Dave's news [4 items]
In my view, there’s a strong trend for people for people to consolidate their online presence, identity, and activity (a practice sometimes called “lifestreaming”).
Two needs crop up again and again. Personally, I want to be able to:
- import and export information about me and my friends/contacts without having to type it all again
- resuse and integrate what I do and say here with my blogs, lifestreams, twitterstreams etc.
In other words, break out of the “walled garden” of Facebook et. al. “Social network portability” is another way of putting it.
So rather than creating a toehold in this or that social network site (what’s hot today anyway Twitter? Plurk?? Identi.ca???) the key thing is to pick one that fits in to the emerging framework for social network portability (OAuth, OpenID etc.)
My tip is, then, that www.3s4.org.uk already helps you do that.
For example, FriendFeed is a website that lets you pull together activity from lots of other websites. If you check out my FriendFeed, you can see comments/posts I’ve made here posted there. (That and all the other detritus from my online existence!)
That’s because each Network member profile has an RSS feed so you can pipe it into other websites.
Any website or widget that accepts an RSS feed can show what happens here, there. If you try it, let us know!
An interesting survey of ‘freeconomics’, the economics of giving stuff away for free, from Wired Magazine.
