Social networks have made it easy to connect and gain visibility over each other’s activity, experiences, stories. Social, interpersonal awareness. Products aren’t really benefiting from this dynamic, nor is the environment. The eco reality we inhabit is still a very disperse one. The stories most people get are pushed by main stream broadcast media which is solely concerned with volume, thus the prevalence of disaster stories. Well disaster stories are just a page in a usually more encompassing story. Where are the other pages, who is writing them and how can we link them back to us and our consumption habits?

First there is the realization that the vast majority of ecological disasters can be linked to retail, supermarkets… spaces where products meet the consumer/user.

Over Fishing in the east coast of africa is mostly done by chinese fleets. Local coastal populations struggle to survive with the few fish which are left. Disaster. Unwinding the narrative thread:  Who signed the treaties that gave away all the fish? [Page 1] Which boats/corporations are doing the fishing [Page 2]Where is the fish processed and by whom? [Page 3] Where is the fish distributed? [Page 4]. An organization such as Greenpeace can get create a page in this story where they ask for donations in order to hunt down these fleets. Users can create pages where they organize a demonstration…

Disaster: Deforestation is Central Africa. Who in local government is allowing for this? Stories of the people who are affected, directly and indirectly? Where is the timber being shipped to? Who is buying it? Where is it being processed? Where is it being distributed to? What products is it ending up in? All of these are pages in a story. Some may be missing, but the idea is to empower everyone to participate.

We vote every time we choose a product from a supermarket shelve, from a furniture shop… A few years back we started ‘voting’ for organic and now we see more organic produce on our shelves (out here in high income countries anyway). The same needs to be applied to every product. We must be given visibility over what we are using/consuming. Most of the time the story is missing pages. Most of the time it’s invisible, to the benefit of corporations who continue to blindly take part is the plundering of our resources.

We must reward all products who get their story right and by default penalize those who have missing pages or no story at all. It’s just like voting. New tools for awareness. As a  witness I can participate and add to a particular page, gain eco capital. As an organization I can create a page and ask for consumers/users to donate for a particular demonstration, for a particular project to help improve the lives of those on the far end of the story line.

The map is important, yes. But to be able to access product stories on the act of consumption is more. It’s at that point that we make a choice: to reward or to condemn. It’s also at the point of purchase that I want my social network to surface if any of its members has liked or dislike this particular product. It’s also at this point that I am more likely to donate for a particular project which is making this type of product possible.

The space of opportunity is immense. It mixes user awareness, story telling, and established architectures of participation.

> Wiki logic.
> Stories/pages easily accessible with mobile when in the presence of product.
> Look at different ways to graphically represent stories, depending on where they are accessed. Books, Clusters, Maps…
> Always give preference to an architectural logic where we cross-reference Social Networking, Pages and Products.
> Possible Augmented reality.

Habermas once wrote, and I am not quoting here: Rationality exists in the structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than the structure of either the cosmos or the knowing subject. In other words: everything exists in the realm of intercourse, social intercourse. The easiest representation of how the latter may start and end is the address-book.

Many years ago I looked at the address-book in my mobile and sighed.

It was a time when Mobile operators had this desire to push more services at their customers in order to gain some brand differentiation as well as extra revenue. It was a time when Myspace was starting and booming, Facebook was a zygote and Orkut seemed like a good investment.

So I looked at that address book and sighed. Everyone’s now fighting for address-book hegemony but at the time no one was really looking at it. I thought of Habermas and the fact that not only is rationality derived from social intercourse, but irrationality as well. Emotional bonds based on experiences. If only one could connect those address-books in a meaningful way?

I had my address-book in my handheld. The same machine I used to take pictures with. To write small notes. It was all within easy reach of the mobile operator. So why did they miss it? Why did not listen to the plethora of highly paid consultancy work they were sourcing globally? Why did they let an east-coast teenager steal the show? I tell you why: because operators never understood the potential of the word SHARE.

Face it, mobile operators are warehouses with billing machines attached to a network that still charges a fortune for 140 characters. They’re unidimensional in their business model.

People will pay to communicate but they won’t pay to share. Myspace came along and showed us that sharing should actually be free. Facebook just made it more intelligent and clean and suddenly, what started as nothing more than a glorified pubescent address-book in ones computer, to share images and thoughts… is now slowly becoming a communication giant.

The same address-book i had in my mobile all those years ago. Sigh. Hundreds of consultants telling operators they should open more innovative sharing channels…  Now, now it’s all too late for you operators. My mobile is built by a manufacturer who has understood there is as much value in a relationship with a google, or a Facebook or a Twitter, as there is with an Orange or T-mobile.

Charge us a flat rate for data intercourse you communication pimps! That’s all we want. All we need is some bandwidth. We are starting to communicate by sharing in real time. My Facebook address-book is more important now. Foursquare will tell me where my contacts are so i can meet up with them in person and speak with without getting charged extra for it. Rather spend the money on a beer than your over-prices voice calls.

And to think you had all those address-books at your mercy all those years and have done nothing creative with them… Shame on you.

I revel in maps that empower indigenous tribes so they can claim their land and assert themselves in front of big corporations. Indigenous people all over the world live off the land they inhabit. They gather, hunt, cultivate and protect an area that needs to be big enough for their communities to sustain themselves. We (mobile beings with medium to high income) can go from A to B really quickly and in the process stopped caring about the space in between.

We can already  look at maps that show us the real time position of trains. I WANT THE SAME FOR FISHING TRAWLERS in east Africa so i can click on the boat, get the captain’s number and verbalise my opinion of his activity at 3AM from a phone booth in cambridge circus.

1. There was a time when maps were analogous to power.

2. Broadcast media came along and rendered maps a little useless as all you had to do was sit in the comfort of your living room and get fed info from the far corners of the earth. Radios and TVs were like confession boxes: watching the news we would be aware of all the shit that was going down, an awareness that allowed us to feel pity thus offsetting some of our guilt. Media spoke of a global village… media spoke a lot of shite.

3. Internet’s first challenge was to connect machines, then people. As we developed applications to connect each other we realised it was all about experiences. Users were being connected by having each one broadcast their thoughts and more importantly their experiences, i.e. photos, videos….

4. Turns out most experiences are physical and happen in a mapped world., i.e. concerts, best cafe in town, just found a bargain in Islington, party at Darren’s in Croydon, first kiss…

5. Users were given maps onto which they could pinpoint the objects they like, their experiences. Devices such as cameras and phones started rolling out geolocation as a standard meta data feature so that ones NY stag party could automatically be added to the map of the city. A new age of maps that mix your experiences and human disasters. Hmm, things could change a little.

6. Space of opportunity for a new ecological consciousness surge. If an oil spill is put in the same surface as the pin that holds my first swim or a memorable holiday, i will care …more. I will be made aware that there is limited space in this playground of ours and that although applications have thus far chosen to display my friend feed as a practical yet boring list,  my friends exist in the same map as i do together with oil spills.

7. Through gaydar i can find a sexual mate in minutes and act upon it. Through seeclickfix i pin point pot holes and broken street lights on a map that is seen by local government. Through openstreetmap i can find the shortest car route between 2 points and drive it. Maps have an inherent call to action.

8. So maps are everywhere and because your friends are starting to exist on maps without crying out privacy rape anymore, we are spending more and more time looking at maps and engaging in more meaningful ways with them (friends and maps and oil spills).

9. Noise. How many filters do you want on your maps? I want to see: all first kisses, potential midget sexual partners, ecological disasters and the location of all hairless cats in my neighbourhood. Filters help personalise information. The danger is that if these filters are not inter-connected they will just serve as blinds and we might as well go back to just lists, with little context. The trick is how can we make these filters interesting and connected so they may trigger serendipity and learning and action.

10. It’s a little sad that I need maps to get to know my neighbourhood, my neighbours. There was a time when my neighbourhood was my map, my world. There was a time when we had neighbours, then we moved on to hyperlinks and friend feeds. We got a little lost.

Patrick’s idea is simple. Get iReporters in the field (you and i + a mobile app).  CNN then push a button and get well positioned iReporters to snap some images of a particular event.

History is a draft and has been for a while now. Data is collected from different sources, put into context with the help of meta data and fit into a predefined architecture. The architecture can be a wiki, a blog, an archive, a wall…

Twitter and FB have become the new electricity. If empowered users will always converse, speak, shout. Nothing new here. What is new is the fact that the recording/broadcast button seems to be always on. Buttons constantly being pushed by an apparently random succession of daily events: life. This leads me to believe that the button Patrick refers to is just a pro-active geo based filter. I am a cnn reporter, push a button, get all those with an iReporter app to take pictures for me of an event near by them.

Forget big brother, the enternainment potential for this idea is magnificent. All those movies with dormant killers who are awakened to perform a suicide mission upon hearing a specific keyword…

I think media has not yet reached its limits of manipulative power. It needs to be even more manipulative, which leads me on to the reality of editors.

For a while [my innocent period] I thought the new editors, of this new world i inhabit, would become a simple combination of user generated metadata and the architectures that accommodate the content itself . The wikis, the chronologicaly driven blogs, the photo gallery organized by colours… the new editors of this planet would be ourselves + a little algorithmic intelligence to help us sort through all the available data + little visual beauty to help display that very data.

Yes we produce a lot of content as we produce a lot of garbage. Who/what sorts it? Who are the editors?
1. Other individuals.
2. Professional editors (who make a living  within the media sector).
3. Machines.

For far too long now have we, speaks a media mogul, watched the twitter noise produced by all these so called journalists. It’s time we reverse the stream of data. It’s time we, professional editors, regain control. Remember when folks sat down in front of a box at 9 o’clock for the news because we wanted them to?

Pushing a button and activating ‘iReporters’  is not crowd sourcing. That’s crowd manipulation, which leads me on to my idea:  What about an app that leverages some sort of celebrity effect, and gets those who own the mobile app, to perform all sorts of interesting acts and broadcast them?

Mob Manipulator: simple commands would create news. More powerful than waiting around and going through all the hash noise produced by twitting crowds. Manipulate the mob but do it blatantly.

More soon on the Mob Manipulator app.

[Patrick's project spawned this train of though. I find his project meritorious and in no way have I tried to undermine it with these words. ]

Image by Chris O’shea.

On one side users get  get their content from professional sources, who create and sell content. I was thinking the other day that most big broadcasters have the same setup, yet ratings vary tremendously: it comes down to the nature of content that is pushed and how aggressively it has been promoted.

On the other side, users are getting their content from their social networks as everyone in it broadcasts their thoughts, cravings and experiences. Stickiness here is a mix of surprise and familiarity. Ratings become reach: how far a piece of content is able to permeate the social networking fabric.
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Content, interface, machine. A service ecosystem, needs to understand that content will ultimately be the uptake driver. The beauty and usability of the device is important, its desirability factor, but in the end it’s content, and our insatiable appetite for it, that makes the difference. If your ecosystem does not have content it will not gather momentum. Content is the blood of a media system. The various devices exist to empower us in order to better manipulate and use content. Like little vampires we are. Media is no longer confused with message. Messages must cross many different media. Blood must flow.

Recapping functionality, pervasive tags… touch screens, mobile devices,  they all serve to allow us to better use and consume content. No matter if it comes from professional or immediate social networks. That is the function of a service design layer. When we use content, we transport it across different devices and consume it in different ways. Blood flows. The content we consume helps shape our identity, which we in turn broadcast, through the same devices and interfaces that professional content uses.

Tapping onto content is not an issue any longer. We inhabit a world where all content is available in several standard formats at all time. What differentiates an ecosystem from the next is its ability to move content around seamlessly, or not. [The cloud comes into play.]

In roman times, long avenues leading to squares was an effective way to control crowds. You could easily corral a crowd in a square and sieve it slowly through narrow avenues leading off it. Renaissance, french illuminism learned from it. Those who own ecosystems manipulate the way blood flows. I bought an ipad and felt there was only one avenue leading in and out of the square. I wanted a usb port to upload my movies. I wanted blood to flow, but it did not, it had to be filtered by iTunes. I understand the market/control logic behind it but I don’t accept it. Google don’t have an iPad, but are working on an ecosystem, a city that makes more sense to me.

If you were to look at current service ecosystems companies are building, and used the city as the image for each, what city is apple building? Google, HP, Intel? What cities are being built for our content, for our minds?

Cities with rivers, ancient chinese cities where crowds had a hard time gathering, roman cities with long avenues and squares, american grid cities made for cars…? These are cities for our minds, blood must flow.

A book of hours. A revolutionary layout where information flourished in boxes which surfaced from wallpaper backgrounds.

I’ve always loved the way cartoons organized a narrative into boxes. Little windows that have their own temporal timeline, perpendicular to the main timeline.

BBC had layout boxes, and eventually those boxes became more dynamic.

Eventually those boxes became a little more dynamic…

Remember the children’s encyclopaedias that showed us the mechanics of the world? Every little chamber with its own purpose.

Moving on to interfaces. Windows seven and the way they approach boxes in a cinematographic manner. There’s always more outside of the frame and the user is made aware of it through navigation clues. It’s an interesting strategy, used by apple, microsoft and everyone else out there, but it does not scale very well. Imagine you are allowed to view the house above one compartment at the time. It perpetuates a grid/directory like layout, simply allowing users to browse it using one or more axis.

I then remembered widsets, which later became Nokia Ovi. At the time they were very inspiring.

I remembered them because they took the boxed house and said: the house has electricity and pipes and antennas and all those compartments are connected to various sources of content. Those compartments are changing because they are connected. I loved William J. Mitchell and the way he looked at both city and internet from an infrastructural perspective.

Once connected, those little boxes became trendy and practical and alive.

The iphone inherited some of this intelligence, but mostly it’s just a grid layout of buttons that open applications. Very little surfaces from the application itself.

If that were the case it would become very messy and processor intensive and ultimately Apple are about extreme simplicity…

New interfaces will only become really interesting when these mostly static button grids start surfacing some of the information that they entail.

A grid is a simple way to organize information. We tend to remember where things are and memorize their position. If these buttons would be constantly moving they would lose familiarity, rendering the user experience more difficult. This obvious conclusion is hindering the way interfaces may move forward.

The interface lies between us and ‘reality’. We use it as a tool and in doing so it shapes us. There are daft tools and intelligent tools. Intelligent interfaces are intelligent tools that push us and make us more intelligent beings. This first layer between us and the tool needs to go beyond the old argument of “It needs to be so easy even my granny can use it”. That is a market requirement not a human one. Granny will learn.

Yes, you can do a lot with a hammer. Yes, it’s the application that the simple button calls that needs to entail intelligent potential, still… I die a little every time I look at that screen and think of this logic where so little intelligence surfaces.

2. You know me because you know my usage/consumption patterns.

Is (1+2) == ME ?

Yes, pretty much.

The new iPlayer is more social, new Spotify is more social, everything and every service has gradually become more social… We’ve been working on this ‘social layer integration’ for a few years now, it’s always surprising how long it actually takes to become mainstream. In any case, this means as a user i am constantly confronted with the presence of my friends, my social reality whatever service i use or place i visit. I can go through their broadcasts, their choices and discover new interesting things. As i discover i add to my own visible identity and reinforce the very objects which are discovere.

Mashables and Techcrunches have already proven that operationally, journalism is nothing more than clever and pragmatic networking. That’s the best way to discover first. To be able to discover first as opposed to getting it on the 8′oclock news, is a major behavioural shift. There is information i want as it happens, other i want daily, and other i want every now and then. My social network gives me the first and lends it a trust factor.

As i discover from my social network i am connecting and re-cementing the bond i have with my friends. I praise those who surprise me and by doing so encourage it even more. ‘I like it’ will soon become ‘I love it’. Everyone is encouraging everyone else, poking: make me laugh, show me your cool experiences in the shape of photographs and videos, surprise me and i will like you, I will love you.

The omni-presence of my social network is now the space i am most likely to navigate, trust and be entertained by. This is because I choose my friends and in the process am chosen by them. They understand and know me and I them.

Businesses want to be my friends. They want to understand me as my friends do and have enduring relationships with me. They try and speak to me through a human voice even though I am just a number with variable potential purchasing power. [Of course i prefer small bespoke shops run by little teams of people. Because they are people! This is one of the reasons some small businesses fare so well online, because they are able to have a much more honest relationship with their users. It almost feels like an Arts & Crafts Ruskian renascence and it's great].

By visiting a place you may or may not choose to have a perpetual connection to that place. Places and people become the same and the internet is now being aptly called the internet of things. Real places are starting to cross-reference users who physically visit them and mention them in their online conversations. This is the internet of things. An internet of objects, regardless of their nature where what is important is the connection they have with one another and not, as mentioned, their intrinsic nature.

So how do i manage my digital identity when:

1. My digital identity is more and more fragmented through the various services i use and the fact I must sign up to every single one of them.

Note that a lot of new services are just requiring basic sign up with as little information as possible, or simply using twitter or facebook connect because they get precious user information from the services that own our valuable social network.

2. In spite of 1, my digital identity has never before been so visible and cohesive. Both to myself and others. This is partly due to the hegemony of 3 main services that I use to connect with others. Google, facebook and twitter permeate all my behaviour and are integrated in most smaller services: This means my identity has never before been so objective and visible to myself and others, simply because it’s so easy to piece it together by accessing those 3 services.

The real endeavour here is in how we piece users together using their usage patterns and social networks. We are able to synthesise life’s building blocks and piece them together in order to engineer life. We are doing the same at a micro social level in order to manipulate the macro social layer, i.e. we are capturing massive amounts of usage data and we have engines that are piecing it all together in order to recreate and predict user behaviour and ultimately influence it.

The intelligence that is able to piece all this usage and synthesise models that aid in understanding user behaviour is amazing and frightening and seldomly discussed. It is is being developed inside some corporations and is the best kept secret of this, the internet of things.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple… everyone is fighting for ownership of the users that use their services.
They all need your data and why not. After all you are entering their shop, their environment. Whether you pay or use it for free, you are ultimately the most valuable commodity. If they understand you, what you like, who you hang out with, they will serve you better and make you happier, so they say, and maybe we are happier. At least we are more connected and as social beings we should and do derive some happiness from it.

The reality is none of these services actually cares about me as a person. I am just another user turned into a set of preferences and numbers they can mine and sell more stuff too when they are not selling those very preferences to third parties (like google). They have shareholders to account to and wallstreet has just changed its name address to chinatown, so everything has become much more object oriented [wink] Social media, yes. But lose the hypocrisy. It’s social media because we are social beings and the best way to sell products is through my trusted and very real social network.

We’ve become hooked on each other, it’s not like i can suddenly change my name so that corporations stop taking advantage of my unified identity. If i change my name I would lose the connection with my friends. My name is connected to my bank account, my taxes… In reality they don’t care what my name is, they only care about my preferences, my desires and how they can influence my next moves. I am one, not a fragmented being, and have to live with it. Real privacy control is impossible and almost futile. The information is still stored by engines whose sole purpose is to make sense of it, make sense of me, put the pieces together just like we’ve been doing with dan and small cells. Plus, now with the internet of things, where we love to experience physically, attend and rate the world around us, a robot would not work, a virtual pet is very 90′s… so I have resigned to the fact that I am an object to be pimped by those who know me, who have taken the time to understand me and who give me happiness in return.

I gave in. Control your privacy settings as much as you can and let go, i say. You don’t know who’s flying the plane you just hope they’re well trained and there is some government body paying attention to rogue pilots out there. It’s so much work to clean up ones browser history, cookies, remember all ones passwords, make sure to untick the tricky subscription box… Why not just let go and allow everything to connect with everything? My online optician should know about my upcoming trip to St. Lucia and recommend a pair of sun glasses. In knowledge lies a good buck. Amazon should know about the fact ‘I liked’ one of my friends posts regarding Anti Nuclear activism, and recommend me a book on the subject the next time i visit their book store… My local cafeteria should be aware of the fact that I put a good comment on its yelp map and give me a discount the next time i walk in…

Connected awareness has suddenly acquired a new purpose.
Google, facebook, twitter… they all sell ME through the shape of my context. They are so horny for my data and homogenization of privacy laws, that you can see their hard-on all the way from micronesia. If they don’t have us they have nothing. We are them until we reinvent ourselves and render them obsolete.

Kwamecorp empowers the whole of The Vinyl Factory. This means we get to work with some of the coolest artists on the planet. Grace Jones tops that chart.

Album apps include most of the features a standard artist app display but go a step further. Album apps contain the whole album and provide a different music fruition experience. One that takes advantage of the smart phone’s capabilities, i.e. accelerometer, touch, camera, microphone… mixing artwork, gameplay and narrative.

Download partial proposal here.