Social Machines

In the unlikely event that you’re interested, a load of laundry finished washing at 11:23p on Mon Aug. 3, 2009. We know this because the washing machine in which said laundry was washed has it’s own Twitter account.

“The Stoker“ is a temperature control system for barbques and smokers; some users of this system have connected their grills to Twitter—so they can get “status updates” from their cooking food.

Somewhere in Dusseldorf, Germany, you can tell what a coffee machine is up to here.

The point? The gadgets and gizmos we have all around us are also a part of our social lives, so it’s almost inevitable that our machines are joining the social media frenzy. Mobile devices use location information to inform social media applications as to the whereabouts of the human carrying the device, and, of course, camera phones are used constantly as part of the social media narrative.

The machines that are a part of our day-to-day lives sometimes play an even larger role on our behalf, serving essentially as our avatars. Consider the Facebook status update. We control what we post, sure, but our updates exist in a context, combined with the comments and news feed items of friends and family, and the system’s social ads. It all adds up to an evolving picture of us, an agent, that’s under our direction but not entirely under our control.

Every time a user of Boxee watches a TV program, their computer (or Apple TV) communicates with other Boxee users and shares viewing history and patterns—automating the process of program discovery by ”socializing” their owner’s habits. Soon enough, content distribution systems” (Hulu, Netflix, to name two) will need to learn how to listen, and react appropriately, to the programming preferences revealed through this ongoing machine-to-machine discussion.

We’re getting closer to a time where machine-to-machine social sub-networks will work for us. As social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter) and messaging platforms (Gmail, Yahoo Mail) grow in sophistication, we will see an increasing number of cases where our social network hubs communicate with machines and systems on our behalf, contacting us only as needed for clarification or instruction.

It’s not terribly far-fetched to envision a situation where our in-car navigation systems socialize with other in-car systems to share routes, favorite destinations, live traffic data, and more, while we direct these systems to share some or none of this information via our main social networking site(s).

There are, at least, five companies poised to lead the way in machine-to-machine Social networking. These are the  companies you need to have on your own system’s friends list, as it were, to make sure your system and their systems are talking about the marketplace and the consumers within it.

Google: Their search technology is already damn-near sentient and they have an amazing habit of providing open API’s for their services. Their ad serving technology is a two-way conversation with the marketplace that can help companies listen and succeed—if they take the time to use the data Google provides. If you haven’t already automated your monitoring of news, blogs, and web sites, try Google Reader as your machine/avatar for tracking your topical and conversational interests.

Amazon: Long the leader in predictive modeling and, as one of the earliest affiliate marketers, knows all about the power of social networks to improve sales. As they move into the Media space with Kindle and digital media, they will also be an excellent machine to track what customers want. Use Amazon’s various RSS feeds to track trends in market areas of interest to your company—you can subscribe in Google Reader (see? the machines are chatting already).

Netflix: The predictive algorithm is a part of their DNA and they have outsourced the evolution and mutation of their systems to the marketplace—transforming themselves into an awesomely smart preferences matching machine in the process. The Feedflix service, although intended for Netflix customers to tract their own use of the service, turns out to be a great way for other interest parties to keep tabs on trends and patterns of interest.

Twitter: Of course… It is, after all, a service that is really nothing more than a database with an API plus pipes to the internet and the mobile communications network. Twitter has a lot to say, all the time. Your systems and processes need to monitor the chatter and tell you what’s going on out there. Twitter is very much the internet’s sensory system. Connect via any of ten thousand 3rd-party applications (we’re partial to Tweetdeck).

Facebook: Maybe Terminator’s Skynet is nothing more than an eventual update of Facebook? Not that we’re sci-fi dystopians. When machines on Facebook have billions of human and non-human friends, we believe the power of social networks will help keep everything tame and well-behaved!