In the news this week were some new ideas for social networking applications I found interesting. One of them struck me as very, very smart (although the mechanics might need a little work), and a couple of them struck me as kind of, well, not smart. Stupid, even. Let’s start with the smart one.
Social networks (like all human networks) are built around a kind of producer/consumer model. Certain members of the social network (or the owners of the social network) produce content of value and other members consume it. Crowdsourcing is a variation on this theme, where the consumers of content actually become producers by voting up or voting down content they like (or dislike), thus adding value to the content. I read an article this week about an interesting application using crowdsourcing as “eyes” for the visually impaired. It works like this: the visually impaired person has an app on their mobile device (called VizWiz, a project developed at the University of Rochester). When they want to identify something visually, they snap a picture of it and record the question they need answered. For instance, they can take a picture of two cans side-by-side and ask “which one is the soup?” Sighted members of the community get an alert that someone is asking a question, and can record and send an answer to the question: “the soup is the can on the left.” Pretty cool! I thought this was an amazingly constructive and innovative way of leveraging the power of the crowd to accomplish something useful. It’s a little slow at the moment (it can take a minute or two to get an answer), but I have to think that as more people sign up (and more automated resources become available to scan photos and understand human speech) this could be a wonderful tool for the visually impaired.
And now for the other end of the intelligence spectrum, from an article in the New York Times. Blu, a company that makes electronic cigarettes, has developed a social cigarette “pack” that contains sensors that let you know when another Blu e-smoker is nearby. What struck me as kind of stupid with this concept is that in most places, smokers are already relegated to a specific tiny area where smoking is allowed. So if someone wants to go hang out with other “smokers,” they aren’t usually all that hard to find. So I fail to see the added value of a sensor to alert me if I’m within 50 feet of another e-smoker. Perhaps with other, not so obvious social connections, the concept might make more sense: Alert me if I’m within 50 feet of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan…the TV show not the movie…hmm. Anyone want to run with that one?
And finally in the “your tax dollars at work” category (assuming you live in the United States): The US Navy has created a MMO (Massively Multi-Player Online) game to develop strategies to fight piracy at sea. MMOWGLI, the game, lets players either act as Somali pirates or as ships that might be attacked by Somali pirates, to figure out strategies to deal with the ongoing problem of naval piracy in that part of the world. Don’t bother trying to register for the game, however, as it’s playable by invitation only.
Didn’t we figure out how to deal with pirates a couple of hundred years ago?
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