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NEWS During last week's roflcon event here at MIT, we deployed backchan.nl - our tool for supporting audience and panel interactions in conference situations. It worked great at roflcon - you can read about people's experiences with it at Wired and NPR's Brypant Park Project (1, 2). Our pictures of the event are available here, and our conference paper about the tool (and our experiences using it in earlier conferences) can be found here. . After showing our mixed reality game Stiff People's League at Ars Electronica 2007, we have produced a video that shows the game, how it works, and what we think is interesting about the project. Check it out in large (150mb), medium (60mb), and small (40mb) versions. . Read Virtually Trustworthy, our article in Science about avatars and trust. We're developing 3D spaces where form follows function, such as meeting rooms where the floors aid decision making, tasks are literally handed out, and the minutes of the meeting grow overhead. Read more about this project at Technology Review. . We are developing tools and theories for analysing and designing social network sites. We seek to understand questions ranging from "will such sites transform society by enabling the rise of Social Supernets?" to "Is Britney Spears Spam?" . Recently completed thesis projects include Echologue, Medina, and Transformative Copying. . Echologue is an interface for public space interaction, designed to heighten the viewers' awareness of particular qualities of the space and its other inhabitants. . Medina is a social network site for collaborative communities. It explores ways to represent the skills people can offer, the projects they need help with, and the limits of their time. . Digital copies are usual exact replicas of their source. Yet sometimes it is useful for copies to grow, change, or simply record their accumulating history. Our Facebook application, Infinite Animation, is an example of such "Transformative Copying". . CLASSES Interested in identity, social design, the future of public space? take MAS 961 Designing Sociable Media this spring, Tuesdays 10-noon  . Learn more about the theory behind our work: take Signals, Truth, & Design, next offered fall 2008. . ABOUT SMG The Sociable Media Group investigates issues concerning society and identity in the technologically mediated world. We address such questions as: How do we perceive other people on-line? What does a virtual crowd look like? How do social conventions develop in the networked world? Our emphasis is on design: we build experimental interfaces and installations that explore new forms of social interaction in the mediated world.