"On Twitter, no one knows you're a car"

The past, present and future are made of social connections. What will happen when objects and buildings join the party?

For buildings, you might already know a little if you watched Yang Soo-In's Lift talk on the Living City, skyscrapers communicating with each other to say something like "there is a cold wave at my location, it is coming your way, start your heaters". Not as useless as it first sounded.

Now what happens when vehicles also become members of social networks? "On Twitter, no one knows you’re a car" writes the New York Times, discussing the recent Ford American Journey 2.0, a project to experiment "applications combining social networks, GPS location awareness, and real-time vehicle data".

The project had several goals: see how a trip can be "socialized", allowing followers and fellow travelers to receive meaningful information, find out how web applications could use the data generated by a car, how the interface would work, and connect the car to existing social networks to see how it could communicate by itself in natural language.

^{Project map from Razorfish's Headlight blog.}

Concretely, the car took screenshots of its interior and of the road (and will have to develop an algorythm to blur plates and faces if it wants to do so in privacy-concerned countries like Switzerland), sent messages describing the road conditions it was facing ("I am not too happy about this weather. Current conditions: mostly cloudy day"), and checked-in at locations it was visiting. Nothing too revolutionary.

But remember one cardinal rule of innovation: very often, "what begins as a lark develops into a major invention". This could have interesting usages: localization and alert in case of emergency, tracking and broadcasting to surroundings for stolen cars, sharing and archiving of trips, tracking of driver's localization for senior or young drivers, etc. Not as useless as it sounds, again.

This will be an interesting area to follow, because it involves such a mass product and because social technologies will be one of the major differentiating factor car makers have at their disposal to attract more customers. Now admit it: this plus an electric engine, that would be nice right?

Links:
• NYT: Social Networking for Cars
• Living City talk at Lift Asia 08 by Yang Soo-In's profile.
• A project this reminds me of: GPS taxi for women in Korea.
• Ford American Journey 2.0 project homepage.
• Make Magazine: American Journey 2.0: AJtheFiesta takes Boulder.
• Nicolas Nova on the importance of futility in innovation.
• Switzerland Tells Google To Take Down Street View
• Ford’s American Journey 2.0 – Redux