[Semi liveblogged]

Right now anything is possible. Right now the energy is there...

Part one: the human essence. I'm studying what it means to be human in the sense of how we interact with technology, or when they're in groups.... so to do that I want to get to some basic ideas about humans. So I have to peel back some layers.

Humans are social animals. Why are we social? If we are social you will live longer - you are less likely to get eaten by a lion if there's someone else there yelling "look out, there's a lion".

We model all social interactions, which is not easy - it takes us years to learn how to do it. We have bigger brains than earlier primates so that we can hold a bigger social network in our heads.

Here's the dark secret of social networks: they are a lot of work. Who has the time? People just can't keep them really current. The systems are passive - they wait for you to feed that information to them. If you don't feed them, they die.

What could be going is so much more profound than what is actually going on. Time is the new non-renewable resource.

If I have a serious social network, why am I not using that information to filter SPAM?

We all create a data shadow every time we're online - email, URLs, IM, Skype... all this information could tell us who is important and why. But we don't use this information - it all gets poured on the floor.

Aside: Mark mentioned that you can't get SMS and call information off your mobile phone. Actually, my Motorola V3 lets me connect with USB and dump my text messages onto my hard drive. I was keeping SMS messages long before by transcribing the important ones, now it's easy. SMS messages have too many precious messages from friends! I don't want to lose that.

Mark points out that while we might think we don't have an emotional relationship with our mobile phones, but if we lose them we're really upset. We lose our social networks!

Enough talk! Mark developed a way to collect information via Bluetooth to capture the data shadow of someone carrying a Bluetooth mobile. They set it up for a week at a conference and they were able to show relationships for each person.

"The street finds its own use for things, uses its makers never intended." - William Gibson

This is not a bubble. This is not hype. This is where we're going: you-biquity!