Presenting our lives for the social graph to view in full 1080p HD

I’ve had a chance to read through a number of articles this Labor Day Weekend on the next generation of smart phones. I’ve been struck by the innovation that chip suppliers and mobile handset makers are cramming into these small portable devices. All this innovation aims to serve users increasingly employing handset as a terminal into the “social graph.” I love the term social graph as it connotes a collective consciousness: what all the connections on all the on-line social networks have become.

And what are we putting into our on-line social networks: pictures, video, audio, and lots of text. These multimedia and text files provide tangible evidence of the significant as well as trivial moments of our lives: reminding ourselves as well as our connections of that trip to London, Paris, Taipei…; the birth of our first, second,… child; the Duran Duran, Grateful Dead,… concert…; the minutes and seconds of our lives.

Up until the first decade of the 21st Century, most of these memories resided in our mind, on paper, or stored away in boxes of photographs, 8-mm film, or VHS cassettes and DAT tape. Now, all of that emotional memorabilia has found a home in the social graph, stored away for as long as we keep our accounts active and available for others to view.

What’s making all this possible is the continuing availability of low cost silicon. This eighth most common element in the universe by mass, a tetravalent metalloid with the symbol Si, atomic number 14, and atomic mass 28.0855, has become to the information age what coal was to the industrial revolution. For the social networker silicon is providing the continuous improvement in the fidelity of these captured moments.

Texas Instruments’ new OMAP chip is promising to allow HD quality image and video capture and playback. The specs call for 20-megapixel photographs and 1080p HD video capture in handheld smart phone. How incredible is that! You will be able to capture an unheard of amount of visual detail to share with your connections. Though the images and moving pictures will only be as good as the eye that captures them, the detail will be there in every frame.

What’s propelling the continuing drive to electronically capture and share these transient moments? Are we all modern day Robinson Crusoe’s stranded on planet earth and needing the affirmation of our man Friday that our lives are meaningful, that what we do is contributing to some collective good for the world around us, and—most important of all—that we’re not alone in our small part of the infinitesimal huge universe?

Or maybe we just need to hangout and brag about what we've done.