Life Syndicated
I am sick of social networks like Orkut Friendster, and Tribe. They have a great idea, of just connecting people and showing who is connected to who, and a place for people to get together. But they have one crutch, its centralized so you have to log in to actually check on messages and people, and no one has time for that.
I think the future of networking is blogs and syndication.
With blogs you have a quick glance of the persons life, you can see who they know by their links. Their links can have tons of meta data using XFN. Which allows you to saw who you are close to, neighbors, friend, business associate etc. I think it needs more work in the linking options but its simple and basic so thats a plus for it.
Also in a blog you can have other information with syndication system. With people using Amazon and Netflix they can get a feed showing what they just rented, read, got etc. Like how I have my listening and reading on the right. Thats just an rss feed from del.icio.us. Also my Flickr pics are there on what I am seeing.
But we can take it on step further with a complete syndication. My friends can just subscribe to my feed, and without visiting my blog. Friends can get my zeitgeist of what I am doing, reading, watch, listening, and taking picture of. Also I can attach some sort of “where am I” so it updates it on my location when I am traveling or just in town.
They are lots of options and ideas, but the main focus is sharing your life with your friends easily. I think slowly we are going to be reaching there.
2 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Have you looked at FOAF? It’s a vocabulary for describing people, their relationships, interestst, and a whole lot more.
You can use tools like foafnaut and FOAF Explorer to view someone’s FOAF file, and explore their social network.
While similar to XFN, FOAF is much more general as it many more different kinds of relationships can be modelled. (I wrote up some notes on the two vocabularies a while ago)
For example you can link to your current reading list, or associate your del.icio.us account with your self-description.
And as FOAF is an open format (based on RDF) the options for adding new relationships and data are endless. FOAF/RDF applications can process this data to provide many different kinds of social content applications. As your data isn’t tied to any particular service it’s also portable; many social networking sites are already offering FOAF exports of your profile, e.g. LiveJournal, Ecademy, AudioScrobbler, and others.
One other limitation of many of these sites is that they’re targetted at an English speaking audience. To be as inclusive as possible, I’ve made my online FOAF generator, the FOAF-a-Matic
easy to translate. At the moment it’s available in 12 languages and I’m always looking to add to this, if people are happy to contribute volunteer effort to translate it further. I’d love to get an Arabic version.
[…] I have mentioned this before, but the future is all about syndication and syncing. One of the latest examples is 30Boxes. It is a simple calendar app, but how integrated it is, and how easy it is to create a date is just the start. I only have to write “Lunch with Mo at 1pm Thursday (at Edo) tag open” and that entry will be created. Moreover, depending on whom I choose to share this info with, the chosen friends will be able to access it through a syndication feed and sync up with my life. Since I tagged it as “open,” I am saying it is an open invite. That way, my friends accessing the feed can choose to join or to create another event afterwards, such as “Coffee at Casper after Edo at 6pm Thursday tag open”. […]