JP Rangaswami and Kevin Marks on social location and other forms of context.
Next session at Heroes Of The Mobile Screen focuses on context, with Kevin Marks and JP Rangaswami from BT. There's a lot of excitement among attendees about this particular session – a number of people have tweeted that the pair are their “heroes”.
“Things that used to be synchronous are now able to be asynchronous as well, and things that used to be asynchronous are now able to be synchronous as well,” says Rangaswami. “It starts allowing us to do things that we hadn't perceived to be that simple before.”
Marks now, and the buzz around the real-time web. So things like voice and TV used to have to happen in real-time, because the technology wasn't available to record and store them – PVRs and voicemail for example. “There's enormous value in buffering things,” he says, pointing to TiVOs and iPods as things people will pay for.
And on the synchronous side, he points to apps that use real-time or near real-time location information – where people are – as a new use of context. Another is social connections.
Rangaswami chips in, saying when he changed jobs, he “deleted everything” (I think he means his inbox and contacts) - to see how people would find him through other channels. Within a few months, he had 80% of his contacts back.
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He moves on to talk about Flickr, and the properties that get passed on with every image “without any real effort” - nearly 40 items of metadata on everything from location, camera type... So that's context.
Marks again - “the power is people tagging each other” - comparing the current not-so-good level of facial recognition technology with the data being supplied by people tagging each other on sites like Facebook.
What other kinds of context besides social location? “Freeform tagging” says Marks – people labelling things – hashtags on Twitter, tags on blogs – and then clustering around that. He also points out that Flickr is mixing tags with locations – so a blog called 'South Bank' consisting of pictures with that tag. “You start being able to join this stuff across and do interesting generic things, but it also provides interesting personal things,” he says.
Rangaswami says the important thing with this new generation of Web 2.0 services, the power is in the hands of users. Is it though? A question for further debate maybe.
What about privacy? Marks makes a good point, in that a lot of information is being put out by social networking users in public, but with the assumption that only their friends will access it.
Rangaswami makes a generational point - “in the same way that the younger generation think that a CD isn't worth ten bucks, but a ringtone is worth four, I have to accept that their concept and expectations of privacy are quite different”.
Marks again: “the concept of public has changed. We used to have this concept of one public sphere, but there are many publics.” He cites Twitter as an example – users tweet to their followers, but they can retweet it – so the “mental model of who you are talking to is changing quite subtly.. as people get used to that, they start behaving in different ways.”
And that's a wrap.
