Chapter Two.
Last week I had the tough act to follow Ray Ozzie and Mike Helfrich of Groove on a Social Software panel Clay Shirky moderated. Prompted Mike to pick up his blog (what about Ray?), and he is back.
There are some amazing examples of how Groove allows ad-hoc application infrastructure creation. Sensor networks based on smart radio network physical infrastructure are realizing Saffo's vision of a shift to Interaction:
The Shift From Processing and Access to Interaction
Source: IFTF
However, current systems lack social sensors. Mike points to the trendline:
D.C. Denison writes about Groove in his Business Intelligence column, which appeared in today's Sunday Boston Globe. He correctly credits "Chapter One" of the internet's history to DARPA. He talks of Chapter Two and the military/technology trend taking hold right now in the form of social software that uses the internet as it was intended. Decentralized groups of people swarming with a common purpose, using the net as a platform for connectivity, leveraging the net's inherent pervasiveness and high availability. [Michael Helfrich's Radio Weblog]
We are still a long way from the social infrastructure to complement ad-hoc application and physical infrastructure. But the right pieces are emerging and maturing.
[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
Ross is really on a roll. He's in the right place at the right time. I really think that SocialText is gonna be a successful company, as not only Ross, but Pete, Ed and Adina are really onto something - right.
I remember Paul Saffo coming over to my house to see our MediaBar - in 1996 - telling me about cheap sensors. We had video ca,eras hooked up to each station, which would grab someone's face, resize it in front of their eyes and use it in all their MediaBar interfaces.
It was at that time that my "anti-VR" attitude solidified into a vision of VideoVR - what some call telepresence - being the long term 'solution'. With cheap video cameras (like $5 a piece - our MediaBar cameras cost over $1k) we'll be bathed in video surveilance sensors, enabling someone to dial-in into a room (well more like "jack-in") and navigate through a REAL space, not some 3D CGI representation of a room.
This will be when all the hyped-up VR stuff comes into reality. Not with synethtic 3D CGI! But that's just ONE application of sensors. Paul is right - it is a fundamental shift - towards interaction - and that means we're finally taking our processing power and access and figuring what ACTIVITIES we can do together!
Not only are the "social sensors' coming into place, but the Smart Mobs will - in a decentralized manner - hack their game machines, setup their TiVOs, moderrate their communities, watch and listen to their media feeds and mesh their services and content into the People's .Net. All connected to the processing power of their local machine, with access to the WWW (and other private backhaul channels) - all the while sensing their social environment, participants and world around them.
These activities are the essence of how meatspace meets cyberspace.
Now let's hope that we'll PLACE OUR VOTES and get us a new administration in 2004.
Back in 1951, Osamu Tezuka, a Japanese cartoonist, dreamed up Astro Boy, a lovable robot with laser fingertips, searchlight eyes, machine guns in his black shorts, and rocket jets flaming from his red boots. To make the 100,000-horsepower tyke seem really futuristic, the artist gave his creation a truly far-out birth date: April 7, 2003. Tokyo may not yet have flying cars, but Astro Boy's official birthday on Monday marks the coming of age of Japan's animation industry. No longer marginalized, the bare-chested rocket boy with the spiky hair, known in Japanese as Tetsuwan Atomu, is being hailed with fireworks, costume parades, intellectual seminars, an exhibit in Parliament and a $1 million diamond-and ruby-encrusted likeness in a downtown department store display.
