Skip to content


The uncanny valley of social networks

Yesterday I was sitting on a bus to work and I saw a guy in front of me browsing through a Twitter feed on his N97 Mini. As it just happened, I was also deep in the Twitter world with my mobile. I couldn’t resist the temptation of spying on his Twitter handle and then looking it up. Suddenly I found myself staring at the world through the eyes of a perfect stranger who just happened to share the same mass transit ride to the office. Which people, companies and celebrities he was following, how he described himself in the profile, what he had to say to the world, what kind of friends he had following him, when he had registered to Twitter in the first place, etc.

I felt like such a stalker, but was I really stalking on the poor guy? That is a question I was left pondering as we parted our ways and I moved on to the next list of tweets. Unlike in Facebook and some other networks that are repeatedly making headlines for alleged privacy violations, Twitter truly represents the raw power of untamed social networking applications. There is no privacy, period. The name of the game is in the public broadcasting of your thoughts to an unspecified audience. You don’t need to worry about the concept of a “friend”, as there are no friends in Twitter. You can of course follow other users, but this doesn’t have any impact on what they can see and know about you. It’s all out there and that’s why we love it. That’s what makes it the ultimate sharing platform.

Let’s take a look into the future for a minute. Layar is a great mobile app for demonstarting the concept of augmented reality. How it works is you launch the AR browser in your mobile phone, point the camera to any direction and Layar will start to append the image with location based information. The usual stuff like restaurants and points of interest are of course available, but you can also view things like geotagged tweets. With the kind of devices we are carrying around in our pockets, it is not at all far fetched to envision a time when you can pull up an augmented reality browser that shows you not just the buildings around you but the names of the people. Think of avatars and @username’s floating on top of the commuters in the traffic jams. The ultimate nude scanner for your mobile?

In the tech or media industry, or any knowledge work intensive line of business, it can no longer be considered bizarre behaviour to be constantly revealing yourself to the world through various social media sites and services. It is rather becoming the norm of what is expected. You better be active on Twitter and Foursquare, otherwise there’s a risk of people thinking you don’t “get it”. Ok, I’m perfectly fine with that trend, with my active sign-up policy to new and exciting web apps.

It is only when the virtual world meets the physical world that things can start to feel ackward. When you meet a familiar avatar in flesh and blood, there cab be a sudden sensation of “OMG, I know too much about you, yet you don’t know anything about me”. The unilateral nature of the relationship can play tricks with your head. People you’ve never met but who you’ve followed through Twitter can start to feel like pseudo celebrities, even though they are likely to be far more average Joe’s in reality than you are, with nothing better to do than posting stuff online 24/7.

I think we’re reaching the uncanny valley of social networks. This concept was originally introduced for describing how in the field of robotics there is a point in which the machines can begin to look too human, thus causing a natural feeling of revulsion in us human beings. In the world of social networks, this same sensation may be achieved by simply knowing too much about the stranger standing next to you. Something that is perfectly cool when sitting in front of your monitor at home can suddenly feel just plain “wrong” when meeting face-to-face. Sharing your life and thoughts is great, but just don’t do it when I’m around. God, us human beings can be such weird creatures at times.

Is there going to be a moment when we simply get enough of revealing ourselves to others? Will the new sociality trend reach its peak and make way for the ultimate privacy backlash, where people simply refuse to give out any personal details to any online service? I’d say that’s an unlikely scenario. Certainly we’ll need to go through the emotions and find the right balance, time and time again, but eventually we’ll have to make it across the valley. With social media and robots alike.

Posted in Web.

Tagged with , , , , .


Tune of the week: Jessy Matador – Allez! Ola! Olé!

The annual Eurovision song contest, a.k.a. ESC 2010, is right around the corner. After a mighty disappointing set of contestants from Finland this year, it’s time to start looking elsewhere for a new country to support. While this track from France may not have all that it takes to win in the ESC, I’m pretty sure it can grow to become a winner in the summer anthem 2010 category out there in the real world. Or even World Cup 2010.

(After a continuing disappointment with YouTube’s support for RSS feeds, I also decided to take a look at alternative service providers and went with Vimeo.)

Posted in Music.

Tagged with , , .


Around the world in 20 days

Sometimes things don’t go exactly like you planned them. In April 2010 quite many of us European travellers were reminded of this, as the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano far up north managed to bring the air traffic into a near standstill. At the time of the news about the possible impact of the eruption, I was spending my week in Kuala Lumpur, giving training to my colleagues at our Malaysia office. I had a return flight booked for Friday night on April 16th, but I didn’t actually return home until May 1st.

I could have flown home earlier, but I had previously reserved a ticket to Microsoft Convergence 2010 conference in Atlanta, US (you can read more about it in my CRM blog, part1 and part2) that was scheduled to start on April 24th. Since it began to look obvious quite soon that the flights in Europe would be affected for several days, I decided to re-route myself directly from Malaysia to US, without visiting home base. So, as a result, I performed my first ever around the world trip in quite a spontaneous manner.

Continued…

Posted in Travel.

Tagged with , , , , .


Tune of the week: Chelley – Took The Night (Grum Remix)

No matter which way you look at it, this has been my Nr. 1 track for the past couple of months now. There’s no shortage of remixes for this catchy vocal track by Chelley, but everything in the Grum version is simply spot on. Pure 80’s disco bliss in a perfect package for 2010. Lovin’ it.

Posted in Music.

Tagged with , , .