Social Networks & Next Generations

I am a young person that belongs to the first generations that created an account on Facebook or so. Recently I was looking at the pictures of an old friend from university; so she got married, and got a wonderful kiddo.Then, I had flash questions about the impact of social networks on the identity of next generations, and on their social behavior. I will illustrate my thoughts by imagining my self the recently born son of my friend, but in the Future.

So I get 14 years old, and my parents allow me to use the internet. Since all of my school buddies have a Facebook profile, it will be the first think to do. Then I add my parents since luckily Facebook suggests this :). The surprise is here: I just discover the whole history of my parents and myself.

What will be my reactions when i discover all of the history of my parents? will we still have the need for those intimate moments of father and son where he tells him special stories from his past to teach him a life lesson? what if in this history there was some bad pictures? and don't tell me that you can control everything on Facebook, because you can't. So how will my father will teach me the wrong from bad, if I saw on his profile a picture of him doing the opposite?

Now consider me finding pictures of me since they gave me the first bath, till the day i had my first music concert in the school... At the first site I'll like that, but afterwards I am pretty sure that it will annoy me.

We can imagine a lot and really a lot of awkward maybe funny situations for the next coming generations. I am eager to see how will social relations will be affected in our new future by social networks. The next video is a nice video depicting the whole life of a man through Facebook. Gladly,  I am not the only one asking himself such questions.

Social answering machine

A few days ago I was in a music class and I was messing with my smartphone. Then suddenly I had this idea: What about an application that updates the message on my answering machine just like a status on a social network? for example in my case in the music class i would have started this application on my phone, then written “I am in the music class” in the status field, then updated the status. If someone calls me and he gets my answering machine, he will hear “I am in the music class”.

As a geek, I thought about the technical aspects of the idea, and i figured out a way to do it. First, you must redirect your incoming calls when you do not respond, to a fixed number. For example, with Orange in France all you have to do is dial: **61* redirection number #. You should own the redirection number, on which you install an interactive voice server (IVR), Asterisk for instance. The VXML script of the IVR must do the following: read for the redirected caller the message text file (e.g.: msg.txt containing the string “I am in the music class”), then save his voice message if he leaves one in an audio file. We will suppose that this is a simple answering machine, so afterwards it sends the voice message to me as a mail, and notify me by SMS for example using the Orange SMS API or other APIs. On the same machine, we install a web server with a simple servlet that changes the msg.txt file upon an authenticated web request. Lets suppose that the request is according to the following form:

www.mydomain.com/servlet/setMessage?msg=I%20am%20in%20the%20music%20class

The server side is done, all we need now is a simple client application on the smartphone. On the application UI, I write my new status, and click on update. the application sends an HTTP request to our webserver with the new status in parameter to update the answering machine message.

We can add complexity the idea by integrating the traditional answering machine services, like calling back to hear the message, or we can have several customized statuses according to the calling number (SFR offers a similar service: SFR Repondeur+). Social extensions maybe thought of, like synchronisation with Facebook or others.

Would you appreciate such an option in you answering machine if it existed in you offer?

Achraf