Phones Are People Too
by Imran Ali
At last month’s Reboot 9.0, Matt Webb’s session on Products Are People Too, explored the notion of ‘products that gossiped’, specifically items that shared their knowledge and experience through ‘chitter-chatter’, learning and defaulting to behaviors that had gone before as well as passing their experience to other ‘younger’ items.
Here’re a couple thought provoking quotes from Matt’s talk…
What if everything in my home had alert lights for things that mattered but not much. My washing machine could have a hopper in it to store my laundry tablets, so it’d know if it was almost empty or not. My dishwasher, if I had one, could report how full the filter is. My freezer could know whether it needs to be defrosted. From the point of view of functional products, all these items should have blinking lights on them. Imagine instead that they gossiped—sent little messages out only a few feet. When I passed them, my mobile phone would pick them up.
Nice! I wonder, what’s the optimal user experience on a mobile equipped to read machine gossip? Should, your appliances be entries in your address book or members of your mobile machine social network so their messages can be filtered, routed and parsed as those from real people? Should my appliances send me text messages, useful photomessages or discrete voice mails!
And just thinking about cultural transmission a bit, what if products learnt off their elders and betters? What if our portable products with wifi connections defaulted to using whatever the elder products in the house used, so my new wifi toy would learn and defer to an Airport Express which has been plugged in and active for a couple of years, or a feisty new computer which sends an awful lot of data.
Great! My shiny new handset should configure itself from my existing digital artefacts - web services, old phones, computers with calendars and address books. Of course, it’d help if such data was consistently standards based and applications made their data openly available…
Matt’s work is consistently thought provoking and exists outside the noise of 2.0 hype, his work and that of his partner Jack Schulze moves research and innovation further forward than most in the technology industries.
