She described some of her projects, for example in 2007 she twittered for two months in morse code for the Brooklyn museum. For another of her projects (‘Status update’) she sent postcards with a limitation of 140 characteres to the museum in New Haven. The museum exhibited the postcards in a wall with a configuration similar to twitter’s life stream.

She also showed what other people are doing, for example Marina Abramović’s performance art in the MOMA. This new form of art is accessible to anybody in the world, you don’t need to anymore to be living in New York, Paris, London or Berlin to become an artists. More important, the emotional message becomes bidirectional. When you visit a traditional museum you normally spend seconds looking at the art pieces, but in this new form of art the performer invites the his audience to play with the art piece, commenting about it, manipulating it and changing it into new forms. This new form of art is originated in the mid of an artist but it is not controlled by him but by the crowd.

This form of expression uses Twitter and Facebook. An Xiao asked the audience what will happen in China. Will the Chinese Artists use a VPN to reach people out of the Chinese Firewall? Will they use Chinese social media tools? Will the government allow this form of expression? The audience answered timidly, but they agreed the Chinese artists will not use Chinese social media tools.

I didn’t understand why at that time, but I do now. This same week Ai Weiwei, one of the most popular Chinese artists and the most active in twitter (here his english twitter) has disappeared. In China is difficult to set a line between artists and political dissidents. Furthermore the Chinese social media tools are closely monitored by the government. For example Ai WeiWei’s Weibo (The Chinese twitter) account was deleted hours after his owner disappeared. Social Media Art movement has not flourished yet in China because the artists tend to be politically active so they cannot use Chinese social media tools and if they use twitter, which is blocked in China, their visibility is zero.

Going back to the topic, An Xiao introduced her current perfomance. She seats in the configuration you can see in the picture. She has several barriers between her and the person. First, an intimidating gesture, second a table, and third a computer that records everything that the person do. The person in front of her communicates with An Xiao using social media messaging tools with their cell phones.

She said that in previous perfomances the communication she had with the complete unknown people had a very high level of trust and intimacy. People told her about their lives and problems in a transparent way. She thinks those communications would have never taken place in a normal conversation with a cup of coffee.

The performance reminds of the conversations we have when we talk with people that are physically close to us using social media tools instead of our voice. Far from the perfomance itself, I think it has also interesting applications as it can be an interesting way to accelerate the therapy of people with depressions as they are able to transmit what they are really feeling in an easier way.

This is a video of her presentation in Los Angeles:

An Xiao / Art Under the Influence… of Social Media @ Mindshare Los Angeles

Simyo also treated us for lunch. We had the opportunity to discuss about Simyo and the future of our applications. Simyo’s team is very powerful and enthusiastic and they have a pretty cool work environment.

Furthermore the old video was really boring. It was a mistake to produce a 16 minutes long video and pretend to get your attention in this time of if-it’s-longer-than-a-minute-I’m-not-going-to-see-it (Youtube mantra?).

So I produced a new video showing the new UI and I cut the important sections of old video. Now I have 4 independent videos in the form of small pills of 5 minutes each. Shorter. Easier to see. Faster to get to the point. Better.

I lost the introduction of the old video though, so if you are new and you don’t know what I’m speaking of, please look the first part of the original video.

These are the videos (Still in spanish):

1. The improved user interface (4:50 minutes) New video
2. Explanation of how the system works (1 minute)
   
3. Demo with softphones,landline and cell phone (4:18 minutes)
   
4. Potential commercial and virality (5 minutes)

What happened with AOL, Compuserve and Infovia in middle 90′ is that they created a lot of content in a proprietary and inoperable way. High quality (by that time) message, chat and web publishing applications. In US that kind of systems were the first contact with internet for millions of people. In Spain Infovia was the closed network that provide the infrastructure for the first providers and Internet companies.

But when the magic of the open protocols like http gain a critical mass, everybody wanted to surf on the primitive wild internet instead of surf on a controlled closed bubble. Some years were necessary before the quality of the new and open internet was on par with the previous proprietary versions but it didn’t mattered. At the end, AOL, Compuserve and Infovia accepted the new situation, took to pieces the closed networks, and mutated as normal providers or disappeared.

Now we are in a similar situation. We have a lot of different social networks but all of them are inoperable between them. For example, you can’t write a profile on Facebook and make it automatically appear on Bebo. You update an event on Tuenti and it don’t magically update also Facebook. You tell twitter what are you doing but Facebook didn’t realize that unless you install glue in the middle.

In my opinion there are two big problems here. On one hand the local social networks with local content are always going to be stronger if they are big enough to be interesting for their users. That means that it’s impossible for a single company to have all the social network users in the world, because the people will always prefer a localized version. Facebook don’t have anything to do in Korea and Japan if they don’t place cute hello kitties all over the website. In the case of my country, I think that if there is a well designed Spanish social network (Tuenti anyone?) is going to be very difficult for Facebook to gain a important market share because the people is lazy to update more than one service. And the more popular service will be always used because it just works.

On the other hand, the social networks believe that all their value is on the information of their user’s profiles. The bigger the network the bigger the business. In my opinion that is completely flawed because is not entirely true. The more people, the more interesting content the site has so it attract more visits, which means more advertisement so you get more money. But only *having* that information on itself *has not value*, you need to offer something interesting before.

Two things can happen. The companies can buy each others in a movement resemblance of the internet bubble or simply glue their databases and create bigger networks. That means interconnect their networks. It won’t matter because the history tell us that it’s inevitable for an open protocol to appear.

So what will happen if a well designed open social network protocol appear in the next months? New companies will start to work together to make reality a decentralized global social network. And new business models will appear, with the objective of creating applications for a common global social network. And new buzzwords. Web 4.0 at least. Who knows!.

And meanwhile, Facebook, bebo and the bigger social networks will need to adopt the common global network, the global resource or die. Like AOL did.

The virtual worlds are another interesting case. The biggest contender is Second Life, but it may appear another competitors using open protocols in the future. If you have the option of creating an island with your own content hosted in your computer or creating it on the closed servers of Second Life using and paying for the official content what will you choose? Did this sound similar to creating a website for AOL/Compuserve/Infovia or creating it on the web?

Social networks like we know now are doomed.

Now we only need to decide what open protocol we’ll use.

What had the application improved this last week?

1. Better architecture. I split the web frontend (the web application you can see on facebook) completely of the VoIP backend (the call manager) on two different servers running on different locations. Now the application is ready to scale.
2. Way better sound quality. AMG (a local network service provider) lent me a provisional SIP account, more than enough to improve 1000% call’s reliability and sound quality. I need more accounts for reliability reasons, though, is someone interested?
3. Completely new user interface. Polished, a lot more integrated on facebook, making use of facebook widgets. A long way to go, though, but a lot better than the pre-release version you could saw on video last week. Now it’s time for user usability reporting and web2.0 effects
4. Multilingual. The application works, so what is the reason to reduce their commercial potential focusing only on the Spanish market? No reason. As facebook didn’t provide yet the multilingual capabilities I designed the application to understand Spanish and English, and Vasque, French and German translations are coming soon. Catalian anyone?
5. Developer corner. I’m the only one developer but I like to work on a complete environment. Nowadays the application had a subversion repository, a wiki with my last thoughts and documentation and a bug reporting software for me and betatesters (some techie friends)
6. Bugfixing. Lots and lots of bugs had been resolved, and lots of new ones are being fixed every single day.

I continue to have ideas to improve the functionality or reliability of the application. I’m thinking in several cool improvements. I don’t know if the application will be ready to enter an open beta state on time (maybe by the middle of next week?) but for sure at the beginning it will have less functionality than other VoIP applications.

Don’t complain! It’s working, it’s a complex system with lots of components and has been programmed on a garage

I’ve made a video showing how it works, what you can do with it and the commercial possibilities and monetization of the application. The video speaks Spanish but I’ll dub the video if there is demand.

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I expect the judges to like my application!

The software is based in the VoIP java prototype I programmed for my final research project but only in the experience I adquired because I ended hating java as much that I developed this new one entirely in PHP. I’m in love with scripted languages.

At the end the big problem has not been the software but the hardware. Right now I’m still configuring the machine that runs the VoIP backend. I expect to finish as soon as possible so I can polish the web interface of the application.

Programming the application has been a lot of fun because programming for facebook is easy as cake and mixing web developing and VoIP technologies is super atractive for me (And I think is going to be a huge bussiness in the next years). Plus the motivation of the conquest it’s pretty interesting indeed