Auscillate.com

Interview with Biz Stone of Twitter

Posted Thu, August 14, 2008, 1:39pm EST

Note: This is the second of a few interview pieces I originally wrote for the now-defunct Nokia Workshop blog. That blog died before these could go up, so I'm going to post them here instead. Thanks go out to the folks who took the time to participate — and apologies that these couldn't wind up somewhere slightly more prominent.

If you're at all interested in social software or mobile applications you're probably familiar with Twitter, the simple SMS broadcasting tool that launched a couple of years ago. Twitter has continued to grow at a fast clip and has taken on a certain amount of cultural resonance, so I decided to ask Twitter Co-Founder and Creative Director Biz Stone a few questions about the social design and interaction design behind the service.

I should note, also, that Twitter has a lovely API which indie developers or experimenters might find quite useful.

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Josh: Twitter is sort of shockingly simple. I'd like to know more about the initial design choices: How did you settle upon Twitter's interaction model?

Biz: Our inspiration was the concept of status-like the away message in Instant Message applications. However, current status is only so interesting when you're always in front of a computer so we wanted to take that idea and make it mobile. That's where SMS came in. When we built the web site, we thought a little push in the right direction would help so we came up with the question, "What are you doing?"

Josh: Were there existing mobile apps that influenced and inspired you guys to build it as you did?

Biz: There were no existing mobile apps that inspired us. Instead, we took inspiration from broader subjects like the dispatch industry and the history of the telegraph.

Josh: Yeah, Twitter has a sort of "telegraph-like" feel to it. Have you read "The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage? Were there any specific ways that looking at the dispatch or telegraph industry informed Twitter's design?

Biz: Yes, I happened to be reading that book around the time we first prototyped Twitter. There was nothing specific that informed the design — I'd say it was more of an inspiration.

Josh: Did you have to actively hold yourselves back from adding features that might've cluttered the project? And how have you gone about deciding which features to incorporate post-launch (such as the "@username" means of addressing someone)?

Biz: To some extent yes, we needed to restrain ourselves from adding complexity with additional features. However, it helped that the service got very popular and we had less time for feature building. In general we prefer to take our time and allow behavior to show us how we can make the service better. When we saw users adopting an @username protocol we decided to implement it in the system and created the "Replies" tab so folks could track those links.

Josh: Is the 140-character message length holy, or is it merely an artifact of the length of an SMS? Would Twitter ever consider raising or lowering the allowed message length?

Biz: The 140 character length is holy to us but it is also an artifact of the length of an SMS. From the beginning, we wanted our service to be device agnostic — a message created on a computer should work when received via SMS. The lowest common denominator was 160 character messages of SMS and we left 20 characters for the username. However, we also very much believe that constraint inspires creativity so the 140 character limit is not going to change.

Josh: The Twitter API seems like an important factor in Twitter's success. Have there been applications built on top of Twitter by third-party developers that have particularly impressed Team Twitter? Anything especially bizarre or unexpected?

Biz: The API has been a boon to Twitter and it accounts for a much larger percentage of traffic than even our web site. Several applications built on our API have particularly impressed us including Twitterriffic which as recently won an Apple Design Award and Twittervision which was recently featured in New York City's MoMA. Early on, we used to be confused when at 5pm PST each day Twitter seemed to be taken over by what appeared to be lots of kittens twittering in Japanese. It turns out there was a popular tamagotchi game built on Twitter — that was bizarre. I think the plant that Twitters when it needs water is strangely compelling too.

Josh: What about community-forming? Were there conscious and pro-active steps you took to develop and nurture the early Twitter community? Do you have any suggestions for social application developers on that front?

Biz: We attracted early adopters and our API helped form a developer community around Twitter. My only suggestion would be that you're building a product for yourself as well as others. Everything else forms around that — or doesn't if you're not personally interested.

Josh: Are there groups who use Twitter that have totally surprised you? Twitter's effect on social justice movements, for example, is fascinating.

Biz: For sure, the story of James Buck who escaped from an Egyptian prison using Twitter highlights the social justice and activism use cases. Emergency workers and news organizations who value the real-time nature of the Twitter network were not exactly a surprise but their fairly rapid adoption has been pretty impressive.

Josh: It seems like many people have strong opinions about what Twitter should or should not do. For example, some people think it should have groups. Or it should have more refined privacy controls. Or whatever. You probably hear a ton of these. How does something go from suggestion to being built into the Twitter infrastructure? Are there any new features like this in the pipe or is this the sort of thing that you like to see users take care of themselves via the API or other hacks?

Biz: It's true, many people talk about wish-list features. However, it's important to measure activity and behavior patterns as well. You'd be surprised at how many people bring up a feature and then just as quickly dismiss it because they love the simplicity of Twitter. We have to be careful what we add to the experience. Certainly, API projects that solve certain user needs are beneficial to us so we continue to encourage that work.

Josh: Where does Twitter go from here? Will there be various regional (or socially-regional) Twitter clones that exist mostly independently similar to how Facebook and MySpace users remain walled apart? Or will we see a rise of services that bridge between these?

Biz: We'd like to see Twitter grow into a global utility around the world. We see existing networks like those you mentioned as devices not dissimilar from SMS. Twitter will remain complimentary to these services as well as new services inspired by Twitter.

Josh: And what about more powerful mobile devices that can run fuller-featured apps and aren't constrained to text messages? Does Twitter depend on outside developers building on the API in those cases? Like Twitterrific for the iPhone.

Biz: Patterns are emerging on Twitter. Already we see three different types of messages — traditional status updates, replies or conversational updates, and messages sharing some form of media. Right now, sharing anything over Twitter is done via URL which renders as linked text and conversations can be hard to keep track of. We'll be looking at these patterns and considering ways to improve the experience while remaining simple and true to form.

Josh: Thanks for your time!

Biz: Sure thing!

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On Sean Tevis

Posted Sat, July 26, 2008, 7:28pm EST

You've probably seen the Sean Tevis XKCD-style campaign comic. It's a pretty fucking charming way for a politician to make their pitch, I must admit. (Tevis is running for Kansas House of Representatives District 15 — representing parts of Olathe, a Kansas City suburb, and some surrounding turf.) He seems like a great, smart guy and it's sort of amazing to see what happens when an information architect — a web nerd (with a blog) — runs for office.

And while the outporing of internet love is great, people donating money to his campaign who do not live in his district are acting irresponsibly. He has apparently received donations from almost 6,000 people (~$50k). I bet almost none of those come from people who live in KS HR District 15. I'm not going to link to anyone specifically because I don't want to be a jack-ass, but plenty of people who clearly do not live in Kansas have announced on their blogs or Twitter that they've given money. I don't think this is right.

Everyone in the United States deserves proper representation in their state and national governing bodies. Sean Tevis is not running for representative of the Internet — he's running for representative of Olathe, Kansas. I worry that by making him beholden to a vast network of contributors who live in California, New York, Texas, etc. that we are actually somewhat disenfranchising voters from that area. If you do not live in Olathe, you are not his constituent. If Olathe is conservative and would prefer to elect a conservative to represent them, well I certainly don't personal agree with the politics. But that's their decision. I have my own state and national representatives it's their job to make my voice heard. Not Sean Tevis'. No matter how charming he may be.

I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My representative in the US House is Democrat Nydia Velázquez. She's apparently quite a well-respected businesswoman — she chairs the House Small Business Committee and sits on the Financial Services Committee. My rep in the NY state Assembly is Joseph R. Lentol. And in the NY Senate, Martin Malavé Dilan. None of these people have cute web-meme-friendly comics on their sites, but I think the best way to use this excitement about Sean Tevis is not to give money to Sean Tevis — it's to get excited about your local politics and learn a bit about what's going on with the people who represent you. You're paying them, after all...

End of rant.

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July 27th Update: Sean Tevis responded in the comments (cool!) and I've somewhat revised my thoughts on the matter.

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Reassembling the Studio

Posted Fri, July 25, 2008, 4:20am EST

Andreas Tilliander at my Oscillate Night 01.

I've decided it's time to reunite the band. Sort of like in the Blues Brothers, except instead of wrangling up my old hands at diners and dive bars I'm gathering together my software install DVDs and product activation codes. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but this afternoon it dawned on me that I could get Apple's Logic Studio for cheap. Which includes Logic Pro 8 — the updated version of my compositional weapon-of-choice — along with a variety of other audio tools I don't know but might be fun to fool with (like the Impulse Response Utility, which apparently lets you "snapshot" the reverb acoustics of a real-world space and import them into virtual reverb and spatialization plug-ins — whoa). So I purchased Logic Studio. Good for me.

Logic Pro, Ableton Live, and Native Instruments Komplete. My holy trinity of audio production and performance. They're a good combination for the synthy sound I like. Flexible. And they don't require any equipment besides the laptop. So now I've reacquired Logic. And I got the new Ableton Live free as a part of my Laptop Battle winnings — so I'm only really missing Komplete. My four-year-old, three-versions-out-of-date Komplete 2 install DVDs didn't really work (not a huge surprise). So I'm deciding what I want to do about that.

Anyway, it's been bugging me not having my little electronic music creative outlet these past couple of years. It's also refreshing to think about making something that's not interactive for a change. Maybe you'll get lucky and if I know you I'll start bugging you with my shitty techno.

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Interview with Noel Chandler of Mosio

Posted Thu, July 24, 2008, 10:00pm EST

Note: This is the first of a few interview pieces I originally wrote for the now-defunct Nokia Workshop blog. That blog died before these could go up, so I'm going to post them here instead. Thanks go out to the folks who took the time to participate — and apologies that these couldn't wind up somewhere slightly more prominent.

Say hello to Mosio, if you haven't already met, another application exploring new ways to build social software on top of simple text messaging. Mosio do Q-n-A: Text out a question and if someone using the service knows the answer (or is at a computer), they'll send you a response. They won a 2008 SXSW Web Award — that's where I first heard about the project. Co-founder Noel Chandler was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.

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Josh: Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for the blog.

Noel: My pleasure.

Josh: So the primary Mosio app is a crowd-sourced question-and-answer system that uses text messages. It's like Yahoo! Answers or Ask Metafilter, maybe, but focussed on mobile.

Noel: Exactly, with more on-the-go focus, specifically tied to speed of results. People who are mobile want info asap.

Josh: To start, how did you arrive at this idea? Did you find that you were often in a situation where you needed such a service? Or did you begin by looking at the mobile space and dreaming up new modes of social interaction?

Noel: It was a little bit of both. My Co-Founder (Jay Sachdev) and I were working together on some cool projects for our regular jobs, found out we were both passionate about mobile over some drinks after work. From there we started talking about cool things you could do with your phone, built a few apps and then the "how cool would it be if you could text any question and have it answered by a real person?" idea came up, so we started building it. It sounds sort of cliche for a start-up to say "it all started out as an experiment," but the truth is, it really did. In fact, the name Mosio is taken from "mociology" (mobile sociology), the study of how humans interact socially with mobile devices. We really just wanted to see what would happen.

Josh: Mosio seems like something that's useless until you reach a critical mass of users. How did you go about building the Mosio community? Does receiving an award like the SXSW Web Award result in a boost of users?

Noel: Yeah, building a self-sustaining community is definitely not easy, but we were determined to make it work. Also, we were lucky enough to have a small group of friends and people who truly wanted to see it succeed, wanted to be able to have the service around when they needed information. Some of those same folks are still an active part of asking and answering, but in addition there's a whole new group of people who we're grateful to for continuing to make the service great. Without them it wouldn't be helpful, informative, funny or addictive.

Winning at SXSW was such an amazing experience. Mosio started out as a "2 dudes in a garage" idea, our first office was literally in my garage, so being able to go to Austin, have a great time in a super fun city and bring home an award was great. The win has definitely helped increase the number of users and partners for us. I'm a marketing guy and Jay is the engineer, so while I've always wanted the party to be so big the house falls apart, he's done a good job reminding me of the fact that if the house falls apart, everybody has to go home or find another place to party. Somewhere in between we have an incredible steady growth of amazing users sprinkled with growth spurts of new people who really like the service, so we're both happy.

Josh: Are there any groups of Mosio users that you're just totally surprised by? Or people using Mosio in ways you hadn't thought of?

Noel: Definitely. I'm constantly surprised by people using the service, so helpful, yet there seems to be an irreverent and smart ass tone that they use when answering. People sometimes ask "why would I ask Mosio about the weather when I could just use Google SMS?" The reason is because Google SMS doesn't respond back and tell you you're lucky that your weather is warmer than where it is or that you should probably pack a jacket just in case. The human element keeps it really cool and the fact that people are volunteering to help each other makes it even better.

My favorite things are the "above and beyonds" with the site, true favors. They come in the form of making a phone call for that person, some people have asked for someone to make a dinner reservation and others have called a store to confirm something before they text back an answer ("I couldn't find store hours on their site but I called for you and they're open until 9pm." or "They said they'd fix that kind of watch for $30 plus $5 for the battery.") I never would have imagined that so much relationship advice would be given out or that people would be so nice and encouraging to those asking for it. It's really cool.

Josh: It's interesting to me that even in this age of sexy high-end phones like the Nokia Nseries and iPhones and such that the lowly text message still seems to have so much potential. Obviously Twitter, for example, has capitalized on this. Do you feel like this is just the fragmentation of the mobile communications space — similar to how we have instant messaging and e-mail and such co-existing on our computers — or will mobile applications eventually absorb the SMS function? Does Mosio have any plans for a mobile application?

Noel: Very true. I heard a quote the other night at a mobile event that was basically "targeting smart phones means 10% of the market. Targeting 'dumb' phones means 100% of the market." While I agree and understand why it was said, at Mosio we believe in the near future almost all phones will be smart phones and we're working under that premise. That said, I'm not sure if other mobile apps will completely absorb the SMS function, but I feel like there will always be a need for SMS, even if "short" means 500 characters instead of 160. We live in a burst culture where RSS feeds, headlines and status updates keep us informed. There's always going to be a need for that quick, set-it-and-forget-it communication function on your mobile, kept separate from email. We love that SMS is ubiquitous, but we also have our SDKs open and studied. You'll see a "beyond messaging" element to Mosio within the next 3 months.

Josh: How do you feel about the 160-character limit? I see you try to adhere to it, but there are some questions (and answers) which I suppose were asked via the web that go much longer. Do you consider it a limitation, the character limit, or a tool for keeping people a bit more concise and to-the-point?

Noel: I really think a lot can be done in 160 characters, but at times it can be limiting. This will show itself even more when a lot of free services begin to monetize and need the real estate to do so, cutting 160 characters to 120 or less. The way we extend that character limit is through a tool on our site that enables you to send a two message response, showing you what your response will look like before you send it. We did it so people could see all they had to do was truncate/abbreviate a word to save the asking person a text and I think people both utilize and enjoy the thinking behind it. I definitely like the by-product of keeping people short with their answers, because it prevents someone from just copying/pasting a whole page and blasting it, which is the exact opposite point. Mosio members now use the acronym WYGO (When You Get Online) to send a link where more information can be found later (or now if you're really interested and have mobile web access). WYGO links are super helpful for that extra information, giving you the option to read it now or later.

Josh: I see you've integrated the Mosio Q-n-A service into the Twitter API. What led you in that direction? And how do you feel about the Twitter API? Are they offering an interesting sort of social platform for SMS-based apps a la the Facebook App platform (a stretch, maybe) where you plug into their social graph so people don't have to go through the hassle of duplicating it on your site? Or is it just the popular hang-out of the day?

Noel: Our decision to develop it came down to two things:

1) We're big Twitter fans and there's an interesting thing going on with people seeing it used in certain ways and then immediately thinking of how they could use it or what they could create for it.

2) When we first built the Twitter Answers App, it was because we kept seeing all of these cool applications being built for Twitter, but mostly in the ways of either repackaging the tweets gleaned from the public timeline or new ways to post to Twitter. Through the same thinking I mentioned in #1 above, we created Twitter Answers.

Our thinking didn't too much to do with plugging into the social graph or anything like that, we just thought it was a cool way to use Twitter. We haven't created a Facebook App yet because we haven't thought of anything yet that we feel would be a great way to use or contribute to Facebook for a long period of time. I think the social graph elements to all social networks is incredibly interesting, each has it's own small nuances. For example, I found out a friend died from Facebook updates, I found out Tim Russert died from Twitter and I found out Heath Ledger died from Mosio when a handful of people all asked if it was true. Not to bring up such a sad topic, but each example is the distribution (and confirmation) of immediate information that is important to people.

Josh: Finally, where's Mosio going in the future? I see you have a myriad other text messaging services at the Mosio.com site — everything from random humorous Chuck Norris "trivia" to automatic birthday reminders. Are you branching out to more services or are you keeping your focus on the Mosio Q-n-A application itself?

Noel: I can't go into too much detail with specifics, but it's a little bit of both. It all comes down to listening to what our users want. You can now post photos (video posting coming soon) which has turned out to be really well received in spite of the fact that we haven't promoted it heavily on the site. The apps are helpful and let people use their phones in new ways, so we'll be building out more of those with some more specific focus on Q&A + location.

Thanks so much for the interview!

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mosio.com

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Watching the Watchmen

Posted Wed, July 23, 2008, 3:16am EST

Oh, Watchmen. They're finally turning you into a movie (apparently after twenty years of trying and to the chagrin of author Alan Moore).

I loved this book as a teenager — I remember first getting into it around age ten, reading by sort of flipping from section to section out of order, not really understanding much but finding myself thoroughly absorbed in the Watchmen universe. The Rorschach section, especially, sticks in my mind.

These kinds of stories typically get abused by Hollywood. For example: the charisma-neutered Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. But the preview's pretty damned striking and Zach "300" Snyder is helming, so there may be hope. Also, they seemed to have nailed the look of Dr. Manhattan (the glowing blue naked guy) — probably the most difficult character to render to the screen. The only real casting miss seems to be Ozymandias, who duesn't really seem to have quite that golden Master Race aspect to him like in the book. But whatever.

Very curious to see how this turns out. March 2009.

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A Light-Weight Experiment

Posted Tue, July 22, 2008, 2:05am EST

Something has to happen with this blog. Apparently I don't really have the time or the wit or the whatever-it-is to churn out the lengthier sorts of essays I prefer. So I've come up with a bit of an experiment for myself — a personal challenge. Every day for ten weeks I'm going to write (around) ten sentences about a single idea.

This seems like a good length to sketch out an idea. Feeling like I have to expand an idea out into some 3000-word treatise just adds a weight which suddenly turns the whole thing into another fucking task I have to add to the pile and then explain to my poor girlfriend why I'm spending another evening fiddling with my website rather than fiddling with her. So this is also an experiment with a somewhat lighter-weight blogging style (which I haven't really tried for, like, years).

Blogs have, by and large, settled into a handful of formats — so maybe this is also an expression of my urge to shake Auscillate up a bit and start trying out some of my other ideas. Maybe I'll even turn Auscillate back into an actual breathing blog again...

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Mobile Music Workshop 2008, Vienna

Posted Sat, May 17, 2008, 6:07pm EST

Art school graffiti.

Hello, there. I'm going to do a few more detailed write-ups and interviews for the Nokia Nseries Workshop blog, so I'm not going to get too much into the nitty-gritty details here. But I thought I should write a few words about the Mobile Music Workshop and my experiences here in Vienna. I'm sitting in the cute little apartment I've rented — it's off in the western part of town in a neighborhood called Ottokring (after Ottokar II, I assume). The windows are open, letting in the air. And a few bugs.

Richard Widerberg talking about IMPROVe.

This has been, just to note, one of my least touristy trips to Europe ever. Between prepping for the Workshop, covering work, and just generally allowing myself the opportunity to sit around and read books or catch up on my TV shows, I just haven't had much time or energy to go and do the full-blown sightseeing thing. I have been to Vienna before and to Austria several times, so I've seen the highlights, I guess. But in a way I've just experienced the city mostly how I would if I just lived here: Get up, go into the University for the conference. Work or read at home. Go grocery shopping. Etc. Not to say I just sat at home staring at my computer all day. I got out. Spent Sunday walking around town (shots from Prater are in my previous post). And yesterday I went to the MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst — Museum of Modern Art) and wandered around the old town a bit. The weather has been amazing — unseasonably warm according to one of the locals at the Workshop, very sunny and bright. Cool in the evenings.

Having a seat, waiting for the show.

MUMOK, by the way, has an exhibition going on called "Genau+anders" ("Exact+different") which traces 500 year, or so, of pure mathematics impacting visual art. A lot of what they have up is, frankly, dumb. "Math-ish" art done by people who don't naturally "get" math or who don't really sit down and really explore it produce some really bland crap. Writing Fibonacci sequences on things and drawing squares around circles doesn't really qualify as using art to "explore" mathematics. Or the other way around. It's just kind of lazy. Math != Minimalist. That being said, there was some good stuff. Their earliest pieces, drawings of solids by Albrecht Dürer from the early 1500s were amazing. And for many of the more contemporary pieces if you detach yourself from the "math" and just accept them as "minimalist" or "suprematist" or whatever many of the pieces were very nice. The giant Sol LeWitt optical illusions, for example, were great (photo coming soon). But back to Dürer, for a sec: I found it very interesting to place into a larger historical context some of the "computer art" (god, what a horrible phrase) that I do and people at places like ITP do. And by that I mean stuff like that from Dan Shiffman's Nature of Code class, stuff that aims to create art out of the math that computers are so good at handling. We're in a luxurious position, in that to visualize a Platonic solid in a nicely rendered way requires a few lines of code, at most. Albrecht Dürer and his contemporaries — up through, say, 1970 — had to draw such things by hand, a much more arduous process. But I feel a similar kind of mentality going into it: A desire to See the Thing that the math describes. And a desire to play with it.

Using bikes as mobile instrument controllers.

Okay. I'm way off-topic. So: The Mobile Music Workshop. The reason I'm here.

One of the break-out sessions.

What is it? Well, it's a small, three-day event that consisted of a mix of talks, workshops, and performances — all exploring in some way the notion of "mobile music" (obviously). So there were technical talks about new tools, design talks about the nature of interactivity and touch, and various technical demos. Lots of Nokia N95 phones — heh. And a few projects with Wii remotes and Nintendo DSes (both great tools for experimenation, by the way). The MMW moves every year and this year was hosted by the University for Applied Arts Vienna and had about 25 attendants. Most of whom presented something. There was only one event at a time, so we all did everything together. Which was quite nice, actually. I think I met and had good conversations with more new people here than I generally do at a big thing like SXSW where everything's just so overwhelming. I had a great time.

Go PhonePlay!

My project — games made with PhonePlay — went off well. It took me a couple of days to get the European telephony stuff worked out (including one evening spent with tech support from one company on the phone and another in chat — erg), but once that issue had been ironed out, things became easy. I installed it at the University and showed my thesis game, called either "3001" or "Paddler," and the game I made for Digium on my trip out there last December, called "Blocks." (Naming these games has become somewhat of a problem — nothing I do sounds right. "Blocks?" "Paddler?" Awful names. But, anyway.) PhonePlay got a fine reception — people seemed pleased. I clumsily fielded a handful of technical questions and that was that.

A Wiimote-based performance.

Like I said, in the coming weeks I'm going to submit a bunch of articles about this to the Nokia blog, so I'm not going to get too deep, here. One subject Nokia might not be interested in, though, is the Nintendo hacking that has been going on. There were a couple of Nintendo-related projects at the MMW: One was a project called "Mobile Tangible Interfaces as Gestural Instruments" and featured homebrew musical software for the Nintendo DS. These were simple musical toys a la Electroplankton. Very nicely done. The DS is essentially a big-screen smart phone without the actual phone calling capability. It's got the touch screen, the wifi, the mic, etc. The difficulty in programming it is probably what's holding back development — why isn't Nintendo pushing this, though? I guess the DS sells just fine on its own... Anyway, another such piece was a performance on the final night of the MMW which features three guys with speakers attached to mic stands which they could gyrate around the generate noise. (You can kind of see what's going on in the photo above.) Attached in front of the cones of these speakers were Wiimotes which, I assume, measured the orientation of the speaker and could also be "plucked" to generate sounds (each Wiimote was mounted using an elastic sort of material). So the performance consisted of these three guys moving these speakers around in the air and plucking the Wiimotes. Clever.

Setting up for a vegetable-based performance with the Institute for Transacoustic Research.

Another performance that night was done by a group called the Institute for Transacoustic Research (see photo above and the two below). I don't know much about these guys, but they seem to be a part of the larger group of people who do performances with entire vegetable-based instruments. Beating carrots on gourds and such. I saw them do a set in Barcelona when I was out there for SONAR in 2005. At the MMW performance they had a few vegetables in effect, but mostly they just had huge piles of kind of everything in effect. From carrots and potatoes to modified bass guitars and a video projection and homemade automated instruments and a mess of digital and analog hardware plus computers. And, as you can see, mice. It sounded good. And they were quite fun to watch because you got to kind of try to figure out what they were doing and there was so much to see them do. Very nice.

Live video projection, also from the Inst. for Transacoustic Research.

A mouse-based controller, also from the Inst. for Transacoustic Research.

So what else to say? This is a kind of messy, incomplete report of the event. I really didn't even mention most of the cool stuff going on. It did feel like I'd found a warm little community of people, which is good. Jonah Brucker-Cohen (my thesis advisor) and Jamie Allen (my NIME professor) are apparently parts of this extended family, as well. So that's cool. Hopefully I can stay involved. I'm a bit irritated with myself for not applying to NIME this year. That seemed to be the next stop for everyone...

Watching a performance.

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