iPods get people laid and can improve their memories, too!

<![CDATA[Here's a great story I heard over lunch with my good friend Tony Fadell, who leads the iPod engineering group at Apple. It seems he gets a lot of email from people living in college dorms, thanking him for their improved sex life.
Why? Well, their iPods have allowed them to create personal playlists that they carry along as a soundtrack to their lives. When they publish their playlists to Rendezvous networks in their dorms, other students surf those playlists to get an idea what people are like.
So, late at night a guy sitting in his dorm may hear a knock on the door and, opening it, find a girl who loves their playlist. Tony gets mail from guys thanking him for this hidden feature in the iPod.
“It’s just that one vector that allows people to connect,” Tony said. We were talking about how walls inside ourselves are starting to come down and I agreed, based my experience with Match.com (I helped raise their initial funding and was on the board of directors for a few years, not to mention that my sister met her husband on Match and my mother-in-law’s sole reason for learning Windows, as far as I can tell, is to use Match—though I think eHarmony is tempting her away).
Our hunger to connect is tremendous, more than the one for sex, though it appears the sex is better—or more easily consummated—than when I was in college. I guess it’s time to read the new Tom Wolfe book, after all.
Anyhow, we turned to a new kind of social exchange that Tony has discovered with his iPod Photo. He and friends who have loaded their pictures, from childhood to the last few days, onto their iPod Photo device. Using the touch wheel, they scroll through the whole collection in a couple minutes, presenting a kind of time-lapse view of their lives. It lets them share in a few minutes a lifetime of experience and discover things in common.
So, to break the ice at a party, imagine passing iPods around so people can explore playlists and photo collections. “Hey, I was at that Stones concert!” or “I’ve been to that pub in Dublin, too!” kind of revelations could start conversations.
Vectors of experience have never crossed so easily and our lives have never been so easily recored (I asked him to build an iPod video camera with a lite version of Final Cut built in that allowed me to quickly edit a segment and upload it to my Web server—the iPod touch wheel is an ideal physical interface to video editing). The question is whether that will make us more tolerant of one another or just put everyone at risk of an inquisition….]]>