UPDATED 07:40 EDT / MARCH 14 2012

Is Ambient Discovery the Radical Transparency We Need? The #SXSW Petri Dish

Is ambient discovery the “radical transparency” the social world needs?  There’s been a few conversations cropping up at SXSW this year around ambient social discovery and the future of social media, which is becoming a very data-centric motif.  As we share more on the web, we drop nuggets of information about ourselves that’s being swept up by aggregators looking to make a compilation on your interests and intentions.  It all started with social media, where user-generated content was a crowdsourcing dream, but now that the information’s out there for the world to see, it’s time to put all that disparate data to work.

The result is a certain increase in the transparency around web users as individuals, as collective data can be leveraged to determine certain expectations about you based on whatever information you have provided.  Its implications lie in retail marketing, purchase recommendations, display advertising, financial planning and dietary outlines, to name a few.  And as the onslaught of data overloads our Twitter streams and Facebook feeds, there’s plenty of data-scrubbing to be had.

The unimaginable amount of data the average user faces on a daily basis has led to a rather uncontrollable distribution channel, begging the need for more end user accountability.  It’s something I’ve expected for some time, given the nature of Facebook and a digital recreation of pre-industrial communities where everyone was far more privy to everyone else’s information.  It seems easy enough to hide in the crowded metropolis Facebook has become, but the ability to readily associate content with the user in fact increases that user’s accountability for their posts, photos, videos and purchases.  There’s a certain permanence to social media, tracking our evolving preferences on friends, products and brands.  And with the rise of big data analytics, machine-learning will be able to do more with our transparent online behavior, for better or worse.

Is data helping or hurting?

Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd thinks the trend towards more transparency can induce fear, not defeat it, with negative circumstances standing out in our minds far more than the positive posts.  With social media outlets like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook reconsidering their user validation processes, transparency takes on a new meaning when it comes to social behavior, and Boyd identifies its limitations in actually encouraging online activity.

But in some ways ambient social discovery hopes to temper that fear with knowledge.  Contextualizing our social data can bring a level of relevance to our interactions that’s valuable and productive.  A string of ambient discovery apps like Highlight were the darlings of SXSW this year, ushering in a new era of prevalent social sharing that facilitates interactions both online and off.

“I think [ambient social discovery] is a really profound, meaningful thing,” says Paul Davison, founder of Highlight.  “So much of this is about reducing friction…If I want to learn about the people around me, how do I do that?  It can be scary.  To make an app that adds control in the physical world as large implications for reducing friction.  It’s literally like having a sixth sense.  We’re going to look back on this and say ‘I can’t believe we didn’t always have this.  I can’t believe we used to walk around blind.’”

Picking up your breadcrumbs to make a meal

Ambient social discovery tools like Highlight are the aggregators sweeping up the assorted data you’ve spread across the web, characterizing your physical surroundings in a perspective that’s in accordance with your own.  See nearby friends or new people that share similar interests, have been to the same places and like the same food.  It’s a conversation starter, a relationship enhancer and a tool to overcome some of our most basic fears when it comes to social networking.

Did SXSW kick-start ambient discovery?

SXSW was the perfect breeding ground for ambient discovery tools, especially as Interactive grew to a reported 30k attendees this year.  It’s difficult to cut through the noise when there’s so many people, places and promotions packed into a single city, and there’s only so much you can do with Twitter.  Putting data to work, ambient discovery tools glean the value from your social graph as a collective, gathering a population’s bread crumbs and personalizing the end user experience on their behalf.

But the ambient trend is also a competitive one, and leading in this space will require a well-planned execution. Forecast, a tool for marking your future location intention, has already learned from the SXSW experiment.

“We’ve seen all week how having your phone buzz every 5 minutes from ambient notifications is simply untenable, and we believe strongly there is a right way and wrong way of taking advantage of geolocation for social connections, check-ins, or events, says Eric Katerman, co-founder and CTO of Forecast.

“So, for example, with the new Forecast app, you can opt to have it automatically check you in to the places and events you forecasted when you arrive there. There is that layer of intent, which we feel is really important to add to the ambient experience – plus it doesn’t drain your battery! With Forecast, since you’re estimating when you’re going to be somewhere, the app can intelligently check you in rather than ‘spraying and praying.’”

Albeit a still fresh trend, ambient discovery emerges at the junction of big data and social sharing.  It’s more than real-time, more than recommendations, and more than shared intent.  As thousands of SXSW attendees take this technology back to their hometowns, we’ll see how well ambient tools can adapt to the world beyond SXSW, and how data can make us a less fearful people.


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