I have an account on Facebook for quite a while now but I actually don’t use it a lot. The main reason for this was that I didn’t get it - I just didn’t understand why I should poke or superpoke someone.

On the other hand I could see the benefit of a huge number of friends (like Robert Scoble, who frequently complained about the limit of 5000 friends) because by “friending” you, they give permission to receive updates from you which can be used as a new communication channels. Nevertheless this reasoning didn’t explain why millions users spend time on Facebook when you are not trying to sell something or spread ideas.

And then I heard the speech from Robin Hunicke at lift08, a researcher at Electronic Arts and suddenly it made sense. When you play computer games like World of Warcraft your fantasy is to be a “warrior who wants to fight in a land of war”. Facebook also helps its users realize a fantasy - the fantasy is “I am a person living a fun life……and I am loved”. And just like in other computer games where you can collect points and stars for for certain activities, in Facebook your score is determined by the number of friends, graffiti, gifts, hugs, laughter, wins and photographs on your Facebook profile. The most important aspect is that everyone of your friends can see whether you are “living a fun life and are being loved”.

How many other applications do you know that make you feel loved?

Watch the speech online:

 

 

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Nokia OpenStudio is a project by Nokia Design which is based on the concept of exploratory design research. The Nokia Open Studio took place in three communities in India, Africa and South America where Nokia together with local teams staged an event to gather design ideas for mobile phones that match the lifestyle of people in their environment.

Nokia designed entry forms and provided writing equipment so that local people are able to write down their ideas and participate in the contest. Additionally the teams performed interviews how the design of their mobile phones actually relates to the people’s life.

At the end an award ceremony was organized and the winners were awarded. The most promising  ideas were an intuitive and instant weather forecast, a solution for creating awareness of the environmental problems as well as a four Simcard holder.

This is a good example of how to identify latent user requirements especially when you are dealing with customers that have a totally different cultural and environmental context.

 

Here is the speech from Younghee Jung

 

For more scientific information about this you can read more about sticky information in a paper written by Eric von Hippel titled "Sticky Information" and the Locus of Problem Solving: Implications for Innovation.

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Another highlight at lift08 was the talk from Pierre Bellanger, founder and CEO of Skyrock.fm. Skyrock.fm is the leading social network in France with approximately 20 million users. From his perspective the biggest opportunity for growth is by bringing social networking and instant messaging to the mobile phone. Simply transferring concepts from the desktop to the mobile phone won’t do the job - the context when using your computer as well as technology and interface are completely different from mobile phones. You can see his speech here:

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