Subject Matters

Tom Foremski writes for SiliconValleyWatcher:

I was at HP Labs Tuesday morning, chatting with Josh Tyler and Philippe Debaty about their work in trying to determine how people will use camera phones. A primary goal of HP Labs is to be able to predict novel uses of consumer technologies and develop supporting computer products or services.

But in today’s world, these researchers are realising that they cannot do things the old way, and that they have to get out of the labs.

If you want to discover aggregate social behaviors around photos and sharing, take a look at Flickr’s millions of users. There are communities on Flickr that could not have been predicted. And this is true of all true platforms–in the current sense of technology platforms for groups: unpredictable behaviors and communities will arise.

Using 20 HP Labs researchers is not going to reveal many, if any, novel uses. How many people using a platform technology would it take to flag the potential for large aggregate social behaviors, I asked? ..

Clearly, these researchers will need to change their approach. They should be out on the Internet crouching in the bushes and taking notes on what people are doing, and then determine new product development. In fact, these should be boom times for anthropologists. Surely, now is their time(!)

Spotting potentially large aggregate social behaviors, and being the first to monetise them, is going to be the name of the game in the consumer digital space.