Made out of people

Defending Hatester

My advisor, Paul Dourish was just at a conference on mobility-oriented, public social software.

He rants, humorosly, about the state of the software:

My friend Genevieve refers to a large class of mobile and ubicomp applications as "girlfriends for geeks." Basically, these are all the applications that attempt to match you to people you might have shared interests with (including shared friends) as a form of promoting social contact. The underlying premise of all of these of course is that people want to talk to each other (or, more likely, "noone talks to me" or "I don't know what to talk to people about.")

Since I find myself becoming increasingly cranky and anti-social, I find it hard to accept this premise, at least as it applies to me. So instead, I want the opposite. I want a bluetooth app for my phone that detects when there are people around me I wouldn't like, and helps me avoid them. Perhaps it can chart a route for me to escape without running into them. Perhaps it can characterise nearby spaces in terms of how much I'll hate them. Perhaps if it detects that I'm in close proximity to someone I won't like, it'll ring my phone to give me an excuse to get away ("What? Little Johnny's fallen down the well? I'll be right there!")

During the event at Intel Berkeley the other day, after a series of girlfriends-for-geeks presentations, I made a note to myself about Hatester.com, a site where you could describe who you dislike, and then find out the most disliked people, chains of dislike, degrees of reciprocity, etc. The marketing slogan would be "because the enemy of my enemy is my friend." It turns out that the domain is registered, even though there's nothing there. Oh, but I see that there is something at hatester.org....

Of course, the dislike network is extremely difficult to figure out. I suppose transitivity is "the enemy of my enemy is my enemy," and reciprocity means "I am my enemy's enemy." But chains of dislike?