Flow-based Triggers

Paul Golding does a nice job describing the opportunity and impact of flow-based mobile applications on our daily lives.  I like the way Paul talks about weaving the flow of our activity streams into how we experience "events" in our personal "timelines" and the "timelines" of others.  

For me, the most interesting of Paul's points is found in his last sentence - "The tools invented to seize the moment have begun to define the moment".  

We will increasingly be triggered to take action in our personal and work lives by the transactions, conversations and relationships found within our activity streams and the activity streams of others. 

The real opportunity for flow-based applications is to evolve from helping us capture and share the moment, to creating triggers for new ones... new transactions, new conversations and new relationships at work and at home that would not have been created otherwise. 

Below are a few sections from his article published in the recent issue of Vodafone's Receiver: 

"We are rapidly headed towards a new era of human interaction that is marked by perpetual conversations and perpetual info drip-feed, as enabled by the umbilical of the mobile.  With its always-on and always-carried potential, the mobile allows our streams of consciousness and related intentions to be converted instantly into actions with both local and remote effects.  Not only does the mobile enable us to seize the moment, but increasingly it is the cause of the moment, adding more and more events to our daily timeline.

Time is nothing other than the intervals on a clock face counted out by the advancing second hand. But this is not how we experience time. We experience time as a series of moments measured out by events. Our personal timeline is a series of events that happen moment by moment and are dominated by the events that happen in our brains – thoughts, contemplations, urges and emotions bubbling up from our sub-concious stream, some of them converted by the conscious into intentions and sometimes into actions. It is communication and self-expression at the speed of thought. 

Not long ago, phone calls ('ring ring'), texts ('beep beep') and the alarm clock ('brrr brrr') were the only ways that our mobiles might 'interrupt' us. With Twitter, other Flow based Apps (my edit) and widgets, this is changing. But don't mistake these moments as interruptions. These are the moments that make the stepping stones of our daily timeline across the ocean of people and info chatter. We weave them into our timeline and they weave us into theirs. The tools invented to seize the moment have began to define the moment."