As of this writing, you can walk the streets of New York City, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami–maybe more. The automated stitching of panoramas from different days and times makes for some high-tech surrealist photography. Continuing the twisted translation of reality into the Googleverse…. Just wait until these are fed by realtime surveillance/web cameras and the most-recent geotagged Flickr photos.

When an architect designs a physical community space, she considers how the architecture will shape social interactions. A long hallway of offices creates an utterly different dynamic than desks with arranged in an open space. One might foster individuality, privacy, propriety; the other: collaboration, distraction, communalism.

Still, physical spaces can be flexibly repurposed and worked around if the inhabitants desire a social dynamic not instantly afforded by the space. Office doors can be left open to invite easier interaction. Partitions can be raised between adjacent desks to limit distraction and increase privacy.

That’s physical architecture. The information architectures of online communities are far more deterministic and far less flexible. They literally define the social architecture by pre-specifying in immutable computer code what information you have access to, who you can talk to, where you can go. In the online world, information architecture = social architecture.

In one sense, I’m echoing Marshall McLuhan: the form and constraints of a medium shape the thoughts and behaviors of those who use them. Every user interface and information architecture is a different medium that has a fundamental influence on its users’ thoughts.

This is true at a gross scale: how is the social architecture of Flickr different from that of Shutterfly? For one, Flickr invites the world into the community to share photos with each other. Shutterfly only lets its users share with specific friends and family members. The first is a commons. The second is the suburbs.

It’s also true at the level of the finest details, which bears on an online community design project I’m engaged in now with Howard Rheingold and a group of professional and student journalists. Our goal is to design the next-generation platform for digital journalism. As an example of how the finest of details can profoundly alter the social architecture of a community: do we show the photograph of a news story’s author in their by-line? Doing so would create a more personal connection to the writer. It would also invite reader bias based on race, gender or good looks. It’s a small detail with large implications.

I think this is an issue which can and should influence our design process. If we build a platform piecemeal, by sticking together “features” which, in isolation, seem useful, we’re not aware of the larger social architecture being created. The features may be contradictory in the social dynamics they engender.

Better would be to start at the broadest level — not the details — by designing the social architecture we’d like to create and find the pieces that will work harmoniously to manifest it.

Edward Tufte at Stanford

Edward Tufte spoke at Stanford this afternoon and I had the pleasure of being in attendance. It was an unconventional talk, as far as academic lectures go, for Tufte was speaking “in the first person” about his own life: his origins in rural Nebraska, his education and formative years, his mentors who influenced his thinking, and the turning points that signaled moments of profound reorientation. As Tufte noted, for a sample size of N=1, the estimated variance is infinite; so other sources should be consulted.

Tufte has had a remarkable career and speaks as someone who appears to have found the courage to follow his bliss, leaving a tenured professorship at Yale to self-publish his famous books on visual information, go on speaking tours, and make large-scale landscape art in his Connecticut backyard.

There were three big lessons I took away from his talk.

Contribute to forever knowledge.

The most important decision a researcher makes is choosing what problem to focus on. One should choose problems that are not only profoundly important, but ones for which good progress is possible. It’s worth nothing to work on grand problems and make no progress. Tufte’s own compass for this decision: contribute to Forever Knowledge. That is, create knowledge that will be universally useful to humankind in any time or place in human history. Tufte ditched his career as a political economy theorist because he found he was working on only temporarily important problems, things he decided were not worth his “time, energy, passion and mind.”

Be self-exemplifying.

In whatever one’s work, be not only a great communicator of ideas and practices, be an exemplar of those same practices and this will communicate the value of what you are saying far better than anything else. Tufte’s books are not only superb treatises on the visual display of information, they are also exemplary demonstrations of clear visual communication. I call them the Kama Sutra of information graphics.

Strive for personal utopia.

Here again, Tufte is, as he presents it, self-exemplifying. While utopian cultures may be unattainable, you can pretty well approximate an ideal life through clarity of purpose, courage to act on that purpose, and, most importantly, doing what you love.

The poem Tufte opened his talk with was excerpted from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, fitting for a self-reflection.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

This is a 1728 Geometry text.

Geometry was the network science of its day, with its richly visual mathematical aesthetic. This is the sort of beautiful abstraction that would drive someone to spend years of life teasing out the endless permutations of a set of axioms. 1728 was the height of the Age of Enlightenment, long before Godel came and tread on the dreams of the humble mathematical ascetic.

Today, researchers of all stripes learn an unspoken rule: beautiful visualization of data makes for “sexy” science. In other words, cool information graphics lead to tenure. It’s partly because visual communication is simply more compelling and has a wider mass appeal. That’s why networks research shows up in the New York times: because it has sexy graphics, not because it’s going to catch terrorists.

It’s no wonder that someone like Edward Tufte, an authority on the visual display of quantitative information, is a kind of cult hero. His books are the Kama Sutra of information graphics.

The tag cloud displayed on my name tag at Stanford University’s H-STAR faculty retreat.

I created tag clouds for every professor’s name tag to visualize their research interests based on research statements and resumes. It was such a treat to watch these great minds interacting and using the tag clouds as launching points for conversations.

I made the tag clouds at TagCrowd. Check it out and play with creating your own clouds from your papers, resume, poetry, chat logs, or whatever suits your fancy.

While the portal may have made sense for web services based on information consumption because it centralized otherwise disparate sites into one, I would argue that it is a problematic model for social software. Here I’m defining social software as any online system that makes identity publicly accessible. Public online identities are constructed wherever content is user-generated, anywhere from a comment on someone’s blog to a slideshow of vacation photos. In the social software sphere, it’s become commonplace to attach public “profile” pages, of one form or another, to every personal account.

Then along come services like SuprGlu and the envisioned GoingOn Network, nifty and convenient tools for tying your many dispersed identies all together in a neat package. However, there are emergent sociological dangers that lurk beneath this tidy surface.

Like identity in the material world, identity in online communities is created in social contexts. The embodied world conveniently keeps our many identities distinct because they are tied to different physical places: the office vs. the bar vs. the S & M club. In the collapsed geography of cyberspace, every room is adjacent to every other, and the walls are thin.

While I may lead a less divided life than some, I’m still a little nervous at the prospect of mixing personal and professional identities freely and haphazardly. With digitally-mediated social interactions leaving traces in persistent and searchable databases, and with community contributions tied to public profiles, the neat partitions of identity are eroding. My del.icio.us links are open for anyone in the world to see, as are my flickr photos. We’re waking up to the face that we are many people in one body…people sometimes better left separate. Call me self-conscious, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea of potential employers browsing my vacation photos or taking notes on the political leanings of my Facebook friends.

Case in point

Jennifer hates her chemistry teacher, and now the whole world knows it, possibly her teacher too. The problem is even more severe for active adults with complex, compartmental lives. While it may not seem so bad now, eventually Jennifer is going to grow up and try to get a job; meanwhile the Wayback Machine has been diligently archiving her entire adolescence for her future employers, college admissions committees, boyfriends and landlords to see and pass judgment on.

I see this coming down to a redefinition of public and private in the digital world. This is a new kind of shared space, where the digital analogue of casual conversation between friends becomes world-wide-readable (e.g. Myspace). “Public” should mean something different for an anarchist message board thread than for a blog posting. One is cloistered communication between members of a small, tight-knit community. The other is global self-publication to a world audience. Yet both are about equally findable in a Google Age. You and I, Jennifer and the anarchists — we’re all facing the aggregation of a potentially limitless number of disparate identities into one, very public identity.

Long story short: please don’t build this. 1) It’s ugly and complicated. 2) It breaks identity boundaries (friends and colleagues). 3) It freely mixes public and private.

Instead, make something that puts me in control of my many selves, including who has access to what information. This is the mission of Identity Commons, though it remains to be seen if it’s workable.

Clay Shirky has started up a Wiki to co-create a pattern language for social software.