I’ve been thinking a lot about A/B testing lately. So many of our experiences online are mediated by this kind of constant tweaking and measuring. What particularly fascinates me is that, when we visit a site like Amazon.com, there is no singular experience we can point to or talk about. If I visit the site, I may get a slightly, or even radically different view than you. Colors may change, text and image may be swapped. In the case of new sites like the New York Times, I may get entirely different headlines for the same article depending on my demographics and geographic location.
All this thinking about A/B testing has led me to wonder: what would an A/B object look like? A website is certainly an object, but in this case by “object” I mean things like a cup. I don’t yet know what an A/B cup would look like, but it seems to me that, rather than there exist an ur, Platonic version of the object, an A/B cup would lead back to algorithms (defining the parameters of the cup we get, selecting a cup based on information about me) and randomness (choosing if I get a particular version of the cup).
I could get into the idea of optimizing our physical surroundings automatically.
Reminds me of the “Living Kitchen” project: http://dornob.com/living-kitchen-wall-uses-multi-touch-nanotechnology/
I think there’s a lot of future in this kind of area, reconfiguring matter to fit the individual.
And of course, plenty of profit for advertising via A/B objects.