target is new

We are talking about the you-web for a year now. Check out this presentation for instance. I was reading the words of the CEO by Larry Page of Google and I found it striking how this concept seems to take a central role in Googles strategy. It is also highly related to the importance of the concept of right-now in services I described earlier on Fastmovingtargets (Dutch).

But first the Google angle. I think the words of Page got a lot of buzz for the way they are putting the content on the result pages instead of the result pages. Which is definitely a sign of a strategic shift. Together with other developments like in Youtube, Google seems to put more focus on becoming a content platform. The danger is of course that they can lose the trust factor that you find the best sources for your question because it is biased by their own source (that does not have to be the best of course).

But that said, I think the way Page focuses on creating personal relevant experiences is more interesting. With the total connection of all instances of the Google profile by connecting all services to one profile, Google will have definitely the most information on all of us in searching and browsing behavior. Facebook will have some more on relations but if Google wants they should be able to filter that from e-mails etc. The way he talks on mobile is typical too. He praises the possibilities of seamlessly adapting the mobile experience to the device. Will be connected soon to the one user of course.

Interesting how Google wants to find out the real world connections and bring them into their platform. And this links with the right now. That is about the instant and the you.
Different aspects are important and driving the developments. The access economy is becoming a fact of life in some high profiled categories like cars (Greenwheels, Car2go, Snappcar, etc.) and music (Spotify). But it is broader than these kind of new aspects of business change. It is all based on a root of new behavior. I made some notes on the right-now development before and the way notification platforms are important.

The right-now approach can directly linked to the you-web. You can have right-now services without a personal experience. Let’s call them ad hoc, but it is much more likely that a right-now interaction delivers also a hyper personal service. A service or product that fits the wishes of the moment of use, especially your moments of use.

Directly linked is the data and profiles. As Google opened up the exchange of data between their services a lot more of data traces will be connected to you in order to make the personal experience possible. Here it is interesting to see if we will develop some data literacy. Will we be bold enough to demand more control, and at least more transparency on the data traces? This could be triggered as the use of data will have more impact.

Data will become ubiquitous to create flow this year. And we will see some major events that will trigger positive and negative in data as influencer. You can expect the first dirty campaigns via social in the US elections later this year for instance. And even models to steer the voting could be possible.
Obama’s social campaign of 2008 is the ultimate case for social campaigning until now. It was mostly based on activating voters and positive engagement. With success. What to expect now, four years later? Just like wars are triggering innovation you can expect these elections be pivoting in the way persuasive communication is introduced. You can expect a bot strategy, with weavrs kind of elements that will try to interfere with our perceptions. That will be smart in manipulating the hype driven journalists and will use social crowdcontrol to create voter control.
The elections will not only boost the big data mining and social roboting, but also drive social gamifying.

And just today we see another trigger for thinking on our data; the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. The consequences for the service can be debated, I go with this take on it: the service is more likely to stay the way it is to keep the users happy, than that it will be ruined by Facebook. On the other hand, you will have to manage your settings even more if you don’t like the idea it contributes to the profiles of Facebook.

I’m not a pessimist by nature and also in these developments I see the value of the drivers of new technologies. We definitely need a societal approach where we learn and request transparency. The development of more and more ad hoc personal shaped products will be inevitable. With the gathered insights from data hick-ups, I hope we grow into more literacy to prevail a backlash in the you-web. I hope it will generate a context for companies to differentiate in transparency as product asset.

Update: And now I just hear about a new app called Placeme that does exactly the things you need for the you web collecting the constant stream of data of your context in all forms and give meaning to it. This whole trend of ambient services is of course at the beginning and booming, like we had the buzz of Highlight after SxSW. The extra angle of Placeme is the way it creates data as a tool for other services to build on.

And the other aspect is important too: how sincerely honest the guy of Placeme talks on the privacy and encryptions of the data, it is the main topic of discussion that raises with the app. I think the competitor that creates the same app where you store your own data and add tools so you can use the data yourself for personalized services with ease of use, will have a great opportunity. This happens one of the projects we are running within /Labs not coincidently…

In a short post of Matt Webb he pinpointed the new Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is emerging. He refers to another article in the Wired of Stephen Levy were this specific new form of AI is spelled out: not the human brain is duplicated, the own computer generated intelligence is flourished.

I think this interesting stuff. And I like to connected it to a development Jesse Schell coined in one of his recent presentations: the Curiosity Gap. He stated that we develop to a situation where we all have easy access to all the knowledge we need, and the successful people will be defined by the level of curiosity to find the knowledge and be open for it.

Others have coined it the new You-web where knowledge will be relevant and connected to your profile. I use the term Impulse Shaped Services for some time now where services adapt to the context of that one user.

In all approaches you can see that we go from a so-called Artificial Intelligence to an Available Intelligence. Smart people use this available intelligence to relief non-critical tasks and distinguish from non-users. Available Intelligence is used ad-hoc and on demand, profiled. So we can say we will live with Augmented Intelligence.

The smart people are those that know which drawer to pull to use the available knowledge and transform this to value. The trick will be the instant character. The intelligence will be defined by the relevancy and of the knowledge and even the predictive character of it. Services will be providing us with the entrance to these source of instant intelligence. So we have a kind of Instant Available Intelligence.

Today is iPad day. With the launch of the iPad articles on the iPad are all over the place. And I think that is not for nothing, I expect some real impact from this new step in casual computing.
Among all the articles on the iPad I found some extra inspiration in the video of an interview with Jack Schulze from Berg London who was showing some new design principles that emerge from the iPad. A new approach to design content for magazine art directors. The biggest Dutch publisher of magazines in the Netherlands did the same in a way when they presented there example of translation of the Autoweek magazine.

But the video of Schulze triggered me with some other thoughts. What will happen if we adding an extra layer in the multi-touch magazine, the layer of context?
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I think I did some post before on this topic here, but a new post triggered some quick thoughts; the shift to the so-called come-to-me-marketing is really happening.
We are profiling ourselves all the time if we are using advanced social tools like Facebook and Foursquare. Permission based will get a new dimension. We will use the new emerging context driven use of online media to obtain useful information when we want it. In our Facebook presentations we often use the example where we show that the number of people interested in books on Facebook according their profile (3 mln) is maybe much more interesting to target than the number of searches to kindle (3k/month).

The same goes for the examples on location aware marketing made possible by the profiling analytics which is added. This will be the next big thing. For commercial messages, but also especially also for services.

In an article of Winston Ross which he wrote for Newsweek (but wasn’t published) I found some interesting teasing quotes. The article itself asks the question what the next Twitter will be. That is a question that is often asked, but in essence not relevant. What is interesting however, is one of the subquestions that emerges: which are the services that will be unmissable, that will be part of our daily routine and become ubiquitous.
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Komen er nieuwe intelligent agents? Een hype in de eerste fase van het internet. Kleine programmaatjes die het web afstruinen op zoek naar relevante sites op basis van jouw profiel. Echt tot wasdom zijn ze nooit gekomen.
Maar nu krijgen dan misschien cloud agents? Ik werd getriggerd door een bericht op ReadWriteWeb. Herhaalt de geschiedenis zich of is het nu wel het goede moment?

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Deze dagen is Adaptive Path in het nieuws met een nieuw concept dat voor Mozilla Labs is gemaakt. In een aantal cheezy video’s met toelichting door Jesse James Garreth wordt het concept toegelicht. Wat ik (onder andere) interessant vind is de manier waarop browser en device samensmelten. Een puur voorbeeld van het ‘internet of things‘. Read the rest of this entry »

De laatste tijd komen er steeds meer mogelijkheden bij om tweets te plaatsen in je stream. Elk met een eigen specifieke reden. Sommige tools zijn ontwikkeld met Twitter als basis (Tweetburner), andere integreren Twitter als communicatiekanaal (Brightkite) of gebruiken het als inputmedium (fire-eagle). Vooral de locatiegedreven toepassingen schieten als paddestoelen uit de grond.

Ik ben benieuwd hoe zich het gaat ontwikkelen, maar ik kan me voorstellen dat ik het deze input zal gebruiken:

• Posten en replyen vanachter de Macbook: Twhirl
• Met locatie posten: Brightkite
• Linkjes posten: Tweetburner
• Vanaf iPhone: Twinkle of Brightkite

Maar voor je het weet is er weer een nieuwe tool…

Dat klinkt wellicht als een vraag van een jaar geleden. Want toen Jaiku en Twitter nog min of meer even populair waren, was vergelijken zinvol. Sinds Jaiku na de overname door Google in ontwikkeling is stilgestaan heeft Twitter een grote vlucht genomen. Waarbij de laatste maand er een echt tipping point lijkt te worden bereikt.

Maar waarom dan toch de vraag? Waar Jaiku zich in onderscheid zijn twee dingen. Als eerste is Jaiku is meer een lifestream waar alle feeds en andere persoonlijk dynamische sites in worden samengebracht. Flickr, Last.fm, Upcoming, etc. Jaiku is veel meer een profilering van je online identiteit. Twitter is een communicatietool, een virtuele kroeg en een voortdurende brainstorm. Waar het contact tussen de twitteraars het meeste meerwaarde oplevert.

Een ander verschil is te vinden in de oorsprong van Jaiku: een client voor de mobiele telefoon. Jaiku was eerst een uitbreiding van je contactlijst in de mobiele telefoon waar locatieinformatie aan werd toegevoegd. Jaiku gebruikt daarvoor de celinformatie van het mobiele netwerk: je vult zelf als gebruiker een id toe aan een cel en als je terugkomt op die plek wordt dat direct herkend en toegevoegd aan je Jaiku bericht. Plazes werkt ook zo.

Nu is er sinds deze week een (erg mooie) twitterapplicatie voor de iPhone uit – Twinkle – die de locatieinformatie die uit de cellen en wifi-hotspots wordt gehaald, koppelt aan de tweets. Elke tweet die via Twinkle wordt ingevoerd bevat ook de informatie waar je de tweet maakt.
Daarnaast kun je ook op locatie de tweets bekijken; de ‘Near Me’-functie.
Het is een logische mashup. Het geeft een extra dimensie, maar je kunt bovendien ontdekken of er een twittervriend in de buurt is.

Het is nog niet helemaal perfect. De locatieinformatie is nog wel erg grof. Nog niet op celniveau maar op stadniveau. En de ‘Near Me’ functie is niet te beperken tot de eigen friends. Maar het is zeker een interessante stap richting een trend waar locatiecontext belangrijk gaat worden in gebruik van online diensten. En ik wacht nog op de eerste Google Map integratie waarmee mijn Tweetpad te volgen is…