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15 May 2007
Ubiquitous Web: Claus Dahl
Posted by Rob Styles at May 15, 2007 02:28 PM
Claus Dahl is one of the co-founders of Imity. Imity is a live service, with users (mostly in Copenhagen).
Imity is a little app you can run on your phone, turning your phone into a more context aware device. Imity uses Bluetooth to 'scan' your environment for other devices. Some we'll only know the name, some we'll have seen before. We can look them up on the web and learn more about them.
This appears to be an experiment in to a social network of devices. Users can tag objects, change the names, add notes to the devices. It also notifies you when it finds devices you registered to be notified of.
This also allows registered users to download details of devices, say a phone, owned by someone they know online, then they can be alerted when they meet that person in real-life. Nice twist in the way the online and offline worlds can be linked.
One of the things that Claus liked was Sascha Pohflepp's Buttons. A camera with no optics, that takes a timestamp then fetches a photo from Flickr taken at that time. Obviously not of the view you were looking at, just taken at the same time.
"I don't have to take any photos of this conference, someone else will do that for me"
The good old LazyWeb. Anyway, it seems to Claus we've been talking today about 3 kinds of ubiquity:
wire replacement
objects with agency
public data-space
These three types overlap, but different technologies lend themselves differently to different aspects.
The technology behind Imity is mostly server-side, with networking over GPRS. This has it's problems, but was the best of a number of difficult options.
Imity shows some really interesting characteristics. You don't have to operate it most of the time, it doesn't require clicking. Recording your environment builds up slowly, over time. It makes it hard to fake history, and means that "meaning arrives slowly". The lightweight simplicity and the difficulty in faking this makes it an interesting surrogate for identity. Claus believes the service is incredibly sticky.
The data, from around 500 users mostly in Copenhagen, shows incredibly interesting patterns in the relationships, showing how the subcultures overlap and intermingle.
The plan is to take recordings of presence of phones around the Roskilde Music Festival. Based on which stages people are watching, and which band is on they can provide recommendations, last.fm style, in the real-world.
Imity client is open-source on google code but as much happens server-side this might not be enormously useful. The intention is to re-factor to provide an API for tagging and mapping MAC addresses to URIs.
Claus finsihes with his personal perspective on provacy and security
Public space is a privacy problem.
Security is a social experience.
We can't possibly know the balance betweeen usefulness and riskiness yet.
I suspect there is not a technological fix.
This is a sensible position. I've always had Bluetooth discovery turned off. Will Imity persuade me to turn it back on?
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