I have moved from Oslo to Copenhagen, swapping one three-letter acronymed institution for another. I will miss the spectacular scenery of Norway, the village vibe of Oslo and my neighbourhood of 3.5 years, cosy Grünerløkka.

I have some impressions/prejudices of Danish life already – partially coloured by Norwegian perspectives – however I am looking forward to conducting some amateur anthropology to get to the essence of Copenhagen and Danish life.

On November 15th, 2010, Facebook announced a new feature relating to messaging. All Facebook users will receive an @facebook.com email address if they choose, and Facebook will end up being for many people the be-all messaging hub.

The interesting aspect of this a big part of the announcement is the cross-channel messaging part of it. People can converse across different technologies such as SMS, web and email seamlessly.

Cross-channel messaging was the core value proposition of rhub, a system I developed during my PhD studies way back in 2006. Like Facebook’s recent embracing of group-oriented communication it’s nice to see rhub was ahead of its time.

During my PhD studies, I built rhub, a system designed for group-oriented social communication and sharing. This week, Facebook has rolled out its new groups feature, which is similar in spirit to rhub’s groups – small groups of people you actually interact with off the internet. It’s also opt-out, like rhub’s groups, stemming from the observation that people are inherently lazy and would rather adapt behaviour than configure or maintain settings. That said, within a group, there are always people that are the hubs, that bring people together, that organise and so forth. Allowing them to create a group and add people means that everyone benefits. Organisers can organise, lazy people can be lazy. Sure, there’ll be people adding others to groups they didn’t want to, but it’s pretty simple to add some controls to curb this behaviour.

I am sure that the designers at Facebook are entirely unaware of rhub, but it’s nice to see rhub’s design validated at such a scale. I’m not sure how far they’ll take the group messaging aspect of the system, but for rhub at least, that was by far the most popular option – pervasive contact with a small social group.

In a week or two I’m heading up to the Trondheim area to do a field study at a industrial facility, to investigate how the shift team go about their work. It is often said that an control room operator’s job is 99% boredom, 1% sheer terror. In this return visit, I hope to be a little closer to the 1% end of spectrum, because this time the whole plant is in a shutdown. During a planned shutdown, a huge backlog of maintenance, upgrades and repairs are carried out that cannot be done while the plant is running. Thus the whole place is a hive of activity and will be a lot more hectic than normal operating conditions.

It’s also in a very pretty area of Norway.

Some statistics on my mobile social system, rhub

• 41 groups created
• 137 locations defined
• 167 people signed up
• 950 photos uploaded
• 1,942 tags applied
• 1,962 group messages sent
  • 5 said the ‘c’ word
  • 8 said the ‘s’ word
  • 16 said the ‘f’ word
  • 89 mentioned ‘beer’, ‘pub’ or ‘drinks’
• 45,768 messages dispatched (that’s a lot of SMSes!)
• 101,235 lines of PHP (not including the C# message dispatcher), which SLOCCount estimates to be 25.51 person-years of work

All in all, not bad for a research prototype and one group of users!