I dunno. I see this cross-breeding with sexting, and the result is NOT pretty.
> Great geriatric aid! Talking to an old acquaintance at a Christmas party and > can't remember their name. Just sneakily take their picture and Goggle will > print out their name AND the last three things you talked about. > > n > > Nicholas S. Thompson > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, > Clark University ([email protected]) > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe] > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Russ Abbott > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > Sent: 12/20/2009 3:34:50 PM > Subject: [FRIAM] Goggles > > > Have you heard about Google's Goggles? This is from the NYTimes story. > > > Goggles allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking > keywords, but by snapping an image with a cellphone and feeding it into > Googles search engine. > How tall is that mountain on the horizon? Snap and get the answer. Who is the > artist behind this painting? Snap and find out. What about that stadium in > front of you? Snap and see a schedule of future games there. > Goggles, in essence, offers the promise to bridge the gap between the > physical world and the Web. > > > It's not in the iPhone store (yet?). It's available for Android phones. > > This strikes me as a great example of the subtle development of a > platform-like mechanism. > > PDAs and then cellphones have had the ability to take pictures for a long > time. But recently that capability has begun to be used for far more than > taking pictures. The other day I heard a report of an iPhone app that lets > you use the iPhone camera as a magnifying glass. Run the app and hold the > lens over something you want to see, and it appears enlarged on the screen. > (I don't have the app and can't say how well it works. But it certainly seems > feasible.) The Google Goggles application uses the picture-taking capability > to convey information from the phone to Google's image database and image > recognition software. It's the first step in giving a phone the ability to > see in some reasonable sense. > > All that's really neat, but the point I want to make here is that > > It wouldn't have happened if cellphones didn't have a basic picture taking > capability -- which require the existence of a lens and imaging > hardware/software. > Once that equipment was in place, people started to find new ways to make use > of it. It is, in effect, becoming part of the infrastructure of the hand-held > device and not "just" a way to take pictures. It has moved from a stove-piped > capability to a platform capability. > It wouldn't have happened if the device within which this imaging capability > is embedded weren't programmable -- and available to be programmed by > external entities. > > So this is a nice current concrete real-life illustration of how a > platform/infrastructure element becomes established. In this case the > mechanism of establishment was not the explicit decision by someone to make > imaging part of the platform. Presumably, cellphones were equipped with > lenses and imaging software simply because it was a competitive necessity, > not because anyone thought anything additional would come of it. Yet > something additional is coming of it. So what's important is to understand > what was needed so that more could be made of the basic imaging capability > than just the original "requirement" to be able to take pictures. > > We should keep that in mind when developing any system. Having a system that > only meets the requirements is not enough. Systems should be open enough so > that they can be expanded in unanticipated ways. This is a nice illustration > of how that works. > > -- Russ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
