Vevo called this first effort to bring the alive web to Vevo a “test run,” and said that the artists chosen will be actively involved. From the announcement blog post:

The best part? There’s a good chance that the artists themselves will drop in from time to time. Maybe announced, maybe not. It would be pretty cool to check a Snoop video and chat with the big Dogg himself at the same time. The more you hang out, the better your chances are.

Chill launched in August as a an offshoot of social conversation site Namesake, and it has clearly taken a few hints from the real-time collaborative music platform Turntable.fm. Users get cute comic avatars and can collectively program video playlists together.

The site isn’t exclusively focused on music videos, and in the past it has been used to stream live videos from events like TechCrunch Disrupt. However, hanging out together and watching music videos seems like a natural fit, and Snoop Dogg has actually been active on the site even before the partnership with Vevo was announced.

Learn more about the future of the alive web at the GigaOM RoadMap conference this week in San Francisco.

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Cars	Drive the next always-on gadget Katie Fehrenbacher	Work	Work is no longer a place Jessica Stillman
Stuff	Access trumps ownership Katie Fehrenbacher	Data	Data is the new digital currency Derrick Harris
Media	We are all media now Mathew Ingram	Identity	Identity is an industry Mathew Ingram
Body	Your doctor is a chip Stacey Higginbotham	Travel	Go anywhere, instantly Colleen Taylor
Web	The future web is alive Om Malik	Location	Where is the new who Ryan Kim

Images courtesy of Tesla Motors, DaveBleasdale, Petteri Sulonen, KatBPhotography, Urban Aquarium Video and Light, xurde, guiguis, kowitz, Marc_Smith, Aperturismo.

Go to page 2 (of 11) on GigaOM .

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It’s fun to watch her interact with these things, not only because she’s already better at some of the games than me. The really interesting stuff happens when stuff doesn’t work the way she expects it to, or when she finds ways to use tech that I hadn’t thought of. That’s when I get to learn how tech should work, and why some of my assumptions about it are wrong. That’s right, I’m a 35 year old journalist who has been covering tech for 15 years, getting schooled by a 4 year-old. And I’m loving it.

Here are five things my daughter taught me about tech:

Touch screens change the way we see the world

My daughter must have been two when we took her to a mall that had backlit billboards, advertising some movie that used what looked like icons as part of its title. She went up to it and started pressing and swiping things, fully expecting that something would happen. It was funny, but also very revealing.

I grew up with the command line, and gradually made the jump to graphical user interfaces. Both shaped the way I think about technology, the way I organize information and the way I interact with new types of devices. My daughter’s experience with technology is fundamentally different. She has never used a mouse, and still has trouble using the trackpad of my Macbook Pro.

Her experience is instead completely shaped by mobile devices with touch screens, which is why she naturally assumes that that any screen is a touch screen. Her view of the world is much more tactile, and she prefers to navigate surfaces to retrieve information instead of diving into nested structures. In short: She wants everything at her fingertips, which gives her a much more organic, immediate connection to technology.

Voice needs to be ubiquitous (or Siri is a huge deal)

"Search for penguins!"

I use a slightly older Android phone, the T-Mobile MyTouch 3G Slide, which was released before Google added voice commands to much of Android. It includes a somewhat gimmicky “Genius button,” which offers voice-activated search for contacts, local businesses and web results. I showed it to my daughter, trying to impress her with searches for nearby ice cream shops. She loved it.

Then, a few days later, she used my phone to watch videos on YouTube, and started to scream: “Search for penguins! Search for penguins!” That’s when I understood that voice on mobile isn’t just something that helps to keep the eyes on the road when you try to pull up an address. It’s an essential part of the device.

We talk to our phone all the time – so it should understand us, and pull up some good penguin videos whenever we feel like it. At least on mobile devices, voice needs to be ubiquitous. Granted, some people may feel a little uncomfortable talking to Siri in public. But for the generation growing up now, it’s going to be weird not to talk to your phone. Why would you use a painful onscreen keyboard if it can hear us just fine?

Linear TV is dead

I’ve been writing about the future of television for years, but one of my biggest aha-moments came when my daughter watched TV at her grandparents a while back. She’s used to watching videos on YouTube and Netflix, (but her grandparents at that time only had basic cable. Guess what happened when her favorite show got interrupted by a commercial? She got mad. Really, really mad.

That’s when I understood that linear TV has no future. Sure, we’ve all used DVRs to free ourselves from the schedule of broadcast and cable channels, and online sources of content have added even more flexibility. But we also still remember the experience of passively consuming hours of TV without interruption, including ads and whatever was on next. Kids growing up today don’t have that experience, and TV is about watching what they want, when they want it.

Games are social

My daughter's favorite game: Bakery Story.

Okay, this one may be obvious to many, it it was still an eye opener for me: I’ve never been a big gamer, and I’ve been having a particularly hard time understanding casual gaming. I just don’t see the point of putting hours into maintaining a virtual farm. My daughter on the other hand is magically drawn to games that feel like work to me.

Her favorite: Bakery Story, a game that consists of managing a bakery and selling cake to people. It’s pretty challenging for her, but there’s one thing she really gets a kick out of: She can spend hours visiting other people’s bakeries, checking out what they have done to the place and what kind of pastries they’re offering to their customers. It’s like taking a peek into other people’s lives, much in the same way we look at the Facebook profiles of our friends – and to her, it’s much more rewarding than getting points in some traditional game where the score doesn’t matter to anyone but her.

The alive web will be huge

Here’s another thing that’s interesting about my daughter playing Bakery Story: Whenever she visits other people’s bakeries, she talks about “calling them.” And if you think a little bit about it, equating real-time social experiences with phone calls totally makes sense. We’ve been using Skype video calls a lot to keep her connected to relatives in Europe, so she is used to the fact that phone calls are becoming more and more about telepresence.

You don’t just call people to talk to them, you call people to share an experience, show them your room and generally spend some time together. That’s the very same idea that also has made Turntable.fm and Google’s Hangouts so popular. It’s not about connecting with intent and purpose, but about sharing real time experiences online. Services that tap into this need are going to be huge, and the generation growing up with them now will embrace them as a natural extension of the technology that surrounds them.

Want to learn more about the alive web and the way companies can design social and intelligent objects for future generations? Then check out our Roadmap conference, which includes speakers like frog’s chief creative officer Mark Rolston and Dreamworks Animation CTO Ed Leonard.

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Day is promising to visit as many Hangouts of her fans within a three-hour window as possible. She announced the house calls on Google+, where she explained:

I’ll answer questions about the show and we can even pose for a photo that you can screencap and post later! Cool? Cool.

The Dragon Age: Redemption house calls will kick off with a post on Day’s Google+ profile on Tuesday at 10 a.m. PST that will ask viewers to post links to their Hangouts in the comments. Day will then click through those links, visiting one Hangout after another.

Hangouts have become a kind of killer feature for Google+ in recent months, and Google has been capitalizing on the popularity of its group video chat service by adding a broadcast option that makes it possible for an unlimited number of viewers to follow a Hangout.

The company has promoted some of these Hangout broadcasts aggressively, going as far as linking to a will.i.am-hosted Hangout from its Google homepage. This weekend, Google facilitated another popular Hangouts broadcast, featuring the two Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama.

However, while popular, these broadcasts have been missing some of the interactivity and intimacy that makes Hangouts so special. Day’s house call experiment, on the other hand, plays with this intimate element, which could make for a much more interesting experience for its participants. And who knows? Maybe we’ll see political campaigns utilizing these kinds of house calls next.

Want to learn more about the growing importance of Hangouts and other aspects of the alive web? Then check out our Roadmap Conference, coming up on Nov. 10 in San Francisco.

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This is an opportunity that others having been looking to exploit including such services as Momento, Memolane and Proust , which help create digital timelines and personal journals based on data contributed by the user and pulled from various online sources. Google has started pushing this message home with its “Dear Sophie” commercial, in which a father documents the growth of his daughter by sending her multimedia e-mails of her. And Foursquare has been talking up this angle recently with its new lists functions, which can organize past places, and the new event check-ins, which help people document what they did when they checked-into locations.

The power of the past

The past is increasingly attractive because of the growing amount of things we do online — all this data exhaust we create. As time goes on, there’s a lot that can be done with it, and it has value when it’s aggregated and analyzed. That’s the premise behind more services like RunKeeper’s Health Graph API, which organizes a user’s health and wellness activities and let’s people see how they’re doing over time. As we look at all this information, it can be good for not just preserving memories or helping us understand each other better, but for self-improvement and awareness. We are slowly moving toward a world where everything is being documented by sensors and the next step is to organize and analyze it all, to produce what some call the quantified self.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that Facebook has moved to create a sort of automatic biography for users based on their Facebook lives that they can augment and add to. The site is home to a wealth of personal data that collectively tells a rich story about our lives yet much of it gets lost and has no lasting value to us. By creating a tool to better capture, preserve and visualize it all, Facebook becomes more than a time-killing social network, it becomes the holder of our past.

What Facebook has to gain

Now Facebook isn’t doing this just to help us cherish our memories. The more data it has and the more it understands what has emotional meaning to us, the better it can target us with ads. By letting us preserve the things, activities and apps that matter to us, it gives Facebook an even better way to tailor ads that demand a higher rate from advertisers.

“Our primary business model and it always will be, is advertising,” says Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of Platforms and Partnerships told Wired’s Steven Levy. “Our platform makes Facebook more interesting so people spend more time on it, because I’m learning about my friends and I’m sharing things about myself and I’m discovering new things. And it also makes it possible for us to put an ad in front of you that’s likely to be interesting to you.”

But Timelines can also be an opportunity to create recommendation tools for users to suggest products they might like based on their tastes and interests. Also, creating more engaging profile pages increases the stickiness of the site and how much time people spend on Facebook.

Perhaps most fundamentally for Facebook, Timeline will give people a new reason to go into oversharing mode. By providing people a way to come back to old entries and gain insights from them, users better see the value of sharing — and the cycle is perpetuated. Maybe you’re nervous about connecting your Spotify account to Facebook. But hey, wouldn’t it be great ten years from now to know what music you were obsessed with? Before, the incentive to share was more limited to how you could impress or communicate with friends in the present time. Photos and videos could obviously be revisited but many things were lost in the past. But Timeline means there can be a point to all of this sharing: a lasting repository that helps paint a picture of your life. And it shows that if you can organize and bring meaning to the past, it can help a company find success in the future.

Can Facebook be your digital scrapbook?

I’m not sure if everyone looks at Facebook as a digital journal and certainly, there is a creepiness factor to overcome in relying on one company to be the steward of your memories. But if Facebook can win over websites and apps to integrate with its updated Open Graph, which will preserve more user activities on Facebook, it will have an even more compelling argument for being a user’s scrapbook. I just wonder if you’ll be able to export any of these Timelines. That would be a great way to lock in users and keep people from defecting. It’s not exactly easy exporting your personal data but if Facebook makes it hard to move your memories somewhere else, it could have a powerful hold on people. And it would show again why owning the past could be even more useful for Facebook.

This move to organize past activity is increasingly what Facebook needs to do, I think, as it exploits the opportunities in its own timeline. It is further exploring the opportunities in the future, by helping people better discover what to do from their friends. And it’s really pushing to make the present more engaging, by encouraging real-time interactions, something Om has called the Alive Web. And it’s capitalizing on the past by making the all of this activity useful as a digital scrapbook. Facebook still has work to do; but today the company is showing that as far as the past goes, it’s got a good chance to be a winner.

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The site was built as a modern day message board or community forum, designed to engage users in real-time interaction around images that can be edited, tweaked and commented on. The site is meant to build off the growing interest in hanging out and engaging online, something Om calls the Alive Web, recently embodied in sites like Turntable.fm. Users riff off of uploaded images using a built-in remix photo editor or by applying stickers. Video, rich text and other tools are on their way in the months to come.

I chatted with Poole last week and he said the goal was to rethink what a message board should look like in a multimedia world. He said many of his ideas stemmed from his experience with 4chan, which has grown into a community of some 12 million users. But he wanted to evolve the premise beyond 4chan and create a more mainstream platform for community interaction.

4chan has gained a reputation as a sort of Wild West destination, where many an Interent meme is launched or fueled by its mostly anonymous users. Its denizens have also been known to pass around sophomoric jokes and graphic sexual imagery. Poole said he believes Canvas can grow even larger by playing off the best aspects of message boards, and capitalizing on people’s growing ease in spending long periods of time on the Web.

“For the longest time, people felt bad if they spent a lot of time on a computer. But there’s now a richness to online relationships and socializing that didn’t exist before,” Poole said. “The market is huge. Tens of millions of people use message boards and forums to hang out, chat, meet people. If we do a good job of offering these community experiences, it could be potentially a lot larger than 4chan ever was.”

While born out of the work that went into 4chan, New York City-based Canvas makes some clear departures, including its much more refined look. It also requires people to register with their Facebook ID, which Poole said is designed to discourage bad behavior. Users must agree to a code of conduct which prohibits adult content and limits profanities directed at other people. And perhaps most interestingly, Canvas includes an archive, something 4chan never had. Poole said the idea behind the archive is to understand the relationship between content and make it easier for people to explore, navigate and study the site.

“4chan is hard to study because it gets erased. It’s hard to trace the source of an idea. We were excited to see how you can trace content and how assets are related,” Poole said.

The early results suggest that Poole is off to a good start. He said since starting out with 4,000 users, the site has grown to well more than 50,000 users via private invites shared by members. According to Poole, the average user session length is 13-15 minutes, not quite up to the 18 minutes of 4chan but very promising. And he said he’s gotten a lot of users involved already, something every community struggles with. More than a quarter of users have remixed a photo on Canvas, and between a 1/4 and 1/2 of users have uploaded an image, remixed a photo, or applied a sticker that includes messages like smiley face, frown or cookie.

Unlike 4chan, which was boostrapped by Poole, Canvas has some serious backing from top investors. Canvas has raised $3.6 million from Union Square Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Founder Collective and SV Angel. With that money comes added expectations including questions about revenue.

Poole said he wants to introduce some premium features to Canvas that will help enhance engagement and improve the user experience. Display advertising will be a last resort and instead, Poole said revenue might revolve around premium tools or additional stickers like Canvas’ “#1″ stickers, which users collect for participating and can redeem for items or share with others. He said the key is to introduce premium features quickly and let the community get used to them, rather than foist such elements on them much later after certain expectations have been set.

“The more you can learn earlier, the better you can respond,” he said. “We’re rather know the ways to add value and we’d like to get into the equation and identify and explore the opportunities sooner rather than later.”

Ultimately, Poole said he believes Canvas can host a lot of unique communities that gather around the central platform. That, he said, can help create a much bigger opportunity with Canvas than currently exists with 4chan and other forums.

“4chan was a destination, but Canvas can be a community platform,” Poole said.

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Just as the marriage of the steam engine with the wheel opened up a world of possibilities, the marriage of microprocessors (everywhere) and network connections (everywhere) is opening up new vistas for the technology industry. The power of a computer in your pocket is such that it impacts how you find places to congregate and consume – from food to wine to clothes to even cars. Every day, you make decisions, based on what the iPhone (or Android or whatever) brings back from the web.

Everything that has a silicon beat – phones, eBook readers, game devices, cars, televisions to even heart rate monitors and scales – is being connected and in turn redefining the very idea of our economy. This state of constant connectedness is what makes it an exciting time. And as exciting as this time might be, today is a time of immense confusion. In order to make sense of many of the changes, I decided that it was time to host an event that gives us a roadmap to the future.

Unlike our previous events — Structure (infrastructure and cloud), Structure Data (data and cloud), Mobilize (mobile Internet), Net:Work (collaboration and work) and Green:Net (clean IT) — RoadMap is less about a single vertical and is more focused on the broader trends.

At GigaOM and our research service, GigaOM Pro, we try and provide our readers with information and insights that act as a guide as they make their decisions. GigaOM RoadMap is going to do that as a one-day conference and focus on the broader technology trends and how they impact businesses and what opportunities they can create.

What are those trends? Well, if you have been a subscriber of my Om Says newsletter, then you are quite familiar with some of the themes we are going to be exploring at the conference. These themes include:

• Data as the new plastic
• The Alive Web
• Collaborative consumption
• Networked cars
• The connected self
• Everything as a service

The event will be held in San Francisco on November 10 at the Mission Bay Conference Center. Further details about speakers will be announced shortly.

Stay tuned.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Cubo789

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Is 2011 the year of online music? It sure seems that way. From the introduction of iCloud and cloud music offerings from Amazon  and Google  to Spotify’s rapid growth in Europe to this week’s public offering by Pandora , digital music has never seemed more interesting.

Or more social. As Om wrote in his post earlier in the week, hot new social music site Turntable.fm is proving to be highly addictive for many lucky enough to get a beta invite, and it is a sign that a more immersive, more alive web has arrived.

There’s no doubt that music is the most social of all media online. Even before the Internet, music has always been as much about who you listen with as what you listen to. P2P sites like Napster hinted that online music had a social side, but it wasn’t until just a few years later, when Myspace  became the center of the online music universe, that the first era of social music had arrived (see the table below for the three “eras” of social music).

In the span of a few short years, it became necessary for almost any music artist — big or small — to have a Myspace page, and users loved to express themselves by uploading MP3s and creating playlists.

Over time Myspace declined, but the social playlist arrived. While Myspace was limited to one social network, sites like Last.fm — and later iLike and Rdio — enabled users to create playlists and share them with their friends through integration with popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter, taking social music outward.

Social playlists proved extremely popular, and they continue to form one of the foundations of success for companies like Spotify. But as Turntable.fm has shown, a new era of social music may be upon us, one that’s less about scaling wide (as is the case with social playlists) but more about going deep.

The third era of social music is about immersion, as sites like Turntable.fm and Outloud.fm make online music seem more like off-line social music sharing (remember that?) by adding more immediacy and intimacy to the experience.

But it’s not just about immersive social curation (which defines Turntable.fm). It’s also about more-immersive social creation. Users of social music creation and collaboration sites like SoundCloud  — which allow immediate feedback from your community down to the details in an individual track — are growing very fast, proving that the act of making music can be just as social as consuming it.

As a new era of social music arrives, it’s a fair question to ask whether these sites are too immersive as compared to more-lightweight, more-passive experiences like Pandora or Spotify. For some, they are, and they may require too much of an investment of time and interest to ever see the same wide popularity of basic social playlist and streaming sites.

But for those looking for deeper interaction around music online, don’t worry. You may become less productive in this new era, but your time has arrived.

For more analysis on the new era of social music, see my weekly update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Image courtesy of Flickr user Denim Dave

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Twitter and Facebook can be powerful tools for reporting on important events, including the uprisings in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden — but they can also become a powerful tool for surveillance as well, as the police and government authorities in Egypt and other countries have shown. What happens when we turn these tools of public surveillance on one another? We got a glimpse of that in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Wednesday, after the final game in the NHL playoffs, when citizens started posting photos of themselves rioting in the streets — and it’s a glimpse of a future some would rather not see.

As the riots were occurring, with hundreds of people reportedly injured and cars and buildings burned and looted, photos of those involved in the incidents started showing up on Twitter and on other social networks such as Facebook and Tumblr. Soon people were collecting them and asking for others to contribute — both on a Tumblr blog dedicated to the riots and on a Facebook page called “Vancouver Riot Pics: Post Your Photos” — and others were passing photos around on Twitter asking others to identify the people in them.

The local police also asked for help in identifying rioters and other lawbreakers. There’s no doubt that all of those crowdsourced photos would certainly help in that effort (police asked on Twitter for those with photos to hang onto them), especially since Facebook recently launched a facial-recognition service that auto-tags photos based on the suggestions of other users, something that critics have said is an invasion of privacy.

This vision of a future in which we all surveill and report on one another — the social media version of philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison made of mirrors that allows everyone to see what their neighbor is doing — doesn’t strike everyone as the kind of future they want to live in. Alexandra Samuel, writing in the Harvard Business Review, said that she sees this kind of Little Brother–style activity as a breach of the promise of social media, which is supposed to help form a community. She said:

I was deeply disturbed to see the community of social media enthusiasts embrace a new role: not in observation, not in citizen journalism, but in citizen surveillance.

But others argue that the kind of behavior seen in the aftermath of the Vancouver riots is a natural outgrowth of how social media functions. Open-web advocate and political consultant David Eaves wrote in response to Samuels that he sees the use of Twitter and Facebook to identify criminals as a natural step, although not necessarily one that we might want to see in every case. But what is the alternative, he asks: governments setting laws for what can be posted and what can’t?

In the end, Samuels is right that social media helps us create or enhance community — but what that community decides to do with those tools is a lot harder to control or determine. A great example is 4chan, the anarchic online forum that has given birth to dozens of Internet memes: The same community that can attack a defenseless 11-year-old girl and subject her to public ridicule can also marshal an incredible amount of effort to identify someone who tortured an animal and bring them to justice. Is that vigilantism? Perhaps.

The reality is that social media is an expression of society’s mores and desires in real time — another example of what Om has called the alive web. Sometimes those desires are good, and sometimes they are not. The same force that compelled people to post photos of suspected looters also convinced some to put together a crowdsourced effort to clean up the streets after the riots. Social media is just a tool, and it can cut in both directions. The sooner we learn that, the better.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Andy Roberts

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