It’s a bit over a week since the workshop on Forgetful Interfaces. I proposed the workshop because I had a feeling that simply storing the data we collect about ourselves may not be such a good idea. To my joy and surprise, all proposed workshops happened, including mine! However, because my thoughts on Forgetful Interfaces were still uncrystallized, I decided to turn the workshop into a discussion. And what a discussion it was. Thanks to all of you who took part, it was truly amazing.

Now, originally I had approached the subject from the perspective of privacy, which turned out to be perhaps the least interesting aspect of forgetful interfaces. We’ve arrived at three different aspects, and there is a fourth one which was introduced to me, outside of the workshop, by Irwin Oostindie. These aspects are privacy, filtering, user experience and security (the latter proposed by Irwin). But, first of all, what is a forgetful interface? In my view, a forgetful interface hides artifacts from view. Here I’ve used the term artifacts rather than data, because forgetful interfaces are about data in a social context. I’m specifically not talking about deleting the artifacts. They’re still there, just harder to get at. Just like how you may forget things yourself, but given enough clues your brain can bring them back.

So, with that out of the way, let’s look at the aspects of forgetful interfaces.

This all started as having a little fun with Ruby and routing tables, and was inspired by similar quantification at a Reboot conference (7 or 8 I think). In short, I registered all unique MAC addresses (hardware addresses of the network cards) which ended up in my laptop’s address resolution table, and did a tally to count the MAC addresses registered to Apple.

In total, over the course of 1.5 conference days, I counted 389 machines on the network, of which 225 had MAC addresses registered to Apple. That’d bring the Mac usage at LIFT to about 58%.

Some caveats regarding the research method, I’ve tried to discount the MAC addresses of the WiFi router I was connected to, and included my own machine in the count. I’m unsure of how the Bonjour protocol made it more likely to find other Macs rather than non-Macs. However, because this is an average over 1.5 days, I hope I caught as many non-Macs as possible. The Mac usage percentage tended to hover well over 60% in individual snapshots.

It’s intriguing how different computer usage amongst the techy crowd is from general market share patterns.

For those coming to the workshops on Wednesday, I’m organizing a workshop on forgetful interfaces. What’s that, you may ask? Basically an interface that forgets… imagine Flickr where photos simply disappear from the public view after a month. Is this good, or bad? Why would we need forgetful interfaces and what would they look like? We’ll put it all together, together, in the workshop.

Forgetful Interfaces Workshop, Wednesday, 9:00.

To those arriving in Geneva on Tuesday (or earlier!),

Why wait until Wednesday to meet? Let's meet up Tuesday night! I remember last year we went to a nice play in one of Geneva's parks, where the staff treated us with a bit of suspicion… if anyone can suggest a meet-up place for this year, that'd be great!

(Yes, sorry, I don't know enough of Geneva to pick a spot myself)

See you all soon!

Computers are discrete. Governed by 1s and 0s, they dutifully record all our traces. Half of the time, that’s not so bad. It’s a good thing my bank doesn’t lose track of my money. But when it comes to that other half, when we create and publish huge amounts of material online, perhaps it is too bad.

I believe there are two kinds of content, let’s name them ephemeral content and solid content. Ephemeral content has a short life span, the Jaiku I just posted about my train schedule looses its value the moment I arrive (1h45 from now). Pictures I take during the day with my camera phone are mostly ephemeral as well. They tell a very small story whose context is quickly lost. The pictures I took during my stay in Geneva for LIFT 07, however, are part of a photo album on Flickr and very much solid. I wouldn’t care if my Jaiku message got lost, but seeing those photos disappear would make me sad.

And yet, Jaiku stores my messages forever.