Now that I’ve had my google G1 phone for a couple of weeks, with its always-on integration of mobile internet and data, I’m really finding that it’s a paradigm shift in terms of utility.

We may not have jet-packs yet, but without a doubt we’re living in the future and certainly seem to be afloat on clouds of information. The steady rise of social networking – now simply the standard for the web – has seen us plug ourselves into many different information broadcasting systems, from our music listening and book reading habits, blogging and micro-blogging, photo and video sharing, through to more realtime information like status and location updates.

Taken singularly, each site – from the rise of friendster and tribe.net, through iterations of myspace, flickr, last.fm, linkedin, youtube, facebook, twitter and so on – has its own merits and each are interesting in their own right; Where it gets really interesting now is in the accumulated effect of them all, becoming a mesh-network of information, covering all aspects our lives, a data overlay on top of the real world.

More often than not, most of our friends share the same site usage patterns as ourselves, to the effect we know in real-time what most of our friends are up to and/or where they are. This steady stream of friend-data, this Ambient Information, seems a very different world of information – it’s not necessarily aimed at you, and not every piece of data is essential to know the general gist of what your friends have been doing, but simply being plugged into this network is quite a new-world feeling. Now instead of the first awkward sentence when meeting a friend “so what have you been up to?”, we now launch straight into discourse – “ah, I see you were away at Bletchley Park at the weekend” or “I bought that album you were blogging about” – instant pickup conversations from online activities, with the online and offline boundaries blurring further and further.

These past few years have seen such a rapid integration between our real world experience and online data – i remember quite vividly only a few years back when it still wasn’t a natural reflex to google information, more of a novelty – remembering to google movie screening times, television schedules, look up the meaning of words or phrases to settle an argument, or even validating information via discogs.

That reflex is now completely instinctive and although it’s one thing to have had all this information at our fingertips whenever we are near a computer, now, with the rise of pocket net-connected devices, geographic locationing and twitter, it really starts impacting your social life in many noticeable ways, from easy hookups with friends, last minute change of plans based on new information or location, and many-to-many communication;

Life imitating art – I don’t think it will be a long wait until we have realtime bus location information (taken from Charles Stross’s “Halting State”) or geo-location based artwork pieces ala William Gibson’s dead River Phoenix installation outside the Viper Rooms (from “Spook Country”) – I still wouldn’t mind a jetpack, but i have to admit I’m quite happy with how the future is coming along.