i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

New York Times (NYT) published a very interesting article asking the question about the potential future of the social objects. (In case you don’t know what social objects are, here is the article called “Social Objects for Beginners”.) In brief, social objects are essentially the physical objects which embody social stories or social data. One example they gave was an Internet-connected tennis racquet which would “automatically check you in to a tennis court on Foursquare, update your Facebook page when you defeat your mate in a social game of tennis, or send you a DM on Twitter when it requires string tightening (!)”.

Earlier in the same month, NYT also did a survey for three startup companies doing business in social objects. What their products are about is basically to combine the consumer goods, custom bar code and shared personal experience all together. They assume that consumer goods will be more valuable and less disposable if they contain shared personal experience. So here is the question: Really?

In the era where we are overwhelmed by massive information, retrieving information we actually need then becomes quite crucial. Carrying information along with physical objects is a brilliant idea, but the question here is “what to carry”. Apparently, the three companies mentioned above seem to embody the narrative stories. Think about it, if it is just narrative stories, who or how many people would be interested in retrieving the stories? I would recommend the social objects to be built more similar to Memex, with the difference that social objects are more interested in logging social data, and focus more than creating the associations between concepts. This data in turn, could be useful to social participants, the parties interested in the social events, or even businesses interested in analyzing the product experience in a social context.