Yahoo! Mobility Breaks Open the Space-Time Continuum

Yahoo! Research Berkeley is a new research partnership between Yahoo! Inc. and UC Berkeley, looking into the intersection of social media and mobile media technology. Marc Davis came to the eTel conference to talk about some of their projects:

Davis is applying Moore's Law to devices such as digital cameras. Since cameras have become so much lighter and cheaper, many folks carry one with them every day in the form of their cell phone. Having a camera with you every day changes how you think about photography. Have camera phones already become input devices? Undoubtedly, the folks at Flickr think so. But what about what's next? What will it take for cell phones to become sensor devices?

Mobility can fuse context, content, and community together; mobility embodies what someone is doing, where they are doing it, and their ability to share it. Here's some examples of how it flows through, in functional terms:

• Content: Created using free text, tags, structured metadata, image analysis, or weather services
• Context: Understood in terms of 'where' via cellular IDs, GPS, bluetooth, and image analysis; understood in terms of 'when' via network time servers or calendar events
• Community: Participate (and know who else is) through tagging, searching, sharing, and remixing

Given this perspective, how does context tie to community? How can I share more easily? The current trend is for the introduction of context awareness to the device, from face or place recognition to bluetooth network awareness.

Davis sees the Yahoo! network as a platform for telephonic applications. Yahoo! knows where people are and what they are interested in, so they are uniquely positioned to do something with the information. This is just swell corporate hype (and from a researcher, too!) - I was much more intrigued by his groovy exploration of space, time, and social space. In this world, the phone supplies your sense of place in the continuum.

Tags: christine herron space jockeys spacejockeys technology telephony o'reilly etel yahoo digital media multimedia