The dangers of relying on others

Since I am too lazy to manage my own subscriptions, I was subscribed to Planet Intertwingly. At 269 feeds though, the signal/noise ratio has taken a bad hit (what do you mean Sam doesn’t tailor his blogroll for me personally?) and I’m going to have to actually import the OPML and weed out stuff I’m not interested in. How annoying.

I strongly recommend any other subscribers tired of my witterings to do the same thing and remove me 😉

Digital Lifestyle Aggregation vs. Personal Aggregation

Following up on my Personal Aggregator (lifestream) dissing of the other day, here’s what I’d prefer to see (I should note that none of these ideas are original, and for most of my audience probably hark back to 2001):

Humans are interested in conversation. Conversation is what drives us. The things I want to see in a stream are places where I’ve previously entered into a conversation, either by starting a new conversation or by replying to someone else, and there have been responses which I’ve not yet read.

Some examples of this: comments on my blog posts, comments on blog posts which I’ve also commented on, comments on my Flickr photos, comments on Flickr photos which I’ve also commented on, emails, web pages marked as “for:pip” in del.icio.us, personal twitter messages (both direct messages and @pip), and so on.

After those items, I’m next interested in the conversations going on around me. That is to say, things that people I know are doing . This is where personal lifestreams can play a part – I’d want a feed from each person’s stream which I can then merge and create an contacts’ lifestream from. These activities also contain an inherent interest value. For example, blog posts and Flickr photos are almost always more interesting than twitter udpates which don’t really contain much value for me.

So let’s just review some of this, and see what we can do:

My Immediate Planet:

  • comments on my blog posts: gmail-created feed available
  • other blog comment replies: cocomment feed available
  • twitter @pip: no direct feed, can filter normal twitter feed
  • twitter inbox: no feed
  • flickr comments: feed available
  • flickr comment replies: feed available
  • for:pip in del.icio.us: feed available

Friends’ Planet:

  • blogs: feed available
  • flickr contacts’ photos: feed available
  • del.icio.us network: feed available
  • twitter: feed available
  • tumblr: feed available
  • last.fm: feed available
  • etc.

All of this is, of course, separate and additional to attention-data maintained resources.

A stream of rubbish

Unlike Jeremy Keith, I couldn’t care less about giving people a nice web interface onto what I’ve been doing. I’d much rather have a view onto what people I know have been doing instead.

A web view of what I’ve been doing is in fact probably the least interesting thing you could possibly do.

He briefly mentioned portable social networks. Well, those aren’t going to work until the services we use start actually providing full import and export. Maybe with the advent of services becoming OpenID providers (even if it is via a proxy) we’ll see a way to create accounts for your contacts without them having to actually do anything and thereby a way to move transparently between services. As if.

I’ve just remembered that the first thing I did with Jeremy’s original lifestream code was add OPML support and then use Leigh Dodds’ “Subscribe to my brain” service to create an OPML file listing my account subscriptions. No work from me and a full lifestream, that’s great, notably because it gives me a quick ‘in’ to the contact lists of those services. I’ll dig out my code tomorrow, but anyone could write it in a couple of minutes.