends. In most cases, your close friends tend to know each other as close friends. They may have other close friends but the majority of them form a closed network. If we were to model this, it would look something like this:

What I am implying is that the size of your city isn’t a major criteria in the size of your intimate network. This is largely determined by personality traits, preferences, length of residency in the community, etc. But what about the other concern, number of venues?

This issue is probably more realistic than the size of network issue. However, it also doesn’t seem as important as people make it out to be. Consider how many places you visit in a typical 2-week period: perhaps 2 bookshops, 3 coffeeshops, 5 restaurants, etc. Now consider how many times you visit those same places in a 3-month period. Over that same 3-month period, how many places do you visit only once? For myself, and for the couple of people I’ve talked to, the number of places we visit tends to be fairly low and fairly constant. Once I find a great coffeeshop, I tend to go back there repeatedly.

In a large city, someone such as myself would probably end up with a similarly sized pool of regular haunts with limited exploration of other places. I believe this pool would not grow much in a larger city. Instead, the geographic distance between the locations might expand. In essence, a city, for me, would function in the same way a town would, only with greater geographic dispersion.

Am I saying that the town vs city argument is pointless? No. There are still benefits and drawbacks to cities. For example, say my haunts include locations A, B, and C. In a smaller community, my friends may be more likely to have congruent sets of haunts. In a city, we may have less overlap. Additionally, there are the considerations of services like public transport or airports, career options, etc.

What is interesting, and what may be worth studying, is why people think network size and number of haunts are major considerations in selecting a place to live. This may help us to understand the disparity between what people say they want from virtual communities (social networking sites as well as the internet as a whole) and what they actually want.

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28
May

Barcodes for Life

   Posted by: Adam   in Internet, Technology trends, Uncategorized

As technology moves forward so quickly, there are certainly those among us who give up on staying current.  For the most part, technology dropouts (or perhaps Luddites) are able to function quite well in society.  History will record that Bill Clinton sent exactly one e-mail while in office as President.

However, in some parts of the world, it is getting harder and harder to function on a day-to-day basis without utilizing fairly modern technology.  In Helsinki, public transport schedules have been electronically tied to tracking programs so you can immediately find out how much longer you will need to wait for a bus or train.

The way this works is that the bus clocks in via RFID at each stop.  This data is sent to a central server which updates how far ahead of or behind schedule that bus is.  A rider at a bus stop points his or her cell phone camera at the bus stop’s barcode and takes a picture.  This picture is recognized as a unique identity number by the cell phone which then sends a text message of that number to the server.  The server responds to the text message by sending a reply to the rider’s phone with the estimated time of arrival for the next bus.

While paper schedules are still posted for the less technologically-enabled, the city is considering phasing paper schedules out in favor of this dynamic system.  This will force riders who do not use the technology to impose upon those who do or learn the technology themselves.

Moving a step further, GetWickd is a combination clothing seller and dating service.  Each customer is given a unique customer id and barcode.  Each time the customer buys clothing from the site, he or she inputs this number and the barcode is silkscreened onto the item.  The idea is that a passerby who sees a barcode on, for instance, a T-shirt will use their phone to read the barcode and will automatically load the wearer’s profile in their phone’s browser.  Similar technology exists to send those browsers to your blog or other web page.

The major adoption problem for this technology is the same one that faced the videophone; the user base network externality.  No piece of social technology is useful in a vacuum.  Therefore, people will only adopt this technology once they see that others have already adopted it.  What’s the point in having a barcode shirt if no-one can read it? And what’s the point of having the software to read barcodes on your phone unless enough people have barcode shirts?  The geek effect may provide an initial user base but will it be enough of a beachhead to establish a market desire for the technology?  Companies will need to establish a single common database (there are already competing standards) if they are to gain consumer acceptance.

The idea, however, raises an interesting possibility.  Since it costs money to maintain the database of site-code linkages, could we see a future where clothing expenditures are no longer a one-time event but a subscription-based model?

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