My innermost Twitter thoughts, revealed (courtesy of TweetClouds)

Running Notes from SXSW ‘08; for more blog coverage check out: the SXSW Interactive Community Blog.

If you’re over the age of 35, don’t bother reading the rest of this post. 

Why? Because what follows will likely be incomprehensible to you in the same way that portable, pocket-sized wireless telephones once seemed like objects of science fiction to a generation before you. In short, you’re not going to get it, and you’ll likely finish reading this post feeling like you don’t understand anything about web 2.0, or technology in general, and that the future is passing you by.  Which is likely true.

That said, if you want to know what your kids will be doing for the rest of the online lives, read on.

One of the highlights of SXSW Interactive was the panel PMOG: The Web as a Play Field.  PMOG stands for “Passively Multiplayer Online Game”; according to game designer Merci Hammon, PMOG “transforms the existing topography of the internet into a game world for players to vandalize, annotate, and curate.”  Huh? In short, it’s a new online game that turns the web into a game world. What that means in a practical sense is that players download a plug-in for their Firefox web browser.  In the vernacular of game designers and Navy fighter pilots, the plug-in installs what’s known as a Heads Up Display (HUD); the rest of us might think of it as a dashboard or toolbar. With the HUD turned on, players can leave “gifts” for one another on regular websites.

The catch, of course, is the definition of “gift”.  If the player is an Ally, you might wander onto your favorite website and find that they left you a crate filled with tools (tools being generally useful and as such, appreciated).  If the player is a Rival, however, you may find a mine that will explode in your face.  Not to worry, though: you can retaliate by planting a “St. Nick” for your rival, which causes his next mine not to work.  

There are two main differences between PMOG and other multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft or Everquest.  The first (and key) difference is that PMOG is played asynchronously, meaning you don’t need to be online at the same time as other players to participate.  You also don’t need to be in the same space: because PMOG uses the entire web as the game world, players don’t have to download (or play on) a separate platform. There’s no Second Life-type of world: PMOG simply creates an additional layer onto the existing architecture of the web.

All of this means that if you can’t spare a few dozen hours a week to play World of Warcraft, you can turn your everyday web surfing into a game (says CEO Justin Hall: “We’re building a game that’s actually LESS popular on the weekends”). To keep track of who’s winning, players earn “datapoints” (the game currency) just from regular browsing - every unique URL you visit is worth two datapoints.  In addition to gifting crates and exploding mines to other players, you can also go on player-designed missions which lead you on virtual tours of related sites (for example, the “Tech News Tour” mission includes visits to Engadget, Gizmodo, Digg and Slashdot). The goal, says Hammon, is to encourage people to broaden their experience with the Internet by exploring places they’ve never been on the web. A little like StumbleUpon, part of PMOG’s attraction is the fun of discovery and serendipity (although one could easily imagine a later version in which advertisers create sponsored missions that give users some “reward” for completing them).

If all this sounds simply like fun and games, think again. Aside from being interestingly quirky and original, the basic premise of PMOG could change the way we interact with the web and with each other while online.  Today we experience the web in a distinctly anti-social way: we surf alone, interacting with content, not people. But the ability to leave metaphorical “crates” and “mines” allows us to annotate the web in a very personal way and then share that experience with others. 

As I said in the beginning of this post, many people will look at PMOG and see at best another online game and at worst, yet another way to waste time at work. But what it really offers is a glimpse of the future: what the Web can, should and truly is meant to be: a social universe where content and people co-exist - if not in perfect harmony, then at least with a cache of St. Nicks.

If you think a new web app comes out nearly every day, you’d be partly right - it’s actually closer to about five per day. Google has popularized the practice of crowd-sourcing product development by releasing “beta” versions of unfinished products into the world for its customers to play with.  I admit to being a bit of a beta geek; the lure of being the first kid on the block to know about the coolest new web toy is irresistible to a futurist who loves to see around the corner to the future.  There are thousands of betas in the marketplace, which made finding a handful of them to feature for this week’s Friday Five more than a little difficult.  That said, here are five products in beta that we think are worth keeping an eye on.

Grand Central

Grand Central seeks to solve an increasing problem in the mobile age - converging multiple points of contact into one. The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.”  The service provides a single number tied not to a phone or location, but to you.  According to the website, with GrandCentral “you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, as well as check messages by phone, email or online.”

(Thomas Friedman’s talk at Pop!Tech, subtitled in Kiswahili)

dotSUB

dotSUB is quietly staging a revolution on the web. Its mission:  to make online video content accessible to the millions of non-English speakers by offering open-source translation services. The idea is deceptively simple: think YouTube meets Wikipedia: users can upload videos, films (even TV programs) for either the rest of the world or dotSUB’s team to translate. Translation services are either “closed” (utilizing dotSUB’s team of freelancers) or “open” (posting a video on the site and letting volunteers translate it for free, wiki-style).  For a great example of the service in action, check out Pop!Tech speaker talks (called Pop!Casts) which are translated via dotSUB into nine languages.   

MetaNotes

MetaNotes is “social graph paper” on which users can paste stickynotes containing text, images, videos, and widgets, creating scrapbooks to track and remember any topic.  It won the top “Experimental” website at the 2008 SXSW Interactive Awards last week, the category which tracks “cutting-edge and trend-setting destinations that are pushing the envelope and challenging our perceptions of the web.” While it still has a ways to go (i.e., it really needs private spaces for users to post notes); MetaNotes’ intuitive interface is familiar and user-friendly. And: it plays well with others, integrating with sites like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Pownce, and Photobucket.

Google’s Experimental Search

Courtesy of the brainiacs at Google Labs comes the Experimental Search project which offers new visualizations of search results including a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, G-Tech (the ambiguous but patent-pending-sounding term for “Google Technology”) extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view results in multiple dimensions. Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB)

Aptly named, the Museum of Modern Betas is the go-to place to check out and track web apps that are in beta.  In fact, we think it should be called the Motherload of Modern Betas - since it opened in two years ago its listed over 4000 sites that are in beta, helpfully organizing them into categories such as Top 100, Most Anticipated, Recently Added and by Language.  The large number of sites it tracks makes getting in-depth information about each one difficult, but active links are provided.  The MoMB is a like a giant playground for the future of the web, perfect for those who don’t want to wait for the new ‘new thing’ to arrive.

P.S. - Last but not least, here’s a bonus track: keep Wello Horld on your watch list; it’s still in alpha and very hush-hush, but I want to go on record as being (one of) the first to say “I told you so!” when it launches.  

P.S.S. - If you’re wondering why I didn’t include PMOG as a beta to watch, stay tuned.  It’s so cool it deserves it’s own blog post.

The clever folks at Botanicalls finally have an answer to the question burning up the blogosphere: is there anything in the world that can’t Twitter?  The answer apparently, is a resounding no, at least in the social sphere of houseplants and the humans with too much on their hands who care for them. Yes, just when you thought it was safe to leave the house, your plant calls looking for a little love:  

According the website, “Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What’s up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world. When your plant needs water, it will Twitter to let you know… When people phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their habits and characteristics.”  

Uh-huh.

Out of curiosity, I call the listed Botanicalls phone number and punch in a 3-digit code from the menu.  #005 connects me to the Scented Geranium, which says in a sexy-pay-per-minute kind of voice that it’s a native of South Africa and “touching me will release my fabulous scent.”

I hang up, feeling kinda dirty.

What kind of world do we live in that requires we devote emotional energy to houseplants?  A world filled with the slippery slope of spime.  It starts with an emotionally needy plant, or a Nabaztag rabbit that just needs a hug.  Next thing you know you’re trying to broker a peace accord between the broom and the floor mop.

Ah, the glorious (future) world of spime.

Twittering plants and emotionally fragile Nabaztags have been on my mind this week as I’ve been writing a scenario for my upcoming SXSW talk that explores the relationship between social technologies and metadata.  In a world characterized by info-glut, how will social technologies help us navigate, control and leverage the mountains of metadata that surround us?  How will they help us when spime starts to spam?

Designers, for better or worse, are on the frontline as the physical and digital worlds collide. Their burden is to design responsibly, to resist the urge to propagate the world with more Useless Stuff Embedded with Useless Data. How can this be achieved? Minus a full-blown design manifesto (for now), I offer instead The First Rule of Spime Design, which says: Spime Shall Be Socially Useful. To determine whether the blogject meets this criteria, consider the QVC test: if it has the potential (even the most distant or remote) to one day appear on a QVC television special - then don’t make it.  Put the glue gun down and walk away. This is the Purple Ketchup rule, which is another way of saying: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Because once houseplants start to Twitter, soon they just might Pownce. 

What can social media tell us about the future?

That was focus of a workshop Sandra and I led recently as part of IIR’s Future Trends conference, the goal of which was to explore how the social media sphere can be used as resource for identifying, monitoring and analyzing future trends.  It was an afternoon-long session so there’s too much to cover in a blog post, but what follows are some of big themes.

The social media sphere has become the primary means for disseminating information and ideas throughout society.

The social media sphere can be divided into six categories: Wikis, Blogs, Content Ranking sites (Digg, Technorati, etc), Boomarking sites (Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, etc), Visual media (Flickr, YouTube, etc) and Social Networking sites. All are seeing exponential growth:

In 1993 there were 130 web pages; today there are over 108 million.*  There are over 2.5 billion Google searches every month. According to Technorati, there are 120,000 blogs created every day; that’s about 1.4 per second.  Japanese is the world’s number one blogging language; English is number two, followed by Chinese.  The 10^th?  Farsi.

Facebook currently gets over 60 billion page views per month, making it the 6^th most trafficked site in the U.S. Flickr is home to 3.5 million photos - 82% of which are public. Wikipedia has more than 75,000 active contributors, working on some 9 million stories in more than 250 languages. And don’t even get me started on Twitter.

The Clickstream Culture & Making the Invisible Visible

As inherently social spaces (in which users share, collaborate, create, ideate and muse) social media sites act as idea transmission systems.  The clickstream of our online lives - our Google searches, Facebook walls, del.icio.us links and blogs - are digital archives of our thoughts, ideas, emotions, behaviors, actions and desires.  Collectively they create a collage of our lives, rendered visible to the world (John Battelle calls this the Database of Intentions). In a sense, we’re making the invisible visible.

And here’s the punch line:

 If We Can See It, We Can Map It

For the first time in history we are able to see - in a real, tangible way - the physical movement of ideas throughout society.  To use a familiar metaphor, we can think of the social media sphere as a complex urban environment where blogs act as villages, bookmarking sites become neighborhoods, ranking sites are cafes (or billboards), Wikipedia is a community garden, Facebook a dense city center.  The links and trackbacks and blogrolls which connect them become highways and roads on which ideas travel. 

Because we can “see” this landscape, we can map it. The electronic exhaust of our clickstream culture allows us to see how a thought, a meme, a sentiment move from blog to Digg to delicious and beyond.

The New Physics of Information Flow

By understanding the “physics” of information flow throughout various social media platforms, we can use them to identify and track future trends. Several transmission models have emerged in recent years to map information flow, including Social Network Analysis (SNA) (mapping of human relationships), Complexity theory (a “systems” view) and epidemiological models (a popular metaphor and model, using the modeling of disease epidemics to understand how ideas spread by identifying their source and mapping “infection” rates).

A final model draws from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point which attempts to explain how ‘social epidemics’ spread via three types of people: connectors, mavens and salesmen.  Categorizing social media platforms in the same way provides  an interesting lens through understand how - and why - ideas spread in the social media sphere:

Connectors : social networking sites & bookmarking sites, which connect large (and often diverse) numbers of people;

Mavens: blogs & wikis, which are knowledge hubs on topic areas;

Salesmen: content ranking sites & media sites, which “promote” an idea and provide a context for its popularity.

NEXT UP: Social Media and Foresight ….

*(that, BTW, is mind-blowing if you think about it. I’m rather unsurprised by the number of web pages today, but I admit that it’s almost incomprehensible to think that at one time there were ONLY 130 web pages in the world. Total. Wow.)

note: THANK YOU to our colleagues at Pinkegreen Design for designing the above Social Media Map; the online version will be available in a few weeks.