Alex Kelleher’s Blog

What does your cell phone know about you?  Well, a fair bit according to researchers at MIT.  For instance, they claim they can divine, among other things:

- how happy and productive you are
- your social status
- your social group

Fundamentally this is just an extension of any form of data mining – take a large amount of data, and try and make some determinations from it.  The examples based on social group and status can be fairly easily explained – by where you spend your time (the types of shop, street, district), and other mobile phones that yours tends to hang out with.  Happiness and productivity was a correlation they discovered when they combined location and call data with questionnaires.

The same group are doing some interesting work with other areas that use mobile data – such as “social serendipity” – trying to match users that happen to be in similar locations, and that have similar profiles or interests.  People have tried to release products into that space for as long as I can remember, but no-one’s yet cracked it, so it will be interesting to see if this research helps.

A lot of reality mining to date has been to do with mobiles (like BlueTooth MyBlogLog), but obviously anything that can sense us and feed data about us will add to this: cars, PCs, toasters… The more, to my mind, the merrier.

Earlier I said that 50 billion videos were viewed online in February 2008, and even that I think is just a U.S. figure.  Now with seesmic et al, people are getting up every morning and saying “hello” to the handful of people who are also trying out the new service, and who knows where that will all develop to.

But one area that video is being used more and more is the delivery of information that before you would have got off a page of text.  Business information.  Views, tips, hints.   And thinking about it, it really isn’t an efficient way of delivering information in many ways.  A 5 minute video is probably equivalent to a page of text which would take 20 seconds to scan.

But what it IS very good at, of course, is getting across all that non-verbal detail that would go missing otherwise.

It’s like trying to make a joke, or be sarcastic, in an SMS text message.  It doesn’t really work until you get to hear the intonation of someone’s voice, or see the daft grin on their face.

As an example, the “Niche Ninjas” drop some useful tips into their videos, which I fell upon today by chance, on affiliate and niche marketing.  Sure there’s ninja-hand waving moments, but there’s some good stuff in there. 

Is this just novelty value, or is this beginning to be the justification for video?  Either way, I’m going to keep to writing for the moment, which is a relief for all.

Geo-tagging, location-based social networking, UPS gps-tracking  – the internet is more alive all the time with geographically based data, and I think it’s a great thing.

Back in “the day” (1995-2000), serving someone a version of a home page based on their location (matched against a database of IP numbers) was state-of-the-art, and really wasn’t always that useful (I still prefer the .com view of google…) 

Now, services like brightkite and loopt will hook you up with your friends who are nearby, or new people who happen to be in the neighborhood of you.  So much for the global village! Also, sites set up to get people away from their PCs, like Meetup.com are going well.  All good.

Bit by bit, the broadcasting, storage and tracking of your physical location is starting to be used for benefit.  Again, years ago there was a lot of talk about SMS geo-targeted marketing, so that when you walked past a restaurant, the reviews would flood your phone – or when you walked in to a shop, discount vouchers would jump into your inbox.  But that was either too intrusive, too scatter-gun (your location was known only to 500 meter accuracy) or if you had to seek them out, too difficult to get.   Now, maybe, the technology is getting there, with GPS phones and satnavs in every hand (useless in buildings, though!).

In fact, growth in use of maps on phones is over 70% in the UK/US, though that’s still from a pretty low base:

It’s a space I’ll be watching closely, and it’s another data feed that could benefit the USER (which, of course, is something I’m mad keen on).

Google search engineers hit the new milestone of 1 trillion unique URLs, a number which is growing at “several billion per day”.  Even with ignoring duplicates, and assuming a lot of pages get shelved as unimportant (endless calendar day pages, empty or forgotten pages, etc.), that’s a lot of content.  That’s 166 URLs for each person on the planet, and 10 for each star in the galaxy (assuming 100 billion stars).  So, quite a lot.

While we’re pushing out big numbers, here are some more to goggle at… They’re not sourced (some of them are estimated, some might be wildly out – but all were spotted on fairly reputable sites).

• 1.4 billion internet users
• 50 billion videos viewed online in February
• 3.3 billion searches on Baidu per month
• 500 million videos on YouTube
• 4.1 billion photos on Facebook
• 2 billion images on Flickr
• 533 million results for “insurance” search
• 10 million articles on Wikipedia
• 3 billion songs sold on iTunes
• 100 million MySpace members
• 10 million songs scrobbled on last.fm a day

Pretty overwhelming, huh.

The “funky stew of social networks” (a quote from the recent seesmic entry via YouTube, as below), and the steadily rising drone of chit-chat over twitter, seesmic, indeti.ca and a myriad other services is getting to fever pitch.  (If a stew can be feverish).  So much so, this guy is writing a book about it called “Welcome to the tweet generation”.

The explosion of services in and around real-time behaviour broadcasting (which I’m going to call RTBB, mostly because I can – I think they are properly called “presence streams” or “lifecasting”) is one of the Big stories of the last 12-18 months.  It’s fuelled by the innate desire of humans (the kind of thing I refer to a lot) for two things:

1. Connectedness - feeling a connection to other human beings, being aware of what other people are up to, and them being aware of you.  The outcome of this is (supposedly) greater connectedness.  Ironically the noise levels, and the sharing of information with people you actually don’t know that well, probably often has the opposite effect.
2. Cool new toys – much of this technology just has the “wow, that’s pretty cool” gut reaction from its users.  Because of that, loyalty can be very low and use is often very short-term.

Taken together, this appetite for new models of, and tools for RTBB will mean a lot of new services will be keep being launched for the foreseeable future.  Darwinian evolution will mean the fittest (probably a combination of the best ideas combined with the ability to grow, develop and monetise) will last – or services that sit as aggregators will end up catching the majority of the traffic.

When I remember to twitter/tweet (whatever the verb is) I’ll do it.  But I have to remember first, and then describe what it is I’m doing, and probably filter it myself for its interest-level…. I know, that’s probably not even in the spirit of it!  So, what might be needed is a “presence stream” tool that posts updates without heavy user intervention.

The noise, in any case, will continue to grow, and that will mean we need better ways of filtering out the interesting and relevant items.

It’s probably a deeply human shortcut, but we really often want to know what’s the most POPULAR thing, in whatever category we’re looking at.  So i thought I’d do that quickly on a couple of sites.  Right now, this is the most popular presentation in english on slideshare with half a million views:

Lots of truth in that one, I’ve seen slides like 36 a number of times…

Almost reaching those dizzying height of views is this collection of “accidents” on docstoc:

Why I Got Fired – Get more Creative Writing

Meanwhile, over at YouTube, Avril Lavigne managed to get over 93,000,000 views on this music video, and on digg.com, the cracking of DRM protection made it to 49,000 diggs.

What does this all say?  Well, the most popular stories aren’t necessary the stories of interest to everyone – and in each situation above there is probably a story behind the popularity which promoted that particular item to the top.  For the same sort of reasons reason that “yahoo” appears to be the most popular search term on Google, popularity doesn’t mean interest or relevance.  But it might be a good pointer, if taken as part of a metric for determining what is “good”.

New Media Age and PC Pro both lead their most recent issues with stories covering the recent demise – and more recent rebirth – of Phorm.  Yes, the people who plan to spy on your every web site visit by sitting between you and the internet at your ISP.  A lot of screen inches have been taken up by what’s already been said in countless blog articles, the now infamous “Bad Phorm“, and sharper-eyed sources like The Equity Kicker.

Well, actually Phorm’s ideas are, if not that exciting in terms of what they’re doing with data, a valid attempt to try and personalise advertising content for users.  By observing what individual users do (in “buckets” of interest category), and then replacing ads within the OIX with ads that match that category, they are at least attempting to deliver more interesting and relevant content. 

They are heavily restricted by their domain of influence (ad spaces within OIX sites), and by the fact that the hyperbolically negative PR (or justified concern, depending on your viewpoint) has restricted what they actually store about a user’s behaviour. 

So where is the benefit as a user in this area of behavioural targeting?  Well, ideally the targeter will work as a “trusted friend”, providing input and ideas for that user based on everything they know about that person.  Trusted friends have access to a fair amount of information – the more trusted, the more information.  They (ideally) won’t share that information, abuse or expose it.  And ultimately their suggestions will motivated by being to the benefit to the USER.  Advertisers, shops, other people – all come second.

That, anyway, is where I think this industry is heading, slowly (and often unwillingly).  And so the winners in this market space will have found a way to take the position of that trusted friend, and grow the trust, the profile and the benefit over time.

No suprise that I’m working on just such an idea…