Social technology & data collection; would you be surprised to see data become like a currency?

An automatic consequence of most social technologies is data collection- tweeting, foursquare checkins, facebook status updates, delicious tagging and uploading photos to flickr- all contribute to data sets.

Developers continually create applications for us to use these data sets. A recent one that I have seen is Where do you go, by Steven Lehrburger. It allows users to use their foursquare checkin data and google maps to create a heat map displaying where they go.

Considering future applications of these types of data sets stretch creative boundaries. The amount of data collected is at scale that in statistical terms is a large enough sample size to interpret trends and patterns in mash ups of different data sets.

Using the example of Where do you go, imagine that rather than inputting a single users checkin data, the whole cities checkin data was used to create the heat map. Instantly, there would be a visual representation of the more popular places. Now throw some time data into that mix; as time passes movement in the heat patches would occur indicating places that are more and less popular based on what time of day it is.

It is not difficult to envisage this type of data becoming a currency in business. Having access to something like foursquare behaviour patterns creates an opportunity for venues to market directly to their target based on behaviour as well as demographic.

Consider the ability to automatically track the movement of patrons visiting a dinner venue before and after their visit; patterns would start to emerge; for example- the type of venue (if any) that patrons were at directly before visiting the dinner venue- analysis of the data would produce probability based information.

If a venue knew the exact probability of its patrons attending a bar directly before arriving at their venue, and the probability was high, they could very quickly plug that information into a financial model and develop very profitable campaigns.

Data collection is an automatic consequence of using social technology and there is massive amounts of value contained in the data sets that we contribute to daily.

Would you be surprised to see data become like a currency?