Masters Project Proposal

I have finally completed my Masters Project Proposal. It combines many of the postings that have previously been added to this site. The entire document can be downloaded here (18mb).

Additional Internet Resource

After much searching I have finally found an internet application that operates similar to the way that one of the apps will on the Identity Share website. I seemed to be running into trouble figuring out how I could implement the "follow a user" app. It is easy to create an iframe in a browser that contains another browsing window, but security features in most browsers limit communication between the iframe window and the parent window if it is not browsing on the same server. Browzmi seems to get around this by running a proxy server that forwards all browsing in the iframe to browsmi's server. I was able to imperfectly copy their method by parsing the links out of website using PHP (currently up at www.identityshare.net). Now that I know it's possible to get around the security issues, I'm confident that I can implement the app.

http://www.browzmi.com/

• Allows users to share their browsing publicly.
• Uses the html iframe with a proxy to record locations.
• Works like a social networking site allowing favorites, comments, and rating for visited web sites.
• Site is designed like a web browser in your web browser.
  

Scenarios for Use

Following is a series of scenarios which are intended to show situations and people that would use the Identity Share Project. These scenarios should help me to focus the project to the scale of the individual and to describe some of the details that will be involved.


In his home in Los Angeles, Robert is surfing the Internet on a Friday morning. As a production assistant for Paramount, he has worked long hours during the week and finally has a chance to relax and browse the web for fun.

He stumbles across a blog posting about a website that allows users to learn about how other people experience the web and he decides to check it out. Upon arriving at www.IdentityShare.net, Robert selects "new user" and is intrigued by the profile he has to fill out.

Most online profiles will ask for a name, but he is provided with a set of interesting categories and many options for each. Under "Profession" he lists "Film Production Assistant." He is interested to see a "country of origin" box and can enter "Mexico," and the "Ethnicity" box will let him type in anything he wants, offering suggestions based upon what other users have entered. He selects "done" and is taken to the main site.

At her home in Montreal, Jasmine, an airline pilot logs in to www.IdentityShare.net, a site she signed up for a couple days before. She is presented with a suite of applications that will let her explore the experiences of other people who use the site. Listed there are: "Links That Define Others," "Follow a User," "Wish lists," "Institutional Identity," "Identity Game," and more. She remembers adding the links that defined her when she signed up. They included www.aviation.com, www.zappos.com, an image feed from NASA, and even a link to the Canadian Lacrosse Association's site.

Choosing "Links That Define Others," she arrives at a page that gives some filtering options. As she selects "American," the number of people shown decreases and the "Top Defining Links" change to reflect the new demographic. Selecting "Southern," further narrows the top defining links. She selects "People with links in common with me" to see who shows up. Finally she clicks on a random user from the list of people displayed.

The selected user is a Male, age 21, Chinese American, in Birmingham, Alabama, working as a waiter. The links that define him are a Crunch Fitness site, the New York Times Website, and the same image feed from NASA that Jasmine has. It intrigues her to think that this 21 year old Chinese Southern American looks at the same images as her every day. She thinks about how it is different than watching the same television show, since they both sought out this one website among millions. She clicks "back" on her browser to search some more.


Matt, a teacher in Arizona, is showing his high school class a website, called www.IdentityShare.com. He explains that the website is about sharing your personal attributes with strangers and seeing how they use the Internet on an individual scale. He fills out the profile projected in front of the class, making them all laugh when he enters “25” for his age. Changing it back to the appropriate “52”, Matt shows how a new description can be added to the hair category; in his case "none". Again the class laughs.
He explains how the site is a good way to show diversity and even similarity between strangers in the world. He clicks on "Follow a User" and is brought to a filtering page. He filters by region to show only people who are choosing to share their browsing experience in the Southwestern United States. Seven users are listed, so he tells the class that he'd like to select someone in the movie industry. He clicks on a "Film Production Assistant" in Los Angeles.

A frame opens up below the header and they can see the person in Los Angeles type in “www.google.com” and then type, "gifts ideas for anniversary," in the search box. The class watches as he reads through a Yahoo answers forum giving suggestions for gifts. Matt explains to the class that it seems funny because he was just searching for gifts online yesterday. The window changes to a Los Angeles Humane Society website and the user that they are following clicks on "Adopt a puppy." The class goes "awwww."


Caroline, a freshman at Ohio State University, majoring in Management, just signed up for www.IdentityShare.net and is browsing user profiles in the computer lab at school. She has narrowed down a particular search and selected the "Institutional Identity" for a 37 year old female living in New York City. She is then presented with the woman's profile next to many classifications that the woman would fall into for marketing or census purposes. Her age is translated into "Baby Busters or Generation Xers born between 1965 and 1980," and her ethnicity is translated from "Turkish-American" to "Other" based on the census categories. Several of her other profile attributes were torqued in a similar fashion. Caroline had never thought about how many identities were institutionally thrust upon an individual regardless of their appropriateness. She found it interesting that ideas and misconceptions could be set in stone within the institutions of our culture.


After leaving work Simon, a waiter, takes a shower and goes online. He checks out his news reader, looking at the new Mars pictures posted on the NASA feed, and then decides to log in to www.IdentityShare.net. He chooses to follow a self labeled "Successful Real Estate Broker" to try and get a hint about what makes him tick. Real Estate has always been a passion of Simon's, although he hasn't yet received his license.

The frame on the website shows the man searching for Flash Games and then NASCAR. That's something Simon didn't expect. He thought that he could glean some sense of what successful people did or looked at, but he realizes a bit more that everybody is different and one aspect of their personality doesn't completely define them.


Susan opens her laptop on a Saturday morning while she drinks her coffee. Ever since retiring she has done crosswords at the table, but today she is trying out a website that her daughter mentioned, www.IdentityShare.net. She has chosen to play the "Identity Game" for to see what it entails.

She clicks to start the game and she is presented with a person who has www.garfield.com listed as a site that defines them. The site asks her to guess what this persons profile information might be. She thinks about it for a minute and sets the age to 18. aShe erases that, thinking that Garfield isn't that popular anymore. She puts 32 under age. She clicks to follow the user for a while and watches as they browse to the Wikipedia page on Calculus. She changes the age to 22 and selects "undergraduate" in the "education" field. She also enters "male" in the sex field. After the person searches for hurricane information she chooses Florida as their location. Continuing in this manner for a while, Susan thinks she finally has it right as she clicks "show" beside the person’s hidden profile. The profile appears, showing a 67 year old female professor in Texas. After a chuckle about how wrong she was, she tries again.

Identity Share Database API

I have begun to work on the Identity Share Database API and it will be hosted on Google's App Engine at identityshare.appspot.com. It is a work in progress so don't be surprised to see a page that does nothing or multiple Python errors displayed.

Identity Share Website

I have created a new website space for hosting my project at www.IdentityShare.net. It currently is an Iframe implementation similar to www.modernista.com. It will serve as my project workspace and the location for my final implementation.

Relevant Papers & Books:

Following is a listing of papers and books that might be relevant to my project at this stage with more to come in the future.

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, by George Lakoff

This is a book about the ways in which humans tend to categorize things and the implications that arise from this. Lakoff dispels classical folk theories of categorization and brings together research from a cognitive and social perspective. I intend to user many of Lakoff's theories in the creation of my user profile database structure.

Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, by Lisa Nakamura

This book focuses on changing the way in which identity is seen online. Rather than a utopia of disembodied individuals without race the internet is a reflection of its creators. This book in dealing with online identity is a perfect reference for my project.

Living Library Organisers Guide, by Ronni Abergel, Antje Rothemund, Gavan Titley, and Péter Wootsch

This is a publication that describes the history, intent, and details of the Living Library project.

Early Feedback on Project Statement

Following are some comments I have received from different individuals regarding the project. I will continue to add posts with this sort of feedback so that during implementation I can have a history of all the comments and issues that I should focus on. Feel free to leave feedback on the project here as well.

Identity Guessing:
My friend Adam Rice (and fellow DM student) stated that it would be interesting to make the project a sort of game, where users could follow a person browsing for a few days and attempt to guess what their profile would be. After submitting a guess they would be shown the users actual profile and they could see how their assumptions were either correct or incorrect.

I am intrigued by this idea because it would serve to dispel assumptions about an individual's actions and how that relates to their identity, but I feel that this would eliminate any sense of instant gratification that users might feel when first visiting the site. I may adopt this idea as an option on the site rather than as the core functionality.

Additional Challenges:
Professor and panel member, Fox Harrell, offered these points as possible challenges I will face during design and implementation of this project:

• Not all of a persons online activities will be interesting. Determine how to parse interesting information so that something meaningful can be learned without wasting too much of a user's time.
  
• People will not necessarily want to share their browsing and online experiences. Provide incentive for sharing and browsing.
• Using an index of the dimensions of difference between people, create a method to suggest individuals to users so that interesting and different people will be shown.
  
• Work with Fox's AIR project goals to create a platform/database system for dynamically creating identities usable for many different systems. The structure of this system would be based upon identity and categorization research.
  

Internet Resources that are Relevant

I have compiled a list of possibly relevant websites and software that may help me with the Online Identity Share Project. Some are more relevant than others, but they are all pretty interesting.

Feel free to add to this list in the comments if you run across anything that is relevant.

http://living-library.org/

• This is the official site for the living library project. Ronni Abergel's living library idea has already had an influence on the concept of my project in general.
• The overall concept is to allow library visitors to "check out" real people for 20 minutes for face to face discussion. The available people are categorized in a very stereotypical manner, i.e. gay male, muslim, witch. Abergel's intent is to decrease prejudice by face to face contact with an indivdual who is more than the sum of their stereotypes.

http://world-information.org/

• This site about page state that they "explore new technologies, future communication environments, and their implications."
• They have strange aesthetics which give the sense that the site is striving for an Avant-garde design, yet it is slightly unnavigable. You have to stumble upon information rather than looking for something specific.
• The site is involve in social research and technology. I can probably find some socially relevant articles here.
• This is a semi-interesting article on the culture of file sharing: http://world-information.org/wio/readme/992003309/1166785452

http://www.we-swipe.us/

• A site dedicated to the Swipe project, a performance art type/real-life bar that travels around N. America swiping drivers liscenses to raise awareness about the information the government and other agencies keep on you as an individual.
• Check out the Request Your Data tool which allows you to see what information companies are collecting about you.
• My project would require much sharing of personal information, so this site may offer ideas for a good way to balance out privacy issues.

http://www.everyblock.com/

• A site that offers news feeds for you block. It doesn't currently support Atlanta.
• The site brings together real estate, business reviews, news articles, and public records for you location/block.
• The public records include building permits, business liscenses, restaurant inspections.
• Individuals in my project could also be defined/categorized by their surroundings.

http://www.modernista.com/
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2008-08-10-modernista-ad-agency_N.htm

• This is an advertising firm that uses a method of javascript overlay on top of other websites.
• The site offers a possible way for me to implement shared browsing.
• They do not seem to use the background web page for any purpose.

http://flock.com/

• This is a web browser designed to facilitate sharing.
• The site uses existing social networks (gmail, facebook, digg...) and integrates them into a people sidebar.
• Users can drag and drop links, photos, and more to share with friends in their networks.
• The site is essentially a normal browser with plug-ins which integrate many social networking sites functionality.

http://delicious.com/

• This of course is the very popular site for sharing bookmarks.
• Delicious began as a site for publicly storing bookmarks but became a popularity contest (similar to digg).
• The site facilitates sharing of one aspect of individuals browsing history, their favorite sites.
• The site creates a new way to search the web, via tags on popular bookmarks.

Sharing Online Identities, Masters Project Statement

Following is my initial Masters Project idea. The details of this statement will change as the project progresses. This blog will detail those changes, additional documents, and related background research.

Project Description:

In thinking about how to utilize the web and web applications to facilitate communication between strangers, I began to come up with ways in which to connect people from different backgrounds with each other. By connecting people who have different histories and experiences, I wanted to create an application that would socially educate individuals on the diversity of the thoughts and life experiences of others. I had two initial problems with this idea: first, the tendency of individuals to associate with people similar to themselves, and second the limits of online interaction.

In doing some background research I came across an article in the Christian Science Monitor which details the project of Ronni Abergel called “Living Library.” The idea is that for one day there are stereotyped categories of people at the local library (i.e. witch, Muslim, funeral director) who can be checked out for 20 minute conversations. This combination of social categorization and social interaction can lead to some interesting insights for individuals unfamiliar with people who self identify with these categories.

To reproduce the “Living Library” in an online environment would certainly fall short, because of the limited communication offered via web applications. I realized that the face to face communication is the important feature of the “Living Library” and that in order to create a meaningful experience for users, they would have to share something of value about themselves rather than just chatting via text. Using this as a starting point, I intend to create a website which allows users to gain insights into other people’s online experiences. I will maintain a categorization structure, which will serve as a profile on the site. Ideally users will be able to browse and search other users profile tags and follow aspects of their online behavior. Technically, this could involve seeing what they what page they are looking at in their browser and seeing mouse positions, but it could also include seeing ads, suggested products, and wish lists that belong to the other user.

Project Implementation:

I will build the web application using an online framework such as Cake PHP, or Google App Engine. This portion of the project will maintain the user profiles, search capabilities, and co browsing experience. The shared browsing experience will be implemented on the front end using a JavaScript overlay that will read an xml file generated by a sharing user, and display the mouse movements and clicks stored there in real time. The ability to share ads and suggested products (i.e. Amazon) will have to be implemented through some sort of cookie sharing plug-in loaded into the browser, with permission to access the local machine. The ability to share wish lists is already available via Amazon boxed-up.com and other sites, and my application could simply aggregate this information.

The site itself will have a profile page, a search/browse page, a share option, and a follow option. I have decided that the best way to maintain user privacy is to only share what a user is browsing from within my site using a JavaScript overlay. The only other option would be to create a plug-in or a toolbar for the browser that would relay this information to the site.

Possible Challenges:

• Getting users to give up their privacy, even temporarily to share what they are doing.
• Allowing the shared browsing experience to work over sites using plug-ins (Flash, Java)
• Ensuring that the experience is interesting enough for users to want to follow others
• Gaining access to the cookie directory to share sites targeted marketing
• Ensuring that the categories of users are robust enough to allow for rich variety, but limited enough to retain meaning.

Project Intention:

I hope to create an application that is both entertaining and insightful. Luckily, the human condition requires that the majority of us have a voyeuristic side that is curious how others live their lives and experience the world. I hope to provide insight, via shared experience, into an aspect of other people’s lives different from one’s own.