The skinnable world

Sorry for the long quote, but Terra Nova's Greg Lastowka simply raises too many interesting questions about a topic that's always on my mind...

"One question to ask is how we'll all feel about this creep away from the physically visible and toward the virtually important. People seem already annoyed enough about how those talking into tiny cell-phones disrupt standard social expectations. What will they think of people playing pervasive games in real spac? And if Dave Winer is annoyed now at how Google Toolbar annotates his web pages, how is he going to feel when Google starts annotating him and his physical spaces? If we can dress up Martha digitially, how long will it be before we start enhancing ourselves digitally, dressing our real environments with virtual ornaments, and even dressing other people with metadata that can be "seen" by those who share their local space and own the right virtual glasses? Our increasingly large metadata profiles are out there now, in fact, they're just not geographically linked, so that (most of us) can't currently profile the random passerby on the street. But we're starting to profile locations -- that's a first step down a longer road."