The world is in the midst of a major change in the way we communicate. The advent of the social and mobile web has made it easy to connect to large groups of people. As a result, hundreds of millions of people are now using technology to maintain strong ties between families and close friends and casual ties between acquaintances.
To effectively deal with maintaining so many connections, frequent status updates have emerged as a popular method of staying in contact. With status updates, you can relay real-time information in a single, concise sentence to everyone you know. Since these updates are not directed to anyone in particular, they are just ambient noise until someone decides to tune in to what you are broadcasting.
We call this the ambient communication model.
What is quub?
Even though the ambient model has established itself as a popular form of communication, it requires you to continuously update your status in order to work effectively. This is a problem. Coming up with new status updates requires time, effort and creativity. Additionally, you are forced to consider a number of complex factors before updating. Is your update appropriate? What should you type in? Who is your audience? Does anyone care? Is your message even relevant?
Because of this, many people neglect to update their status and it's value decreases. Without consistent updates, the ambient model falters.
That is where quub comes into play. quub encourages users to post their status updates frequently by making the process easier, faster and more efficient. quub boils the complexity of status updates down into three, simple questions. Instead of forcing you to create your own status updates, quub learns your routine and makes status suggestions that reflect your habits, your routine, and your lifestyle. This innovative approach turns frequent status updates from a cognitively intensive process to a simple point and click process.
How is quub different from Twitter?
This is undoubtedly the first question to cross people’s mind when they discover quub because Twitter has become synonymous with status updates. Although quub and Twitter are both used to share status updates, the type of status they communicate are vastly different.
Twitter is a micro-blogging service. Micro-blogging, like blogging, is generally targeted at a broad audience in order to generate interest in something or to start a conversation. The typical post on Twitter is event driven and entertainment driven because frankly, strangers don’t care about what you are doing. It is an excellent platform for the broadcasting and distribution of information and we’re big fans ourselves. However, we don’t think it is the proper place to update your presence information.
quub focuses on a type of status update that we call micro-presence. Micro-presence is more private and it is appropriate
for a smaller, closer group of contacts. It conveys personal, presence related information, including location,
current activity, and availability. “Where are you?” and “What are you doing?” are two questions that micro-presence
commonly answers. Everything about quub, from the user interface to privacy settings, makes frequently updating your
status line with presence information fast, easy, and useful.
How we came to be
quub was created by George Ruan and Dr. Donald J. Patterson as a solution to the participation problem they noticed with micro-blogging services. In short, micro-blogging requires too much time and effort so the average user becomes a passive observer instead of an active participant. So, in 2007, George and Dr. Patterson teamed up with Nate Esquenazi, their software engineer, and together they set to work creating a unique, innovative service that would streamline the process of status updates, making it more efficient and easily accessible to everyone.
quub stems from Dr. Patterson's academic research project, Nomatic*IM, at UC Irvine's Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction. Nomatic is a tool that allows users to utilize instant messaging services to broadcast status updates to their friends. With quick, short status updates becoming an increasingly popular form of communication, George and Dr. Patterson decided to emphasize the concept of “micro-presence” and take it beyond mere instant messaging clients and onto the web. Thus, quub was born.