RFID and the social life of objects

I'm at a conference in San Francisco today, and not blogging.

However, I wanted to note a very stimulating entry at Foe Romeo on the social life of objects.

A lot of talk about RFID has centered around 1) business uses, and 2) resulting privacy concerns. Foe Romeo's notion of using RFID as a tool for voluntarily documenting the social life of objects-- how often they've been used, how they've been read, and so on-- is stimulating for it suggests how smart players could create user-centered services that make RFID more familiar, and help deal with the privacy worries:

I'm very keen on the idea of user-initiated RFIDs for objects with emotional investment (like books and vinyl LPs) that can be killed or blocked by a recipient if they value their privacy more than the game.... Particularly if it allowed them to connect with future and past owners/collectors of that object, track its travels and recall forgotten details or annotations some time later. They are interested in the social life of objects.

Imagine a book that can say ‘I have been read by 36 people before you - in 3 cities (London, Sydney and Helsinki) - and all of them paused on page 132. I once spent 5 days in the lift at the British Library, just travelling up and down, after being released by a BookCrosser.’

Imagine a book that can tell its own story as well as the one contained within its pages.

This notion of using tags to voluntarily document the life of an object-- to turn ownership and use into a kind of collective game-- is one that we've already seen take off with geocaching, and Where's George, a game in which you use the serial numbers on dollar bills to track where they've been spent. There's already a system called BookCrossing that works like Where's George. (Both systems are completely voluntary.)

This idea of books that tell their own stories also connects to the world of social navigation, about which more later.