the shout experiment
brett :: 12.28.2008+10:46

about

heartShout was a project that asked, “If you had 100 characters to say whatever you wanted (anonymously), what would you say?”. I started it because I wanted to make something very Web 2.0 (mostly in mockery of the whole movement). So Shout basically offered a text box, a selection of icons to tag the text with, and a submit button. One could browse the shouts in reverse chronological order, with the most recent appearing in very large text with a huge icon at the top and the rest smaller. There was also an RSS feed, in keeping with the spirit of Web 2.0. Unfortunately there are no screenshots of it, though this page recreates some of the feel that it had. Players had to wait 12 hours between shouts. This was to ensure a large userbase and prevent spamming, and also to try to encourage players to think about what they would say. The icons were from the Tango Desktop Project.

what happened?

rj-45Mrs. Entropy wasn’t built as a powerhouse of computing ability or reliability. She was always envisioned as more of a test-bed. So, invariably the hard drive died, taking the only copy of Shout with it. Tragic, no? Of course it was, as there weren’t any database backups either. I had planned on analyzing the data and making some interesting statistics available, but before I could it was lost. Overall though, it was interesting and perhaps a success. Sometimes there would be conversations, sometimes friends would ask me to look in the one place where the data might be connected to the owner: the ip log (used for limiting posting) because they were paranoid (mostly useless without more info as I could only glean general location). I wrote some initial thoughts about it on my blog back in 2007. Notice that it was going to end in May 2008, but the hard drive died before then.

f.a.q.

microphone What about Twitter?

What about it? Twitter is designed as a giant network of people who know who they are. Similarities exist, but the purposes are entirely orthogonal.

What about Post Secret?

No idea it existed when I made this. Pretty cool, though different in intention and execution.

I want to use it!

Not a question (^_^). Sorry, but you can’t. See above. Dead, gone, data forever lost.