“I’m the kind of guy who can’t keep a plant alive for a week, let alone a relationship” – Jerry O’Connell
Throughout our social lives on the internet, we tend to maintain many more relationships than we do in real life. Keeping all those relationships healthy and staying in touch with everyone becomes more of a chore, and sometimes it’s just hard to remember when you did what!
The Social Garden project from MIT MediaLabs comes in to help solve this problem. Using a plug-in architecture, this Mac OS software will track your interactions with each individual through emails, social networking sites, phone calls, text messages, instant messages and many other channels and tools. Social Garden will represent each of your relationships as a plant, tracking its progress over time. The more frequent your interactions are with a person, the healthier and bigger the plant will be. This visualization maybe displayed on your computer, mobile phone or even a photo frame.
This will certainly be a fun and pleasant way to be reminded of the person you haven’t heard from in a while, if only it could understand the content of the interactions. Currently, Social Garden will only be able to track the frequency, but hopefully with an infusion of NLP (Natural Language Processing) it might be able to give a more accurate representation of the relationship.
Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of relationships you have to maintain online? Do you think Social Garden might help you? Let us hear your thoughts.
The Concept of Social Garden
The phone rings. It’s your mother: “It’s that time of the year dear, can you help me organize this year’s family reunion? I’ll have my semantic web agent send you the details and I’ll check back with you in half an hour. Take care”
Web 3.0!
That would definitely be labeled as a “nightmare call”, but thankfully mom loves socializing with family members so her agent is connected to their agents… making your life a lot easier. This enables to you check the data that your mom’s semantic web agent has sent over. Other than access to the agent’s contact list of agents, the only other detail that your mother added was “ I want a warm weekend sometime in the next 2 months. ”
So your trusty little agent goes to work and finds appropriate dates based on information from the other agents. He then checks online for hotel bookings in California and Florida – since you have it on your wish list for this year, he puts those results first – and then comes up with 3 package options for each place that would be within budget for you and your family. Then he sends a confirmation email to you and your mom. The phone rings again “Oh hello dear, I just got your email. I like the idea of going to the Keys but I rather pick a different hotel than the ones listed, I heard good things about the Eden hotel from Aunt Jill, Can you check that out please ?”. A couple more clicks, and the trip is planned, hassle-free.
It Could Happen One Day…
That’s one of the scenarios that the next generation of web, Web 3.0, promises us. The ability to allow our computers to not just access, share and preview information but to understand the meaning of information contained in documents and relate it to you, the user.
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