Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Did any of you try Nokia Friend View?

It's a hot mixture of micro-blogging and location based service for S60 phones.... And something that should have been done before, by someone else, as an open project using open standards.

It's what I always wanted to have, but I know I will not use it because it only works with S60 phones and the few people I know who would be interested in such a toy do not have S60 phones.

If there was the same thing as free software, built on open standards, they would use it via laptop or other phones and it would be much easier to build a community around it.

Pity.

Nokia spoiled it again with their walled garden attitude. (Same with Nokia Chat... I really don't understand their strategy.)

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Yes, I did.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

:D


Best comment ever. Restricting a community to a series of devices is so 1980s!

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Actually there's web access...

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Web access that works neither in MSIE nor in microb. - Also, the web access doesn't support the most important part: location. The web application doesn't see where I am.

Anyway, such things wouldn't work as web applications. What's needed is an open framework that lets people choose among several clients and providers. Like POP/SMTP makes email a winner, hotmail alone would have died.

In fact, probably most of what would be needed to copy Friendview's functionality is out there... That's why it's such a pity that nobody did it before in a way that could be easily ported to a GPS-device like the N810... And in a way that would allow me to actually use it with the people I know. (Come on, how many of your friends have compatible S60-phones?)

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Funny, I've used the site in MSIE...

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Wait, this is a beta release of an application running on S60 + web. Thre is a limited number of S60 devices officially supported, but I guess nothing would stop other manufacturers of S60 devices to do the adaptation/contracts needed. 'Not limiting to devices' means in practice to port the app to Maemo, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android, etc... or make the web support work in a way that the browsers and location frameworks of those devices can support the functionality.

By the way, Nokia acquired Trolltech and is pushing the cross-platform Qt (and other cross-platform technologies) precisely to address this problem.

http://betalabs.nokia.com is not that different to a garage.maemo.org for Nokia research and young projects. http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/friendview offers feedback channels in the form of comment and email to the developers. I sent them an email this week and they answered pretty fast.

Have you tried sharing your questions, concerns and views there? Pointing also there to the thread here? I'm sure they are interested to know.

By the way, I'm qgil at ovi and I also want to give a try to this. Invitations are welcome.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Carman provides a way to see where your friends are via pigin ...

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Yes. I use their blog+mail to give feedback; their applications are sexy and I have quite a few of them installed on my 6110 Navigator.

My impression is that the people who work on these projects are trapped in some 20th century corporate strategy that they know is dated and wrong, but need to follow anyway because that's what the management decided.

The same topic was discussed over at the Beta blog when they first released Nokia Chat: There's no technical reason why I shouldn't be able to use this without registering at ovi; there's no technical reason why it shouldn't just work with any existing XMPP-account I already have. The Beta Labs people refuse to comment on this particular issue in public, but I think it's plain to see some suit-and-tie zombie at Nokia actually and honestly believes they could push sales by restricting the use of these good ideas to a walled garden that's under Nokia's control: ovi.com here, S60 there,... The point they're missing, though, is that these community services need at least two people to be useful and fun. So what happens is that each of us tries it, admires the nice idea, finds out there's nobody out there who has the reqired technical equipment (phone, data plan,...) and therefore stops using it again. (It's absurd to assume people will buy S60-phones and register at ovi.com only to because of friendview.)

What would be the better strategy?

Use existing, open standards to build a great service; make great software for people to use it. Then go and beat the competition by how you do it, not what you do. And use the fact that you created the service in the first place for marketing.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Thanx for accepting mine... I can see where you are! I'm lovin' it. This is fun. Go post some messages... And upload an avatar! :D

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

heh, signing up for friendview now, but on the terms and conditions link i have:



Ovi Service Terms

$agreementVO.agreementDate



https://account.nokia.com/acct/publi...sAndConditions

I've certainly read them heh

as lcuk by the way, but I can't do anything because
"Sorry, you must verify your e-mail or phone number before searching"
I haven't been sent anything.
*edit: ive clicked a verify button deep within the settings.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

It's just a beta and S60 is a very broadly licensed platform. I don't think it should be criticized because it isn't free and completely open.

And as to "walled garden" comment, Nokia is much more open than others in mobile community (at least in the US).

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Good to know that beny1967 is 1450,17 kilometers away. ;)

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

would be cool to allow setting up twipwires for people in local vacinity

it wouldnt be good for real stalkers mind you, but if you know a friend is flying into the country, you could get a ping when they land.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

I'm on too, feel free to add me as friend :D.

In the web interface the map doesn't load (only appear the zoom tool and a blue background), anyone having this problem too ?

I'm using FF 3 in Ubuntu.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

I think that is exactly where this is going. A guy at NRC came up with this about 5(?) years ago.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

And I almost forgot that Nokia bought http://plazes.com too some months ago.

The building blocks are more or less there, and they don't look that XX century walled garden etc etc.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

I found it. Invented at Nokia by Federico Fraccaroli in XX century.
That hasn't a DaVinci sort of sound to it, doesn't it? ;)

Patented in 2007, not Davinci like...

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-P...&RS=PN/7280822

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Plazes.com have already a good infrastructure, more options and better maps :). I think Nokia should integrate this service into friendView for a better user experience, instead of writing a new service.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Hehe ... :D

See, this is what research projects are for. There's this video at YouTube in which Brenda Castro talks about Friend View and says something along the lines of "It's a project to find out how people react to the comforting feeling that there's always somebody near you" (don't recall the exact words).

You could communicate inside Nokia that there's a second goal that they might investigate further: The comforting feeling that certain people are still far, far away. *LOL*

(BTW: It still looks close with the right zoom factor on my small screen... I like seeing you so close to me ;) ...)

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

I'm not sure we're talking about the same issue here. In fact, there are several different issues with this Friend View thing, not all of them being under Nokia's control.

Issue #1: S60 isn't wide-spread enough
While S60 might be a well-established platform and attractive for developers, it's not popular enough to ensure a group of people who know each other in real life and would be willing to share their locations also own compatible phones. - It's the other way round: Although most people I know own Nokia phones (estimated 60%), not one of them has a S60/3rd Edition device.
While this sounds like a real bummer, in fact it's a minor issue. If Nokia really wants to push such a service, they could try to make it available for other devices after the research period.

Issue #2: Somebody should have done this before
Not Nokia's fault, of course. But it's so obvious that with a clever mixture of existing, well-established technologies (XMPP und RSS), this kind of service would have been possible before. There's no magic to it.
This is exactly the creative input missing from the community, BTW, that people sometimes talk about. And this is the reason why I started ranting about the project in an Internet Tablet forum: The N810 is the perfect device for this service. Friend View by <enter your most admired Maemo developer here> should have been on the N810 from day 1.
(Don't get me wrong here - I'm not really accusing developers here of missing this opportunity. I know it doesn't work that way. I just sometimes wonder why and how a group/community as a whole could become more creative in inventing new services instead of copying another media player feature from the big guys. The developer can't start to work without the brilliant idea, and the brilliant idea needn't necessarily be his own.)

Issue #3: They should have used documented technology
From my point of view, this is the main thing. I really don't care if they release a research project as proprietary software on one single platform only... That's not ideal, but it's not such a big deal, either.
The really interesting stuff goes on beyond the application. How data is exchanged, which data, which server, .... all this. The focus should have been on establishing a de facto standard on how to re-use existing, open technology for such a project. This way, it wouldn't matter much that their own client only runs on a few devices. People could toy with the idea and both improve and spread it.
So what I feel is "so 1980s" is the concept that (that's how I interpret it) Nokia thinks they could gain any commercial advantage by not using open standards and tying the service to both their devices and their servers.
A good service would allow me to switch client and service provider and still have the same basic functionality with the same contacts I had before. Like I can change my mail client and my mail server and still write mails to the same people I did before - because mail, in fact, is POP3/IMAP/SMTP, and not Outlook/mx3.isp.net.

Solution to #3
What should they do instead? Well, what do we have? We have XMPP to indicate presence (online/offline) and location (via XEP-0080). That's already half of what Friend View does. The other half is the micro-blogging thing that doesn't fit well into XMPP because of its non-realtime nature. Well, there are microblogging services. Microblogs can be processed as RSS, and RSS has standard ways of including latitude/longitude in machine readable form into feed items.
What we also have is gateways between XMPP and existing microblogging services. They are in productive use and even recommended by Nokia Beta Labs as an additional value for their Nokia Chat service.
So the full functionality of Friend View could be mimicked by a location-aware XMPP-client that posts to and processes RSS from a micro-blog. How exactly this is done and how you handle access control in this case would be the content of this research project. The result would be

1. a location-aware microblogging service that works with any location-aware XMPP-client people want to write for any platform
2. location aware, RSS-processing clients that work with any location-aware microblogging service

This would be the 21st century way to do it. And I don't even think Nokia would need to be afraid of the competition if they show them how to do it: They'd still have this advantage of making it work 'out of the box'. So they'd be the gravity center of the community, even if some (who am I according to some people here? Oh yes:) nerds choose to join in from their GPS-equipped laptops or (even worse) Internet Tablets.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

i can teleport with this software, and also time travel!!!

i posted from the future and managed to get from Manchester to London to New York (and back again) in a matter of seconds.

the interface is a bit quirky however and not as slick as jaiku.

having friends is one thing, but having friends listed together is another, the default map starts at localized resolution but having only a couple of worldwide contacts on there is a bit bare.

my world needs filling up.
quim, as you said it needs an easy way to import contacts.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

I don't currently have an S60 device either, but it is the most widespread mobile OS in developed countries (your friends notwithstanding). And a social network app optimally shouldn't be limited to any OS, but your comments fail to recognize that (at least in the US and Canada) there are no open standards in the cellular ecosystem. We couldn't even make SMS and MMS work for the longest time because the network operators refused to cooperate to provide interoperability. Most device manufacturers have capitulated (iphone, G1, BB Storm are all operator exclusive). The situation is EVEN WORSE for service providers. Even Apple with their iTunes decided they wouldn't try to buck the system. Nokia has at least pushed S60 independently of the network operators; and to a large extent that you are apparently ignorant of and certainly unappreciative of.

One operator did already try a similar service, limited to their own customers and certain devices (much smaller than the world of S60), and for a hefty fee. N810 is not the perfect device for this since: 1) by your own admission, there aren't enough devices; 2) a S60 phone has the right performance match. Let me also point out that it is internally inconsistent and the epitome of hindsight to say "so obvious that with a clever mixture of existing, well-established technologies ..., this kind of service would have been possible before"

Quote:

Issue #3: They should have used documented technology

See my comments on #1 regarding the cellular ecosystem. A suggestion of someone other than a network operator establishing a "de facto standard" (broader than S60) isn't credible.

Nokia certainly would like to have an app work across service providers. But there are large practical constraints. The network operators in US largely control the client devices as well (except for S60).


If I'm not mistaken, the network operators don't share XMPP or XEP-0080. Now if you want tunnel that inside TCP/IP packets, the network operators in US control the client devices too (except S60).

The network operators are the gravity center (some would say the black hole) of services innovation in the US.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

While I do agree with SD69's comments (sorry Benny) I still have to believe there is way to deploy friendview using technology friendlier to more devices... perhaps Flash?

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Please re-read my post. I'm not talking about the cellular ecosystem, I'm talking about a service for all kinds of mobile devices (laptops, cell phones, PDAs, tablets...) and even desktop PCs.

Thank you, I'll try to reach your level of wisdom eventually.


How would the number of devices in use influence the usefulness of a service that's build on open standards? Would you say email isn't useful on the N810 because there are not enough devices?

I don't understand your remark about performance. (Language, not content.) Could you paraphrase it?


Again, please re-read my post. I'm not talking about the cellular ecosystem. I'm not talking about a network operator and I'm not talking about a standard in terms of platforms (as S60). I'm suggesting a standard that describes how geotagged microblogging feeds are processed by clients. This is completely independent of any platform, ecosystem or operator.

If they wouldn't, I couldn't use Google Talk on my N800 (or Nokia Chat on my S60 phone...).

And even if some of them don't: It's just the same as if they would for some reason try to block SMTP. That doesn't mean the concept doesn't work. It only means you can't use it on this one network. (Friend View as it is today could be blocked by the network operator, too. So what?)

The US cell phone market is relatively irrelevant here:
You build a service that can work on everything as long as it processes bits and bytes and is connected to the internet. So as possible clients you have desktop PCs, laptops, PDAs, tablets, cell phones... worldwide. This is the 100%-basis we're talking about. Let's say (because it's a mobile service) 60% of the users will run it on cell phones. The US is roughly 10% of the worldwide cell phone market, IIRC. (Probably a bit more, but 10% makes it so easy.)
So even if all US operators would block this, 94% of the potential customers worldwide wouldn't even know, let alone be affected.
Not exactly a gravity center...

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

So, finally, this is evolving in the right direction with (Telepathy-based) Empathy now:

http://blog.pierlux.com/2009/01/22/e...re-are-you/en/

It will be interesting to see how much of it Nokia uses in upcoming Maemo versions, as this software uses Geoclue and Nokia doesn't.

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

Is flash friendly to any device?!

Re: Nokia Friend View: A missed opportunity
 

... or user?