Move over “Beatles: Rock Band.” Step aside “Max Payne 3.” Look out “Resident Evil 5.” Twitter and Facebook are coming to Xbox. That’s right, on June 1, the people of Xbox 360 announced they are integrating these leading social networks to Xbox Live, the company’s online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service.

When pitted against the likes of a motion controlled system, Twitter and Facebook are fighting an uphill battle for buzz. In fact, from what I can see the news that these social networking giants are coming to Xbox has been met with virtual silence. But if you take a few minutes to glance over the official company statements concerning these integrations you will quickly discover why this move is one of pure genius. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Microsoft might have just have just announced what could be the real deathblow to the competition.

Says Microsoft: “By bringing Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm to Xbox 360, we’re not only extending the walls of your living room beyond your home to your friends all over the world, we’re creating the definitive social network, uniting more than 300 million people to share thoughts on music, play games and tweet.”

By incorporating these social-networking tools into their gaming device, Microsoft is uniting a passionate community that comprises hundreds of millions of people and, in large part, revolves around its brand. Just think about all the possibilities this creates.

First Microsoft’s Xbox team will be able to more efficiently interact with their audience, alerting them to new games and features, unveiling unknown secrets and hints and rolling out the red carpet to upcoming gaming events, all directly to the gamer’s couch. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

More interesting is the ability for Xbox gamers to easily and effectively communicate with friends (both gamers and non-gamers), advocating both the Xbox gaming platform and new games via Facebook mini-feeds and Twitter. The new Xbox additions will allow gamers to easily comment on games they’re actively playing and share in-game screen shots with ease.

Now thousands of new messages and game images will enter these services daily and in doing so will forever change the way games are marketed. But how will it impact the in-game advertising market when the likelihood of in-game ads getting more and more media exposure thanks to these shared screenshots? The fact is these ads are going to become a hotter weapon.

Even the most dedicated gamers have interests and passions outside of the games and Microsoft has made strides towards establishing the Xbox as the definitive media hub of your home. That’s where services such as Last.fm come into play. Now gamers can turn their Xbox into a music center that has access to millions of songs that can be streamed through their device, which undoubtedly is connected the best speakers in the house. Another soon-to-be-released feature includes the ability to watch movies as a group via Xbox Live and communicate via microphone and your avatars. Combine this with the recent addition of the Netflix moving streaming service and you have one very powerful device that is finally leveraging the power of a social, tech-savvy community.

Frankly, I’m sick of talking about social media. I’ve had a long-standing view that eventually everything online would have social functionality and that it would become a commodity function of the web. For me, this is a clear indication of how much I may have underestimated how far this could go. As more and more electronic devices become internet enabled and the concept of sharing our lives via the social web becomes more commonplace, how many other devices in the near future will take on similar functionality to what Xbox is pioneering? For example, adding this functionality to a DVR could change the broadcast or movie industry profoundly as it would allow them to use social media far more effectively as a marketing channel.

I was hoping that I wouldn’t be talking about social media in the next couple of years, but as this evolves from device to device maybe this is not the end but just the beginning. Stay tuned.

If you hadn’t heard: I lost my laptop and even more tragically my flight log book (seen here) in the back of a London cab about two weeks ago. I’ve only now caught up with the back log and started to re-assemble my life and you will start hearing from me again on a weekly basis.

I stumbled across a couple of brilliant interactive art pieces over the last couple of weeks (via some smart friends of mine – Damion Parsons and Colleen DeCourcy). The first one is not very digital at all – it’s the ultimate “Human Interface” titled Hi. Effectively it’s a guy in a box that looks like a Microsoft surface performing all the computer functions himself. Entertaining and awesome – it’s a must watch and share video.

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From Vimeo:

Concept, design and high-tech by multitouch-barcelona.com
Music: wake up, wake up by lullatone.com
Filmed at hangar.org
hi-res pics at flickr.com/photos/multitouchbarcelona

The interactive installation “I Want You To Want Me”, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, for their “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition.

I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating. It chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, using real data collected from Internet dating sites every few hours.

The piece is presented on a 56″ high-resolution touch-screen, hanging vertically on the wall, and was installed at MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day.

Which one do you like better?

It has been suggested that Google is looking to acquire Twitter because it views it as a threat. That line of thinking is completely insane because Google isn’t going anywhere. The company is still the top dog in terms of financial stability, commitment to innovation and business strategy. Depending on what research firm you ask, Google owns roughly 80 percent of the search engine market and is still gobbling up market share. In terms of users, Twitter doesn’t even match Facebook’s potential as a rival. Twitter is simply not a threat to Google; in fact, the search giant could simply consume the Twitter API. The good news is that it probably won’t because Twitter is a piece of the greater problem Google is looking to solve.

There’s no question that the Web is getting crowded with content. The user-generated era is spawning such a huge amount of data that it’s nearly impossible to find anything with traditional keyword-based search anymore. The ideal search should be personalized and capable of referencing search history, relevance, social bookmarking, micro-blogging and contextual relevance with each search. Google has been working on this semantic Web model for a while because it will theoretically allow search engines to tell you what you’re looking for before you try to find it. As Twitter has created an online collective consciousness on virtually any topic, it makes sense that as Google labors toward its Web 3.0 ambition to organize all of the world’s data, that it would be interested in this new data stream. Real-time search is the catalyst to this goal, a cultural paradigm shift, but data without context is useless, and this is where Google excels.

Searching real-time content in its current state finds millions of stream-of-consciousness, rants, and blurbs that are largely irrelevant in their raw data format. However given the right context on the aggregated whole based on desired filters it could provide real-time opinions, sentiment, and behavioral data. If Google finds a way to track it back to the Web search it could be one of the aspects that help the semantic prediction model.

As online utilities, tools and content are created daily, search will have to adapt as well. Many people seem to think that Twitter will become the de facto medium of the common voice. This isn’t true. How does a 140-character opinion replace a full-length article on Wikipedia, a 30-second video spot, a corporate site or even financial or stock information? Humans interact with different channels because of varied contextual factors; relying on Twitter as the end-all be-all simply isn’t realistic.

Twitter is a single service, not the final piece of the puzzle for Google as an increasing number of companies publish real-time, user-generated content. A comprehensive real-time search engine would need to monitor a host of user-generated content from sites including Twitter, FriendFeed, Plaxo, Loopt, Brightkite, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace as a baseline. There are companies already doing this but it’s still data with no context for the most part. These companies are currently charging some good money for their services, but it’s only a matter of time until someone like Google taps into this and makes it available for free.

Another fact that has flown under the radar is that Google has technically already entered the micro-blogging space via latitude. The service combines geographic data with micro-blogging and taps into the company’s existing gmail and Android platform user base as well as its deal with Apple’s iPhone. More than anything, this shows Google understands that context is king and will be the future of search.

Initiatives like micro-blogging, mobile and social media are helping companies get closer to the user experience to provide users with information when they need it most. Innovation is the key to success and whoever figures out how to combine social data with contextual information will have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the search engine landscape.

As featured on AdWeek.

Coca-Cola Europe launched an interesting project for Sprite earlier this month that I think is worth noting.  “Green Eyed World” is a video series revolving around a 23-year old singer from London as she looks to fulfill her dream of becoming a star. The audience is able to influence her choices as she journey’s through the music world by commenting and voting on the site.

The audience can follow and interact with this 23-year old singer from London as she creates new opportunities for herself by following her dream.  By joining her journey online, the audience can influence her choices through commenting and voting directly in the GREEN EYED WORLD videos using their own Facebook profile.

The interesting twist is that the highly customized YouTube channel doesn’t include the familiar comments that we’re used to using, but only allows users to comment by logging in with their Facebook credentials via Facebook Connect. This function makes each comment act as a seeding element for the campaign across your friend’s list as well as allows you to easily see what your other friend’s have said about the episode.

This use of Facebook Connect stood out to me because it was completely replacing a very familiar commenting system, but I think it works for this branded entertainment campaign. The quality of the video looks solid. The videos views aren’t particularly high yet, but I think this could be very interesting to see how it plays out as it’s too early to see how successful it’s going to be.

The “Episode Zero” show will be immediately followed by several viral extras on YouTube and Facebook updates from Katie leading up to premiere “Episode One” of “Season One” on May 1st. Viewers can also download a free application for their iPod/iPhone in time for the beginning of the season.

Sapient launched the first part of it’s digital campaign for Coca-Cola’s Happiness Factory 3 last week. The project, one of my lifetime favorites, was truly built on the blood, sweat, tears, ingenuity, and smiles of a lot of people. The site took a very large team of creatives, designers, developers, IA, project managers, animators, and 3d specialists to create. Check it out here.

I’m thrilled to announce that it won an FWA today! Hopefully this is a good sign and indication of a successful campaign that resonates with all who see it.

I also recommend checking out the HF3 MSN Messenger games we created with Microsoft. Microsoft said they pushed the boundaries of the platform and the multi-player experience is pretty amazing.

We’ve got some more stuff in the cooker, but you’ll just have to wait till it launches.

And you thought my giant robot prediction was crazy....

Earlier this month I was able to visit CeBIT, the world’s largest technology show case, in Hannover, Germany. The exhibition space is absolutely enormous totally over 5,000,000 square feet. Imagine the biggest convention center building you’ve ever seen then imagine at least 20 buildings of that size and you’ll have an idea of how big CeBIT is.

I was able to meet some brilliant people from around the world, speak on a panel about social media, and be exposed to some great bleeding edge technology. All in all it was a great couple of days (even though I missed my flight on the way back).

Most buildings were focused on one subject that included green technologies, security, enterprise network technology, mobile, GPS, computers, gaming, or my personal favorite “the future parc”. The future parc was focused on innovative new technologies whether they had been productised or not. You could look at technologies at an early stage with the potential that you might see a new opportunity for it’s use.

I’ve highlighted some of my favorite items below that I saw during the conference. Some are really far out and some are fairly simple – I hope you enjoy the quick summary.

AIPTEK – This German company has produced a very small lightweight project that fits into the palm of your hand. It’s got no where near the kind of power you’d need to do a full blow presentation at good quality, but it would be great for projecting movies from an portable device like an iPod or iPhone onto the wall. Another nifty feature includes an oboard memory card so you can just store movies in the device and avoid the third party portable device all together. It’s still early days, but very cool none the less.

Global Emotion – This wasn’t actually a piece of technology, but it stood out to me for two reasons. One, I have full intentions of living in Asia this year and two I just thought it addressed a very interesting issue for westerners trying to do business in China. iWays is offering a course that allows you to learn to understand the body language and facial expressions of the Chinese people in comparision to some western body language that might cause you to mis-understand a business situation. I could see how this could be invaluable in today’s world.

GestureTek – These guys are doing some amazing interactive displays. They’re doing everything from massive table top displays that allow you to drag content around with your finger and close and expand additional content at will to touchless screens that react just based on the movement of your hands. It’s starting to feel really futuristic.

Another cool product they had on display was called “The Cube”. It was a self contained and portable system for doing projected interactive displays that react to gesture control. Imagine for example projecting a bunch of lilly pads onto the floor that when you moved near them with your feet bounced and rippled in reaction to your motion. This is definitely eye catching stuff. I still think they haven’t unleashed some top level creative talent onto it yet, so they’re still a lot of room to do some amazing things.

Fraunhofer Institute – The Fraunhofer Institute booth took the cake for me for most mind blowing innovations (with actual working prototypes). Some of the highlights included:

• Flat panel TVs that displayed near perfect 3D imagery without the need for 3D glasses.
• 3D digital dashboards for automobiles that also reacted and tracked your eye movement.
• Real-time facial expression analysis that could identify your gender and mood.
• A digital wardrobe where you could change the color and design on your clothes by just standing in front of  a special mirror.
• A bathroom designed to help manage the elderly (for example) in terms of making sure they’ve been doing their bathroom routine and taking the appropriate medications. It then reports back to any caregivers to alert them of abnormalities.
• An image search that allowed you to dynamically search for “simliar images”. The system was smart enough to identify properties like number of people in the image, consistent colors, a positioning of objects in the frame.

I’ve included some of the photos I did manage to take. I should probably also do a quick shout out to the people that invented the massage chair with matching audio and light stimulation. I couldn’t relax as well as I would have liked while testing their product because I kept thinking about how much I wanted to buy one…

Photos after the jump…

Google is not going anywhere … People have been predicting that Google will go down for years, but they’re still the best company out there, in terms of financial stability, innovation, culture, and business strategy … Google has 81.5% of search engine market share:

Granted, and this could take an entire post by itself, the web is getting too crowded: social media, user generated content, web 2.0, read write web, call it whatever you like, it’s generating such an huge amount of content that it’s impossible to find anything with traditional keyword based search anymore. The ideal search should be totally personalized (and again, Google has been working on this for a while and I’ve been a beta tester for some personalization features), but it should also take into account search history, relevance, social bookmarking, micro-blogging, and contextual relevance … Web 3.0 or semantic web will allow search engines to tell you what you’re looking for before you try to find it …

I digress, the point I was trying to make is that as the web grows, utilities and tools get created daily, content is generated everywhere, search will have to adapt as well. So back to Borthwick; he says that real time search will kill traditional search … How does a 140 character opinion relates to a full lenght article on Wikipedia, or to a 30 seconds video, or to a corporate site, or to financial or stock info … I mean, really Borthwick, we know you are a twitter and tweetdeck shareholder, but do you really have to make sure an absurd comment?

One of the ideas behind web 2.0 is openness… Everything has open APIs nowadays, and there are many companies using them to monitor social media … So if you really want a real time search engine, it wouldn’t be just twitter … twitter is gaining huge momentum, but they only have half a dozen million users… a real time search engine would monitor twitter, joost, brightkite, facebook, linkedin, myspace, just to name a few:

There are companies already doing this; granted, they charge some good money for these services, but it’s only a matter of time until someone (Google) taps into this and make it freely available… That said, how would Twitter kill Google again?

I’ve seen some nice analytics powered by Twitter, like the chatter during the Super Bowl mapped by state over time to match the exact events on the 4h period … I love it, don’t get me wrong, but how is that really relevant to search? Imagine pulling up search.twitter.com and all you get back is: “cardinals, steelers” … What am I supposed to do with that data? Completely irrelevant … Data was king, but now we have too much data … Context is king now …. Twitter search provides no context whatsoever, and thus is completely useless…

I almost forgot to mention, Google actually is trying to enter the micro-blogging space bundled with their really strong initiative to penetrate the mobile space … Google launched latitude last week, that combines geolocation, micro-blogging, and tap into their existing gmail user base, the Android platform, and their deal with Apple / iPhone …

Micro-blogging, mobile, open social …. Innovation is the key to success, real time search is not ready for prime time, and whoever figures out how to combine all social data with some context will have an opportunity on the search engine landscape.

I don’t think that many people would argue with me that this generations MTV is YouTube and it’s lesser cousins. The highest viewed videos on YouTube represent a large number of musical artists. Social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and to a lesser extent last.fm are connecting artists with their fans in more rich way then any fans in history.

How big is this aspect of an artist’s success online? Britney Spears is hiring a full time social media expert and she started by posting on Harvard job boards. My point is that the music industry has changed, the way fans are interacting has changed, but the way we consume music videos hasn’t for the most part.

Music videos are still, even on YouTube, just broadcast video. They might drive people back to a website or a myspace page, but for the most part lack any form of interactivity. Why aren’t people pushing the envelope?

For starters the budgets in the music business are impossibly small for online marketing, they’re shrinking, and I feel that a huge portion of the big labels are in state of atrophy as they continue to panic at how their industry is changing. There’s an opportunity to do something wonderful and really cut through the clutter, but someone is going to to have take a risk. Dear music industry, here’s a suggestion: Use your music video production budget to produce an interactive music video that in it’s primary formed would be viewed on a website. It would extend the artform of music video production, leverage your video production budget to aid marketing, and interact with fans in a way that is obviously successful in all other aspects of your online interactions with them.

Luckily some people have taken some interesting experimental attempts at this. The indie band Arcade Fire released two of the singles off their last album in this form last year. They created quite a bit of buzz considering the fairly low profile of the band (in comparison to some mega-artists). MGMT also released an interactive video using Quicktime.  I guess no one had heard of Flash at their managmenet group. Aside from that minor jab, they deserve respect for making the effort. Check them out below and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about.

I think they’re all interesting and add a new dimension to the music. What excites me is that I know there is so much more potential there in terms of breaking new creative ground.

Arcade Fire – Black Mirror
Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
MGMT – Electric Feel (Interactive with Quicktime)

One of the things I learned recently is that the music companies are getting paid royalties now for the number of views on their music videos by video sharing sites. If it’s actually a revenue stream for them – doesn’t it make sense that they’d want to create more versions of their videos personalized by the fans and up online?

There is no doubt in my mind that this is the natural evolution for music videos. The sad part is that someone like Madonna will probably be the first big artist to come in and do this in a big way and get all the credit for it.

It works by providing the augmented reality software with some form of tracking marker that it knows to overlay 3 dimensional graphics over. The results are astounding – it truly allows consumers to feel as though you have brought a little piece of your imaginary world into their reality.

Right now marketers and technology innovators have done some very interesting examples of augmented reality using symbols printed locally and are then placed in front of your home web camera. Although I think this is fun and definitely buzz worthy I believe the true opportunity is in the not too distant future as more and more mobile phones adopt the technology. Image the potential of being able to re-invent outdoor and print marketing by adding an interactive component to almost any ad by just pointing your mobile device at it.

If you know of any other great examples please forward them to me. I have included a great example of a two player mobile game for Fanta developed by my friends over at the Hyper Factory as well a brilliant Papervision 3D and augmented reality combination.

Visit Fanta.eu to watch a video of the Fanta game in action or actually use it with compatible smart phones.

Otherwise check out the video after the jump.

Papervision – Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

Msnbc.com’s brand new inauguration video player features some innovative features: beyond streaming the live event itself, it features inauguration speeches stretching back for decades. Each has a transcript in a sidebar. Click a word or a tag, and you jump instantly to that location in the video. Highlight a sentence or two, and it spits out a little code, letting you embed that exact clip on your blog. Dynamic editing, right from the player… More about the player in the Wall Street Journal.