HP’s Bernardo Huberman on Mobile Social Computing

mobilize-speaker-2Dr. Bernardo Huberman is a senior fellow and director of the Social Computing Lab (SCL) for Hewlett-Packard, which is conducting research into the explosive phenomenon of social networks, and the human interaction with them. That research is being used to produce services and applications for the mobile sector to help users deal with the glut of information that social networks provide in vast quantities. The lab has produced one application for the BlackBerry platform, and another is under development for multiple mobile platforms.

I recently sat down with Huberman, a speaker at our upcoming conference, Mobilize 09, to discuss this research and the products derived for the mobile sector. We talked about how mobile users deal with the massive social networks (Twitter, MySpace and Facebook) and how special technology can leverage it to best effect. An edited version of our conversation is below.

James Kendrick: What interesting research do you have going on in the lab?

BernardoHubermanHuberman: What we have been focusing on the last two years is my work to recognize that in this incredible era of crowd-sourcing and generation of content through social interaction, information that used to be a very valuable asset has essentially collapsed to zero value, because it is so plentiful. This information has become so plentiful that it encourages user inaction, because it comes from so many sources. We started this idea of “social attention” — basically how millions of people attend to particular ideas and information.

Because of the community aspects of the web, there is actually a very small personal real estate. This can be mapped to a small display of a mobile device, and the question is, how do you maximize the information of that personal information on the screen? I am very proud that this conceptual work has produced a product, where a mobile device can print the information to any printer that is nearby. We call it CloudPrint. It’s a mechanism where if you receive an email, or a PowerPoint or other document, you can read it on the device screen or press a button, and it will search for nearby printers and send it to print.

James: And that is licensed by RIM for the BlackBerry platform, is that correct?

Huberman: Correct, it was incubated in the lab, and eventually a deal was made with RIM.

The next thing that I can talk about has to do with work I have been doing for many years concerning social networks. With Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, for example, the fact is when you examine the interactions that people have with each other through these networks or via the phone and email, the actual network of interaction is a very small subset of that large social network. This research led to the investigation of “intimate networks.” We did a big study of users on Twitter to determine how many users were actually exchanging messages with others. We were able to measure precisely that the network of people that users actually engaged was a very small network, not the massive social network they belonged to.

It is the same principle at play when you have a very large Rolodex, but the number of people you actually engage daily, weekly or monthly is very small. Out of that work we invented a service, which we call Friendlee, that runs on a mobile device and captures your interactions with others. This includes phone calls, text messages, emails and interaction with social networks. Friendlee computes on the fly a small network of the people you actually engage most frequently, with these people at the top of the network. People you engage less frequently populate the bottom of the network. As time progresses, and as you change jobs and meet new people and so on, the system keeps dynamically recomputing your social network, and displays it for you in a very compact, meaningful fashion. Not only that, we utilize location-based services (LBS) to tell you where the people in your network are. This can be turned on and off to protect privacy as needed.

You can see with a simple glance all the most important people in your social network (intimate network), communicate with them, send them a text message, call them, whatever you wish. It can tell you where they are, the weather at their location, and all that stuff. There are some interesting applications for the enterprise, but mostly for the consumer, that we are testing now.

James How do you anticipate leveraging Friendlee into actual products or services?

Huberman: I can’t divulge too much at this time, but we do presently have it running on Android and Windows Mobile devices. We can go to other platforms as well. We might know about an actual product by the time of Mobilize — I can’t say.

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