Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/h-k-d/

Personification of objects is as old as language, nowhere is this clearer than in languages where every noun has a gender, often arbitrarily ascribing a male or female identity to things like tables, helicpoters and placemats. However, it has always been obvious that these were figures of speech (no pun intended). The gender was metaphorical not literal, the act of personification a literary or poetic construct.

This clear delineation is breaking down today via the Web and social media. In particular, it struck me the other day that things like Twitter and Facebook, flatten out the distinctions between people, objects, companies and ideas as all of these things (and more) now have the ability to create a profile, collect friends/followers, describe their tastes, preferences and affiliations and generally build data that describes them and their social graph.

Obviously, to the vast majority of applications and services on the Web (barring captchas), the data associated with an object or idea is not really that different from the data associated with a person. Therefore, it’s possible to see that objects, ideas and other abstract concepts could start interacting with us in the same way that our friends, family and associates do. For example, the year 2010 could start posting on your Facebook wall, “see you in a few months.” Or perhaps more usefully, an object called “Tax changes for this year” could look at your behaviour and suggest various ways to cope with it.

Clearly a lot of this stuff is happening. Things like phone bills and bank statements and even refrigerators now have a lot more intelligence. It’s easy to see how the data fields around these objects could be expanded to include more of the meta-data that Facebook or Twitter build around us. And it’s an easy step from there to see how something like a Facebook group – which is often representative of an idea and which already has a lot of meta-data around it – could be made more intelligent and set free to act on its own.

I think this is already really interesting, but it’s even more fascinating to think about the other side of the equation which is what’s happening to us – people. Where we have, up till now, been extremely hard to define and describe using simple statements that anyone can understand, this is no longer the case – as far as the Web is concerned we are as logical and simple as anything else.

This is another view into how the Web is shifting the framework of our concepts. The word “idea” carries with it a clear (ha!) sense of abstraction and intangibility, while the word “person” implies tangibility yet also indefinability. While our usage of these terms on the Web assumes these same meanings, their actual potential and behaviour no longer match. It’s interesting to speculate that our language may hold us back from seeing a lot of the new possibilities that come from objects, ideas and people interacting at the same level.

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Yet again, this reminded me that we often subconsciously bring frameworks of thinking from the physical world into the digital world. I think we do it all the time. For example the idea that we buy digital ad space based on size is fairly ludicrous. Online, space is virtually unlimited – websites don’t fill up, there’s always more room!

However, to be perfectly honest, I’m as guilty of as the next person of slipping into that kind of thinking from time to time so I’ve created this handy chart that can be used to quickly check my thinking. I’ve posted it here, it may be helpful for you too.

Technorati Tags: charts, frameworks

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Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jyoseph/

This brilliant post from Gizmodo made me remember some thinking I’d done about using services to extend or enhance the value of things. I think the events of the past few months are starting to turn this approach from a “nice to have” into a viable survival strategy for lots of different types of companies.

It feels to me that this is one very obvious way for companies to hang onto revenue in these times. As:

1. People hunker down and spend more time in their homes
2. They delay upgrading large ticket items
3. The cost of moving atoms continues to increase
4. Things become more connected

Using digital services (and/or software) to enhance the experience of using existing products or services offers companies a much better marketing efficiency story. Rather than seeking to acquire customers in an environment like this which is bound to be costly, delivering services is a retention strategy which can also generate positive income.

Clearly electronics manufacturers and retailers are big candidates for this kind of approach as new customers continue to be harder to find, but as companies like Fiat are showing, non digital products can also become services platforms through smart use of analogue to digital interfaces.

Companies whose entire revenue is based upon winning new customers in order to make a one time transaction are almost certainly going to be the hardest hit in the next year or so. I have to think if I worked in retail, automotive or the consumer electronics industries I’d be thinking really hard about this right now.

Technorati Tags: retention

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Image via Sydney Morning Herald

A poll of the office here as well a scan of the blogs bring a fairly tepid response to the new Nintendo DSi. However I am optimistic that it’s actually going to prove to be a pretty significant leap forward when all’s said and done.

From a feature standpoint, there’s not a lot to mention:

• Slimmer, smaller form factor
• Larger screens
• 2 x built-in camera
• Updated Wii-style interface
• Music playback
• Photo manipulation software
• DSi Shop/DSWare download service
• Increased internal memory / SD Card support
• No GBA port

But I think that the dual cameras ought to enable some pretty revolutionary new gameplay. I don’t think that Nintendo really means them to be image capture devices. Instead I think they’re meant as input-capture devices. Dual cameras mean that the movements of two people can be captured at the same time and mapped onto the same field of play. I can imagine lots of scenarios where this could be really revolutionary. Or consider that dual cameras could allow for some pretty amazing augmented reality gaming as one camera captures your surroundings, another captures your actions and the game maps both together.

Combine this with some other new input devices that are starting to appear and the DSi could do for portable gaming what the Wii did for living room games.

I see this as another example of a couple of trends that I’ve been following over the past year or so. The rise of analogue to digital interfaces or the importance of measurement are both facets of a desire to digitize aspects of our physical world so that the associated data can be manipulated by services. The value that the DSi will bring won’t be in its hardware as much as it will be in its software. Value isn’t in things it’s in the services that ride on top of those things. I also think this can only be good news for cash strapped manufacturers as they look for new ways to delight their customers.

Technorati Tags: Nintendo DSi

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Apparently, the researchers were stumped for ages because at around 800 different characters, the Mayan language didn’t fit the 20 – 35 needed for an alphabet; the 80 – 100 needed for a syllabic language nor did it have enough to fit a logographic language like Chinese which has thousands of different symbols.

The breakthrough was finally made by a teenager who realised that the Mayans did indeed have syllables-based writing but that there were often up to 15 different symbols for the same sound. The choice of which symbol to use appeared to depend not upon linguistic considerations but instead upon graphic considerations. Basically, they would substitute different symbols based upon the look of the symbols as well as the meaning of the symbols. Their writing had both literal as well as artistic meaning.

I thought this was fantastic on so many different levels. The richness of communication that this system must have been capable of is amazing to imagine. Additionally, because the symbols were pictures that different people “wrote/carved” differently the character of the writer/carver would have come though unmistakably. All in all, these would have been writings that would have required a reader to absorb and study in order to gain their full meaning. Writings that might have revealed layers and layers of new meaning the closer one looked.

Sigh…

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You may be familiar with is the vinyl/CD debate that has raged for the past 25 years in the high-end audio world. The argument is this: because CD (and any digital technology) approximates a smooth sound wave through sampling – creating a stair-stepped approximation of the wave – it can never sound as natural as vinyl which produces smooth analogue sound waves.

I found myself thinking about this a while ago while watching John Adams on HBO. The dialogue has more nuance, more subtlety and more range than the typical dialogue of today. As a result, the type and quality of emotion and meaning that can be conveyed is greatly increased.

The trend of language in most countries has been towards simplification and coarsening, and while research is contested, many studies show that average vocabularies have been in decline for decades.

With the advent of social media, it feels that this trend has been exacerbated. Services like SMS, Twitter, IM and so on actively limit the kind of communication that’s possible. New service adocu takes this to the extreme with one word posts. Of course, this is not a one-sided story. In return we have greatly increased the quantity of words we use and consume, we have invented new words and (in the Web 2.0 world) we are increasingly relying upon metadata like tags to return nuance back to our communications.

However, this feels like the communication equivalent of sampling. It’s an approximation of analogue communication, using different levels of words to convey more meaning. Of course, as we’ve seen with music, going digital has many advantages. However, I predict an analogue communication movement to appear. Face to face communications sessions with lots of pauses, wry tones, innuendo and references to classical Greek literature.

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