Greg Elin of Fotonotes talked last night about how cameraphone pictures are communicative acts.  People take billions of these pictures already, and as they snap an image they often think to themselves, "I'm going to send this one to my aunt," or "I'm going to post this one on my office wall."  The picture has a destination and a gesture ("here, I was thinking about you") inherent in its creation.

Greg's focus is making pictures, and objects within pictures, easily annotatable in a standard, flexible, and dynamic way.  He's making a great deal of progress along these lines -- watch for chat applications that incorporate Fotonotes.  We'll soon assume that any conversation includes (or, indeed, is focused on) writing about/on/with pictures.

Cameraphone pictures are already communicative; Greg wants to make the communication explicit.

I've loved Google Images ever since I first stumbled across it.  I stick pictures into emails to show where I've been -- because I don't take pictures (yet), I like using other people's pictures for this.  What if Google Images had pictures that were full of conversations and explanations and pointers?  Greg says, "Sure."  As he says, "jaw-dropping."

Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs taught us that social interactions changed with messaging.  People feel themselves to be present where the message is read -- already at the party, say, even though they're half a city away, because they've been messaging with people there. 

What will "presence" mean when we're messaging with mixed-media/RFID-enabled cameraphones?  Does it bring distance back into the equation (as in "I'm here, taking this picture, and you're not")?  Or does it make us all feel present, in a small electronic way, wherever the picture was taken (when we see it on our screen)?  And with RFID capability built in, our presence in a picture will be a piece of data of record.  (Add FBI access to phone records that include pictures, and you can worry.  But we're in the ecstatic part of the story here, not the fearful part.)

What makes a picture such a desirable and interesting object, even one taken on the fly by a phone?  For the taker, it's bound up with looking for companionship ("I want you to understand where I was so that you can understand me," or "I want to remember where I was so that I can understand myself").  For the recipient, it's a communication and a gateway into another world. 

Pictures are decentralized electronic oracles that reveal a world mediated by the taker and understood by the recipients.  We all want to see them -- our eyes go to pictures and rest there, as we actively look with imagination and insight (compare the video experience, where we read for plot rather than expression most of the time, passively led by the video author).  And we'll have billions and billions of them online.