Passive Collection Of Presence And Activity
By now, many marketers (and some consumers) are beginning to recognize the power of the social graph in regards to spreading word of mouth messaging. I get the sense that many equate the notion of the social graph solely with Facebook and other online social networks.
What if I were you tell you that the social graph begins online for most people, but the true power takes place in the real world?
What if I were to tell you that as you sip your coffee at the local coffee house, your social data from online networks is playing a role in how you can be addressed by others around you, and even targeted by advertisers?
While this is not widespread reality today, it will not be long before this becomes a widespread reality.
related note: Think for a moment about Neal Stephenson’s vision of the metaverse. In Stephenson’s metaverse, one must enter by using a visual altering hardware device (in his case goggles). Now think about the questions I posed above. What if we did not need to enter the metaverse, what if the metaverse was slowly brought to us and we were already in it (willingly or not)?
Back To Current Reality For A Moment
I just got done reading a post on Read/Write Web entitled, “Yahoo Experiements In Reality Mining With Bluetooth My BlogLog”
According to MyBlogLog, their new mobile tool, m.mybloglog.com will do the following;
“Bind your Bluetooth address to your MyBlogLog account and discover others nearby and [sic] find out if you have any shared interests. Meetspace keeps track of time spent with others so you have a running log of people to meet and things to talk about.”
Google’s Dodgeball service has provided similar service for quite a while, but my sense is that what Yahoo is trying to do is garner user data for the marketing purposes.
It will be very interesting to see if this service is adopted by bloggers who use MyBlogLog however, my feeling is that they will run for the hills
Technorati Tags: bluetooth, lifestreaming, yahoo, mybloglog, dodgeball, Neal Stephenson, Metaverse, social graph, Facebook
Mar 07, 2008
Hi Adam!
A great post, I should say it’s exactly what I was thinking about and discssing with my students back in Saint-Petersburg, Russia.
Nathan Eagle of MIT went even further in his research by collecting the call logs of the participating users, however such a deep analysis of human behaviour will certainly raise more and more privacy questions.
For the metaverse term that you have mentioned… There is a paradygm of augmented reality, which is, in short, all about augmenting the physical reality layer by additional information layers – for example, with virtual 3D objects or data feeds “attached” to an object of physical space.
If we think augmentation towards social networks, we might say that services like that mybloglog mobile app or others, are augmenting your real social network by integrating your online social network with it. Nicholas Carr said that we need “…a new deal on privacy…” in order to make augmented reality the reality. Currently there is a big lack of social science working for the social web, this lack muct be filled asap, otherwise there is a huge risk of having the entire human society divided into geeks and retrogrades, and in a further perspective this difference might cause serious conflicts on many levels.
Mar 07, 2008
Thanks for the comment Kirill and welcome to A Media Circ.us
I love the comment that you pulled in, and I feel that we do need to spend a great deal of time considering augmented reality and the privacy concerns surrounding it.
One of the issues is that people lump augmented reality in the same category as virtual reality, and with the lines blurring between the three. people are not realizing that at the end of the day, it is all, reality!
We have people committing suicide over things that happen on MySpace, money laundering in virtual worlds and I am sure there are many other things that I am not aware of.
I would love to hear more about what you are doing with your class!
Adam