This is their mashup of the same data source
http://www.ais-live.co.uk/AIS%20Live/solentferries.html

I get the file, pick out the ferries I’m interested in, do a bit of geofencing and direction vector analysis to work out where they are and what they’re doing, and twitter accordingly.

Cool, huh? :)

Tom: ‘d towerbridge up’ is a great example of Andy’s point. It would indeed be brilliant. (And it would of course have to say “I’m opening for @tomtaylor” rather than the MV Dixie Queen) but since it’s been retrofitted, and presumably without the City Of London being involved, it’s funny precisely because it’s unlikely. Nothing wrong with informational one-way stuff (good job on the asteroids!) but I’m looking forward to seeing, and making, interactive stuff too.

It took a couple of hours of messing around with Ruby, and was done.

As you say, the next step is for things to respond. I’m waiting for ‘d towerbridge up’.

Again, Sterling’s original context was recycling; part of the Viridian Design movement he founded and was championing at the time. It wasn’t so much that these devices were transmitting because that didn’t really matter; it was that at the end of their lifecycles their history was accessible (for learning purposes) and their blueprints were available (for efficient disassembly purposes).

There are certainly other uses for the technology, and as you said Sterling points them out. However, the enthusiasm over devices talking with one another or communicating with some central server seems a mostly tech-centered one. It’s a far different context and one which seems prevalent among those whose understanding of human history and behavior is probably considered insufficient by those who don’t share their enthusiasm.

If average people are outraged when their rental vehicle reports back how often they’ve violated a speed limit – breaking the law! – imagine how uncomfortable they’ll be when they can’t be sure which objects in their possession are busy exchanging data with centralized servers run by unknown persons in parts unknown being mined for data in the same way the device itself can be probed (which is what I’m guessing the OpenSpime folks are *really* excited about).

Just look at how people embed code into Second Life objects. Chat relayers. Rigged poker tables. Spam agents. Trackers. Who exactly is wrangling your spimes and should you realistically expect to always have final control over them?

Ask yourself this: how do you turn an invasive SL object “Off”? You don’t. You delete/destroy it. And if you’re aware, you don’t acquire it in the first place. Businesses knows this, and we can expect them to embed things without our knowledge, just as Sony deployed rootkits.

At some point we’ll need a broader discussion regarding this technology. But to even have a meaningful conversation we need to remain neutral, both cognizant of the benefits but also deeply suspicious of potential abuse. Because their *will* be abuse.

Right now I don’t see much neutrality when I read about this technology. It’s mostly gee-whiz writing. It’s of the “trust us, we’ll just encrypt the data” variety. I find that alarming.

Items that can be interacted with are a different matter. My tendency would be to keep most of the intelligent agents external to the object though – it just needs to feed information and receive orders, the real intelligence can be located anywhere in the world, operating on that data, and sending commands. In this world, humans would almost never interact with the sensing objects directly – there’s no need, they’d interact with the intelligent agents that are doing all the “spime wrangling” for us.

Of course, this isn’t really OO. It’s interesting to see Object Oriented programming change to simply Object programming.

All these concerns about the natural political end of publicising information are very interesting. I would recommend that every real life object that delivers its stream of information to the real world does so in an encrypted manner, possibly with different levels of detail encrypted with different keys. You certainly want objects that receive commands to do so with authentication and encryption, so it makes sense that they should deliver data that way too. That way, there would still be a “pairing”, like with bluetooth,of your agent with your objects, and it would be the agents job to make the data you’re interested in public in a nonencrypted form or simply to use it to wrangle you a better life.

@csven You make an interesting point about spime not necessarily constantly transmitting. Sterling’s introduction to spime talks mainly about it being searchable. I think this comes down to something which can interpret a complex world and share it with us in way that we can personally and meaningfully consume. As a really simple example, andy_house tells him/us things like “gym temperature is perfect”, rather than a constant stream of temperature readings. (He talks about this banding approach in a comment on Nick’s blog.) That’s an added layer of value, rather than transmitting a nearly meaningless stream of changing temperatures. It needs to care about those, but we don’t. This could be augmented still further by the other things the house ‘knows’. It wouldn’t be hard for it to nudge Andy with “The gym is the right temperature, your diary says you’re free until 9pm and all you’re doing is watching the TV on your own tonight. Why don’t you get in the gym and do that there?”. I agree (strongly) that objects shouldn’t be streaming data to us just because that’s how they captured it. It’s probably more important that these smaller elements are sharing with each other, and either queried by humans or otherwise interacting with them in an unobtrusive and lifestyle friendly way.

@orchid8: sorry. Mine too.

@Darren: I think you’re exactly right about ecosystems of data that we don’t need to access or input, but exactly wrong that microblogging systems like Twitter will ever be taken over by non-human communications. The objects do need to talk among themselves but they’ll probably be doing that on channels where we humans don’t normally hang out. After all, the reason early tweetjects are sharing with us on Twitter is because that’s where we are. People use Twitter as a convenient alternative to sending updates to themselves and interested friends via a text message, or an RSS feed (or, more accurately, perhaps they use it because it offers either, or both). As with blogging, it’s somewhere that makes sense for objects to communicate with humans, but only because the humans are there too. Twitter is designed for human use, though handily, objects (and especially the human-facing abstractions of those objects) can share that space with us. Other, less human-friendly channels are much more highly optimised for object-object chatter though.