Dear World (and especially Robert Scoble)
Today I read a fantastically thought-provoking piece from Robert Scoble. Yes, that guy. Love him or hate him, he is talented and he definitely knows a thing or two about tech. We’ve had our fallings out over mobile from time to time, but overall - he’s a good guy.
The post in question, entitled Location 2012: Death Of The Information Silos, talks about what the geo-location-based/cache world of tomorrow could look like by the time we hit the Olympics. The key word here is could.
Human beings. All of them.
It really is a great piece, seriously - go read it. First Robert talks through his dream day, how his friends are alerted to meetings and how his kids get the right amount of McDonalds they need right at that moment and it’s all about CONTEXT.
With location, context is king.
A couple of years ago I kicked around the idea of a facebook phone and what that might ultimately one day look like, we’re kind of nearly there with the heavy facebook application integration we’re seeing these days (and it will of course, only get better), but something I touched upon then which is still just as relevant today is ‘passive contextual awareness‘.
Your phone KNOWS you. It knows what’s going on your apps, in your diary, in your contacts, in your maps… it knows you. I’m in the gym. My phone knows I’m in the gym, it changes my voicemail, location, presence information, profile…. all to reflect that info. This is where my head was at two years ago. AdAge wrote about it recently… and today Scoble has followed suit. We’re getting there. S-L-O-W-L-Y.
And that’s the key point, the word we’re using here is SLOWLY.
Robert’s piece on TechCrunch today/yesterday (depending on your timezone) highlights the high-end user requirement for awesome geo-tech. It also highlights the barriers preventing this from happening. Silos of information, apps not sharing data, the future is not now etc…
All great and relevant points. In fact, this one of the sharpest things Robert’s written in a long time.
BUT.
The human race just doesn’t work that way. Humans are inherently scared of change. ‘Embracing the unknown’ is oft described as a personality trait, not one of an entire species. When William Gibson famously said “The future is here already, it’s just not evenly distributed”, he was right and very much still is.
The big guns, the huge massive players in the whole world - thing big here guys - they KNOW this. They know that to introduce massive change and upheaval in the way we behave you have to condition your users for it. Your users in this case are human beings.
Human. Beings.
Historically and empirically we know that sweeping behavioural change, in the main, happens by accident. To effect change on this kind of scale you have to plan for it. Plan, plan and plan again.
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