Category: Ideas

What could you do with an archive of every text and photo message you'd sent or received between April 2008 and December 2010?

This is the question I've been asking myself since O2 closed its Bluebook service, allowing users to export their data for posterity. The data is a prosaic 2.6MB package of XML documents, but buried amongst this archive are the stories of people, places, friendships, events and travels that represent almost three years of my life.

What could this data serendipitously surface about my life that isn't already apparent? What insights are buried in this XML…

Could cross referencing this with my Dopplr, Google, Flickr, Twitter, Gmail, Foursquare, Delicious, Last.fm, my blog, my bank and utilities records, give form to something unseen – or simply make the mundane tangible? Is this a Feltron-style art project, or the basis of an interesting product? 

I'm starting to feel that this kind of "meaning mining" is something that's moving from the canvasses of data artists like NYTE, Jer Thorp, Nicholas Felton and Stamen, to something that everyday users will demand.

I joined the advisory board of Treasuremytext for this reason, it's why memory and recall are personally very important to me and why I believe the Quantified Self culture will yield an emerging field of 'revelatory life services'.

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Incidentally, my friend Paul started sketching ideas based on a late-night discussion of meaning-mining 🙂

Last week the UK’s Home Office, began to considering plans to archive all email and telephony communication as part of the forthcoming Communications Data Bill and ongoing national security operations. As both the BBC and the Times have noted, the proposals originate from an administration that has a comically appalling record of data loss.

Like much coverage of privacy issues, debates flip between Orwellian panopticons at one extreme and absolute privacy at the other; neither is a viable or desirable position. The reality of privacy is that most people view it as less an absolutist human right and more a social construct or vehicle for social transaction; we often trade elements of our privacy for social, reputational and sometimes economic value.

Perhaps the most significant and desirable quality of privacy is a sense of control over how privacy can be revealed, retained and traded by the owner of information – this control is central to the theories of attention economists and startups such as Root Markets.

As such, it’s possible to recast the plans of the Communications Data Bill as a benefit to citizens (note that I’m against this bill, but supportive of exploring services that might bring some benefits to archived communication.

Think of all the valuable metadata and media generated by your mobile phone in the course of a day – generally, this is visualised as a dry, itemised billing experienced, when in fact – as illustrated by Gmail – aggregating your personal communications can be immensely valuable. More so as we live our lives in a multi-modal soup of IM, email, SMS and voice calls.

Picture a service that logs numbers, costs, duration and partieds to a call…even transcribing the audio content automagically, or using human APIs. Each call becomes a searchable, replayable and accountable history of your telephony; as the concept screenshot above illustrates – our cellcos have this data, it’s not difficult to see how this becomes a feeature of a service such as Google, perhaps even creating a new value chain in the attention economy between users, Google and telcos. Of course privacy converns remain unaltered, but the user in this scenario is extracting some palpable value and a modicum of control.

As time+distance becomes increasingly irrelevant in an world of VoIP, perhaps future value for telephony resides in brokerages for attention data. Ian, began to explore this as part of an R&D programme at Orange – Project Comcentrix – described as a ‘Flickr for telephony’. However, perhaps the near ubiquity of Gmail and it’s capability for archiving AIM, GTalk and email means that archived telephony is simply a telco-provided feature for webmail providers.

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Wow, I just realised, Google’s noted mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ isn’t so linguistically different from Philip K. Dick’s ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’!

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UPDATE: Tim O’Reilly just Twittered that SkyDeck are working on the problem!

I used to be Freeserve+Wanadoo’s digital identity futures guy – providing technology intel on Hailstorm, Liberty Alliance, Sxip and LID; eventually some of our work contributed to the adoption of  OpenID across Orange.

Throughout this work, no initiative ever seemed to begin with a simple exploration, storyboarding or visualisation of a user’s journey or experience of a federated or shared identity. Consequently, the underlying technologies worked well, but failed to anticipate the motivations of real users.

Lately, I’ve been feeling the same anxieties on the development of standards around Open Data principles and Data Portability. Though individuals such as Marc Hedlund, with Wesabe‘s implementation of a Data Bill of Rights, have come at it from a user-centric perspective. It’s about time some interaction designers got out ahead of the technology, schemas, standards and formats to understand how we’ll all experience data interoperability, portability and sharing in a practical sense.

There are some clues in the design of applications like Flickrfs and the notion of a familiar filing system metaphor, but perhaps they aren’t entirely appropriate…personally I feel the experience should be as simple as synchronising a pair of connected devices…hence my tongue in cheek visualisation above 😉

Sure synchronising, images, metadata, music, playlist, messages, social graphs and other media between web applications belies a great deal of technological complexity, but shouldn’t the role of great design be to encapsulate complexity within simplicity?