I'm on a ridiculous number of social networks. The ones I list in HowToFindMeOnline are maybe half of them. I don't list MySpace (because it's evil) and Facebook (because it's so closed) or Livejournal (because I use it to talk to old friends who aren't connected to any of the groups I talk to on other sites). After a while, you get this huge number of contact lists and message areas to keep track of, and even if these are all people I like, it's still a PITA.
I've been fighting back by aggregating all of my output from such sites through Tumblr, but I don't know if anyone reads it (it's the feed on the main page of lifeofaudrey.com if you're curious). What I really want to do is externalize my contact lists from all of these different places, so I can do the same to other people I'm interested in. There are a couple of open formats for defining lists of contacts: XFN and FOAF. So what I need is a way to export my contacts from elsewhere into an easily parseable list, and then connect that with each contact's feeds. This would be (relatively) easy if everyone were on a site like ClaimID. Given the current state of things, it's a bit more complicated, but I want to start brainstorming ideas for how to break out of the individual site silos before we're all locked into Facebook with no idea how we got there.
Closed services have a place. There's something to be said for any tool that helps people do what they need. I just feel weird about having my entire life spread across dozens of sites, only sometimes able to combine the useful parts. What if half my friends are on YouTube and half are on Vimeo, and I want both sets to see this funny thing I made? I run into this problem a lot, in various forms. I want to share the things I write and create online in a low-maintenance way, and be able to consume my friends' content in the same way. That's why I think tools for exporting and recombining are needed. There's probably even a solution that doesn't put a heavy burden on the user to set things up.
Page Information
|
Wiki Information |
Recent PBwiki Blog Posts |
Create your own free wiki!