Yesterday Google launched their new Google Mobile App for the iPhone. The biggest innovation is that it allows people to search by voice. And not the geeky command based sentences we use behind a computer (‘restaurant Rotterdam’), but actual sentences (‘show me restaurants in Rotterdam that serve pizza’). It also monitors where I am and uses this data to enhance the search results. View the Google promo video

The iPhone has changed from a great phone into a multitouch device that is redefining interaction design. It has changed in a gameboy, planner, fishpond and even a DJ tool. I’m starting to suspect that it is actually a Transformer, but have not yet found proof… until now. I would have suspected the iPhone to change into a walking robot or an ice cream machine, but never… ever would I have thought that it could actually change into a flute. But with Ocarina it just did.

Ocarina is an application that changes your phone into a working flute. When you blow into the microphone it will generate the sound of an ocarina; the flute originating from the Zelda games. If you want to play tunes you can put your fingers on the holes displayed on the screen. And it actually sounds quite nice:

SMule: Ocarina [Zeldarian] from SonicMule, Inc. on Vimeo.

But what makes this application really special is the additional feature: the ability to listen to other people playing the Ocarina at that exact moment. You’ll see a globe of the world, on which lights around the world are displayed, showing people playing the Ocarina. One moment you’re listening to somebody trying out the Ocarina in Japan and the next moment to a beautiful play in New York. You get the feeling that you are eavesdropping, which is something special.

And they do have to be interesting — for social applications, again more than conventional software, must be interesting. More often than not they are interesting because they are used as tools for talk. Talking with, to, at, amongst, in front of, behind, and to the side of. Talking with friends tends to be interesting to those involved simply because it is among friends. But where the face to face dimensions of social interaction are also rewarding for the obvious reasons, social applications must deliver a working substitute. There is no real “spending time together” online.

Even chatrooms, which are as much a precursor of lifestreaming as anything else online, can only approximate this sense of togetherness. I recall early days in IRC chatrooms where that sense of being there or of being in it was as much due to the suspense and waiting (for somebody to type out their response) as it was due to the “room” itself. One might even argue that this pressure of time grows in the user the slower the technology is to record and transmit time. The longer the latency, the greater the waiting, and thus the greater the anticipation, suspense, and urgency! (Is it not said that suspense in film is simply the time that it takes for something to happen?).

Swurl.com is interesting because it has a visual timeline of the lifestream (pictured above). In calendar format, and well-designed, the timeline looks good and is an attractive visual representation. It’s low on conversational content and talk, but it captures the past of a user’s activity in a compelling presentation. Plurk.com also has a timeline, but one that is used to steer interaction (and which looks more like a horizontal river display). Not only does Swurl’s calendar provide thumbnails of pictures and shortcuts to posts, it expands to accommodate periods of heavy activity. All days do not look alike. I like that.

This variation is important in lifestreaming apps. In contrast to the profile-based site or service, the stream stands in for the profile. The person’s talk stands in for profile elements. These choices make sense, because the call to action in a lifestreaming service is talk. It’s not browsing, searching, or navigating. At least not quite yet (I believe we’re ready for more order and structure). Really, each message/post/tweet in a lifestreaming app is its own call to (inter)action, which is also why most users are in it “now” or never.

Which makes Swurl’s representation of past user activity interesting to me. Most lifestreaming have stayed away from the archive of past activity (what’s the pleasure in paging backwards through a user’s posts?). But there’s a lot of value in past activity, and visual coverage of the past can take many forms (think Edward Tufte). We’ve seen none of them yet (Chirpscreen’s slideshows come to mind, though it would be nice to see them become actionable) but I’m certain that we will.

If twitter is the power curve of lifestreaming, then apps like swurl might show us some of the value in the long tail — the long tail being the past. To picture this, take the standard long tail graph and turn it sideways. The Present is the curve, the Past is the tail.

Mining the tail of time is mining in depth rather than mining across connections. Mining the connections of past time, for lifestreaming apps, might mean drawing connections across the past times (pastimes, experiences, too) of a site’s users. Currently, Swurl engages conversations around a user and his or her posts. But we could imagine indexing user streams for the purpose of making connections and extracting content. After all, a user’s post posts, talk, uploads, etc are used by many applications to predict or anticipate choices and preferences.

I’m excited to see what Swurl, with minimal complexity, has done to wrap a bit more around lifestreaming than we get out of tools like twitter. Twitter will remain for me my primary talk tool, as it has and will continue to have the best audience awareness. But if you wanted to imagine social networking, and profile-based social networking around lifestreaming instead of profile pages, Swurl would be a good place to start.

Join me on Swurl!