Library clips

In an earlier post I talked about the different types of streams and the a way to centralise your web experience…I also posted on this in relation to the blogosphere.

I really think the keyword in gluing this distributed social web is “interoperability”…this was the first big word I learnt in library school

I don’t have any answers about this, but this is what we need to make our web experience smooth, at the moment we like to use different types of services for different purposes, and all these sites don’t effectively mashup, apart from minimal API’s and RSS.

We have all different friends in each service, and being able to centralise this would be much easier, in the way of tracking activities, and communicating in a distributed world.

A lot of people use Facebook as their one and only social network, they use it for blogging (notes), posting items, adding photo’s, adding video, and of course connecting with friends.

The Facebook News feed is an activity stream that keeps you in the loop of what your friends are doing on their own profile, and what they are doing on other people’s profiles.
You can keep track of what your friends are doing to you via a notifications mechanism, which also notifies you by email (just incase you don’t have your head buried in Facebook all the time).

NOTE: There is also a notifications RSS feed…with tools like ZapTXT and Rasasa, you can change the delivery to IM or SMS, Feedcrier also does IM.

We have 3 scenarios that the Facebook News feed, and notifications cover:

1. friendstream (what friends are doing on their own profile)
2. on to others (what friends are doing on other people’s profiles)
3. on to me (what friends are doing to me)

Problem

What if you don’t just use one social network for everything, this is the case with a lot of people…I use:
- Google Reader
- Twitter
- del.icio.us
- Slideshare
- Podchains
- Ziki
- Technorati
- Facebook, etc…

And what if your friends use a whole host of various services, not really a “what if”, this is a reality.

Each of these services I’ve had to create a profile (register a username and password, interests, details, etc…)
Most of these services allow me to publish or collect content.
Most of these services I’ve had to create a contact list by making friends.
Most of these services have messages I have sent and received with these friends

NOTE: Facebook now allows you to send a private message to an email address, but you can’t receive an email as a private message

Solutions so far

As long as each service I use: my blog, my presence, my bookmarks, my podcasts, etc…has an RSS feed, I can splice these feeds together and offer one RSS feed where people can keep up with all my content.

Or better still I can use a lifestream service that specialises in this type of RSS splicing, infact they offer an interface that nicely streams your stuff. At the same time some of these services allow you to form groups, add friends, send messages, etc…the infiniteness of social networks. I use Ziki.

A lifestream is not quite the Facebook Minifeed, a lifestream is limited to what you post or collect, it doesn’t also include what you do to others eg. message, comment, rate, etc…(perhaps excluding comments you make in the blogosphere).

Let’s examine solutions for the 3 points above:

1. Friendstream (what friends are doing on their own profile)

Most lifestream services allow you to visit another person’s lifestream profile within the same service, and some of the time you can add them as a friend so you can view your friends lifestreams from your page, and some of the time you can view:
- mixed river of news friendstream
- one friends lifestream
- friendstream by content type eg. all YouTube posts from all my friends

Refer to my post on friendstreams to see which services offer this functionality.

Then there are Tabber and FriendFeed that allow you to manually create a friendstream from scratch.

At this stage we have made our own lifestream, but we are still stuck with collating a friendstream…as your friends have to register, or going to the level of making your own friendstream (handy, but time consuming).

A simple and effective friendstream is Spokeo. It’s not a lifestream or a social network, but instead an RSS Reader that specialises in your friends web profiles (friendstream).
You enter your email and it fetches your contacts web 2.0 user spaces. Very effective way of subscribing to all your friends content without them having to be registered with Spokeo.

Plus there’s more, each users RSS Reader has a feed, so you can subscribe to another persons Spokeo RSS Reader, this is like keeping updated on the friends another Spokeo user reads.

Anyway this is a smart RSS Reader that helps you find your friends subscriptions in social networks, I guess you can add any feed and use it as your main RSS Reader as well…not sure.

So far not bad, I feel I can keep up with my friends content, one way or another. My Gmail contacts are considered as my universal contact list, this is what I have to plug into a service to generate a friendstream.

Now I’ve encountered a new problem, my Gmail contacts are not all my friends, what about my slideshare friends, Facebook friends, etc…

When I join a service can I enter my Gmail details, Facebook details, etc…so it grabs all my friends.
Indeed this is what Loopster does, you enter your profiles to generate your lifestream, and it grabs all your friends from these profiles, pretty neat.

Hmmm, what if you use del.icio.us for your bookmarks, but someone you like uses magnolia, ie. what about seeing someone’s content from a service you don’t use.

It seems we need a combination of Spokeo and Loopster in a way of fetching friends.

This is a bit cumbersome to do everytime I want to try out a new friendstream service. I’m thinking that we could do this on some sort of ID site, like openID, so when we want to try out a new friendstream, we login in with our openID, and it can harvest our contact list. openID would always have an up-to-date contact list with each service each friend belongs to, even if we don’t belong to the service. Also as we add a friend or drop a friend from a service, openID will synch and refresh the contact list…nice.

2. On to others (what friends are doing on other people’s profiles)

The Facebook News feed let’s me know what friends are doing on their own profiles, in a distributed world we are nearly there attacking question 1. of the friendstream.

The Facebook News feed also lets me know what my friends are doing to my other friends (and their friends as well, I think).

eg.
abby commented on shays wall
shay tagged abby in a photo
neil rated abbys post
shay commented on abbys video
abby tagged rich in a note
neil added rich as a friend
..and so on.

How do I keep track of what my friends are doing to each other in a distributed network?

I haven’t seen a service cover this issue as of yet.

3. On to me (what friends are doing to me)

This could be seen as an egostream or replystream, a stream of all twitter replies, blog comments, blog inlinks, flickr comments, slideshare comments, etc…
Including the first three mentioned above is easier enough as they output an RSS feed, but not all comments from social networks have an RSS feed.
Plus, comments is only one type of activity a friend might do to you…

But besides streaming this, just like your lifestream, is there a way to get notifications from all the networks in the one place, a variation of the replystream in its delivery, perhaps an inboxstream.
At the moment it is our email, my email account is the central spot for comments, friend requests, etc…from all my social networks.

As I’ve mentioned numerous times a service called Fuser wants to take this burden from your email inbox, and have an inbox for all your social network interactions…just like RSS Reader has taken away the burden of email for updates an alerts for persistent searches, news, journals, etc…

ProfileLinker is another service concentrating as an inboxstream, it’s also a friendstream service…from TechCrunch:

“ProfileLinker focuses on creating a single interface to all of your social networking accounts, notifying you of friend updates, messages, and search all your networks at once. They are continually adding new networks to their collection of 75 so far.”

Then there is the outboxstream, I’m not sure at this stage how much Fuser and ProfileLinker allow you to send messages and comments to friends profiles in various social networks from the one spot.

So the answer ot number 3. is in the works, let’s see how far we get.

In the end the ideal service would be like openID, mixed with your ultimate contact list, lifestream, friendstream, replystream, inboxstream, and outboxstream.

Between social networks

Besides having a central place to do everything, I also like the idea of social network being able to talk to each other.
Email clients allow you to send/receive messages to each other no matter what client you use, same goes with IM, so what about social networks. Why can’t I send a message from Slideshare to a Facebook friend, is it because I’m already in a context in slideshare.