information diaspora « The Mendicant Bug

friendfeed

12 June 2008 in friendfeed, information diaspora, information overload, social networking, web 2.0 | 1 comment

After hearing about it for weeks, I caved and decided to check out friendfeed last night [and again, ht @dpn]. In previous posts I mentioned something I like to call the information diaspora. This is the phenomenon created by posting all sorts of personal information about your likes, dislikes, thoughts, opinions, etc all over the web and your subsequent loss of that information because it can’t be managed. I can see friendfeed coming in handy for removing some of this problem. You can attach a number of different social networking sites, flickr, youtube, etc all to your friendfeed account. Whenever you post something new in one of these sites, that information will be updated on friendfeed for all of your friends (and yourself) to be able to view. It’s not the perfect solution, but it is a very big step in the right direction.

Check it out. As usual, my username there is ealdent and feel free to friend me.

Emperor Zuckerberg I

3 January 2008 in facebook, information diaspora, mark zuckerberg, opensocial, plaxo, robert scoble, roman empire, social networking | No comments

The Roman occupation of Judea (Israel) during the first century AD was disrupted in 70 AD when the Jewish people revolted. Rome, being a kick-ass military power, put down this rebellion. However, they couldn’t let the Jews get away with this attempt at self-rule, which might encourage other provinces to do the same. The new, crushing occupation and settlement of Judea led to the beginning of another diaspora of the Jewish people (the Jews had been scattered before, read your Old Testament).

I’ve talked about my idea of the new information diaspora a couple times before. We fill up all these different social networking sites and online services with personal information about our hobbies, preferences, friends, etc. This information is separated by incompatibility between platforms. OpenSocial is a move towards removing these boundaries, but so far it hasn’t caught fire.

In Facebook’s terms of service, you are not allowed to scrape Facebook for content. They don’t want you to gather information about your social graph, since that would potentially undermine their service. Ergo, you can import information into Facebook, but can’t export it out. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (though whether it was really his idea or software is disputed), seems to be shaping up to be quite a tyrant in this realm. It’s almost daily that some news about his bungling comes over the blagoblag.

The latest fiasco surrounds Robert Scoble, one of the better tech writers out there (in my opinion). He was using Plaxo Pulse, a service that attempts to solve a small part of the information diaspora problem by consolidating your friends’ activities on different sites. Facebook, however, put down this rebellion by disabling Scoble’s account. Robert’s crime? Trying to get the names, email addresses, and birthdays of the 1800 friends he has on both Facebook and Plaxo.

The Empire never ended.

Tweets for Twits

18 December 2007 in facebook, information diaspora, social networking, twitter, web 2.0 | No comments

Well, after many frustrating months of waiting for Twitter to finally fix their gmail contacts import feature, I have finally done it! Surprise, only two contacts were signed up — and that’s two more than I expected. However, one of those is a professor who probably only checked them out because they’re using his technology and the other was a friend who had only one update:

“nothing.”

Social pressure from me caused him to add another update. That’s what I tell myself anyway.

What is Twitter, you ask? It’s basically Facebook status updates made global. Indeed, you can even add a Facebook app that allows Twitter to update your status. Of course, it means you get “is twittering: ” inserted at the beginning of any tweet (a single Twitter status update) as your status update.

While Twitter at first seems like status updates on steroids, it’s actually evolving into something else far more useful. I’ve talked before about the information diaspora and the difficulty of keeping up with all your personal information as it flies around the web. Twitter at first adds to that mess, but it does offer interesting ways of tracking small bits of information.

Erin McKean, the Dictionary Evangelist, uses it to keep track of new words she comes across. Twitter lets you text updates from your cell phone or IM client so it’s easy to update on the go. Robert Scoble uses it as a sort of mini-blog of things he comes across or finds out about that wouldn’t really make a full-fledged blog post. So Twitter has uses for logging your web surfing, hobby, life activities, etc., which is a useful information diaspora reducing measure in my book. The only question remains whether this would be of any use to you.

Check me out and follow my updates on Twitter. If you haven’t signed up, consider it. If you do, let me know so I can follow you.

Information Diaspora

9 December 2007 in facebook, information, information diaspora, information overload, mashable, neologisms, social networking, visual bookshelf, web 2.0 | 3 comments

I’m going to officially coin the term information diaspora to mean the dispersion of individual personal preference information throughout the web. Whenever you sign up for an account, you leave a part of your personal information somewhere. Whenever you enter an address to order a book, more information. When you look through digg comments and you thumbs-up or thumbs-down a comment, more information. Whenever you favorite a video on youtube, leave a wall post on facebook, rate a movie on netflix, more information. All of this information is accessible to you as long as you can recall where you have left it. If you forget about a website you signed up for, that information is now missing. It’s not dead or gone, just missing.

Your brain is no longer the homeland of all these orphaned data. Social networking is great, but with the current Web 2.0 bubble expanding the way it is, the inherent incompatibility in the global network is becoming more and more a problem.

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