Hypothesis: In five years we will look back at apps like Ding Dong, Snapchat, and Poke and understand them as important milestones on the journey towards a more ambient communication powered by contextually aware devices — the world that Paul conjures up in the TechCrunch article above.

Here's a recent piece on Ding Dong (siliconallee.com) (ht @Nick).

In it, the creator says things like...“you sometimes just don’t have time for it but you want to let someone know that you are thinking of them anyway,” and "we think there is a way to communicate missing."

What do you guys think? Is there a pattern in these emerging apps that helps to validate Paul's vision?

The way I see the products mentioned above is not only contextual as mentioned in Paul's article, but also as minimum viable forms of communication. I like to reference them as the atomic units of interaction that are allowed by the mobile devices we now carry in our pockets.

I often worry, and possibly we're getting close to this reality, that the number of possible combinations or remixes of the sensors on our phones is getting close to its limits. And that we're in a place now waiting for other devices and platforms to build on in order to attain a reality like Paul's above.

But at the same time, I'm often pleasantly surprised by products like Ding Dong that even with the same devices and sensors, can iterate to find a new and beautiful form of minimum viable communication. There are a million subtle ways in which we interact and communicate with one another, and finding ways to properly and simply replicate these interactions with our devices is very difficult. But when it's done right, when the experience is natural, almost passive and during the appropriate context, these products can have very powerful results.

Snapchat, Ding Dong, and the like are often viewed as silly toys or apps, but they are tapping into very natural human interactions that we have every day, all the time, usually offline. These products are replicating these simple forms of communication through our devices in our pockets, and that's why even though the products themselves will change over time, they are meaningful and in one way or another are here to stay as well as flourish.

I agree that this sort of MVP for communication is interesting — and in some ways, much of the experiences in the last few years have been about that. This is what I touch on here: youngandbrilliant.net
But I'm not convinced that this is the same as ambient social. It's possible that location data is a form of that, but I remain unconvinced of its large-scale applicability. For young, mobile urbanites, these applications may make sense. But for many people, these applications exist on an uneasy line between "things that don't make me look interesting" and " things that violate my privacy."

I also have a hunch that much of what is conveyed in an MVP for communication would not be information (eg, location), as we keep wanting these updates to contain, but actually emotion. What made the Pair app so visceral is they used this form of touch in such an interesting way, it allowed people to convey an emotion in a very resonant way. I think there's a world of expression that's disconnected from just information (where I am, who I'm with, etc) and more about emotion.

Can it be that we're going from sharing afk/irl activities w ourselves, and maybe most importantly with others, to sharing our thoughts? Here I'm not really thinking in the twitter-way of tweeting what's rumbling around in our thoughts on others and society but in the sense of wanting to convey those momentary emotions and (positive) thoughts we have of people in our lives. Starting to log our thoughts, not just our actions and activities?

Re: Ninakix, indeed MVP for communication is quite different than ambient social (possibly I redirected the conversation :-) but I think ambient social is a close cousin in that many of the same passive or lightly active elements are present in both cases. Your comment on expression over information is interesting, and I like your post on it. Dustin Curtis wrote about it recently as well: dcurt.is ... What other examples aside from Snapchat have you seen?

I'm not sure I'm sold just yet, but at the moment it seems even the products seemingly based solely on information are trying to find ways to add personal expression to the data (Yelp, Ding Dong, etc).

re: Ivalu - Yes someone mentioned to me yesterday that we're finally moving from large broadcast systems to 1-1 and small group sharing. It's been written about ad nauseam, but possibly it's coming to fruition as a result of social graph fatigue on facebook, twitter, instagram, etc?

I guess what I'm asking here, Nina, is whether or not we'll look back on these "MVP's" and see the seeds of what will become true ambient social applications. There are two things that these apps are teaching us:

1) That merely declaring your presence is an acceptable way to connect online
2) That simply taking note of that presence is an acceptable way to react

As you say, we live in an ecosystem of social apps in which the sharing of "meaningful information" is a requirement for connection. These apps are helping us move out of that world, and that's the first step toward a more 'ambient' environment.

There's two big challenges for these kinds of products, that I think intersect with each other:

1) habit. People use applications that they develop a habit of using. It's really hard to build a product that people don't use frequently enough to develop a habit of using.

2) privacy. The way to get around this is to develop something that transmits data automatically. But, most people like their privacy too much for this.

Perhaps for a segment of the population these apps would make sense. But I think the opportunity for ambient data would be actually within non-"social" (ie, not pertaining to where other people are) data: something more akin to Yelp Monocle or Pinwheel.

As far as knowing where other people are, I think one line of experimentation that's interesting was a project done to mimic the Weasley's clock, from the Harry Potter movies. It showed where each member of the family was (work, school, in transit, etc) and was actually very weirdly reassuring to people. Another similar app was Google Latitude, where you could allow friends to see your location data. These aren't about expression or communication, but rather, building closeness and reassurance.

(At this point I wish I could remember the study of couples and text messaging, where couples would text each other the mundane things they were doing, but that built a sense of closeness throughout the day, even when they were physically apart)

I think the interesting thing here is that such an app is actually in some way necessarily lateral, as opposed to minimal—as Nina points out in her article, it's not that it's enough to simply to post a picture of the food that I'm having, or who I'm having it with—it's that it's *too much* to be more explicit (or explicit in the way we're used to thinking of it) and text that same sentiment as a sentence.

That is, the style of communication that is emerging here isn't simply the kernel of a more elaborated medium; rather, my posting a temporary or unelaborated image or ping or ding-dong or what have you actually sidesteps our expectations (Grice is useful here) of verbal communication in a way that allows for intimacy and connection.

I think the real question here is not, 'how do these new apps extend our communicative capacities along dimensions of ambience or context (or ease of use or demographic selection etc),' but rather 'what is it in this sort of application that allows us to model human communication more faithfully than more elaborated, supposedly sophisticated media currently can?'

Snapchat is, intentionally or no, a partial technical solution to the problem of the narrow bandwidth of telecommunication—the answer isn't bigger pipe, but more careful sensitivity to the way people talk. That Ding-Dong is a UX improvement in the direction of ambience is more interesting as a closer model of human interaction and less as a new way to convey information packets.

I have a couple of issues/concerns with the rise of ephemeral communications. While its great that more and more information is being shared - I think these "conversations" are so much like talking (meaning the interaction does not need a specific purpose) that people using snapchat, similar to BBM several years ago, forget that everything creates a digital record and can be stored even if they didn't intend it to be stored. It also seems concerning that while apps like snapchat allow for far more creativity than txt'ing, they further diminish the perceived need for face-to-face communication.

.I find that the first levels to ambient social is in community sites like couch surfing, airbnb, skyara(I think it's called), dating sites, LinkedIn, interest-based online+afk communities: I have something specific to offer and I'm looking for a receiver, vice versa.   So the ambient social isn't automatic yet, it's manually tapped in on various websites.   Grindr would be a good example of a location based app that communicates certain data on a person, to the surrounding crowd.   When Google+ first launched it was promoted as the interest based community site: tired of sharing to the same 250 contacts, where few, if any, were interested. G+ gave the interactive crowd.The base is there,let's go for more targeted, spontaneous and sporadic!