After reading an article in The Washington Post the other day about the upcoming integration of a facebook application into GM’s in-vehicle OnStar systems, I couldn’t help but make the comparison to proposed REDCAR features.
Facebook has the potential for organizing groups of people through their interests and preferences, event calendars, places and memories, daily routines and current status updates, but it misses out on that final step: direct connection. Because of this, there lingers a perception of this social networking site as more of a toy than a tool. While some of the more ingrained users employ these features to the extent of sending official invites, messaging rather than emailing, or adopting its calendar features as their primary means of scheduling, a large portion of its user-generated content tends to be whimsical.
But pairing Facebook’s technology to create remote connections with REDCAR’s ability to create physical adjacencies can have much greater potential toward collaboration, resulting in time and financial efficiencies, increase in personal interactions, sustainability, and the general organization of our cities and the groupings of people that operate within them.
OnStar meets social networking