Recently I spent an afternoon with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. She's author of the Crafter Manifesto, and recently launched ThingLink, a "free product code for creative work." The basic idea is very simple:
Thinglink.org is an open database where makers can register free unique identifiers for their work and create labels for their products. The beta was launched at the Maker Faire/San Francisco in April.
Artists, crafters, designers, and small producers stand to benefit from online recommendation systems because recommendation systems place their products on equal footing with those of the large corporations. However, recommendation systems require unique identifiers for products. UPCs, EANs and EPCs are examples of standard ID schemas. These codes are not accessible to individuals and small producers especially in developing countries because the codes cost money and reserving them is a complex process.
Thinglink is a free, alternative product ID code that can be attached to products in the form of a human-readable label, a barcode, or a RFID tag. The idea is that anyone can thinglink a product, and anyone with the will and the skills is free to create a recommendation system for thinglinked products.
I think there are a bunch of provocative things here, all wrapped up in a very simple object.
First is the idea that there's value in attaching digital IDs to handmade-- or really any unique-- objects. Ten years ago, creating a unique identifier system that closes the gap between an object and information about that object would have seemed really weird, or just sinister; but now, at least among some circles, the value of such a system is easier to see. (ThingLinks are little bits of spime.)
But this isn't just a matter of creating a UPC scheme for crafts. Industry codes establish objects as members of a family, and do so largely for purposes of supply chain and inventory management. While you might be able to build such functionalities around ThingLink, its purpose seems to different: ultimately, it's not about helping establish some object as part of a category, but capturing unique information about it. This is particularly cool because, as Dan Pink might put it, more and more of us don't buy things; we buy things that have interesting stories.
Of course, the two functionalities aren't mutually exclusive. Consider books, which have ISBN numbers. Booksellers who deal in rare or used books can use ISBN numbers just like Amazon; but they also want to collect information about specific books. Antiquarian booksellers record information about a book's overall condition, dust jacket, marginal notes, inscriptions, dedications, water and mold damage, and other things; having a way for that information to be associated with books would be quite useful.
The fact that the system is low-tech compared to UPC codes is also something that works in its favor. It means that the barriers to entry are pretty low, and may create more room for experimentation and evolution. For example, I could imagine a in which weavers could send pictures of their latest creations to ThingLink via their camera cell phones, and have the system send back an ID for that object, and create a record of it in the database (with the ID number, the picture, creation date, and information about who sent it). Such a system might be like folksonomies or Wikipedia: informal and imperfect, but good enough for everyday use, and very attractive when the alternative is nothing at all.
But what struck me most forcefully wasn't anything about ThingLink itself, but the casual ambitions behind it. Have we really reached the point where a graduate student in Helsinki, Finland, working with a few friends and a couple off-the-shelf commercial services, create an international standard? Are there enough servers in the world, enough cheap computers, and sufficiently ubiquitous Internet access-- not to mention an instinct regarding the value of using common protocols, if not absolutely formal standards-- to make this possible? Can individuals now command the resources to do what used to require formal organizations, lots of special interest group meetings, and offices in Geneva? Josh Schachter pulled off something like this with del.icio.us; of course, Tim Berners-Lee arguably did this with the World Wide Web protocol (though being at CERN and being able to build on a trend toward standardization in publishing formats helped).
Maybe.
Technorati Tags: business, cooperation, culture, digital-physical, RFID, Shaping Things, Web 2.0
I've been very cautious of this project since I first heard about last year. It feels like a technological solution to a social problem. Can a Finnish graduate student create a global standard for uniquely identifying items? Sure, as easily as anyone can create a one-column database table and hand out guaranteed-unique numbers to passers-by.
The actual problem has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with consensus: why is ThingLink's name space any better or worse than others? It currently represents a single point of failure, bound to ThingLink's continued willingness to pay DNS and hosting fees. How is it any different from creating a web page for an object (say, in the myspace.com, geocities.com, or stamen.com name spaces) and affixing that on a sticker? That certainly eliminates the primary point of failure, while simultaneously making the whole problem seem a lot less sexy than ThingLink lets on.
The advantages provided by ThingLink are the same as the advantages provided by various other social-network sites: the name space offers social context and expectations about the kinds of people likely to create points of reference there. This is absolutely useful, but not universally and not for the same reasons.
Posted by: Michal Migurski | July 16, 2006 at 01:35 PM