Extracting knowledge from habits

Maculey said it best

“The measure of a man’s character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.”

In essence, what you do is what you are. Yet, this doesn’t easily translate to our increasingly interconnected online world (Penny Arcade sums it up in a comic strip).

Web 2.0 today lets us define all kinds of relationship. We create circles of interests based on what we say, not what we do. We add and remove each other as friends on whims.

Just like in real life, everyone wants to associate with people we admire (after all, we are the company we keep.

This desire do be associated means social graphs will always be more or less inaccurate. Two people connect on linkedin, or three people are in each other’s IM lists, or someone subscribes to someone else’s twitter feed.

What does that really mean? One’s definition of friendship is rarely equal to another one’s. The reciprocal pressure of EBay-itis (where anything less than an AAAAAA+++++ rating means you suck) doesn’t help to correctly describe relations.

There needs to be a better way.

We think there is. Over at Habitual Knowledge we’re working hard to create an engine that automatically extracts and formalizes these relations based on what you do, rather than what you say.

More later …

Comments

[emory]

This is really interesting Hans, and reminds me of the work Justin Hall is doing with "Passively Multiplayer" software.

He also wrote an essay in 1995 or 1996 called "I am not my habits," which I found rather interesting as well.

Passively Multiplayer is online here: http://www.pmog.com/