My innermost Twitter thoughts, revealed (courtesy of TweetClouds)

Perhaps it’s the constant ringing you hear - in your pocket, on your hip, in the car.  Or the fact that even a cursory look at the local mall or a city street seems to indicate that humans have mysteriously developed a new appendage, one complete with a dial tone.  Or maybe it’s the haunting realization that the way to your teenage daughter’s heart appears to be through an iPhone.  You may not have heard, but your surely intuit, that the world recently reached a tipping point. There is now one cellphone for every two people on the planet.

The mobile phone has been hailed as the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history.  As with any technology of this magnitude and reach, what follows is revolution - social revolution, to be exact. From fish farmers in India to mobile financing in Africa, the ability of the mobile phone to effect social change is one of the most exciting and important stories being written today.  This week’s Friday Five highlights just a few examples of the growing trend of “mobile activism.”  

Texting for Social Change - FrontlineSMS

In many developing countries mobile phones are not only far more ubiquitous than computers and landlines, in many cases they are the only means of communication.  Organizations such as NGOs rely on tools like text messaging to reach out to the communities they work with. FrontlineSMS is a text messaging system that allows a user with a laptop and a GSM mobile phone the ability to send a large number of text (SMS) messages; because it depends on cellular networks instead of the Internet, it will work in any country on any GSM network. In the first two years since its release, FrontlineSMS has been used by NGOs in 41 countries for a wide range of activities including monitoring elections and disease outbreaks, blood donor recruitment and the exchange of market price information for vegetable and coffee growers.

Mobile Phone Reporters - Voices of Africa

Launched in May 2007, the Voices of Africa project is creating a cadre of “mobile reporters.”  Armed with mobile phones, the reporters are known as ‘camjos’ (short for ‘camera’ and ‘journalist’) who use mobile phones to write, takes photos and makes videos about daily life in Africa on subjects they find newsworthy. Using the mobile phone as the reporting platform is critical, as many journalists don’t have access to the Internet to file their stories. According to the project site, Voices of Africa aims aims to “put Africans in a much better position to take part in discussions that have been taking place about their continent  for centuries without their knowledge and participation.”

Environmental Monitoring - MESSAGE on a Bike

This New Scientist article reports that cellphones used by bicycle couriers are monitoring air pollution in Cambridge, UK, and beaming the data back to a research lab. The project, called MESSAGE, is developing low cost sensors to provide data for the planning and management of environmental impacts in urban areas. Sensors are embedded on vehicles and people to act as “mobile, real-time environmental probes, sensing transport and non-transport related pollutants and hazards.” One very practical application: working with doctors to correlate their patient’s asthma symptoms with the air pollution around them. (thanks to Changeist for the heads up)

Mobile Acitivism = MobileActive

MobileActive is a global network of people (and their tools, projects, and resources) focused on the use of mobile phones in civil society. It’s without a doubt one of the most comprehensive and connected sites on the web documenting the use of mobile phones for activism and advocacy, featuring hundreds of examples, case studies and resources (see this Boston Globe article for a sample). Most importantly, MobileActive taps into activists around the world, connecting a community that is literally creating social change one cell phone at a time.  For anyone interested in following the emerging trend of mobile activism from the ground up, the organization’s news aggregator and del.icio.us feeds are must-reads.

“Socially Networked Consumption” - CarrotMob

What if the most important step you could take to help solve the world’s most challenging problems was to drop into the corner store on a certain week and buy a certain brand of toothbrush? This is the question posed by Carrotmob, a new non-profit that organizes consumers to make purchases that reward companies who make environmentally friendly choices.  At its initial launch Carrotmob organized 300+ people for a few hours of shopping at a local market in San Francisco. The company, K&D Market, pledged to allocate 22% of gross revenue from Carrotmobbers towards energy-saving measures. The big idea, according to founder Brent Schulkin, is to improve the world by helping companies embrace socially responsible choices, leveraging the power of “socially networked consumption”* to do so.  

*4/22/08 update: Stephanie Gerson, a student at UC Berkley, wrote to tell me that she coined the term “socially networked consumption”; while the term isn’t explained in detail on her blog (only: “peer consumption via consumer networking sites”), according to her email she’s writing a thesis on the topic.

We like to think of the FringeHog Friday Five as a weekly starter-kit to the future: each week we feature five perspectives on “the future of” a particular theme from food to design to yes, boxes.  The science behind choosing the topics is simple: satisfy our insatiable curiosity about how to world is changing in both profound and minute ways. This week is a brief look back at some of our favorites.

Have an idea for a future Friday Five?  Drop us an email.

Five Things to do with your Genome

Genes are becoming the Legos of life, a super-size carton of biological toys that can be endlessly combined, cut, spliced and reengineered.   The average human has about 25,000 genes - that’s a lot of A, C,T & P’s floating around. Scientists are still clueless about what to do with most of them, so here’s a few ideas for putting your spare genome to good use (including hang it on a wall and use it as musical inspiration).

Future Cities

Does the world seem a little more crowded these days? If so, it might be because on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 a subtle but significant tipping point occurred: for the first time in human history, the world’s population became more urban than rural.  On that day say researchers, the global urban population exceeded that of the global rural population by 125,849 people. The after-shocks of this seismic shift are just starting to reverberate in cities throughout the world. This Friday Five features cities of the future, including megacities, “smart” cities and the increasingly popular carbon-neutral city.

The Future of Water

While more than 1 billion people on Earth - about one sixth of the global population - lack access to dependable, safe drinking water, yet industrialized countries readily pay a small fortune to drink tap water out of a bottle. Here at five views about the future of water, one of the most critical - and contentious - issues facing the humankind in the coming decade. 

Super Size Innovation

What will inspire the next world-changing innovation?  It just might be money.  The X-Prize Foundation calls it “revolution through competition”; I call it Super-Size Innovation. What it is: cash prizes to solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges. A new crop of public “innovation challenges” have emerged, all offering large cash prizes for armchair innovators who are able to solve some of our most pressing problems: global warming, space travel, clean water, to name just a few.

The Future of Robots

For nearly fifty years, robots have captured our collective imagination.  From Rosie, the arthritic robo-housekeeper in the Jetson’s to Robin William’s emotionally available Bicennential Man to every guy’s favorite cyborg assassin, the media has played to our fascination with all things humanoid. Here we look at the increasingly social role robots will play in the future, from violin-playing androids who care for our elderly to, um, sexbots.  

Today the world welcomes its newest democracy.

Sixty years ago the remote Himalayan country of Bhutan was, by thoughtful intention, stuck in the Middle Ages.  The small Buddhist kingdom saw its first wheeled vehicles and the end of feudal serfdom in the 1950s. Today - a few relatively short decades later - thousands of electronic voting machines will record the results of Bhutan’s first ever general election, and with it, the birth certificate of a new democracy.

Trapped between India and China, Bhutan is a small country (about the size of Switzerland) with a population of around 700,000. The nation has a reputation for being protectively insular; it’s never been colonized and a century of royal rule has stressed the preservation of tradition and culture: a national policy of Etiquette and Manners includes a compulsory dress code (knee-length robes for men and ankle-length “kira” dresses for women) in public places; television and the Internet were only cautiously introduced in 1999. Bhutan is perhaps best known to the outside world for its policy of Gross National Happiness (GNH), which advocates that cultural traditions and the environment not be sacrificed in the pursuit of economic development.

Yet despite its self-imposed isolation, the country - at the specific and determined behest of its kings - has followed a careful, thought out plan to join the modern world.  In 1998 Bhutan’s fourth king, Druk Gyalpo  (”Dragon King”) Jigme Singye Wangchuck announced his plans to transition the country from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy, voluntarily reducing the scope of his powers and ruling with the advice of his government.  In 2005 he declared that the country’s first national democratic election would be held in 2008, saying in part, “The sovereignty, stability and well-being of a country must be placed above everything else.  The country is more important than the king.” It was a move of remarkable foresight for a king who ascended the throne at the age of 17, and earned him a spot on Time Magazine’s list of “100 People Who Will Shape the World” in 2006.

In the West we talk a lot about the rapidity of change, often referring to the explosive adoption rates of mobile devices, or our ever-shrinking electronics, or the how fast Facebook is growing. Yet these data points pale in comparison to the type of change that Bhutan is embarking on.  In preparation for the social and political transformation ahead, Bhutan’s Election Commission spent two years canvassing the entire country with a massive civics lesson, educating villagers about their role and responsibility as citizens of a soon-to-be-democratic country.

In 2006 King Wanchuck abdicated the throne to his son, 28-year old King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wanchuck, who will oversee Bhutan’s first steps as a democracy.  Today, Bhutan’s citizens are voting for their first-ever National Assembly. The new leaders - nearly all of whom are in their 20s and 30s - will write the next chapter of Bhutan’s unique history.  How this remote country handles the growing pains of democratic ideals is yet to be seen; like any democracy, conflict is to be expected, perhaps even courted.  Will Gross National Happiness survive? How will Bhutan’s citizens - and their new leaders - negotiate the social and political changes of this next period of modernization?  How will Bhutan respond to being led by many voices, rather than one?

It’s not often that a democracy is born in relative peace; in Bhutan’s case the credit can be laid at the feet of far-sighted leaders and a community that values spiritual harmony above economic gain. Bhutan has undergone remarkable changes in the last 50 years; one can only wonder what the next fifty will bring.

How do we visualize cyberspace?  For all of the serendipitous surprises the web has to offer, it’s ironic that the traditional metaphors for cyberspace are about as appealing as a rush-hour traffic jam (”information superhighway” anyone?).  Ah, but the web is so much more than an electronic pileup of bits and bytes!  Looking for a little visual pick-me-up, this week’s Friday Five sent us spelunking for some of the more interesting and entertaining visualizations on the web.  Enjoy!
 

Packet Garden

One of my all-time favorite web apps, Packet Garden allows you to harvest your IP traffic and grow your own personal Internet garden.  As the website explains “To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a ‘Peer to Peer plant’ is grown, and so on.” A world based on your digital data is born.

Flight Patterns

Whatever else you do today, watch this video.  It’s simply one of the most mesmerizing visualizations you’ll ever see.  Digital artist Aaron Koblin used FAA flight tracking data of aircraft traveling across the United States to create this visually stunning interpretation of globalization.

 Universe

I’ve said in the past that I’m the (unofficial) president of the (unofficial) Jonathan Harris Fan Club, and here’s another reason why.  “Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe  presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from DayLife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world - a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place - and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.”  Like all of Harris’ work, it’s beautifully rendered and brilliantly thought-provoking.

TwitterVision 3D

Sometimes it feels that Twitter has turned the world into an “endlessly chattering global family.” The micro-blogging site has nearly quadrupled its user base in the last nine months, registering over 900,000 members.  Where are all those Tweets coming from? The 3D version of TwitterVision gives you a pretty good idea: it visualizes random Twitter posts from around the world in all of their profound and mundane glory.  Created by Dave Troy, Twittervision is part of the new MoMA exhibit Design and the Elastic Mind.

3D Mailbox

OK, this one’s just for fun. 3D Mailbox has a seemingly impossible mission: Make email fun.  The program turns your email program into a simulation of LAX airport traffic. From the site: “Every email you send or receive is represented by a jumbo jet. New email comes to the arrivals terminal, or to custom hangars (mailboxes) that you define… departing mails leave via the departures terminal. Based on the origin or destination of your mail, each message is depicted by any of over 80 world airlines. Get a message from the UK, it comes by Virgin, British Airways. Send a message to Italy, it goes out on Alitalia or EuroFly. Emails with attachments are carried by the couriers: FedEx, UPS, DHL, and CargoLux.” While the program has gotten its share of mixed reviews (primarily from tech analysts who perhaps take email a bit too seriously), the video trailer alone is worth a look.  And yes, that’s “Spam Air” in the picture above.

 (MB note: The following is part of a new article I’m writing on maps of the future. As I develop the article I’ll post my research here, highlighting some of my favorite maps.)

On January 17th the following things happened:

Protesters gathered in groups and attempted to walk into the town centre; police fired live shots and tear gas canisters to disperse them.  Three protesters were seriously injured and one shot dead.

Police battled youths who set fire to roadblocks; the police shot indiscriminately, “targeting anyone on sight”; one man was shot in the stomach as he stood in front of his house.

A 13-year old boy was laid to rest next to his uncle´s house; the burial was attended by hundreds of residents who wailed and lit up bonfires.

Most likely, you didn’t hear or see these stories, except in perhaps an aggregate way: they all happened in Kenya, a result of the post-election violence which engulfed the country.  In situations such as these, the major media outlets give the world a “big picture” view of the crisis: violence, rioting, bloodshed, deaths. But the individual events, the microcosmic acts of violence, go largely unreported.  They aren’t, however, unseen.

In the days following the Kenyan crisis, a group of Kenyan bloggers from both inside and outside of the country got together and created a website to map the spread of violence.  The site, called Ushahidi, allows users to report incidents of violence (as well as peace efforts) via the web or SMS.  Incidents are verified and then uploaded to Ushahidi’s site and displayed on a geo-tagged map.   The site also features a tool that allows for a “timeline” view of events (see below). The value of the site isn’t in its archival capabilities; as Global Voice’s Ethan Zuckerman wrote in this post, the importance of Ushahidi is helping people visualize the spread of violence in real time.

Why is this important? With all of the famines, wars, floods and other crises in the world today, what good will visualizing the chaos in Kenya do?  Friend and fellow blogger Erik Hersman, one of the founders of Ushahidi, answers this question in the most eloquent way I’ve seen yet.  In this post he suggests that a digitally connected world not only grants us a front row seat to the rest of the world, but also the power to influence events and create change in a way that was impossible just a few short decades ago.  So that events that may occur thousands of miles away are in fact - quite literally - in our digital backyard.  Which makes it a lot harder to just sit back and watch.

Ushahidi is a potent example of the power of what I (and many others) call “collaborative cartography.” Rather than simply create user-generated maps of local wifi hotspots or cool coffee shops, however, maps like Ushahidi have the potential to effect change. As part of its annual conference, Netsquared is hosting a competition to identify the best mapping mashups geared toward accelerating social change. Ushahidi is in the running, as are others like the Rosetta Project. Voting is open to the public until the end of the day Friday; the top twenty will receive a share of $100k in prize money to further develop their sites.   You can support projects like Ushahidi by voting here.

Earlier today, legendary science fiction writer and future visionary Sir Arthur C. Clarke passed away at the age of ninety in his home in Sri Lanka.  This Washington Post obituary fittingly refers to him as the “unofficial poet laureate of the space age.”

A few months ago he recorded what ultimately turned out to be his final message in this YouTube video “90^th Birthday Reflections” (see this post).  In it, he reflected on his diverse career as a writer, undersea explorer, space promoter and science popularizer.  Of these, he said he hoped to be remembered most as “a writer, one who entertained readers and hopefully stretched their imaginations as well.”

In a testament to the power of social media, a virtual memorial is quickly amassing on YouTube.  The crowd-sourced eulogies range from the personal and profound to the poetic and offer a wide angle view to Clarke’s enduring ability to inspire.

Running Notes from SXSW ‘08; for more blog coverage check out: the SXSW Interactive Community Blog.

If you’re over the age of 35, don’t bother reading the rest of this post. 

Why? Because what follows will likely be incomprehensible to you in the same way that portable, pocket-sized wireless telephones once seemed like objects of science fiction to a generation before you. In short, you’re not going to get it, and you’ll likely finish reading this post feeling like you don’t understand anything about web 2.0, or technology in general, and that the future is passing you by.  Which is likely true.

That said, if you want to know what your kids will be doing for the rest of the online lives, read on.

One of the highlights of SXSW Interactive was the panel PMOG: The Web as a Play Field.  PMOG stands for “Passively Multiplayer Online Game”; according to game designer Merci Hammon, PMOG “transforms the existing topography of the internet into a game world for players to vandalize, annotate, and curate.”  Huh? In short, it’s a new online game that turns the web into a game world. What that means in a practical sense is that players download a plug-in for their Firefox web browser.  In the vernacular of game designers and Navy fighter pilots, the plug-in installs what’s known as a Heads Up Display (HUD); the rest of us might think of it as a dashboard or toolbar. With the HUD turned on, players can leave “gifts” for one another on regular websites.

The catch, of course, is the definition of “gift”.  If the player is an Ally, you might wander onto your favorite website and find that they left you a crate filled with tools (tools being generally useful and as such, appreciated).  If the player is a Rival, however, you may find a mine that will explode in your face.  Not to worry, though: you can retaliate by planting a “St. Nick” for your rival, which causes his next mine not to work.  

There are two main differences between PMOG and other multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft or Everquest.  The first (and key) difference is that PMOG is played asynchronously, meaning you don’t need to be online at the same time as other players to participate.  You also don’t need to be in the same space: because PMOG uses the entire web as the game world, players don’t have to download (or play on) a separate platform. There’s no Second Life-type of world: PMOG simply creates an additional layer onto the existing architecture of the web.

All of this means that if you can’t spare a few dozen hours a week to play World of Warcraft, you can turn your everyday web surfing into a game (says CEO Justin Hall: “We’re building a game that’s actually LESS popular on the weekends”). To keep track of who’s winning, players earn “datapoints” (the game currency) just from regular browsing - every unique URL you visit is worth two datapoints.  In addition to gifting crates and exploding mines to other players, you can also go on player-designed missions which lead you on virtual tours of related sites (for example, the “Tech News Tour” mission includes visits to Engadget, Gizmodo, Digg and Slashdot). The goal, says Hammon, is to encourage people to broaden their experience with the Internet by exploring places they’ve never been on the web. A little like StumbleUpon, part of PMOG’s attraction is the fun of discovery and serendipity (although one could easily imagine a later version in which advertisers create sponsored missions that give users some “reward” for completing them).

If all this sounds simply like fun and games, think again. Aside from being interestingly quirky and original, the basic premise of PMOG could change the way we interact with the web and with each other while online.  Today we experience the web in a distinctly anti-social way: we surf alone, interacting with content, not people. But the ability to leave metaphorical “crates” and “mines” allows us to annotate the web in a very personal way and then share that experience with others. 

As I said in the beginning of this post, many people will look at PMOG and see at best another online game and at worst, yet another way to waste time at work. But what it really offers is a glimpse of the future: what the Web can, should and truly is meant to be: a social universe where content and people co-exist - if not in perfect harmony, then at least with a cache of St. Nicks.

If you think a new web app comes out nearly every day, you’d be partly right - it’s actually closer to about five per day. Google has popularized the practice of crowd-sourcing product development by releasing “beta” versions of unfinished products into the world for its customers to play with.  I admit to being a bit of a beta geek; the lure of being the first kid on the block to know about the coolest new web toy is irresistible to a futurist who loves to see around the corner to the future.  There are thousands of betas in the marketplace, which made finding a handful of them to feature for this week’s Friday Five more than a little difficult.  That said, here are five products in beta that we think are worth keeping an eye on.

Grand Central

Grand Central seeks to solve an increasing problem in the mobile age - converging multiple points of contact into one. The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.”  The service provides a single number tied not to a phone or location, but to you.  According to the website, with GrandCentral “you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, as well as check messages by phone, email or online.”

(Thomas Friedman’s talk at Pop!Tech, subtitled in Kiswahili)

dotSUB

dotSUB is quietly staging a revolution on the web. Its mission:  to make online video content accessible to the millions of non-English speakers by offering open-source translation services. The idea is deceptively simple: think YouTube meets Wikipedia: users can upload videos, films (even TV programs) for either the rest of the world or dotSUB’s team to translate. Translation services are either “closed” (utilizing dotSUB’s team of freelancers) or “open” (posting a video on the site and letting volunteers translate it for free, wiki-style).  For a great example of the service in action, check out Pop!Tech speaker talks (called Pop!Casts) which are translated via dotSUB into nine languages.   

MetaNotes

MetaNotes is “social graph paper” on which users can paste stickynotes containing text, images, videos, and widgets, creating scrapbooks to track and remember any topic.  It won the top “Experimental” website at the 2008 SXSW Interactive Awards last week, the category which tracks “cutting-edge and trend-setting destinations that are pushing the envelope and challenging our perceptions of the web.” While it still has a ways to go (i.e., it really needs private spaces for users to post notes); MetaNotes’ intuitive interface is familiar and user-friendly. And: it plays well with others, integrating with sites like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Pownce, and Photobucket.

Google’s Experimental Search

Courtesy of the brainiacs at Google Labs comes the Experimental Search project which offers new visualizations of search results including a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, G-Tech (the ambiguous but patent-pending-sounding term for “Google Technology”) extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view results in multiple dimensions. Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB)

Aptly named, the Museum of Modern Betas is the go-to place to check out and track web apps that are in beta.  In fact, we think it should be called the Motherload of Modern Betas - since it opened in two years ago its listed over 4000 sites that are in beta, helpfully organizing them into categories such as Top 100, Most Anticipated, Recently Added and by Language.  The large number of sites it tracks makes getting in-depth information about each one difficult, but active links are provided.  The MoMB is a like a giant playground for the future of the web, perfect for those who don’t want to wait for the new ‘new thing’ to arrive.

P.S. - Last but not least, here’s a bonus track: keep Wello Horld on your watch list; it’s still in alpha and very hush-hush, but I want to go on record as being (one of) the first to say “I told you so!” when it launches.  

P.S.S. - If you’re wondering why I didn’t include PMOG as a beta to watch, stay tuned.  It’s so cool it deserves it’s own blog post.

 In a few hours I’ll be doing a session at SXSW ‘08 called The Futurist’s Sandbox: Scenarios for Social Technologies in 2025, with my colleagues Wayne Pethrick, Jamais Casico, Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan. As the title suggests, we’re presenting four “experiential” scenarios that explore how social technologies might evolve over the next few decades.  What are experential scenarios? They’re scenarios that engage the audience in the narrative of the future story; as such they’re much more interesting to tell (and watch) and give you a hands-on feel for what the future might look like, rather than a written story in which you’re left to imagine the details in your head. Since we have the last session of the conference and I fully intend to go directly from there to the nearest party, here’s a sneak peak at my scenario, called Can You See Me Now?

As information technologies continue to propagate the world, the electronic exhaust of our click stream is generating unprecedented amounts of metadata.  Rather than a useless by-product however, metadata is a valuable resource, an untapped gold mine of previously invisible patterns, intentions and relationships.  How can we recycle and repurpose metadata to expose the hidden layers of connections between people, objects and environments? In the future will we use metadata judiciously, or will we create a world of information obesity?  How will social technolgies instantiate themselves in a world scaffolded by metadata?  Maybe they’ll look something like this:

The Unauthorized Lifelog of Cory Doctorow, Volumes 1 - 6 (pre-release, March 2025)

Turn objects into Blogjects with DNA Markers, customizable with your DNA

The new bling: iCandy contact lens stream up to 5000 info channels directly to your eye

The Emotional Forecast

Protect yourself against anger mobs with Anger Away!

More notes on the session and descriptions of all the scenarios will be up soon.  Many, many thanks to Pinkergreen Design for creating the above future artifacts!