Robert Scoble walks through three emerging apps: Highlight for location-based socializing, Face.com for face recognition, and Homesnap for property lookup via AR. He worries whether users will accept how far these push past the privacy line.
What are you excited about right now? What's on the horizon? I know that you really have your eye on the up and coming.
You know, I'm watching all sorts of different startups, from cloud computing startups to this new thing called Highlight. Highlight is interesting because it shows other people who are on highlight within 100 yards of you. And even if you think that's freaky and not interesting, I think it informs a new kind of app that's coming. Thanks. Because we built our social graphs out on Facebook, and Facebook knows all about us, we can build a new kind of app that lets us compare friends or dating or whatever and see new things about the world and the people who are close to us. I think it's going to end up with Google Goggles, where I'm going to look at you. And there's this Israeli company called Face.com that has face detection, and it'll say who you are and then show all your facts on Face.
I've been predicting that for a long time. Anybody who watches these interviews know that's what I'm waiting for.
It's really close. The question for these entrepreneurs and these companies is, where's the freaky line? And how far over that freaky line can they push people? Because Instagram, when you first hear about it, is like, that is freaky. That's weird. Or like, I've been showing people this new app called Homesnap, where you take a picture of a house that's any house in the United States, and it shows you how much that house is sold for and all sorts of information about that house. So the camera and the compass and the GPS are all working together to find where you're standing and where you're aiming and find that house. And people say that's creepy because even though it's public information, it's taken from a public street, so it's public. But these new kinds of apps are playing with us, and we're like, should we really go there? Should we support this? And so this freaky line is going to constantly be pushed, and it'll be interesting to see how consumers react to them.
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