Obviously the nature of human relationships (“friending” and “business contacts” being the subsets of that we're working on now). But others as well.

Currently I'm most interested in locality or geography, the whole place/space thing. Using mobile technology for machines (GPS) we'll probably get some of the data. Using mobile technology for humans (iPhone/Android/ec) we might gather some of the meaning.

Maybe the Intelligent Web will be able to cross the street on it's own someday. And then maybe learn about the street and where it goes, why we use streets, etc.

Fascinating post. Can't wait to read more, my gears are churning through it already.

[...] ik mij er echter op dat ik oeverloos veel tijd besteed aan het delen van informatie en friending. Vriendjes worden is overbodig. Het is zo jammer dat het niet echt bijdraagt tot mijn productiviteit. Het is allemaal zeer [...]

[...] them perhaps by the end of this year. I blog about some of the concepts and theories as I know that friending will someday go away, and when CRM systems connect to social networks registrations pages will be extinct. It feels good [...]

[...] against you.* (2) Saying not doing: You focused on saying rather than doing, eg: you assumed that saying your were friends meant you were friends (eg Facebook) . Can brands be friends? A common moot point; Blyk seems to think so. It’ll work if the [...]

Also, it is a big mistake to argue from current cultural norms (esp. citing “human nature” since I am not sure anyone believes that cultural is not a flexible construct that evolves based on environmental factors). If anyone had told us in the 60s that our society would accept the lack of privacy inherent in the Internet today (At any moment the system knows what you have purchased, where you are (if you have a GPS phone, what you have watched on TV, not to mention every click you have made on the web, your friends on social networks, your job history etc.) I am sure we would have thought this was a description of Stalinist Russia…
Social norms are shifting rapidly and we are becoming more accustomed to an Internet-intermediated life…

Here is a great video that, if you haven’t seen it, tells the “we are teaching the machine” story very well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
Stick with the video – the payoff is worth it.

This is really interesting stuff.

In my mind this relates to Project VRM (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page) and the notion that we can use The System to our advantage in many ways – taking our relationships with us wherever we go and also consuming information from companies, people etc based on our interests/ friendships that The System know’s about based on what we’ve been doing online.

[...] Why ‘Friending’ Will Be Obsolete – Jeremiah Owyang Every few days, (or hours) you probably get a friend request of some sort, the good news is, someday, this will not be relevant. [...]

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/msg/8c510fa232cb6078

The Google wants to teach its system more about how web sites work. Web site owners want the presentation of the data to be useful to real people.

Some review of the old semantic vs visual arguments from back in the day will probably yield some good stuff to mine here.

This post is so much more than ‘friending’ it’s about the internet becoming a sentient being that like a butler, can anticipate what we need and want.

To answer your specific question, ‘yes’ it will be able to identify who your relationships are with (in proximity from your wife to your business contacts) based on your previous behavior –and theirs.

Now, back out of the weeds: Think bigger, everything we do online (even clicking) is teaching the system to crawl, walk, and someday talk and run next to us.

[...] Why ‘Friending’ Will Be Obsolete Jeremiah Owyang vermutet, dass die Systeme im Web in Zukunft so intelligent sein werden, dass sie aus unserem Verhalten werden ablesen können, mit wem wir wie verknüpft sind und wir so nicht bei jeder neuen Web App unzählige "Freunde" hinzufügen müssen. (tags: socialmedia web2.0 friend owyang strategy trend via:mento.info) [...]

Unless the system plugs into a pair of “precogs” like in the Minority Report, it will never know who I am going to make friends with TOMORROW.

So, IMHO, as long as humans are making new friends and random coincidences are happening (i.e. bumping into and meeting new people), then “friending” is not going anywhere.

RE: Where’s it all going, a “thinking being”: Yes, you can just graph the human brain vs. the accelerating trend of machine intelligence and see the lines will cross in the not too distant future. If you assume continued and accelerating rate of technological advancement, then this is indeed, a no-brainer, if I may use the term.

Just read “The Singluarity Is Near” by Ray Kurzweil.

Cheers,
Chris

There are systems like this that already look at your email behavior (like Xobni) that can already track at who your real contacts are based on behavior and history.

This trend is really inevitable.

What you describe “Intelligent websites (and their data) will be able to determine who our friends are from our behaviors, context, and preferences, without us verbally (or physically) having to indicate so.” even when technology will make it possible it will fail because it goes against human nature.

Related to our personal lifes, humans will not let anyone to make decisions for them and will dislike this possibility even if it could be useful. We will prefer to make mistakes than to trust a machine or ’system’. That’s simply human.

Personally, I like web recommendations based on my browsing history or past behaviour on the web but not to the extend that the web will recommend me friends. To illustrate my point, there are cases when users don’t mind the system using their info (amazon recommendations) but there are other cases when users are pretty vocal against it (remember gMail at launch).

This post reminds me the article a couple of numbers ago in Business Week about IBM trying to model with numbers their consultants in such a way that ‘the system’ could optimize their output. Really interesting article that drove a huge reaction from readers saying that they will not like to work for IBM….curious

[...] The first post was by Jeremiah Owyang where he suggests that at some point this whole cycle of friending will become obsolete because we have taught the web to be smart Thinking forward a few years, “friending people” whether in Facebook, Plaxo, or will no longer be an activity that we’ll have to do. Intelligent websites (and their data) will be able to determine who our friends are from our behaviors, context, and preferences, without us verbally (or physically) having to indicate so. [...]