Chris Thorpe
Posted on: January 6, 2010
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Audio:
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Slides: On the horizon of a real-time networked society
Transcript:
So, I’m going to talk a bit about the real time web. Which is, sort of, what everyone is
seeing up here. Everyone talks a lot about the social web, where you actually look at
individual relationships and networks relationships, and it’s great that people have talked
a bit about sentiment analysis, because that means that I don’t have to get into it.
We can see that we’re real-time, so those who are at the back can actually read the slide
[?], on the slide show.
I think the really great thing about the real-time web and about what’s going on now is
that it’s going to involve different business models than we’ve ever seen before. Certainly
different business models from what we had in the twentieth century. And, actually, if it
means we lose books like this, where it talks about dominating your market one Tweet
at a time, then it can’t come fast enough for me.
I don’t think you should dominate conversational media. Sadly, I’m dominating here,
because there isn’t an opportunity for you to talk back. Social media and the real-time
web are all about talking back. So, let’s forget these crazy things about domination.
And, if we forget about these things like domination, then we may well lose the idea of the
six-bladed razor, which, actually, only really exists, because there’s this, sort of, arms race
between product and advertising all the time.
I, actually, want a much better future for the real-time web than thinking about how you
monetize it throughout. I don’t think ads are going to be the interesting thing there.
I also want to get rid of this concept that a Emir [Haq?] talks about so really well, which is
the Zombie Economy. Which is talking about making products that nobody ever really
needs and then persuading them that they do. I think what we can start doing is building
a better world. A better world where companies, actually, look at what they have inside
them, as assets, and they work out how to monetize those assets really, really easily, be
they [?] assets or others. A place where charities are made more out of the people who
give money and do things for them than the grand PR plan. And, a, sort of, place where
manufacturing companies can see if people want the things that they are going to build
before they build them, and, actually, know they have orders for them. It’s not far away.
And what’s driving it is this massive amount of data. You can see that we’re generating
data all the time here and the amount of it is enormous. So there’s about four thousand
tweets per second on low day, on Twitter, generally. And there are these massive fire
hoses of data that geeks like me can go and play with and stack up with things like
sentiment analysis and other algorithms and start mining them for interesting conclusions.
And, so, it’s a really unprecedented time. We’re generating more data on a daily basis
than the majority of broadcasters and newspapers have ever done.
And, whats really fascinating is the thing that’s driving this data generation is this concept
of social. It’s making things which are amazingly impersonal, like city life, into things that
are amazingly personal. And if you dive down deeply enough, what you find is that this
social media we talk all about is, actually, very much like real life. And it’s a lot more like
village life than it is about, like, city life.
And what you find is, that if you look at each of the individual social graphs that you saw
up here on that set of slides before, is that they’re about the same sort of size as a village,
they have similar relationships in them to a village. But they’re a very unique village,
because they are a village that revolves entirely around you. But I’m not so interested in
this particular village. What I’m interested in is the sort of thing where you start zooming
away from the village. So if you imagine you’re, sort of, pulling away from it, in sort of a
Google map style and you’re just looking at clouds of feelings and sentiments, this is the
thing that fascinates me. And I think that it’s going to be the future in terms of how we
monetize this space.
So let’s take one really good example. I’m really glad that nobody has shown this today
because I was rather scared. But everyone knows Traffic Guru and the Guardian being
gagged. And everyone has probably seen this image tons of times before. But the thing
that really excites me about this is actually the things the Guardian couldn’t talk about, and
couldn’t talk about for a week or so after the gag was lifted, are talked about here.
Dumping, toxic, Minton, the Minton report. This, on wiki-leaks, that the Guardian couldn’t
even mention for a week later. And it’s being talked about on social media far faster. All
you needed was a broadcaster to shine a light on corruption and people started finding
things. And they do this for this very important point that Tom [Coates?] says really well.
We live in the age of ‘point at things’. And that’s what social media is about. It’s about
pointing at things: people, brands, concepts, organizations. And what’s fascinating is to
flip that and start to understand what you can do with all of those pointers. It’s a really
rich amount of informatics.
This, for me, was one of my favorite tweets from the day of [Cart Iraq?], talking about
media history being made in real-time, media censorship being futile. It’s a lovely brave
new world. And what we see all the time if you sit in an organization that has lots of these
tweets pointing at you, like I do in, sort of, parts of the week, when I’m in the Guardian,
is you almost see flocks and migrations of people through these social spaces re-tweeting.
We’ve seen it today. And so what we really need to do is, sort of, try to understand how
we harness this and how we reflect it back out in terms of data that people can use and
monetize themselves.
What I really want to explore is, actually, what starts happening when we have the
real-time in the real world, because all of us carry around these things. Most of the people
in this room do. It’s not ubiquitous yet. Not everyone in the country does it. About one in
seven has a smart phone. But you actually have a really unique collection of resources
within those phones to talk about sentiment and place and time. And so you start to,
actually, be able to think of the world with a smart phone and the world of data as a world
where, actually, every individual citizen within that world starts to be a part of a sort of a
big, sort of, sensory organ. It is a city. It’s a kind of an abstract concept. But we all
exhibit one sort of particular tendency, which is that we all exist in place and time, at the
same time. And it comes back to me hoping that the future of lots of these services isn’t
advertising, because we could do wonderful things with being able to tell people about
where we are and how we feel. But those wonderful things don’t normally involve getting
a voucher for a, sort of, restaurant that’s right next to us, sent to our phone. That, to me,
is a bigger invasion of privacy than somebody knowing where I am. But we can start
building wonderful things that are different from that.
I think a lot of interest comes from striping away, when you’ve got, sort of, geo-data, so,
data that comes from your phone. So, I think, one of the next trends going forward is geo
and social together. And start looking at phones like this as data objects rather than as
people. It’s just a thing that I carry, it’s not me. And one of the ways that I really like to
think about this is, is think about objects that also talk. And one of them is ships. So this
was a view out of an airplane window the other night when I was coming back from
Stockholm. And these are all ships moored outside some of the ports. And I thought
wasn’t it fascinating if ships could talk. And actually they can. There’s a lovely sonnet
where all of these ships tell you about their GPS positions all the time. They tell you where
they’re going. They tell you where they’ve been. They tell you about what cargo they have.
If you can do that for a city, then, actually, you start getting really interesting things to do
with urban design. The, sort of, whole idea of cow paths that you get through fields,
where people choose their easiest route through, you can start doing with the data that
comes through social networks and on phones. And people are already starting to do this.
This is [? Thorpe], from Canada, who’s looking at people, saying, I’m arriving at, and then
an airport name, on Twitter, and he looks for their city of origin and then he can plot their
route for the world.
But you can do it another way. You can tell Lufthansa what your Twitter ID is and what
flight you’re on, and they’ll then tweet for you when you can’t be there. It’s kind of
interesting, this dichotomy of me tweeting as a thing or a thing tweeting as me. And so,
I was kind of interested, a bit, about how you become a data thing. And since I’m a geek,
and since I like walking, I decided to do it. And I set up a different Twitter account and
I made up a mobile phone app that sent my position back up into the cloud all of the time
and I decided to raise some money for charity, a really lovely called [?]. And I said where
I was going on these walks and then I started telling the story of it. And I told it semi-
anonymously. I set up a different Twitter account. And I sent back pictures of it. Most
importantly, I sent back my positions all the time. Why did I do this? Well, I think there
are lots of situations where we do things very transactionally in the online world. It’s
very binary, naturally. And one of those is fund-raising. Also looking at things like the
marathon and stuff like that. And if you get a data-feed of this stuff, you can start to tell
your supporters where you are, I think you’ll actually do a lot more. So I’d really want to
play with the marathon data now. And it also comes down to a lovely thing which Matlock
said recently, which is that data plus time is story. And we’re creating amazing stories
here.
So. And people said some lovely things about how it could bring a trip abroad into your
living room, and also about how you could follow along. And it’s very moving that it
became very bi-directional. I was telling my data story and other people were encouraging
me when I felt tired.
So, coming back to my original thinking about wanting to look at places where organizations
were changing through this real-time web. One of them is the Guardian, which is now
selling the raw materials of it’s articles to developers like me to make things out of. It’s not
selling an entire newspaper. It’s not selling a digital facsimile of it. You can buy individual
bits of data.
There’s also a thread list, that we heard about earlier, which is taking submissions and
then only making things when it’s got a market for them. Which is really important from a
sustainability perspective going forward as we run out of resources. There are lovely
charities like [?] itself, that makes itself totally out of it’s supporters. It lets them tell the
important stuff about what the charity does and how it does it. And then there are
interesting things to do with swine flu trending. There’s lots of leftover data on the web.
Places where people will search for things. And if you start mapping where those searches
are, like Google can, you can see where there are potential trends to do with swine flu. So,
actually, I think this new world is pretty much there, or is certainly just around the corner.
Thank you very much.