Half-Formed Idea: Message in a Bottle

Okay, this is a half-formed idea, but I'm going to try putting it out there in spite of it not being too well thought out. Further, instead of my usually super-expansive (and unwieldy) thinking, I’m going to try and keep it short.


I was listening to On The Media (http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/02/01/07) when a guy brought up that an app named ForwardTrack (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html) had been developed as a way of getting people to look at ads online by allowing them to not only send the ad to friends, but to get info on who their friends in turn sent the ad to. I thought it was a brilliant way of getting people to map their own networks by giving them feedback on the nature of the network they were charting. In fact, people wanted to grow the their network of ad viewers in order to see how big they could go:


“Watts and Peretti set up a regular mass-market ad buy, running banner ads on several prominent blogs and news sites. Like many ads these days, they added a button on the ad that allows people to forward the ad to a friend--a way of collecting eyeballs for free. Typically, people ignore this "share with your friends" pitch. But Watts and Peretti included technology called ForwardTrack, which displays the route the ad travels once you've forwarded it. This turned ad forwarding into a piece of social cartography. People would pass the ad specifically to those friends most likely to keep it moving. It became a Facebook-like contest to sign up the most friends.”


All of this made me think of the papers I’d read on semantic social networks and cluster maps. What if one hollowed out ForwardTrack and allowed people to forward images, text, links, whatever? Let people take such an app and do what they please--pushing messages, images, and seeing what networks of viewers they can get. The app will give them feedback in the form of semantic cluster maps (covering concepts, f2f relationships, existing ontologies, etc) of their choice regarding who looked at their media/message. This could potentially lead people to make new sorts of connections.


This new app could be a network or semantic analysis/research toolset that could be expanded and tweaked over time. It might be tested in Second Life (Can this sort of thing be done in SL?) before crossing the virtual divide onto the web or f2f social relationships. Perhaps future students might extend the toolset to design new collective intelligence or social networking apps in Second Life.


Dovetailing off of Dan’s post from Tim O’Reilly, a ForwardTrack-like app (Let’s call it “MIAB” for Message in a Bottle) could be used to create on the fly GIS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIS) maps. It could also be used to support growing psychological research efforts in Second Life
(http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-virtual-laboratory) (http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2179)