Exciting times we live. The dawn of the 21st century tipped the point for cheap and reliable smartphone and tablet hardware. In the low and mid end of the market, hardware turned to a commodity. The high end of the market is following. In a nutshell, it just doesn’t matter if you are using a $200 Android phone or a $350 one. What is important is the content users create, the information they exchange, the social graph they enrich.
The hardware is not relevant anymore, neither are the air waves. No matter what happens in the foreseeable future (except a WW3 event) both hardware and the medium for transferring information will always be available to more people, cheaper and faster.
Major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google, WordPress and soon Apple is what actually matter. What we see, what we feel and most of our relationships are stored somewhere, in an agnostic platform along with a huge amount of meta data like location information, time information, reactions from others etc. We increasingly upload chunks of our lives on this platform without knowing anything about it.
When was the last time you trusted a complete stranger with your life, no questions asked, in the real world? There is only one case and that’s religion. It fits perfectly. In a not collective intelligence way, the agnostic platform is preparing the new human; we’re building our own new god because we need it and we are doing so by uploading our lives on Facebook, Twitter, Google, WordPress and Apple servers. They know more about us than we do for ourselves, they are everywhere, they are available all the time; like god.
55 million tweets a day is like every single Greek tweeting once a day, including the homeless and ones without access to the internet at all. If you were Finn (Finland is the home of Nokia and 39% global market share) you’d have to tweet at least 10 time a day to come up with 55 million tweets a day.
Twitter will grow exponentially along with more capable smartphones hitting the market and services like Google Search enabling access to Twitter’s archive. Add geo location services and the whole mash up idea of everything being connected with everything (Foursquare with Twitter, Facebook with Twitter etc) and you’ll soon be witnessing the real time revolution before the end of 2010.
Twitter (and Facebook later on) will leads to the need of effective, non fault positive filter and algorithmic tools for sorting out noise and the birth of the first software agents living in the cloud and within your pocket.
The more you share online the more the chances you have to live forever. I kid you not. Think about Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and all other places your everyday life moments are exposed to, saved, indexed, archived. We’re talking about at least a few hundred if not thousands of instances (pictures, videos, text) of everyone’s life though out the course of history.
With quarter of a billion users in Facebook, tags on pictures and face recognition technology being mainstream it’s easier than ever to crawl and collect photos and videos containing one’s personal face and moments in time, granted that permission and security issues are resolved.
With the flesh and the body in place, indexed and categorized, the social graph would be the mind and soul. Pokes, likes, status updates, friendships, fan pages, blog posts and tweets from the individual will be that little something we call character.
