Why (digital) Me?

Jeff Pulver posted last week on “Life 3.0”, and the “Digital Me”. I think that his post hits squarely on one of the most interesting phenomena of the 21st century: the need for a “digital representation” of the person. But I think that Jeff has missed one of the key aspects of this phenomenon: the mobile angle and its fundamental ramifications for the relationship between people and technology.

The Digital Me is something we’ve never really needed before, but it is an inevitable result of technological evolution, of the birth and success of the Internet. Web 2.0 has created, for the first time, a truly interactive, useful, robust and steady virtual world, in which we can and do act, interact, and relate. We use the virtual world to accomplish real tasks in our real world, everything from ordering groceries to watching movies to meeting friends to scheduling appointments. For the first time, there are businesses, organizations, things to do, that cannot be interacted with in any modality other than online. We MUST spend time in the virtual world.

In order to interact with this virtual world, we need a virtual self to represent us. Further, we want our virtual selves to be a good, effective, reliable representation. We want the virtual self to be able to communicate our personalities, our preferences, our likes and dislikes, in all of the various aspects of the virtual world. And thus we have seen the explosion of networking sites, blogging, reputation and standings sites, and an enormous consumer demand for effective use of personalized information. The next evolution of the Web seems likely to be the complete fusion of separate sections of the current virtual world, and the ability to have an effective, personalized representation within it. But there’s still a piece missing. What is next? What’s the missing piece where we should all be innovating?

More recently, Jeff posted a call for the next big Voice-over IP application. Though there are undoubtedly still things to be done in that arena, I think that voice is, pretty much, done. It is the ‘killer app’ and it accomplishes what we need: communication, interaction, and personalized representation. We can’t really improve on that. So, I think that what’s coming next is actually the fusion of the two worlds, and I think that mobile technologies are going to be what brings it about. Already we are using our mobile devices for far more than communication. Mobile gives us the ability to take the virtual world with us as we interact in the physical world: bringing our databases to the drive through, our blogs to the baseball game, our flists to the clubs. And through the mobile devices, we can refine, inform and develop every aspect of our virtual selves. Soon we will use that complex, unique, knowledgeable online self as naturally as we do our physical selves, customizing our virtual world and borderlessly transitioning between it and the physical. That is Life 3.0.