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.

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”.

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…