The ENTiPping Point

With a potential announcement coming about Facebook and video chat being integrated to compete with Google+'s "Hangout" feature, I took a gander at Facebook's main page source code this morning.  Scrolling down to the area that loads the Facebook "Chat" functionality, I found these curious bits of code (highlighted).  Have they been there and we just haven't noticed?  Will we see Facebook video chat soon?

Previous Posts:
- Introduction
- Relationship Traits
- Making It Happen

Up to this point, I’ve written about what “metafolksonomy” is, how it is defined by our relationships with one another and how we might practically integrate this into our daily interactions within the social web.  The potential uses for a system that could help to organize and maintain contacts is large.  By interacting with each other, over time, we could build these great profiles that would let us find other people that we connect with; call it “crowdsourcing the crowd”.   But there are always pitfalls to new ideas.

Can People Benefit from Ratings Like Products?

What if the crowd doesn’t favor you?  People are not always going to find you interesting.  What if you were tagged as a “hypocrite” because of something you did during a single relationship with someone else?  If you translate this to the marketing world, research shows that people actually want to see some negativity in reviews and ratings because they find the product’s assessment to be more believable.  Is this true for people?  If not, why?

One thought to help combat the impact that a negative tag is weighting tags based on comments.  If you have 50 tags of “hypocrite” then maybe that’s more true to your nature than if you just had one tag, who may just be an old ex-girlfriend trying to lash out at you.  Think about a tag cloud representation and it becomes clear.

Sponsoring Profiles Might Be Next

How hard, then, would it be to sponsor favorable tags for certain individuals?  Maybe a stealthy PR group pays a firm to sponsor tags for a political candidate.  Suddenly the human tag cloud is skewed and people searching for a given hot topic from within a certain geographical area find a political candidate in their area instead of legitimate friends to connect with.

Search is Your Friend (and Your Enemy)

“Transparency” and “openness” seem to be emerging concepts as we dive deeper into the social space.  What would a metafolksonomic system of publicly identifying your persona do to the human interaction and relationship process?  If I could search and find someone that was a good match for my personality, how would our first few interactions change?  I’d have a whole host of information before I met you – would I be less interested in digging deeper to see if the “taggers” had missed something?

How about the longevity of this information being available?  What if I change over time and lose bad habits that I’m tagged with?  Surely, that needs to be reflected in my profile, but how?  Do we weight present-day information higher so that older tags get “stale”?

Are We Ready?

You tell me.  I see great benefit in this concept and yet approach it with intrepidation.  Just as the privacy conversation has been expanded due to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s comments in January about privacy not being a “social norm” anymore, so too can the conversation about how much we want to allow others to help define us.  Metafolksonomy is the utmost in social. -- it’s classifying the classifiers.  It’s a thought that goes beyond tagging events, places and websites.  This is not rating a dining spot for its al fresco seating.  It’s rating you.

Are you ready for us to hold you up?

(Photo by Billie Joe's Entourage, modified with permission)

In Part I of this two-part blog post, I laid the foundation of a theory that one day Google will be more and more involved in our daily lives in the physical world.  From phones with the Google-sponsored Android operating system to washing machines and microwaves running Android to a tablet controller for all of these devices, there is a real possibility that we could see Google become integrated into our home's functional operations.

But these devices will use electricity, and yes, Google will be there, involved in the next step of the chain -- energy.

Reason #4:  Google Will Help You Manage Your Energy Usage

Utilities around the world are embracing their customers' desires to manage their energy use at home.  Whether it is from the perspective of cost or environmental stewardship, customers want the ability to monitor how much electricity appliances, HVAC systems and water heaters are consuming in their homes.  They seem to be willing to shift behaviors and consumption patterns based on electricity pricing.  With more utilities rolling out "smart meter" programs that transmit usage and billing data back to the utility company wirelessly, consumers have the possibility of accessing their own usage data in 15, 10, 5 or even 1 minute increments.

Google hopes to help consumers do this with a program called "PowerMeter".  By partnering with utilties and display manufacturers, Google is hoping to provide the API and visualization component needed to give customers the electricity consumption information that they want.  During the peak times of the day, customers can curtail energy use in exchange for a utility offering a better rate for them during off-peak times if they do so.  But a customer would need to to know when they're using the most electricity, which appliances/equipment were using the most electricity and how much it is costing them to run their home at a given time.

But Google isn't wanting to build monitoring devices or meters.

Google wants your electricity usage data -- the data that shows your usage patterns and energy behaviors in the household.  There's no charge to the consumer for this PowerMeter "cloud" service.  People will want to use a free tool that uses an online service that they are already familiar with if it helps them manage their energy bills.

And once millions of people's energy usage and trend data is with Google, it is a veritable marketing cornucopia.

Reason #5:  Google Will Become an Electricity Marketer

Just this month, Google submitted an application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to allow the "Google Energy, LLC" subsidiary to purchase wholesale power from other electricity providers.  So if someone wanted to start an energy company and create power solely from, say, pond algae, then Google would be allowed to take this energy and purchase it directly from this company rather than being required to purchase their electricty from whomever supplies the electricity at Google's physical location.

Google claims that they are only wanting to do become a wholesale electricity marketer because they want to control costs at their data centers and gain access to the types of carbon-neutral energy sources that align with Google's "green" intiatives.  Other companies, such as grocery store chain Safeway and Wal-Mart have also filed for this status for the same environmental reasons.

And here's where it gets interesting to see Google as an energy wholesale marketer.  By gaining this FERC approval, not only do they position themselves as energy consumers on the wholesale market, but they also have the opportunity to be wholesale sellers.  Who could they sell to?

...'you' and 'me' via our own electricity provider.  One day, we could actually be using electricity from our local "XYZ Utility Company" that was generated by a venture capital renewable energy provider and sold to Google Energy, LLC.

With renewable energy legislation being pushed through the U.S. Congress, utilities nationwide could be required to provide up to 20% of their customers' electricity using renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar and other less common sources.  Those utilities that don't have renewable energy resources in their territories could be given the option to purchase enough renewable energy on the wholesale market in order to make up the portion required by proposed legislation.

Google Will Win Our Homes

Whether we like it or not, Google is here to stay for the near term. From the basic Android OS smartphone, all the way to providing us the very electricity that we use to recharge that very phone, Google is becoming more and more a part of our everyday lives.  Right now, Google might just have someone looking into what will be come the next player in a conglomerate of small LLC's.

...Like, maybe, Google "Store", formerly known as Amazon.com?

With the unveiling of the Apple iPad this week, the tech industry is now abuzz with the thought of the way that Apple's device could potentially change the way that we use the internet at home and on the road.  There is no doubt in my mind that there is a segment of the population who will find this to be a very key purchase for their home.  Think of how many casual computer users use their laptops -- searching the web, shopping, browsing photos on Facebook or Flickr -- and other non-text intenstive operations.  The keyboard-less tablet device with wifi and/or a mobile connection is the perfect solution for surfing around the home.

But it is the operating system and the platform of the iPad that I have long-term questions about in the home.  While Apple is going to great lengths to integrate itself into my everyday internet activities with products like iLife and AppleTV, I think I know who will ultimately win our homes and our home-area network -- Google.

Reason #1:  The Android Open-Source OS

Anyone who has ever tried to do something creative and interesting with software will tell you that open-source software provides a tremendous opportunity to expand and enhance functionality that the original developers provided in the official code.  Just look at the way that the Apache web server has developed over time as developers were allowed access to the source code and encouraged to create all kinds of add-ons that would work with the server's core code.  Over time, this made it a better product -- more stable, more robust and the ability to run on all kinds of hardware.

The Android OS, while in its infancy, will mature over time and will be able to support multiple devices, screens, and interfaces.  Having toyed around with basic Android app development, the structure of the code is such that it very logically separates the device its being displayed on from the core functionality.  This will be a key component to its success in the home.

Reason #2: Device Agnosticism

Bill Gates realized at a very young age that success would lie in having your software run on hardware not created by one manufacturer, but a variety.  IBM wanted to buy Gates' "DOS" operating system from him.  But realizing that PC's would be in so many homes in the near future, Gates decided to license DOS to IBM and subsequently made money off of every version sold on an IBM computer.  The future was not in the hardware, but the ability to have control over the heart of the PC -- the software.

Apple has married its OS to specific devices, much like it has done most of its existence with its vertical integration model.  Value can be gained from complete control over the hardware and software, but it can also be the Achiiles heel.  Think back to 1995:  Apple realized that there was an opportunity spread its OS by allowing hardware mandufacturers to enter into the "Macintosh clone program".  Even then, Apple realized that the software was driving their success.

At the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, one company, Touch Revolution, gave us a glimpse on how the future might look, both from a hardware and channel/software concept.  Touch Revolution (as seen in the video, below) has several appliances that they are embedding Android into for control.  They show us an example of a phone, a copier, a microwave and a washing machine all running Android.  How about an app to cook a tenderloin in the oven?  Download the "linens" app for custom wash cycles.  After all -- hardware is hardware, the heart is in the software controlling it.

What about your thermostat running Android?  Why not?  It has relays and sensors just like these appliances.  There is no reason that Android couldn't control this basic instrumentation.  Pick anything that you have to interface with and control in your home and the possibility exists of basic control using Android.

Reason #3: The Cloud

The iPad announcement got me thinking about how this might change the way consumers used their computers at home.  Many of us already have a laptop that's in the kitchen for surfing while the pasta's boiling or in the livingroom while our spouse watches TV.  That laptop has a hard drive and somewhere to store what we're working on.  The iPad has flash drive ability which, mentally, seems very temporary.

Could tablet devices force people to start thinking "in the cloud" about their applications they run?  If so, then guess who does that very well. 

Yes, Google.  The same Google that makes the Android OS.

Take a look at what the Google cloud offers:  e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet, presentation software, a newsreader, a search mechanism, photo storage and sharing, phone service, YouTube integration, and even health records storage.  While the prospects of storing all of your data with someone else might seem scary, my feeling is that we will soon see the benefits of handing over some privacy outweigh the benefits of not doing so, at least in some situations.

What if it's an Android tablet-type computer like one of these from last month's CES show?  In theory, don't you think that there would be tight integration between the cloud apps from Google and an Android tablet?  We can only hope that Google has thought about native app support for directly accessing the API's for all of their cloud applications.

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So if we pause for a moment to recap, we have an open-source operating system that can be run on a variety of devices in the home with our productivity/internet applications existing in the cloud with Google.  We have devices that are mechanical (like washers, dryers, HVAC equipment) and need to be controlled, but we're controlling them with smarts based off of developers worldwide who have customized applications for specific needs that we can choose from. Notice we're talking about electronic devices that use electricity.

In Part 2, I'll paint a picture of Google's ultimate goal of becoming the hub of our home electronic lives.