Over the past few weeks, I’ve had cause to do some thinking about Voice Assistance Technology, specifically what kind of ‘personality’ these things should have. When the topic was first raised, my instinctive response was that it was the wrong question. It took some further mulling and conversation to work out exactly why. TL;DR: in order for trust – and, by …
Bring on the noise [post 44/100]
How many questions a day is the average human prepared to answer? When I was in school, days when we were asked loads of questions were scary – they were exam days, or worse, pop quiz days. Most questions were asked person to person, and were related to events that were shared between those people or the wider community. Maybe …
FOR SALE: Me. Good condition. Convenience ONO. [post 42/100]
[This article was written for Prophecy and is cross-posted here with permission.] We are addicted to technology. Literally. Cognitive scientists have found the same kind of dopamine response in smartphone users checking Facebook as in gamblers pulling the handle on a slot machine, or junkies getting high. And we know it. We now have resorts where you can pay to …
Unauthorised Agents, continued [post 30/100]
Yesterday I posted about a pretty awful experience that I, and everyone in my address book, have just experienced at the hands of RareBridge. As I wrote at the end of that post, I emailed the CEO, Simon Gregory, to let him know what I thought of his activity. Later last night, I received a reply. He apologised “for any …
Unauthorised agents [post 29/100]
Toward the end of 2014, I received an email informing me that a friend and former colleague had joined a new professional networking site called RareBridge. When I clicked through, I found no information was available without sign-up. In a fit of uncharacteristic naiveté, I created an account. The next step was headlined, “Search for friends already on RareBridge” – …
My Tivo is trying to make me gay* [post 20/100]
I’d like to revisit the topics of personalisation and etiquette in digital services. Over the last 2 days I’ve posted a couple of things about beacons, their potential and also their pitfalls, and I’ve had some feedback across a range of channels that tells me further discussion is warranted about opting in and preferences and user control and all those …
You talkin’ to me? [post 15/100]
Last week I made mention of poor recommendations by way of suggesting that we should maybe stop trying to draw conclusions about everything all the time. This time I want to point out another facet of the problem. I’ve written before about Big Data and the general meaninglessness of that term. Still one of my favourite quotes from 2013 was …
La la la la la can’t hear you! (or, when personalisation really sucks) [post 9/100]
There’s a bit of synchronicity of ideas going on today. A friend and co-conspirator in Superhuman is working on an interaction model that’s heavily driven by personalisation. And this morning, I was linked (thanks, Tom!) to an article about where the Nest experience went terribly wrong for Kara Pernice, one of its (former) users. These two things share a critical …
The Clarified Self [post 8/100]
In 2012, the lovely and talented Kitty Leering asked me a question that changed the way I was thinking about rather a lot of the things I’d been thinking about. We were talking about Picnic 2012, and she asked me: “What does it mean to own yourself in the digital world?” I did a talk on the topic, and have …
From Abstraction to Action [first of 100 posts in 100 days]
By way of, ahem, encouragement, the lovely Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino last week challenged/shamed me into writing 100 posts in 100 days. This is 1/100. Fortunately I already had something partly written. It’s occurred to me that a lot of thought, discussion and debate goes into the talks I give (I pretty much never do the same talk twice), and yet I almost …
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