FluidNexus

Just a quick note to say that Fluid Nexus was one of the winners of this year’s memfest competition in the “beyond” category. Congrats to the other winners, and thanks to Bruno, Luis, and Monica for their help on the project at the inclusiva-net meeting!

Two more blog postings about Fluid Nexus to report: the first is on a site discussing the decentralization of Twitter, and the other is written in Russian and from a person who seemed to have a similar idea. It’s great to see all of these posts and discussion about decentralized message passing.

Jamie Wells, from the mobilestance.com website, recently wrote a really great article entitled Andoid App ‘Fluid Nexus’ Aims to Move Mobile Messaging Off the Grid about the possibilities of Fluid Nexus in the world of marketing, a space that I have not thought much about. As I spoke about at the workshop, I’m quite interested in seeing how an application/object like Fluid Nexus is multiple, how it mutates in different contexts and is always partial depending on your point of view. Jamie’s article is great for this sort of perspective and I’m very thankful for this different point of view.

Why Marketers Should Care. By now you may be asking yourself, “Well that’s all well and good… but where is the clutter-clearing, super-interesting marketing application I was promised?” Well for me, it all starts at the end of the application’s official description, where Mr. Knauf and company, in an abrupt and seemingly self-conscious reaction to the aforementioned high-minded phraseology, come down from the clouds and throw the pragmatists in the audience this juicy bone: “Additionally, Fluid Nexus can be used as a hyperlocal message board, loosely attached to physical locations.”

The low hanging fruit here is clearly in the event marketing space – where countless applications for the technology easily come to mind. From basic messaging and exclusive mobile invites to celebrity chats and innovative crowd games. With this approach a marketer wouldn’t have to worry about wireless network coverage (a problem that comes up more than you’d think). Other benefits to the technology (over existing mobile messaging channels) include exclusivity (be in the know), cost (once the app is downloaded use is basically free to both the marketer and consumers alike) and the ever intangible and equally elusive “buzz factor.”

I’ve been working on porting Fluid Nexus to the Google Android platform, partially, yes, because of their challenge, which would enable to work on the project full-time for a couple of months, but also because I want to support a platform that aims to try and open up the world of mobile phones. Here’s a short video with some of the interface features I’ve developed so far. I still have to write the code that deals with Bluetooth sending and receiving; this is more complicated than it should be, because the emulator doesn’t support Bluetooth yet :-(

Fluid Nexus on Android, early test. from Nick Knouf on Vimeo.

… and here it is, the beginnings of Fluid Nexus as ported to Google Android. More to come very soon…

I haven’t been keeping up with all of the developments, but evidently Apple recently released the iPhone SDK. While searching for other things (regarding google android) I read a post that states that background applications are not allowed using the iPhone SDK. Since Fluid Nexus requires two background processes to be running at all times (a server and a client), I won’t be able to develop it for the iPhone.

Not that I wanted to anyway: the iPhone is too expensive for my projected users, and the fact that the development so far has proceeded in such a closed fashion has entirely turned me off of any iPhone development.

As part of a submission to the Prix Ars Electronica I created two new videos…well, more slideshows with narration than videos. The first one is about some of the critiques of network views of reality that underpin the project, while the second is about the technical details of the project.

Here are Ogg Theora versions of all three Fluid Nexus videos: Fluid Nexus Project video, Critiques of Networks, Technical Details.

Critiques of Networks—Theoretical bits for Fluid Nexus from Nick Knouf on Vimeo.

Technical Details for Fluid Nexus from Nick Knouf on Vimeo.

The workshop is over, but not the project—more information about it soon.

But here is the final video about the project that I showed at the end of the workshop.

Fluid Nexus Project Video from Nick Knouf on Vimeo.

And here’s the final presentation, in OpenOffice format.

The video is available (but warning! It’s over 150MB; streaming version coming soon). Also, check out the public subversion repository, as well as the Fluid Nexus website itself.

I wanted to make it to one of the election rallies celebrating the victory of the PSOE in the Spanish elections that took place today, not only to see rallies in a different country, but also to get some footage of large crowds for my documentation video. I wandered about, looking and listening for large groups of people. I only came about people with PSOE flags out their windows, honking their horns. But I just found out from someone that the rally was near Plaza de España, a place I walked by but didn’t go much beyond. Foo :-(