Here is the talk I gave to round off Social Media 09. I’ve actually I’ve pushed this live as I’m speaking, partly because it’s the real time thing to do, partly because due to the layout of the room half the people in the room can’t see the screen and partly because I’m flying without access to my notes which will lead for an interesting 10 minutes and I’d like people to experience the talk a bit more as I intended. Here is the slide deck and a few paragraphs on some of the themes I was trying to cram in.

I’m interested in thinking a lot about the value within sentiment streams. Thinking about it from a totally different direction from advertisers pushing sentiment and demographic derived ads into it the data. I’m not saying that ads are totally wrong, I just think we need to think of more and better things here. There are a few things I wanted to explore in this short talk.

First of all I want to think about what other business models may exist around bulk data; business models more modern than embedding ads to sell things. I think there’s great potential to buy data feeds to make products and services more efficiently. To use it look for trends you can produce towards. To look for people who might buy the things you speculatively design and to look for feedback on existing services. I’d love the industry to move away from the advertising driven arms race which has given us the six-bladed razor (via the one, two, three, four and five bladed razors) where the need for bigger better new is driven by non-experiential advertising.

The second thing I’m interested in exploring is the real time space between the internet of people and the internet of things. Thinking about some of the things that people like BERG, Stamen and RIG are doing at the moment makes me feel that the dreams of interactive built environment and ubicomp are starting to finally escape from flying car land.

I’m also excited by things like Jer Thorp’s visualisations of air travel and Lufthansa’s MySkyStatus which essentially convergent ways of looking at your travel, either declaratively by associating yourself with a plane or implicitly by associating yourself with a journey through what you say at either end. I like thinking about the way you can associate yourself with a “thing” and let it become your mouthpiece for when you can’t speak. It would also be wonderful to be able to attach and detatch your identity from real-time services; so you could be just generating ambient geodata which could help inform people about living in built environments and then, when you wanted you could go declarative you could switch on your identity so you could play locative games and tell your friends where you are.

And just to make one thing straight I don’t want geotargetted ads to my phone, that’s just such a lazy thing to do with something as wonderful and personal as this set of devices and services.

Where I want to get to is to see more about happens when you use data and social to make things like for instance fundraising and sporting events data driven and inclusive. If you can follow a marathon runner you’ve sponsored, get updates as they pass through boundaries, then maybe you could send a message of support to them as they go past a big screen. With all we have at our disposal this is more than possible technically, all we need is access to the underlying data/APIs. I did a little exploration of this with my Four Walks project and the augmented solitude I found as people joined in virtually with my meditative hike through the Austrian countryside was so fascinating and moving. I also have a suspicion that you could probably raise more money for charity through this sort of bidirectionality or data driven people centric story telling too.

So, let’s build a real time networked society, but let’s not fill it with adverts. That would be so lazy, we need to find value within the stream of data or through the use of the flow of data rather than floating billboards on it.