Watching Amber Case’s recent TED talk, “We are all cyborgs now”, I learnt about the fascinating concept of “ambient intimacy”. As the self styled ‘digital philosopher’ explains;

 

“It’s not that we’re always connected to everybody, but at any time we can connect to anyone we want.”

 

How intimate the relationship we have with our social networks is governs the way we operate when we’re living our lives – those of us who use social networks for solely for business aren’t likely to be permanently glued to their mobile phone even when they’re out with friends. Similarly, those people with a very close and intimate relationship with their social network friends might sit in the pub with their “real world” friends and ignore them, preferring to talk on Twitter, Facebook or an instant messaging client. Neither is wrong per se, so long as you’re striking a healthy balance.

Some start-ups are beginning to pick up on the fact that the emotional connection that users have on social networks is strong but often difficult to broadcast to your friends. I recently blogged about a new social client called “Vibefeelr” that enables you to post messages to your friends with an attached “vibe” that approximates to how you’re feeling at the time. This sort of thing is likely to become more common. There are a huge number of Facebook apps that do the same thing, and once Twitter’s ‘annotations’ enable users to attach metadata to tweets I imagine it won’t be long before there’s ‘emotions for Twitter’ too.

In the mean time there’s another new social tool for Twitter called smood.it. Smood.it lets you post an emotion to Twitter with a few attached hashtags to tell people why you’re feeling the way you are. Further to that those, smood.it will watch your tweets and catalogue how you’re feeling based on which emoticons (smilies) you use. It’s quite a clever approach because it means you build up a history of feelings without having to leave whatever Twitter client you use. Unfortunately, in my case anyway, it’s woefully inaccurate because I use happy face smilies far too much. With some tweaking, maybe a hashtag like the “Selective Twitter” Facebook app uses, it could be a powerful tool for people who want to track their feelings.

I imagine the next few years will see an increased use of ‘augmented’ social networking, with additional data coming from options we choose when we post. Who knows, perhaps our current state of mind might be captured from a camera, or even from an analysis of the post itself. It’ll be interesting to see what people come up with.