A social network for things | Beyond The Beyond

“Thingiverse is also introducing a new “Follow” button that will connect you to the things, digital designs, designers, users, tags, categories: all the stuff you care about most. By following a Thing, you’ll get a notification when someone comments on it, makes a copy of it, or remixes it. Some new digital designs inspire a whole family of new Things, and the Follow button helps you keep track of those.  ”

As Bruce Sterling says, it’s almost a social network of things. Now just imagine to have this affordance in augmented reality – you just point your smartphone, tablet or google glass to a thing, you activate some app and you get all this information. Also in the press release, the guys from Thingiverse explain how users have been tagging their uploads with useful descriptors – and so now you can follow tags or categories to get updates in a dashboard. We’re talking here about the annotation of our physical reality, bookmarking no longer just the digital world of websites but of the objects which surround us. 
via Diigo http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2012/11/developments-at-makerbot-thingiverse/

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3 Responses to A social network for things | Beyond The Beyond

  1. Well, it’s the Internet of Things, in app form.

    I’ve always really resented this and despised it. Because it means that hordes of techies who got there first because they made the tools will do all the annotating of reality. They will make the notes on things they like, in the way consistent with their culture. This will be awful in every respect. We will all be stuck with their annotations from their culture, just like we’re stuck with their crappy code that doesn’t work, just like we’re stuck with their Yelp reviews or Rate my Prof reviews that they get to first. This will take a long time to iron out, and in that time, they will do a lot of damage!

    All you have to do is to look at Wikipedia to see the results of a world where all the things are labelled by first-adopter geeks. Horrendous.

  2. cubicspace says:

    soon be be as dead as 3d warehouse…. 🙂 or as exciting as 3dvia.com

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