Adding a note about Foursquare to months-long thoughts about combining online and offline technologies with real-time data to help us live better lives.

Getting bigger | Sighisoara, Romania | Sept 2009

Me, Sept 2008, Online technologies will transform how we make offline decisions:

The true long-lasting impact of the Internet will be in how we harness the power of the web to transform how we make decisions in the physical world.

Instead of just focusing on how to improve our online lives, the far greater potential is in combining online and offline interactions. The power of the web is how we can structure, measure, analyze and evaluate the massive amount of data we continually create to guide our decisions in real-time.

In the physical world, however, we invariably face a lengthy lag between when data is created and when it is used in a decision. We constantly make decisions using incomplete information because we have no choice; collecting more data is often too expensive, too difficult or simply not possible. Thus we create heuristics, stereotypes, rules of thumb and other methods for making decisions in environments we do not fully understand.

While collecting more data does not always lead to better decisions, technology is creating unparalleled opportunities for us to use larger amounts of up-to-date data to make quicker decisions. We are beginning to see web technologies address larger opportunities in navigating the physical world using dynamic, real-time, structured data in addition to our more typical use of the web to access static, dated data (e.g. restaurants, bars and driving directions).

Obviously, Foursquare is a great example of how we can aggregate and structure real-time offline data about people and their actions to create networks and communities around human behavior.

The real question in my mind is how can we aggregate those interactions into platforms that can create new markets to support new business models?

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Related

• Consider an extrapolation by Jan Chipchase, Owning Eyeballs.
• Consider the difference and similarities between physically and digitally annotating the physical world; what good are directions if they are in places we don’t look?