Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Jangl rolled out a pretty intriguing new service today.  The pitch?  They claim to have assigned a phone number to every email address on the internet.  Go to Jangl's home page, and enter the email address of someone you know, and it connects you… on the phone of your choice.  Publish your unique jangl URL (mine is http://callme.jangl.com/alecs@exmsft.com), and anyone will be able to call you… all without you revealing your true phone number. You can even embed the whole thing in a graphical widget if you like…. as below.  

So am I excited?  Well, it works based on not just who you are, but also who the people are trying to reach you.  It's a New Presence application… discerning your communications intents based on the identity of the person trying to reach you and your preferences.  The really cool thing? It's not a new identity scheme… it's just leveraging the identity you already have in your email address.

Jangl announced masses of other new features today too, but by far the most interesting was the marriage of email address and phone number.

This might be the most important revelation in the technology business this year.  Google wants to know everything about you, and help you organize every aspect of your daily life.  It's a radical expansion of their footprint and mission from organizing the world's information to organizing the world's personal information.  Not unexpected, but perhaps earlier than expected, Google has acknowledged that they will catalog everything, and build more intelligence on top of that catalog. Their apps business?  A mechanism to capture more of your data to feed the maw of the search engine, and provide raw material for their analytics business to build upon in the future. 

Rob Hyndman notes that 10 years ago Double-Click was run out of town for a similar vision.  Have we come that far? 

The breadth of the goal is awesome.  Whether society is ready for it is entirely another question. 

Mike Gotta, writing about the role of analytics in social systems, has posted a pretty neat view of what the ideal collective intelligence system built around social networks would be. He has mashed together a whole series of products and ideas from different people (including the New Presence manifesto) to produce this view of the world:

• Take what's going on in my life
• add more context about what I am doing
• in the context of my interaction patterns
• correlate everything in an intelligent manner
• continue to analyze continuously, both past and present
• discover what's important to me, even if i may not know it
• augment that information before you communicate it to me
• signal such information or messages relevant to my work context and focus
• in a manner that is aware of my attention priorities

I'd paraphrase this to three phases for how intelligent systems can help us be more effective.  They gather information and analyze it in context, discover what's valuable, and then deliver that information using appropriate media and at appropriate times.  That's been our focus (in the domain of real time communications) at iotum since day 1.  Mike has neatly generalized what we do to all information systems.

Facebook is a great example of a tool trying to do this today.  Billing itself as a social utility, it lets you aggregate information from the people you care about, and control the way it is presented to you.  It allows you to selectively dip into the traffic and flow of your social network in a way that fits your needs.  That's the beauty of it, and the reason I switched from Twitter and from Jaiku. 

Go read Mike's whole post.