Monday, October 17, 2005

Your identity "aura"

I was thinking today of some possible future trends on our way to man-machine integration (known to some as the singularity :). More exactly I was thinking of all the recent moves on the portable devices, like the speed at which Apple is sending new iPods to the market and the Palm-Microsoft deal. The idea is simple and probably not very new. Wouldn't it be nice to carry your identity around in a machine readable format. It does not really matter in what way, it could be for example a device with wireless connection with a certain radius that you could turn on and off whenever you wished (any recent palm/cell-phone thing will have it nowadays). Now imagine you walk into a bar and the bar recognizes your identity, takes you list of music preferences from your music player or from the net and includes them into the statistical DJ playing stuff. This way the music the bar will play will be a balanced mesh of the tastes of the majority of people inside. The same way you could pass by any social place and check out the most used tags of the people inside to decide if this is the type of place for you. People broadcasting their identities would bring the same type of web 2.0 mesh/innovations to the social places around us in the real world.