• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 30, 2010

Actually, it is objects. Specifically, it's figuring out how to tie the social graph directly to the physical world of objects. That's what he and his partners at Stickybits are starting to do, and he explained their status during an opening keynote at the Social Media Insider Summit in Lake Tahoe this morning.

After reiterating the rapid progression of online media – from Yahoo through Google and up through more recent social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter – Goldstein maintained that the next big development would be turning "objects into media."

The initial applications being developed by Stickybits revolve around product codes, and how they can be tagged and appended with data by and from people scanning their labels.

"StickyBits was born with the question, 'How could we attach digital graffiti to a physical wall?,'" Goldstein explained, noting that that's not really feasible today with GPS technology, but it is with codes, because codes are on "everything, everywhere."

"People were adding content to all sorts of things from their refrigerators or supermarket shelves," he said, noting that users basically "scan something" and their scanning behavior also gets added to the social graph surrounding that product's scan, whether it's Corona beer bottles, products on a supermarket shelf.

Goldstein shared an example of a program Stickybits recently conducted for Campbell Soup – a Soup Scan Sweepstakes that encouraged consumers to go to local stores and scan new Campbell Soup packages to win prizes. He said the program has been showing some "really nice lift" and is tracking demonstrably higher than the average of all of Stickybits other programs.

Goldstein then offered a litany of next generation social media apps and platforms that are further transforming the business, but ended by predicting that the next big leap would jump from codes to simple objects themselves. Citing Google's Goggles app, or potentially other similar applications that utilize visual search, would, in the "next three or four years," change the world again.

"You won't even need bar codes," Goldstein predicted. "You'll just be able to scan products with your phone and it will bring up all sorts of interesting information."

Goldstein's next bit: Stickybits