“Vicky bought a Izola shower curtain linen at 10% off on Fab.com. “

“Peter pinned a picture on Pinterest”

“Asaf viewed a feed on Pixable.”

Many of you probably have seen posts similar to those at some point on your Facebook Ticker or Newsfeed. There are several actions you might take, 1) try to turn them off, 2) click on the post to see why your friends are so obsessed with those services and keep posting them, or 3) if you happen to use the same service, start feeling self-conscious knowing the content you are consuming is also seen by others. No matter what action you take, one common thing you will come across is that most of the content is automatically shared without the sharer’s awareness, and this automatic sharing function is usually set by default by third-party services.

Facebook revealed “Open Graph” last year, where Facebook will share user’s activities on sites outside of Facebook with their friends. Whether it is listening to a song on Spotify, watching a video on Viddy, or reading an article on The Guardian, everything can be shared on Facebook for friends to see and join in. According to Zuckerberg, the idea of Open Graph is to combine the “actions” users engage in both on and off Facebook into a single spot, and hence create “a completely new class of social apps than what was ever possible before”.

Apparently one major benefit of Open Graph for Facebook is that it facilitates better advertising. However, from a strategic perspective, Facebook’s aggressive initiative suggests a shift in their strategy: from relationship management to content curation. With Open Graph they can now leverage social connections to enable users to filter through a massive amount of information online and find interesting and personally relevant content. There has been a major argument about how real a Facebook relationship is compared to one that takes place offline. Instead of purely focusing on duplicating offline relationships online, Facebook and other networking sties can provide another unique function — helping users establish lightweight connections with people and in the process gain relevant and useful resources. In some cases, every once in a while, users do tend to find content or deals they are interested in just by watching their friends’ online activities. Facebook’s focus is not only about turning transient and lightweight relationships into emotional and deeper ones (i.e., finding best friends in your life), but also about bringing utility to those connections and making them meaningful to users. The video below put together by Percolate helps us better understand the concept of content curation and how it works from a user’s perspective.

The good news for brands is that those concerns didn’t stop Open Graph being successful in increasing engagement and traffic. The Guardian, The Independent and Yahoo! News have all reported massive increase in traffic and engagement on their websites since adopting Facebook Open Graph. So now the question becomes, as brands, how do we leverage this unique opportunity to better engage consumers, while being mindful of potential pitfalls?

The three questions below will help us answer this:

How is content spread and consumed in the real world? We know that some people are nervous about showing their iTunes playlists to friends, so why wouldn’t they be self-conscious when it comes to sharing playlists online? Google+ might not be so much of a successful social site, but the Circle idea (which allows users to share different content with different groups of people in their network) could be borrowed for “frictionless sharing” to really work in an acceptable and meaningful way. Users need to be given options of whom to share with as well as what to share, rather than feeling forced to broadcast all of their online activities.

What is the motivation of users sharing consumed content? Frictionless sharing is more of passive sharing from a user’s end, and therefore the motivation might be less about self-documenting but more about bringing benefits to others and getting inspirations from the community. Therefore, providing a feedback function to stimulate discussions around the content that’s being shared is key. But this is not just a comment box or a “Like” button; it has to be designed in a social context and user-friendly way. For example, asking users to rate the content based on certain criteria and share, allowing them to start a group conversation, or sharing different comments with different groups of friends, such as friends who have consumed the same content versus friends who only have heard about the content.

What’s in it for users? Besides making “frictionless sharing” more social and relevant, are there other utilities brands can offer to users? One method is to provide exclusive and personalized content to improve user experiences. Airbnb now allows users to register through Facebook and personalizes the search results according to their Facebook network and how they are connected to the hosts/reviewers. Shelby.tv aggregates all of the videos being recommended by family and friends on Facebook and Twitter into a single personalized video streaming channel.
Simply put, Facebook’s Open Graph and the notion of “frictionless sharing” would only work if brands respect sharers’ privacy and truly bring utility to both sharers and users.

The type of brands that benefit the most from “frictionless sharing” so far seem to be e-commerce sites. To them, this “frictionless sharing” function is a great alternative to email spams for presenting offerings to consumers and keeping them on top of product updates. Designer shopping site Fab.com has had a 50 percent boost in traffic from Facebook since they adopted Open Graph. (They offer members $10 worth of Fab.com credits a month for activating their Facebook App, which automatically publishes members’ purchases to their Timeline, Newsfeed and Ticker.) Other e-commerce sites like Payvment and Lyst encourage users to “own”, “want”, “love” or “share” products, which create higher engagement and more comprehensive data of users’ needs.

Like many of the initiatives Facebook has launched in the past, the initial response of this “frictionless sharing” among users was more negative than positive. It can, however, be a powerful tool for certain brands if privacy, relevancy, utility and social context are added into this functionality.

So, what do you think of the future of “frictionless sharing”?

But the size of the stacks, and their continual desire to render the other stacks obsolete mean that they're brittle and can disappear very quickly – such as AOL, Yahoo! or Nokia. They also tend to depend on hero leaders, and this means in the long-term stacks are unstayable.

The other Bruce in town was Bruce Springsteen, and he gave a keynote in SXSW Music highlighting his musical heroes:

The Wikileaks emails hint at less than savoury clients and spying on the local Occupy Austin group (and indeed the talk was 'occupied' for a few minutes). But, as Friedman points out, many of those emails were inbound, rather than written by anyone at Stratfor, and the selectivity of the release (967 emails out of 5 million) allows WikiLeaks to bend the discussion in any way it likes. He's sure that there are many emails between his staff complaining about him, calling him names, and generally letting off steam. That's what email's for. But changing the privacy of the emails will be uncomfortable, unsettling, and potentially damaging for everyone involved.

Imagine if all your emails suddenly became public: Friedman's pretty sure this is going to happen at every company, at some point, and potentially hacks on personal accounts too. Rather than "transparency creat[ing] a better society for all people", people need places to have private conversations. This allows intimacy, negotiation and statesmanship.

He argued passionately that people somehow lose the emotional connection about what and who they're writing about when they sit down at a computer: see every vicious Internet comment on YouTube or a newspaper website. LulzSec wanted to destroy the company, with 100 employees (which so far hasn't succeeded).

Part of the hack was social – not only did they need the raw information, they needed to portray Stratfor as an enemy (which is why Occupy Austin was part of the story). This highlights another faculty lost when on the Internet – that of critical examination of information and media. "Why I am being told this? Who by? Why now?"

This was writ large in the two stories on the Internet bigger than SXSW: Kony 2012 and Mike Daisey's Apple NPR story retraction. Both involved a story a little too good to be true (but based on some facts and reality) spun up into something bigger due to a prevailing Internet wind. The need for media literacy is greater than ever given the amount and speed of stories created and consumed and the ease of sharing. In both cases, the Internet quickly upturned rocks and tried to shine a light to find the truth – combined with some good old-fashioned journalism – and the media story became bigger than the original causes Invisible Children and Mike Daisey were championing.

This year, 3 stood out: Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, Ray Kurzweil, singularity booster, and Stephen Wolfram, inventor of Mathematica and writer of A New Kind of Science.

Wolfram's talk was very interesting – chronicling 25 years of Mathematica, a program he has singularly authored and directed, and as well as being incredibly useful and good in its niche (mathematical computation), it also changes the way a mathematician, engineer or anyone approaches a problem. He calls it a "computational telescope". Wolfram is keen that schools and education change the way they teach maths, removing a lot of the rote working out and letting computers (and Mathematica) taking the strain of the actual computational work.

Mathematica morphed into Wolfram Alpha – adding in 15 Terabytes of raw, reliable data and a natural language front end (which he was not sure would work, but gets 90% of queries right, and has something to show for 95%). It knows about Macbeth and washing machines. Some data sources are live, letting you ask about, say, the planes overhead New York right now. It's not a search engine, nor is it a place to find data: it's a place to find computations of data, which is what a lot of people are actually looking for. And it throws all the models, statistics, graphs and maps it can at the data – leaving you to tease out the right stories. There's never a blank page. See for example a dataset of the passengers of Titanic.

Digging through the page you find this:

Which are some tiny statistical stories it has created from the data – you were more likely to survive if you were in 1st or 2nd class, were younger, or were female. Not huge revelations, but to be able to go from raw data to this in 1 click is clever and new.

Wolfram took his data quest to the next level using 22 years of personal information he's collected about his life – every keystroke, every phone call, every email has been kept and now he's managed to analyse it.

The data is interesting, as are the graphs, but it seems like he's still trying to get his head around what this means – and especially what revelation it gives that may change the way he lives his life. Probably only with further manipulation and playing with the data will he get a feel for it and start to tease out meaning.

And that's what I'd love to be able to do – know the system well enough to explore the data. It's clear that Mathematica, and now Wolfram Alpha, is Wolfram's right arm. It's meticulously crafted to mirror how he thinks, and it's interesting to think about what supporting systems we could have to help understand who we are and what we do.

HipGeo takes information from your phone based on location and combines it with photos and comments to make a digital map-based collage; a sort of travel diary.

Price: Free

HipGeo on iTunes

Pixel Land (iPhone, iPad)

This is a minimalistic take on Super Mario Bros. It's a fascinating idea; taking something so familiar to so many people and making it totally alien by simplifiying it to 64 pixels.

Price: £0.69

Pixel Land on iTunes

GroupShot (iPhone, iPad)

This app takes a series of shots, lets you choose the parts of each photo for the app to use to build the shot you want. It's an interesting way to consider what makes the perfect shot.

Price: £0.69

GroupShot on iTunes

The Rainbow Machine is a simple, joyful project that uses the idea of light painting to add a rainbow to the background of photos. Nice.

2. Light

Beatiful light ooze.

3. New York

Stunning photo series of NYC by Frederic Bourret offering unexpected angles and different perspectives. 

4. Suitcase symphony

A musical floor for for airports by Jeriel Bobbe. Reminds me of Melody Road.

5. Eyjafjallajokull

Gorgeous projection mapping project by Anti VJ inspired by the Icelandic volcano. Viewers watch as the landscape unfolds on the wall in front of them, and it’s one of the best projection mapping projects out there at interrogating the viewers’ visual perception of space.

6. Babyloid

Fluffy robot designed to ease depression in older people by keeping them company. It’s a great example of the idea that moving away from humanlike features can actually create a more emotional response in people. The Babyloid stays away from the creepiness that would come with simulating a real baby’s face, and in doing so it give people clear cues to which they can respond; LED lights turn red when it’s content and blue when it’s unhappy.

7. Barbara and Michael Leisgen

Nice photos from the 70s by the Leisgens.

8. The Joy of Books

9. Janine Trott

Photography with nice attention to set design by Janine Trott.

10. Gift of Life

With thanks to Josh Spear, illusion 360, New Scientist, I Like This Art, Lost at E Minor

Nice app that combines photography with a bit of 3D projection. What I like about it is its smallness and focus on detail (in counterpoint to apps creating giant panoramas). The thought behind it is capturing those little details just outside the frame. 

Price: £1.49

Stilla on iTunes

Windosill (iPad)

A puzzle game for the iPad filled with funny little objects and sounds. Sufficiently realistic movement and sound combined with a healthy dose of oddness.

Price: £1.99

Windosill on iTunes

Google Translate (iPad)

Newly enlarged for the iPad, and—while there's room for continual improvement in the linguistic accuracy—it's pretty impressive, translating between 63 languages by text and understanding 17 languages when spoken to.

Price: Free

Google Translate on iTunes

This is an online magazine themed around death. For such a heavy topic, though, it’s creatively vibrant, bursting with varied submissions from writers and artists. A rich representation of a complex topic.

2. Ryoichi Kurokawa

3. Richard Shilling

Lovely art made of nature by Richard Shilling.

4. Limbo

Goergeously atmospheric game for Mac about a boy travelling through a dark world.

5. SAGA

Breathtaking natural landscapes photographed by Stockholm-based duo Inka Lindergard and Niclas Holmstrom. 

6. Being Elmo

Fresh from the festival circuit, this is a fascinating documentary about Kevin Clash, Senior Puppet Coordinator of Sesame Street and creator of Elmo. The skill and dedication he possesses to bring such life to a muppet is truly impressive, and the film looks to be quite magical.

7. Jelly Swarm

8. "Tree"

Large scale outdoor installation by Myoung Ho Lee exploring scale and perception.

9. Dreams of Space

Nice blog full of artefacts of past space travel visions.

10. All Eyes on You

Fascinating (if a bit creepy) window display by Britzpetermann made up of huge floating eyes set in a window that follow passersby. With little blinks and ticks, it’s amazing how full of personality a window full of eyes can be.

With thanks to I Like This Art, Creative Applications, Lost at E Minor, Boing Boing and BOOOOOOOOM.

Behind the scenes…

We were inspired by the University of Illinois' experiments with making silver conductive ink:

However, I wasn't allowed to buy a centrifuge, so we thought we'd experiment with what's available off the shelf from your local friendly electronic component supplier. Could we make a Christmas card with a self-contained circuit?

After a lot of research with various silver inks and paints, we found a conductive ink pen that was the easiest to control. The other challenge was making an interactive circuit using as few components as possible that could run off a watch battery.

It wasn't possible to use traditional electronic components as they're too hard to attach to paper. We're using surface-mount electronic components – they're more normally found on the circuit boards in your consumer electronics: they're designed to be placed by robots and soldered on in an oven. Instead we're gluing them to paper by hand and drawing a circuit between them. The main problem is that they're tiny, so we had to find ways to handle them and place them easily.

We ended up with a mini production line.

The finished cards, ready to be sent.

Merry Christmas!

(thanks to Kevin MacLeod for the music)