Maya Lotan is about to launch the fantastic flirting service which i discovered back in July 2005 when she presented her final thesis at the Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea.

The idea is to help users connect with people they meet in public spaces and "lure" them into a private corner to get to know them better. It works with "Seeds". Each of the Seed has a private number that doesn't reveal who you are but leads the other person to a webpage where he or she can get a series of clues about you.

How can you give the Seed to someone you fancy without unvealing who you are?

- If you know the email address of that person (a co-worker for example), you can send the Seed by email;
- or you can print and give away a Seed. Hand it to him or her yourself, ask a friend or the waitress to do it when you've left the bar. Each Seed is personalized, you can choose the colour and the patterns and the code is unique, it's just for you and that person.
- do it freestyle.

Each Seed leads to a private space shared by the new "partner" and you. It's a kind of exclusive blog for the two of you. You can put there images, videos, music, messages, etc. And list events and places where you're going to be a week from now.

Hi Maya! Urbanseeder was your one year thesis at Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea. What prompted you to turn it into a marketable product?

I had no choice, I just couldn't focus on anything else. I thought it might really work, and had to bring it to the stage it can be used by people.

Which challenge(s) do you or did you have to face to turn an experimental work into something "real"?

The first challenge, for me, was finding people to believe in the product with me, and people to consult in. The second is adapting the product to the real world, meaning reevaluating the feature set according to what is really key to the product vs. what is just fat, or what relates to existing behavior vs. relies on hypothetical future technology trends. The third, is thinking about the product as a business machine, where the challenge is not so much in the numbers, but more in the forming of a model.

I guess, the biggest challenge is 'letting go' of my idealistic vision and conforming with reality.

Do you think that this concept of flirting interactions cross any frontier or will it be interpreted and welcome in the same way in any culture?

We are really looking forward to seeing, what we believe will be, all kinds of weird interpretations of the product. In the basic level flirting is human nature, but on the surface culture has a great effect. There are different codes of dating and definitions of privacy that will probably effect the way it will be used in different cultures, groups, and ages.

Have you already tested the prototype? What was the feedback?

So far, just parts of it, mostly with friends and colleagues, as well as a few nights out Seeding in Tel-Aviv. The feedback: "What ?@#F?" "Wow!!" "Hmm..". Some people get very excited about it, while others remain skeptical. The product will only be released as Beta around March this year, and this will be its first real test. We have quite a few people signed up already and welcome others to sign up for the Beta at urbanseeder.com.

I love the patterns of Urbanseeder. Who designed them?

Thanks! I love that you love them. The patterns are a product of Michal Amram and Oded Weigel - AKA michaloded - a designer duo we were lucky to be introduced to. They fell into place as part of a complete team effort including Gil Rimon, Shemi Frenkel and the advice of friend experts.

Thanks Maya!

Justin Hall has been working on a new concept for Multiplayer Online Games for his Masters degree at USC Annenberg Center, that’s implementing a point giving system for searching the web, reading emails, texting from you mobile and lots of other activities not directly linked to an online game environment.

He calls it the Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG) where MyWare tracks and catalogues your online activity and assigns a point giving system so checking your email might yield you 10 extra attribute points for "wisdom" or reading the journal of experimental quantum physics gives you 25 attribute points to "intelligence".

The concerns of the MyWare and sharing information with other players touches on lots of privacy issues and how to handle information in a safe manner. Justin defines the PMOG genre like this:

Passively Multiplayer is a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online.Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.

One of Justin's design sketches illustrating his understanding of a web experience and interactions for modelling the game.

I think it’s a really interesting concept when you think of some of the research being done into combining game theory with work routines and making work routines quest based and maybe adding a visible reputation system at the water cooler etc.

And the hype being generate in 2006 on living in virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, this concept is adding a new dimension to the debate.

Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, has posted notes from Justin’s speak on the DIY Media seminar weblog. The post also has a great discussion about the privacy issues, semantic web and valuing experience.

Link: Passively Multiplayer Online Games

Katharina Birkenbach (aka Ponypink), an Amsterdam- and soon Berlin-based designer, has just launched a pretty fresh social networking website, it's called Nearness. Built on Mediamatic's anyMeta system, it allows you to feed it with various information about events, people, things, etc., all of which are equally treated as artefacts. This allows users to create rich interconnections between the individual entries, creating an ever more complex network of stuff.

I asked Katharina to briefly line out what the idea behind it is: "Nearness is an environment where people can store their information that is surrounding them in their daily life. It is not focused on one kind of media but is open for nearly any kind of information, doesn't matter how big or small, important or unimportant it is. Nearness can become an always present little companion, which is helping you to collect, to not forget, to organise the things you like. But organising not in the sense that you are somehow the administrator of a complex folder system, but by generating context for the data and embedding it in the data network. The context in which, for example, your favourite book is displayed is not only set up by the information you've entered, but all the users of Nearness. In this sense it can develop to some kind of stimulating treasure trove."

Trying to explain the potential of it, she also sent me a scan from her sketchbook which is pictured above, along with its history: a photo from i-D magazine, alluding to The Virgin Suicides. A sticker from Dazed and Confused which itself is a quote from The Who. Ten friends also made collages like this as part of something called Feed Me. So, Nearness in her vision could grow to become a tool for the same process. Something that today many creative people use notebooks for: collecting snippets of culture, ideas – in a way making mental collages but with the power of a networked system.

On another Amsterdam-related note, my short recap and pictures from last week's wearables workshop are online now. If you're interested in what people actually made, you should have a look.

Finland- and UK-based artist-researchers Loca were running their project in downtown San Jose. They had molded hollow concrete objects which they attached to various lamps, traffic lights and signposts. Being made of gray concrete makes them effectively invisible which is important because they contain sneaky cargo: inside, there's a mobile phone and a power source which lasts around a week. Using a custom software, the phone will continuously scan for devices that have bluetooth enabled and set to discoverable. Every occasion of a tracked device will be sent to the central database and archived there. At their booth they would print out a receipt-style list of the places you've been to which in my case was approximately 2 meters long, others were gigantic. Now here comes the fun part: Loca not only collects your data but also tries to combine it with the context of the "urban semantics" it is operating in and tries to draw conclusions from that. Having checked out a few shops and the park for instance, you would suddenly get the message: “You were in a flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park; are you in love?�.

Another thing that Loca do is the tagging of photos according to the electromagnetic context of the device at the time they were taken, i.e. the identities of the nearby bluetooth devices. The pictures they have been uploading to Flickr for some time now contain information about the presence of other's cameras, which already represents quite a history of social encounters, opening a wide field of possibilities for mining and combining the data. There was another work called BlueStates which apparently works in the same direction.

IN[ ]EX is a project by a Canadian art group which acts as a nice low-tech approach to the spread of digital information. Their piece consist of a shipping container with (initially) 3000 wooden blocks of various sizes attached to it with tiny magnets. There are also a few bigger ones that actually contain sensors for the smaller blocks. The setup has two functions: a sound installation inside the container which is being generated and influenced through the way that the small blocks are attached to the wall of the container and around the bigger, sensitive blocks. The other part is actually participatory since the artists ask visitors to pick a block and take it with them. Ideally, they should attach it to another metal surface in the city, spreading the installation all over the place. IN[ ]EX is meant to "explore the migration of capital, goods, and people through the ports and public spaces of Vancouver and San Jose", and the Canadian wood did migrate quite a lot. By the time this photo was taken, almost 1000 pieces were already gone and you would see them in the most absurd places, some people get really ambitious with these things.

The exhibition-space at South Hall in San Jose, being a giant temporary tent-like structure, was a bit remindful of the Cargolifter hangar close to Berlin, blimp and blimpsters included!

mates is a location-based social networking system developed at the University of Michigan and aimed at introducing and connecting people based on the intersection of physical location and other properties they might have in common.

With mates, your IM program could automatically create buddy lists based on the people in your classroom, office building, or neighborhood; you could be informed via SMS when old friends happen to be nearby or your laptop/handheld could connect you to a live feed of information about nearby people and events.

The open infrastructure will allow existing software to harness the location based social networking and a platform on top of which other new applications can be developed.

Via del.icio.us.

The interactive name tag helps people connect, reports Agenda live, Inc.

"Interactive tags developed by Rick Borovoy, co-founder of nTag in Boston, store pertinent data - supplied by all attendees at an event - and then use radio signals to match interests and business needs. Worn on a lanyard around the neck, the tag holds a small screen that flashes messages when a person is near someone he or she should meet.

One message might say: "Hi Joe. We have three things in common: We both like baseball, live in the Chicago area, and I need a Web designer." Joe's screen would likewise greet his fellow conventioneer, with the last item reading: "And I'm a Web designer."