Daily life has a duration, a flow, but it does not lead anywhere; the very adjective ‘day-to-day’ and its synonyms indicate that time here is constituted only in repetition.
Anthony Giddens (via gravity7)

The 5 Most Pretentious Productivity Buzzwords - Mike Vardy

I guess I am getting used to seeing my name in other people’s posts on topics I’m interested in, but in this case I think Mike Vardy got what I said backwards, in a piece about productivity buzzwords:

Mike Vardy via The Next Web

5. Flow

Actual Definition: To proceed smoothly and readily.
Virtual Definition: A way to say that you can’t be interrupted or progress will grind to a halt.

I’ll be the first to admit that when I’m writing, I’m in a state of flow. And I hate to be interrupted when I’m in that state. But the prevalence of the term on the Web has created the notion that once flow is broken, then it’s okay that progress stops. And since flow comes at any given time and without warning, then all you can do is wait for it. Not true. Some things require full attention and a state of flow is perhaps the “fullest” of attention one can offer, and some don’t. When I come out of flow, I can work on emails, reading and things that can be done and can be afforded interruption.

“The small shift of consciousness that comes from remaining in the flow setting — messages and posts flitting by, dozens of chats, firing off quick updates to your circles of contacts — seems like the devil to the advocates of industrial age thinking and practices.” – Stowe Boyd

So while not everyone appreciates flow, it is a powerful tool — as long as its power is being used for good (getting the best out of a person) and not for evil (getting hardly anything out of a person).

I think Vardy’s definition of flow is too restrictive, making the case that flow equates to concentrating on a single thing. However, flow means being in a zone where everything seems to be working together, and there is time for decisions to be made, actions to be taken. Think about the players on a basketball team, playing at their peak: they see the floor, the other players, and move effortlessly to where the ball is going to be. They aren’t distracted when a team mate calls to them: it’s all part of the flow.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi characterizes flow as energized focus, being completely immersed in an activity. But the boundaries of what is part of the activity — and what is outside of it — is as flexible as the range of human endeavor. It is not limited to a single unitary task of short duration.

But for many, flow has become synonymous with a exclusionary focus on a single activity, but I don’t use it that way.

Working Together Is Better Than Working Alone - Stowe Boyd

Over at the Podio blog, in my Future Of Work series, I look at some recent research about social ‘flow’:

Charles Walker, of St Bonaventure University, wanted to test the idea that activities that lead people to a ‘flow state’ are more enjoyable when they are social, as opposed to solitary.

[…]

Walker devised a study to compare the level of happiness (‘joy’) in solitary versus social activities, the details of which I leave to his paper. But bottom line, he contrasted solitary activities — like singing alone, cooking alone, gardening alone — with their social analogues — joining a jam session, cooking and eating with friends, acting in a play with others — and found that social activities seem to be inherently more satisfying. Once again, it seems that we are social in our deepest DNA.

Go read the whole post.

Wandering Mind Is a Sign of Unhappiness - John Tierney

Our minds wander about half the time, and it doesn’t make us happy. Happiness is linked to flow, where we are intently wrapped up in what is going on.

Ev Williams: Twitter Will Actually Help Information Overload - Liz Gannes

via @mathewi

Williams, on stage at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabs, compared Twitter to email, where information overload can be incapacitating. “The problem with email is that it’s sender-driven, and sender-driven media doesn’t scale,” he said. On the one hand, the recipient hates email for being spammy because “the sender is motivated to send as much stuff as possible because it’s free.” On the other hand, the sender may be dissatisfied because she’s not reaching the right audience for whom she may not even have email addresses.

Blogging (Williams was previously the founder of Blogger) and Tweeting can be different (and better) than email, he said, because people who have something to say can find their audience. That’s a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information,” he said.

That’s also a contrast to Google, said Williams, which serves more purpose-driven needs versus Twitter’s focus on “an interest-based world.”

“Google is very good at ‘I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer,” he said. “Twitter is more ‘I’m interested in many things, I don’t know what I need to know.’” Where Google is more likely to be gamed by a company like Demand Media, Twitter is a different beast.

However, there’s still the problem of filtering information on Twitter. “What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care about,” Williams said. He said more such products were on the way.

I like the recipient- v sender-driven distinction, but I think the reason that stream apps seem to help us cope with a crazy busy world (‘overload’) is that they tap into the flow state in our heads allowing us to multithread, while inboxes are purely linear.

Tor Nørretranders

A beautifully spare summation of Reboot by Trine-Marie Kristensen:

[from Jaiku]

Post reboot / / / people are streams (Tor) and connections are about flow (Stowe) and products are people too (Webb) .

Tor Nørretranders opening presentation was one of the standouts of Reboot, for me. The line “Sex is the origin of all that is noble” rang like a bell in my head for hours later, and since he kicked off in the main hall on Thursday, it was a perfect bookend for my presentation Friday first thing on the same stage. I am bad at note taking these days, but my friend Lars Plougmann created a mindmap of Tor’s presentation:


.

Stephanie Booth took some notes of my talk (although she disagrees with some of my arguments), here. I will try to create a longish post around my slides tomorrow. (Today it is sunny in Copenhagen, and I intend to go rambling.)

Lars Plougmann also did a mind map of my talk:

Like Trine-Marie, I also thought Matt Webb’s talk was great: we need to think about products — not just AI-inspired software, but all sorts of things in the world — like people if we want to design things better. The way we interact with them should be increasingly like a conversation, not just our fingers jabbing at buttons. His examples were inspired, as usual. And the perfect touch of not being too serious: he consulted the I Ching when he was stumped about how to complete the talk, a few days prior to the conference, so he included the guidance of the Oracle in his talk!

I also enjoyed Leisa Reichelt, Alexander Kjerulf, Stephanie Booth, Håkon Wium Lie, Robert Paterson, Kars Affrink, Marius Watz, and Marko Ahtisaari. The micro presentations were really fun, although the conversion from Powerpoint to Keynote screwed up my fonts. Still, people liked my “Entrepreneurialitis” micropresentation.

The life outside the talks is what makes Reboot so great, and I can’t even begin to try to characterize that, except the Dopplr Users meeting, which was a little more formal.

230ce or “The Flow”

Nicole Simon interviewed me for the upcoming Reboot conference, specifically about my talk (Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic), but also about the soul of the Reboot conference itself.

/Talkshow: Leisa Reichelt (17 May 10:30am PT) on Ambient Intimacy

Leisa Reichelt of Flow Interactive and Disambiguity will be my guest this week on /Talkshow. I am going to poke into the whole idea of flow applications (twitter etc.) with Leisa, and her idea of ambient intimacy. Probably a presentiment of her talk at Reboot on Ambient Intimacy, as well as mine, Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic. (PS I think Reboot is going to be great this year!)

Click here at the time of the show to get access to the audio stream, or call in the show at +1 (718) 508-9560 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              +1 (718) 508-9560      end_of_the_skype_highlighting to ask questions.

/Talkshow is sponosred by Blogtalkradio

Five ways mobile changes the world. Forever.

Brian Solis has a great wrap-up of a developing (and inevitable) collision between Twitter, the reigning social presence flow app, and Jaiku, it’s less well-known but worthy competititor. Leo Laporte’s now well-known defection to Jaiku from Twitter has led to a lot of folks checking Jaiku out for the first time. Solis characterizes the impact of that break this way:

[from Twitter Me This, Is Jaiku a Threat? Let’s Ask Those Defining the Landscape]

[…]

Now, there is a line in the sand. A division between Twitter and Jaiku. No one thinks that two can survive, that this tournament of arm wrestling will divide the community.

However, I don’t think so.

Both offer points of value that will appeal to different market segments (left and right) as well as those who can enjoy playing both sides of the fence (the middle).

[…]

Back in December I joined Jaiku to test it out and I had this to say:

[from Jaiku by Stowe Boyd]

Basically, you are pushing out status messages to a list of buddies (and the whole damn world, if you want to) like Twitter, including by texting on your cell. The added wrinkle is that Jaiku allows you to add RSS feeds from your blogs, Flickr, and del.icio.us accounts, so that Jaiku becomes the pulsing bloodstream of your online identity.

I returned to Jaiku again in March, after I had become a confirmed Twitterholic:

[from Trying Jaiku As A Better Lifestream]

I was fiddling with Facebook today, to see if it could be tweaked into being a better single stream for all my traffic, and I managed to crash Firefox by putting Technorati tags into a Facebook ‘share’. I have decided to continue using del.icio.us bookmarks because I can tag them, even though they feel awfully static.

The answer might be to add more streams to Jaiku. I have included my Last.fm recently played stream, the Ambivalence feed, and I have the nice folks there trying to figure out why Upcoming.org RSS feeds don’t work (missing the ‘.xml’ suffix?). I already had Twitter and Flickr streams there.

One nice thing about Jaiku: comments are possible on all stream items. Look at this screenshot, based on an interchange with Petteri Koponen of Jaiku. Note that the initial start was a Twitter that was streamed into Jaiku.

This comment notion is great, and provides an interest new dimension to social presence flow. In Twitter, we do something similar by direct messages to others, or via a ‘shout out’ into the stream by writing a message with an ‘@’ preceding a person’s name: “@ briansolis - nice post”. [Note that the latter spontaneously occured on Twitter, invented by some savvy user. It’s not a supported feature.]

But in Jaiku, comments get added to the initial message: a neater solution.

Also, Jaiku has the flavor of a tumbler blog as well. Various flavors of elements in the stream are denoted with different icons. Any sort of RSS feeds can be flowed into the traffic, and passed along to your downstream buddies. In this way, it actually feels much more like a Facebook profile page than Twitter.

Both Twitter and jaiku are mobile, although at the moment Jaiku is only supported natively on S60 phones. Jaiku’s ambitions with mobile seem more advanced than Twitter, involving a sophisticated client on the phone that supports presence and messaging. Twitter is limited to SMS, at the moment.

So, is this the final bout for supremacy in social presence flow apps? I don’t thinks so. It’s early days yet, and the apps are rudimentary at the moment. I think we will see a lot of innovation, as well as efforts by the majors to get involved — either by acquisition or by their own efforts.

Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic

A video of my presentation at Reboot courtesy of Nicolas Charbonnier (Charbax): It’s called “Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic.”

I am going to get a transcript made at some point. It’s posted at Slideshare, here.