Gizmodo points us to some interesting news - full-sensory virtual reality immersion has just taken another big step. Researchers from The University of Tokyo have combined motion tracking, holograms and ultrasonic waves to create virtual animations you can see, interact with - and feel. The ultrasonic waves are able to simulate a variety of textures and can focus in on very specific locations, making for a very realistic tactile experience.

Watch a video demo below.

[via Gizmodo]

By Dan Gould | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Electronics & Gadgets, Science, Web & Technology and digital immersion, holograms, tactile experience, ultrasonic waves, Virtual Reality

This week, we came across the NYT Magazine article uncovering the growing subculture of “2-D Lovers“, grown adults in Japan that have found romantic love with their favorite characters from anime, manga, and video games. The article considers the possible cultural forces propelling the trend - namely, “the difficulty many young Japanese have in navigating modern romantic life”. The article reports that more than a quarter of Japanese between 30 and 34 are virgins while 50 percent of men and women don’t even have opposite sex friends. For some, it seems 2-D love may be the only way to experience romantic (and sexual) pleasure.

The article was followed by a Scientific American story published a few days later, reporting on another separate yet related phenomenon: social surrogacy. The article discusses the findings of new research that suggests watching your favorite TV shows can alleviate loneliness and provide a sense of belonging just as effectively as true interpersonal interaction. The study showed that individuals found a similar sense of comfort when ’spending time with’ (watching) their favorite tv show characters as if they were real-life friends. Watchers would even grieve when losing their ’social surrogates’ (due to a show cancellation, for example), experiencing the same despair and longing as they would with a true friend.

The two articles, though discussing discrete phenomena, point to the same idea: the displacement of real life social experiences with simulated ones. The emotions we experience in being with our friends and lovers are being carried over - and sometimes even replaced - by mirrored feelings we develop for our favorite characters, toys, and objects. Kevin Slavin discussed a related idea in his excellent talk at PSFK Conference NYC. He offered a look at how our outside and inside realities are merging: as we are becoming more dependent on our possessions, our possessions are becoming more dependent on us. Sophisticated technologies are helping us reach this meeting point between object and subject - our objects are not only mediating connection between us and others, but serving as a substitute for that very relationship.

The growth of media should also be thanked for making social surrogacy so appealing. The channels, gadgets, websites and apps to help us be and/or feel ’social’ (with a real person or just the idea of one) are only getting smarter and more diverse. Our everyday lives find many of us immersed in entirely virtual communication and socialization, based on a simulacrum of real life or an entirely fantastical one. We are avatars talking to avatars, on our own terms, at our convenience.

These semblances of real life interaction and the feelings we have for our toys and favorite characters may feel authentic, but they offer experiences quite different than person-to-person ones. In a real life interpersonal relationship, the connection is shared: it is a two-way interaction between living, breathing beings - each with his/her own thoughts, actions, and reactions that must be accepted and dealt with. Our relationships with objects, characters and avatars is always at a distance - we are interacting with the representation of something, rather than the thing itself. This arrangement results in a unique type of relationship - one that should be considered differently than a real-life interpersonal one. And as new ways of staying connected, entertained and virtually ’social’ grow and become mainstream - one has to wonder how these new forms of bonding will adulterate the one we cannot imitate. As we continue acculturating ourselves to new means of virtual connectivity, are we losing our understanding of how to do it the old fashioned way in the process?

By Christine Huang | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Arts & Culture, Electronics & Gadgets, Gaming & Social Networks, Health & Beauty, TV & Film, Trends In Africa, Web & Technology and anime, japan, love, Relationships, Sex, virtual

Image Credit: Getty Images, Hunter Wilson Photography/Flickr

Image Credit: Getty Images, Hunter Wilson Photography/Flickr

No matter how complex and diverse our online communities are, and how sophisticated and evolved the new ways in which we interact with one another seem, buying and selling still remains at the fore of the online world. Though the basic act of commerce has not changed, many entrepreneurial minds have envisioned new ways to facilitate our transactions, and bring business beyond cash and coin.

The Renmibi

In China, the QQ Coin—a currency attached to the massively popular QQ chatting and social networking service—has broken out of the virtual world, and is increasingly used to pay for real-life goods and services. Use of the QQ Coin has become so rampant that it has begun to affect the value of China’s official state currency—to the extent that the People’s Bank of China is actively seeking to crack down on QQ misuse.

M-PESA

The idea behind the M-Pesa digital currency is to permit branchless banking in the third world—allowing for loans and money transfers in areas where many have no access to a physical bank. M-Pesa enables basic bank transactions executed entirely via mobile phone. The M-Pesa service has carried interesting sociological consequences; one university study has explored the role the service plays in granting women greater financial freedom, as well as allowing their husbands to keep mistresses paid in secret.

Ecopup

A concept by Ashwin Rajan, a student at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, about a green-loyalty scheme where earned points for environmentally friendly behavior can be used as currency.

Image Credit: Getty Images, Fursov Aleksey Photography/Flickr

Berkshares

BerkShares is a program supported by the E.E. Schumacher Society that has had success in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts. People can go to a participating bank and purchase BerkShare currencies at a discount and then use them to make purchases at local businesses enrolled in the program. Businesses can use BerkShares to make change (keeping them in circulation) or sell them back to the banks. The currency comes in several denominations and features designs by local artists.

The Totnes Pound

The Totnes Pound is a ‘real world’ currency that was created in a small transition town in England to support local business and keep finance from leaking out.

Threebies

Threebles takes the concept of a credit rating and applies the principles of a triple bottom line. The program uses external feedback loops to measure social and environmental impacts and then creates financial consequences. For example, if a company earns a poor environmental rating, it would have to pay a higher rate of interest to obtain a loan.

World of Warcraft Gold

In World of Warcraft, players earn Gold as they advance through the game. The currency has become so sought-after that it is bought and sold on a black market, experts said.

Low-wage workers in China are known to play the game for a living and then sell the virtual currency they earn to avid “World of Warcraft” players in the West. This despite the fact that the game’s maker prohibits such activities.

Pay With Facebook

Facebook has rolled out its much-vaunted “Pay With Facebook’ system, as an alternative payment method for in-app purchases. The system has the obvious advantage of starting off with a massive potential base, but it’s unclear what any Facebook user’s incentive is to pay via the platform as opposed to say, Visa or Mastercard.

e-Gold

The e-Gold system was founded on a general suspicion of the American dollar and a steadfast belief that currency should be grounded by the gold standard. Established way back in 1996, e-Gold was eventually felled by its popularity with credit card scammers, and its founder has been embroiled in a legal battle with the government—though he does promise to clear his name and restart the service.

By Piers Fawkes | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Featured Articles, Finance & Money, Gaming & Social Networks, Global Community, Web & Technology, Work & Business and alternative currencies, Local, Money, virtual currencies, virtual worlds

As far as most experiences go, we like to keep ours decidedly on the side of the real, but with the internet increasingly taking over more aspects of our lives, that’s becoming a bit more difficult. Thankfully though, the digital realms haven’t managed to find adequate replacements for some things, eating and drinking chief among them, until recently perhaps.

The NY Times points to the strange trend of virtual bars and restaurants that are popping up on the web, a concept that is becoming so popular in fact, that one such establishment, Air Yakiniku, is now the 29th most searched site on Yahoo. Combining the comforting psychology of the crackling fireplace videos of yesteryear with interactive elements both real and digital, this virtual Korean BBQ joint invites visitors to participate in a one-of-a-kind dining experience that takes the idea of eating alone to new heights.

Users are instructed to print out paper aprons to keep the “grease” from spattering on their clothing and encouraged to have real bowls of rice and dipping sauce on hand to add an extra layer of engagement. From there diners can select from amongst slices of chicken, pork and beef and watch on screen as they cook (complete with sound effects). When a bell goes off, the meat is done and you’re able to, one would imagine, eat, but therein lies the problem. And while the payoff might be a bit lacking, at least you’re not left holding a check (in any form).

Still, as odd as the experience might be, we could imagine it being somewhat entertaining with the addition of a social component - a group of far-flung friends suddenly leaning against the same virtual bar, let’s say. But until that day comes, we’ll continue to make plans to meet up far from the realms our respective computer screens.

[via NY Times]

By Scott Lachut | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Arts & Culture, Entertainment, Food & Drink, Gaming & Social Networks, Trends In Asia, Web & Technology and Air Yakiniku, digital, dining, japan, real, virtual experience, virtual restaurant

Back in February we reported on a conceptual product called LightLane that would create a virtual bike lane using lasers projected behind the rider.  Due to the overwhelming response from bikers around the globe and its success at design competitions, the folks behind the idea have decided to put it into production.  As of right now, it’s in the “production engineering” phase, but it’s already looking great.

LightLane will hopefully provide cyclists with some much needed safety on car-cluttered roads and we have high hopes for the forthcoming commercial product.  The LightLane currently uses two Diode-Pumped Solid State green lasers to create very visible lanes to keep automobiles out of the cyclist’s personal space.  Check out the video to see the lane in action:

[via Gizmodo]

By Nicko Margolies | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Automotive, Design, Electronics & Gadgets, Sports & Fitness, Transport & Travel, Trends In The US, Work & Business and Bicycle, bicycles, bikes, biking, lasers, LightLane, virtual lane

British designer Kyle Bean has created this impressive set of cardboard sculptures as a statement on the environmental impact of constantly upgrading to the newest tech gear.

[ via Design Crave ]

By Francisco Hui | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Arts & Culture, Design, Electronics & Gadgets, Environmental, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds and art, carboard, ipod, Nano, Nintendo, recycle, scuplture, sustainable, technology

There’s been a hell of a lot of chat recently about exactly how you can make money through social media. So far, the only ones cashing in have been the founding principals when they sell off a fraction of their site to a traditional media company, which immediately gives them an insane valuation in the billions. Right now the situation smacks of the late nineties, dot com “Field of dreams” model. The one that said if you build it they will come, then we’ll start making dumpster loads of money by selling lots and lots of really shitty and intrusive advertising on the site. It didn’t work ten years ago and billions of dollars worth of VC money went down the rancid tubes of hundreds of short lived Silicon Valley start-ups.

And it’s beginning to look like deja vue all over again. Because, recent research has shown that one of the major reasons for the exodus of people from MySpace to Facebook is that MySpace users are being increasingly put off by the amount of advertising on the site. Owner Rupert Murdoch – The Wizened of Oz – Is continually talking about switching from an advertising model to a pay-for-content one on all his digital sites. Just last week, Jonathan Miller, his head of digital properties, was shooting his mouth off expressing his violent disagreement with free internet content. Speaking at yet another digital gab fest conference, he said he’d like to see at least some Hulu content restricted to subscribers. Yeah, and we know “some” soon becomes fucking “all!” He even claimed it was a well known fact that ad-supported content “doesn’t work,” saying that web companies should start weaning users off the free content they’ve come to expect by sticking them with a series of micropayments. Funny thing is, when he was AOL’s chief executive officer, in 2006, he made the decision to deep six their failing subscription model and make it a free service, supported by ads. OK, so what the fuck changed, Jonathon?

Actually, nothing has changed, because apart from Google, no one else is making serious money. People are thrashing around trying to define exactly how you make money in a Web 2.0, social media environment. I would predict that the pay-for-content model will also fall on stony ground. Not just because we are dealing with an entire generation who have grown used to not paying for cable or satellite TV, Newspapers and magazines, and increasingly music and movies. But also because there is so much stuff out there that they are afflicted with what Linda Stone has called “continuous partial attention.” And I don’t mean that multi-tasking bullshit everyone loves to talk about. I mean the fact that people spend less and less time focusing on a single thing because they are so fucking scared they’ll miss something, they are constantly scanning way too many things. To the point where some of these douchenozzles get killed crossing the road, ‘cos they’re tweeting about the great donut they just shoved down their pie-hole…

I have news for the Wizened of Oz. These people will not pay for content, yours or anyone else’s. Back to the drawing board guys.

George Parker is the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. His new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, has just been published by Amazon and is currently setting the ether ablaze. He will continue to relentlessly promote the crap out of it until you are forced to stab yourself in the eyes with knitting needles.

By George Parker | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology, Work & Business and advertising, George Parker, marketing, Micropayments, social media

With the Internet’s ability to empower individuals, social media platforms have become powerful forces for change and community action. Social media interconnects millions of people at any given point providing everyone with a megaphone that can be heard far and fast.

While companies conventionally buy media and hire PR agencies to tell people about their charitable efforts, recently Adweek reported on a different kind of media tactic to help people discover and disseminate the good deeds of brands. More brands are tapping into people’s do-gooder impulses to spread their charitable messages through P2P endorsement. Giving the supported charity a donation is incentive for people to post about it in their personal feeds—the real-time “stream” of updates on Facebook & co.—creating word of mouth that comes close to a personal recommendation.

This tactic has the potential upside for brands to be more cost-efficient by offering donations vs. buying ad space to build awareness for the supported cause. And it allows them to redirect some of their media budgets to cover part of the costs of the cause initiative. But there is also risk if people see the efforts as promotional tactics and social media spam vs. believing the brand wants to genuinely solve a problem or effect real change.

Target

Target’s Bullseye Gives campaign found the perfect blend of social media and charitable giving. For two weeks in May, users could vote once a day for one of 10 charities on Target’s Facebook page, to determine what percent of Target’s $3 million each charity would receive. Votes were published on news feeds for friends to view and become fans of the brand. The campaign resulted in 167,000 Facebook members who voted over 291,000 times and a 3,000% surge in Target’s wall posts.

Kraft

Kraft has teamed up with Feeding America to create the Share a Little Comfort campaign that offers to donate 1,000,000 boxes of Kraft’s Blue Box Mac and Cheese to families in need. With a single click of the mouse, users can donate a free box and share their charitable ways with friends on Facebook and Twitter via Kraft’s helpful links that instantly update news feeds with a convenient prewritten message, informing and encouraging friends to donate. At press, the campaign generated over 73,000 donations.

Media Arts Mondays is produced by Media Arts Lab. You can subscribe to Media Arts Mondays here or download this newsletter here.

Add your thoughts about this topic in the comments section below.

By MAL | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Featured Articles, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology, Work & Business and branding, marketing, Media Arts Mondays

At the Creativity and Technology Conference,  Zoic studios presented their project for “Killzone: Behind The Bullet”. It’s a download-able demo on the PS3 which follows the path of a bullet where gamers can control the camera angle, playback speed, and audio elements. The video renders in real time from the game engine, appealing to the gamer’s needs to see what the graphics are capable of.

To make the video, Zoic used in-game elements and animations to create the set. Taking existing assets, such as characters, lighting, and textures used to create the game and re-purposing it to create the video. The implications affect animators, who might have normally been needed to create the animation seen inside the video. If we can create content from prefabricated assets, where does that leave animators?

The video below is a regular version without input from a player.

But didn’t someone need to create the animations inside the game to begin with? Ed Ulbrich’s presentation sheds some light into new animation technologies.

Ed Ulbrich and his company, Digital Domain, were in charge of creating the special effects for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Rather than manually animating a 3D rendering of Brad Pitt’s facial expressions as he ages, they developed a surface mapping technique to capture it. Traditionally, motion capture was done by tracking moving points on a surface. This limits to how many tiny tracking balls you can put on the actor’s face. Surface mapping involves painting the actor’s face and tracking everything at once rather than individual points, resulting in much higher resolution.

They then surface map Brad Pitt acting out 70 different facial expressions to form a database of animations. (As a side note, there’s a science to studying facial expressions called FACS.) Combining these 70 expressions creates the basis for all the animation used in the movie where the actor is aged. It’s a more efficient method than having animators capture his idiosyncrasies.

By Francisco Hui | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Arts & Culture, Electronics & Gadgets, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, TV & Film and animation, benjamin button, CaT, digital domain, motion tracking, zoic

Broadcast on China’s CCTV national television, “Win in China” (????) is the world’s largest and most lucrative business plan competition. With over $5 million in prize money, the TV show pits 120,000 entrepreneurs competing to win $1.5 million dollars to invest in the winner’s business plan.

The documentary, produced by Robert Compton, follows the TV show of the same name and features entrepreneur celebrities such as Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group and Chairman of China Yahoo, who served as Head Judge and Liu Chuanzhi, founder of computer giant Lenovo.

CCTV host sums up the role played by entrepreneurs in China: “Today, entrepreneurs are the biggest heroes in our society.”

By Sean Leow (PSFK Shanghai) | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Finance & Money, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Trends In Asia and business plan, china, WIN IN CHINA

Recently there has been a rash of cautiously critical opinions in the advertising blogosphere about augmented reality. Commentators at Advertising Lab, and Supercolider all believe augmented reality to be this year’s “Second Life”: over-hyped, under tested, and, at worst “disposable eye-candy”.

We fully acknowledge the potential for this technology to be merely an addition to the marketer’s arsenal of gimmickry. And, also see that there are still many kinks to iron out with it: the process of getting AR to work with your home computer/webcam can be cumbersome, and even when you’ve got it to work properly, you’re oftentimes peeking around a sheet of paper to see the generated image. Yet, in the right context, AR executions can add an incredible layer of interest.

We previously reported on Mini and Lego whose AR ads enable a more intimate experience of the products’ scale.

Ray Ban and Coraline’s AR endeavors allow for a personalized experience of product communication.

Furthering personalized experience is a campaign Adverblog points us to that Doritos has launched in Brazil to promote their Sweet Chili Flavor: A Pokemon-style online critter collection game that is activated through AR.

Is augmented reality doomed for crashing the hype cycle? The verdict is still out. At present we’re still seeing a handful of interesting applications for the technology.

By Ruben Sun | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology and augmented reality

At this week’s E3 exhibition in Los Angeles, Microsoft is showing off a device they’re claiming will both revolutionize video gaming and render obsolete its hitherto requisite accessory—the controller. Dubbed “Project Natal,” the peripheral is an array of microphones, an RGB camera, and a depth sensor, that work in concert to pull off sophisticated face, voice, and gesture recognition that allows full-body movement to translate into intricate on-screen commands. Microsoft is proclaiming the device not just a quantum leap in gaming, but also the next step in making its Xbox the pinnacle of home entertainment, allowing Natal to hook up with online shopping and video content browsing with only the use of one’s hands.

[via Kotaku, Playfeed]

By Sam Biddle | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Electronics & Gadgets, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds and e3, Facial Recognition, Microsoft, xbox

Nascent online service Quirky is hoping to eliminate the opaque process of product research, industrial design, marketing, and manufacturing that stands between inventors and consumers, collapsing them into a streamlined, democratized online discussion they’re saying takes only days from start to finish.

Anyone with an idea and $99 can pay to pitch their proposal to Quirky’s users, who after deciding whether or not the idea is viable, will then provide feedback as the idea approaches manufacturing, voting on potential names, logos, and product design choices. Once the product begins selling, those in the Quirky community who contributed most to the feedback process are compensated proportionately, with the idea’s originator receiving a guaranteed a minimum 40% cut.

For those apprehensive about parting with $99 without a guarantee that their vision will go anywhere, Quirky touts the feedback process as beneficial even for those who are rejected:

We’ll give you in-depth analytics regarding your idea that will help you understand the type of people that are klustering around your idea. Through analytics, you can see how factors like age, gender, income, interests and more impacted the trajectory of your product idea.

Quirky’s first product—a universal wire retractor—is already available, with others currently in gestation.

By Sam Biddle | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Design, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology, Work & Business and Crowd Source, Design, Industrial Design, open source, Product Design, Quirky

Social media is revolutionizing our lives as individuals and as marketers. In the last year, Facebook exploded globally and Twitter grew by a staggering 1382%. Last week Google launched the ‘Wave’, a new in-browser collaboration tool, ushering in the era of real time, aggregated communication.

Leading corporate brands are responding. The list of Fortune 500 companies using social media reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ including Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Intel, Nike, Motorola, Pepsi, Starbucks, GM, GE and IBM. Yet even as social media goes mainstream, what it means for us as individuals and how we speak as marketers is not yet clear.

To dramatize the impact of social media, I’m going to visualize the growth of our interconnectedness using the concept behind the Charles and Ray Eames, IBM film called ‘Powers of Ten’. So I’ll start with home computers,  expand out across social networks, up through our community, city, country and the globe until we arrive at the Twitterverse and look to the future.

Obviously technology connects us in many complex ways, each one worthy of lengthy study. For brevity’s sake, I’ve assembled powerful visual snapshots of each level of connectivity thanks to many wonderful thinkers, companies and artists, each of whom are credited. The list is not meant to be exhaustive, but it aims to provide an overall sense of our multi-faceted connectedness so that we may better understand our changing roles as individuals and marketers.

x1 Visualizing Networks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace
Building on a study by The Social Computing Laboratory at HP Labs, Brian Solis wrote a great post in which he visualized his Twitter network. The image on the left shows his outbound communication network at a given moment, while the image on the right shows the inbound. So complex and fluid are these networks that they are only measurable in snapshots as new ideas, content and context constantly morph the network in all directions.

Outbound

Inbound

x2 Real Time Aggregated Dialogue Across Social Networks
Whether it’s Tweetdeck that combines your Facebook or Twitter streams, or the more sophisticated Google Wave that aggregates email, web chat, IM, and project management software, new communication platforms allow you to combine your social networks and tools so information can flow between them. The Wave even gives you the ability to watch conversations live or replay them, as it records each sequence of communication character by character potentially revolutionizing email.

x3 Mapping Community Emotion using Social Media
Since 2004, Christian Nold has been orchestrating Biomapping – a crowdsourced, community mapping project - which wires people up to Galvinic Skin Response (GSR) devices to record their emotional states. The resulting maps are revealing visualizations of communal emotion. These serve as a dramatic illustration of a new phenomenon created by social media – an increasingly real time awareness of the emotion of our community and how it affects our perception of it.

x4 Visualizing the Hidden Networks within Cities
Korean Artist, Jee Lang Sub, created these stunning images that reveal the hidden networks or circulatory systems of our cities. As we commute from home to work, or simply move about a city, communicating remotely on computers or phones with social networking apps, we constantly inject our moment to moment experience into the information flow of our networks. A simple example is the way Twitter beat all other news sources to report the most recent Los Angeles earthquake.

Rome

Paris

Moscow

x5 Using Emotional Cities to Chart the World’s Emotional Pulse
‘Emotional Cities’ is the work of Swedish artist, Erik Krikortz that creates multi-layer, visual reflections of the world’s emotional pulse. You simply pick your current emotional state on a seven-level scale, allowing Erik to calculate and plot the average values for different cities, countries and the world in real time. In some cities, their emotional state is even projected on to a light installation, so you can know the emotional temperature of a city as you fly in on a plane. The social potential for this is staggering as it allows individuals, networked groups, entire cities and even countries to track their emotional states and virally affect others.

x6 Wireless Global Shared Experiences
MIT’s senseable City Lab recently released an incredible visualization of the mobile cell phone use during President Obama’s Inauguration. Called the ‘The City Project’, we witness the anticipation of the Oath of Office, the drop in call activity as people listen to his address and the celebration of his inauguration as President, all around the country. The two videos dramatically illustrate how social media such as texting, Facebook or Twitter enable shared experiences to generate collective consciousness, not just among groups of individuals, but across countries (first video) and around the world (second video).

x7 Ceaseless Global Information Flow
Again from MIT senseable City Lab, this visualization tracks the volumes of IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world in real time. The size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the amount of IP traffic flowing between that place and New York City. A greater glow implies a greater IP flow. Like blood in our circulatory system pumped by human curiosity, information feeds our appetite of dialogue across all social networks.

x8 A Living History of Social Media
This chart plots many of the most significant moments in Internet history. Those related to Social Media, Web 1.0 and 2.0, are colored orange and pink (click to enlarge image). When envisioning the complexity of our interconnectedness, you cannot ignore the cumulative effect of all these tools, from email to Wikipedia to Twitter, that serve as a foundation of dialogue for all emerging social media and tools layered on top of them.

x9 Glimpsing the Twitterverse
Brain Solis and Jesse Thomas produced this wonderful alpha version of Twitterverse that charts the most important tools used by communications, service, marketing and community professionals to manage their Twitter groups (click to enlarge image). In total, apps number over 1000 and together create their own ecosystem. Impressive in its own right, Twitterverse is just one of thousands of social networks (see Ning) that constitute the enormity and complexity of our new connectedness. (Steve Rubel also offers a wonderful visualization of the future of Twitter he featured at TWTRCON.)

x10 The Future March of Social Media
According to Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law the internet ushered in a period of double acceleration and double instability, driven by the doubling of chip processing power and the squaring of the number of people on the net. Now, that same awe-inspiring potential has transferred to the web. The impossible is increasingly commonplace, and as the chart below shows, the pace of web platform development and hence the sophistication of our social communication, is only accelerating. As Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra stated in his keynote at Google I/O, “never underestimate the power of the web”.

As Joshua Cooper Ramo states, the next decade will be characterized by constant newness, the previously unthinkable, and an accelerating pace of change. While this makes the future more unpredictable than ever, there is no doubt the tireless march of technology will continue to connect us in unimaginable ways in real time. As our collective identities are enhanced, our sense of distinct individuality will be affected. And as our virtual and real life personas become equally complex and connected, each individual will be forced to define a personal balance between the two.

For marketers such connectivity means brands must appeal to individuals not through demographics or as target audiences, but as latent communities. Connection within social networks turns on emotions expressed through ideas, content and dialogue, not because of similarities in gender, age or location.

As Mary Shapiro noted in AdAge after returning from the Web 3.0, marketers are currently struggling to reconcile targeted ad spending with a consumer’s need for privacy. Increasingly consumers must be given the choice as to what marketing they invite into their organically-driven networks (a ‘pull’ vs. ‘push’ approach of the past). As more social networks flourish and grow, they will cease to be passive landscapes for marketing messaging (from spam to DM’s to brand offers), and become proactive forces that dictate conscionable brand behavior and bring about social change.

The original ‘Powers of Ten’ film served as a timely reminder of our relative insignificance as human beings. The Twitterverse version dramatizes the growing significance of social media. As Kevin Kelly wrote in Wired, we should “never underestimate the power of tools to reshape our minds”. With each passing day, social media is fusing our hearts and minds together in a powerful, shared experience to create a collective consciousness that redefines our lives as individuals and marketers, and serves as a powerful signpost for our future in a global community.

Thanks to Pete and Ben of Mashable fame for their great coverage of Google Wave and to Maria Popova and her fantastic site Brainpickings for bringing Jee Lang Sub, Christian Nold and Erik Kritkortz to our attention.

By Simon Mainwaring | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Advertising & Branding, Design, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Web & Technology and Design, internet, social media, Social Networks

Later this year EA will release a Beatles version of the sing-and-strum-along video game Rock Band. It looks like you can play with the band in some of their classic concerts. Here’s the just-released trailer:

RockBand

By Piers Fawkes | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: Electronics & Gadgets, Entertainment, Gaming, Social & Virtual Worlds, Music and beatles, Music, the beatles