Ok, so lifestreaming is the rage of ’08, what with SocialThing! and Friendfeed and all similar services hogging all the attention.
But I also see something that’s been bubbling under the surface that I call ‘mechstreams’. I see machines edging in as equals in our lifestreaming services, sending out streams of data indicating what they are up to or thinking or what. And I don’t mean info alerts like weather or news, but info about what is going on.
This is not new, really, but I think the time is right for these things to mix with real lifestreams.
Examples:
- Tom Armitage hooked up the Tower Bridge to Twitter so that it can say ‘What am I doing?’ every time it goes up or down.
- I heard yesterday from Jan Chipchase of a teapot that says when it’s boiling water. In this case, it’s an unobtrusive tool to keep an eye on elderly folks – if the teapot is being used, then the old folks are doing fine.
I think this is fine and dandy in this day and age of the re-birth (again) of ubicomp and semweb (both of which I have been waiting to bloom for a very very long time).
So, where do you see this going? Tom Armitage gushed about this about a year ago. Have things really developed further?
[PS: In the course of actually slowing down to write this post, I keep finding more discussion of this topic. The inestimable Julian Bleecker used the term ‘blogject’ for objects that blog. He wrote up a minifesto 2 years ago. Krap, I need to get out more. Some days I feel like Rip van Winkle waking up and missing a huge chunk of the discussion.]
That’s what Microsoft’s Live Mesh is all about, giving everything a feed and letting your action be defined by feeds. They use the 2 way RSS protocol called Simple Sharing Extensions, but it’s the same thing.
Just like the telephone networks, which at first were used for voice, suddenly got trumped by the likes of dial up and later on DSL.
The same will happen with mobile networks and other types of networks as well.
Machines spitting out a feed isn’t the interesting bit, it’s machines that are aware of the machines around them and also are aware of your information taking all of this raw data and giving you something useful that is HIGHLY interesting.
Great post, Charlie. Not only do I feel like I’m missing a big chunk of the discussion, but more importantly, all of the ACTION too!
Carrying on with Stefan’s point, imagine feed-spitting blogjects that are aware not only of each other, but also of the people around them — perhaps with RFID and/or NFC — and you’ll get something that is even more interesting.
For example, while on a business trip halfway around the world, you learn the instant your son scores a goal because the goalpost automatically sends out that bit of news to your son’s private Twitter account, which you’ve subscribed to. Granted, this would take away from the surprise of your son telling you the story himself!
Of course, there are a about trillion workplace applications for this.
Reminds me of when I ran the Paris marathon and a select group of friends received an SMS of my times every 10km because of an RFID chip on my running shoes.
This is something I find completely fascinating! You can add architecture to the list of “streaming objects” by way of andy_house ( http://twitter.com/andy_house ) – a house that tweets. I posted about this project last month and am quite curious how feeds can tie into new school urban informatics ( i.e. http://www.serialconsign.com/node/211 )
We are heading to a future, where one day everything would be done at the tip of our voice. Just thinking of the abacus the chinese used earlier and now what they have given today.