I watched most of Facebook’s F8 conference today. Lot’s of new stuff, lots of monitoring in the background. I’m sure a lot of people will freak out about privacy issues… but once we move past that, there is one phrase that sticks out, “social by design.”

I’ve been doing a lot of research on self monitoring lately. Both for personal and work reasons, it has been a hot topic. The 4-Hour Body, Fitbit, Nike+, Jawbone UP, 23 and Me, and the Garmin Vector are just some of the things that stand out.

I’ve also had a mild obsession with communities that are based on interest rather than friends… like Svpply or the Netflix recommendation algorithm. My thought is that your best friends might not be the best source for information on a niche issue.

So what does the new facebook platform offer? One word: Context.

Its all too easy to monitor your own runs every day. Or your diet. Or your taste in music. You can see what you’re doing and what might be working (if you have some goal in mind)... but it takes on a whole new meaning when you can compare yourself. Not just to friends, but people in similar situations.

This is what I think is so cool about all of this new stuff. It gives you a new way of looking at yourself, in the context of your social graph. It gives you new reasons to talk to old friends. And it gives the over-sharers a filter, where they can still capture every moment of their child’s life, without broadcasting it to the world. There is a place to share things with everyone, and a place to record history… all in real-time, all in the background.

And this is why I think social design is important. We’ve got to start making tools that fit seamlessly within our life. The benefit for people who use the tracking tools I mentioned above is amazing… but the user base is still small. Anything that has a layer of complexity or an extra decision is going to kill usage. So designing products with this in mind from the beginning IS key. And the focus shouldn’t necessarily show off what you’re doing to your friends, but to track it for yourself, and to learn from it.

Thats why I had a ‘holy shit’ moment when they started talking about Feltron. I can’t count the number of times I’ve referenced his reports, not just for content, but style as well. If this is any indication of what the timeline will look and feel like… I can’t help but get a little excited.

Think about your aggregated data over 10 years. One interface pulls together your meals, exercise, friends, music, vacations, pictures… What happens when you start trending the data? Maybe you find out that there is a correlation with the number of vacations you take and the amount you exercise. Maybe you start to see a pattern of your mood and how it affects your weight over time. Maybe you learn that the more you interact with certain friends, the more you succeed in work. WHO KNOWS WHAT WE’LL LEARN. But I think it is cool as hell that we can build the tools to make it happen.

I’ll end with a quote from Peter Drucker, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, “What gets measured gets managed.” A lot of people are making a lot of cool stuff right now, and Facebook is giving us an interface to tie the data together. Once that data is collected, we’ll be able to start telling new stories in new ways… and finding that meaning within the data is where I see the future.