INSTANT MESSAGING, THE SOCIAL CIRCLE, AND THE TELEPHONE [Forbes  Sep 1, 2003]

Researcher Mei Chuah at Accenture Labs is leading a project in reality instant messaging and online commerce, using software "robots" to find out what you and your friends are doing and then linking you together and brokering new adventures (such as "Interested in buying concern tickets together?") -- by your digital cell phone. Chuah says, "The point is to be connected to your social network at all time. Since you're always carrying it, the phone is the nexus and the portal to other devices -- it should sense and control them."

Quentin Hardy, writing for Forbes, explains that once companies realize they can sell more by creating social activities around their products, even more things will communicate, and we will respond to them. Chuah's own research interests gelled when she realized that a lot of the social networks went over into the physical world. People had parties with people they'd never met, except on the Internet: "I started thinking there wasn't that much of a boundary between the virtual and the real. It's all socialization... We will have people-to-machine wireless, people-to-pet -- all sorts of wireless communities. This is coming. The phone companies will have to adapt to survive." [NewsScan.com]