Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I like this one:
"The shadow app: I often hear developers say that their job is not to develop one application, but instead to develop two apps -- the public-facing application, and the private application, the "shadow app," which helps the company understand how the first application is working. Of course, statistics packages and traffic monitors are as old as the web, but these companies are explicitly rejecting any standard, pre-packaged code for this purpose, and are instead asking the questions they need for their specific businesses. One example: Flickr had a report of users with no contacts in the Flickr social network, which they called the "Loneliest Users" report. What a great report -- a way to see who is uploading photos but not sharing them with anyone! With that, they could go add themselves as contacts for these "loneliest" users, and teach them how to use the contact feature."

What you are referring to as "implicit computing", it's what Marc Hedlund coined "the shadow app".

Last.FM All you have to do is to listen to music, which you were doing anyway.

Microsoft has a delightful feature in its Office suite that tries to guess what you're trying to do by looking at what you type, then pops up a cute little paperclip-shaped elf to give you a helping hand.

Implicit computing is dangerous if executed poorly.

You could consider what typo-squatters do as the dark-side of this.

Amazon Recommendations do that. In fact, I have a friend who was having trouble thinking of a present for his wife. He cleared all his cookies, went to Amazon, and browsed some items that his wife liked. After about five minutes of this, Amazon gave him some great recommendations that he never would have thought of on his own.