Brought to you by Twitter and the Stevenote.

Not a radical proposition- social media offers a way for people to connect along varied information channels that have never existed before. How do you explain the purpose of data-mining to someone who punches a time clock? Or location-based contextual data to someone who has never used GPS? There is simply no frame of reference for this emerging sector other than the ever-perversive shine that “cool factor” casts on such things. I consider myself hip in this area but in truth I don’t have a clear enough picture of the long term benefits. I am knowledgeable enough to guess at those benefits and understand the need for a solid, flexible and open foundation for what will be the most highly connected time in human history.

As I twittered yesterday in excitement, we as a community are finally equipped with the technology to create this system. Some of the current paradigms such as polling are old and busted. We know how to serve web content, do cloud computing and make pretty designs. We can now move forward and kick some ass.

The title I wear in my day job is “architect”, so in the interests of meaningful post content lets take a quick look at the needs for Connected Humanity 1.0:

1. Must be locationally and contextually aware, humans tend to move around.
   Location without relevant contextual information is GPS. If I am in the office, what floor? On a college campus what building? Campus buildings tend to not have street addresses. Even better, am I at my favorite cafe where (more importantly) I have been 10 times this week?
   Most phones being sold from the latest generation have GPS or cell tower triangulation, manual updates are also easily accomplished ala brightkite: “@work”
2. Must put people in touch, possibly make assumptions.
   If my close friends, acquaintances or neighbors are nearby (and are advertising their presence) I want to know. In fact, I want to know if they are busy, free, or are meeting clients and should not be disturbed. If someone visits the same cafe in the previous example and we have friends and interests in common, should we know about it?
3. Micro-blogging works.
   Conceptually a new way of expressing and broadcasting content with the addition of conciseness. If you can’t express a feeling, location or idea in 140 characters, get with the program.
4. Must be scalable and reliable.
   Cloud based services = reliable, cheap, and scalable computing resources. Most people have a website/blog, some of us are bigger geeks and run an OpenID server. Language holy wars aside, there isn’t much you can’t do with literate programming and Google App Engine / Amazon S3 these days. Get over it
5. Must be distributed.
   Authentication mechanisms such as OpenID and messenging protocols such as XMPP (Jabber) can assist with this. Twitter is great, but I need to be able to run my own Connected Humanity 1.0 system the same way I run an OpenID server. The Twitter’s of the world provide value from their unique features and services.
6. Must support privacy / trust model.
   Facebook has a decent model in the context of configuring the Twitter application to only show updates to certain groups, with exceptions for people. This is important.
   Distributed trust frameworks are a different discussion but might play a role. Haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this aspect as it relates to social media.
7. Standards must be open, cross platform, and community accepted.
   Standards folks, they are important. “Java” will never be the right answer to this item. However things like JSON, XML, and OpenID will all be parts of the answer.
8. There is more to this than technology.
   The technically inclined can really grok this, but it will be the end-users who shape the future here. There are soccer moms out there today who don’t know this yet, but one day will pick up a 3rd gen iPhone and create new world of interaction. The IT crowd will never think comprehensively enough.
9. There is a business case for social media.
   Not talking about Minority Report eyeball scanning advertisements (although suits would argue for this one). Productivity has been creeping upward by leaps and bounds since the industrial revolution. In the information age relationships and context are the currency of connectivity. This kind of connectivity will enable the post-iPod generations to kick some serious ass.

Cases in point:

Last month there was a last minute “Twitter flash mob” in STL. About 10 people some friends, some strangers starting pinging back and forth on Twitter and we ended up at happy hour at The Dubliner and discussed Twitter and social media. I met a few new friends and just got a Bright Kite beta invite from one of them (Thanks CosmosGirl!).

At the Gateway to Innovation conference I heard a great little talk on infusing entrepreneurial ideas into your organization from boblozano. He mentioned Twitter and I posted a tweet (referencing a previous session on EHR) on my Blackberry 8800 via the Google Talk application.  The Twitter application on Facebook posted this to my Facebook news feed. A girl I went school with saw my status update on Facebook and emailed me a question about EHR. This loop is incredible:

Human -> Mobile device -> Google Talk Servers -> XMPP -> Twitter -> HTTP -> Facebook App -> Status Feed -> Email -> Human

The free exchange of ideas and conversation between similarly minded people would never have happened without social media! Much to come in the next few years. I welcome all feedback, please hammer away

The date marking the end of prehistory, that is the date when written historical records become a useful academic resource, varies from region to region. In Egypt it is generally accepted that prehistory ended around 3200 BC whereas in New Guinea the end of the prehistoric era is set much more recently, 1900.

via Wikipedia

I did find a super video about Twitter, why it’s useful, and it’s role in social relationships and interactions. I got the video from jasonbutler42 and hist post made me go find my first tweet (April 08, 2007 @ 8:15 PM) almost one year ago!

Click here to view the embedded video.

via jasonbutler42.com

Thus, expect non-too frequent updates.

Cory Doctrow, I much admire your ability to verbally express so many things that fly around my gray matter. Stealing a number of lines, some modified from a 2002 article:

I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living. Whether I’m writing code, architecting information systems, business plans, or interacting with early 20th century technology via hand tools, whether I’m speaking at table to hungry minds or yammering down the phone at some poor techno-wannabe, my success depends on my ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.

Thus I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.
Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. And using Twitter. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.

Without my electronic blog, tweet trail, gmail search, etc. I would be utterly useless. A portion of my intelligence has been externalized and can never be put back in. Bring on Intelligence Amplification!

Twitter is a way of life. It’s living with a publicity policy. It’s friends, Romans and country people the world over engaged in timely snippet conversations that fit into 140 character chunks.