Who am I? Reassessing my online profile

My Social Graph

I’ve been really thinking about my online profile and the links I have. It’s intriguing to play with the Google Social Graph API even though it’s only useful if you’re trying to build a social app (which – well – everyone is).

I’ve also looked at lots of tips on blogging, especially a recent post from Chris Brogan on Ten Secrets to Better Blogging. I’ve only just started blogging recently, but I know I’m being a little haphazard about it.  I’m probably not even following it for this blog.

I’ve also been looking into my social networks and who I follow and who follows me. I love social networks and I love interacting with them. Twitter and Friendfeed are where I get a lot of information from. The thing is for some reason I constantly feel under pressure to make a difference to people’s lives through my interaction.  Twitter is slightly different, but… why can’t I just be me?  Am I being me or not?

Friending is a currency

Links were the currency of the early noughties, and now friending has become the major currency we’re all trying to achieve.  Things like XFN and microformats have sprung up to help us connect with each other and Google is obliging so that we can get at that information. So, now it’s not just the HTML links we have pointing to our content, it’s also the virtual connections between me and somebody that we have on the web that matters.

So, it’s becoming all about getting “as many friends as possible”.  Having 100,000 friends on MySpace wasn’t (and still isn’t) impossible, but calling them friends is quite blatantly wrong – at least, if you’re primary use of the web is as a businessman.  It smacks more of a marketing strategy and something (shock horror) viral and insipid than of a social network.

Being in Business

Being in business, I am attempting to make money (doesn’t have to be a lot, just enough). In some ways, I find that it’s odd mixing my online business activities and the idea of “friending” with my business. It makes it all the more personal, and less about business.

In some ways, my online profile is me and it’s separate from my business. That separation is blurred now, with LinkedIn and others who force me to portray myself in terms of business.  Facebook is different in that it allows me to be me and gives me a semblance of control over who and what people see of me, and it’s much more personal.

The funny thing is that the people that make a lot of money out of the social networks are the network owners, the people who run the things.  Now, in an equivalent of a dot-com boomtime, we’re in a social-network boomtime, where the VC money is going into things that are about “building communities” around a topic.

Who Am I?

So I come back to my original question. Who am I? Am I the businessman on LinkedIn or am I the friendly guy on Facebook?  Am I the stream of random thoughts on Twitter or am I the stream of life information on Friendfeed.

One things for sure, I don’t think any of these things mean that anybody else can truly know who I am.  The funny thing is, I’m not sure that I always know either.  Maybe the interactions on social networks are part of what shape me?

What do you think?

Internet Infinite Feedback Loops

I I’ve been playing with twitter for a long time, and I’ve recently also created a friendfeed account. These are fun tools to keep in touch with my techie friends and to discuss how often twitter goes down.

Now, I had the idea a few days ago, that given that friendfeed is an aggregator of my online content (and there’s a lot – not as much as some but a lot nonetheless) was it be possible to create a feedback loop?

So how do you go about doing that?

A feedback loop is very simple.  Something that gets posted to the in one place gets reposted by an application reading that feed back to the same place. An infinite loop.

So, to test this theory I setup 3 things:

1. A twitter account for extremefeedback
2. A friendfeed account for extremefeedback
3. A Twitterfeed account

I setup the friendfeed account to read from the twitter account. I setup the twitterfeed account to blog the RSS feed from friendfeed. So a post on twitter should be read by friendfeed, and then posted back to twitter via twitterfeed.

I then posted 1 tweet to twitter… and since then, that tweet has been retweeted from friendfeed by twitterfeed. I have created a feedback loop! It’s only on a 30 minute timescale (that’s what twitterfeed will do) but it still works.

Why is this important?

Basically, it was very easy, and because it was very easy, this could be a problem given that there will be a proliferation of aggregators in the not too distant future.  The reason being that a single post is consumed without any thought to the ID of the post – in other words, what is the original post and how do we know?  This means that a feed cannot currently (or chooses not to) recognise the same post being reposted.

As there will be a proliferation of aggregators, there will be a growing problem with reposting of the same content across the internet.  Assuming that somewhere someone will make an RSS to twitter (or friendfeed etc) that is quicker than 30 minutes, it’s entirely possible to see a situation where internet posts fill the internet and cause either a meltdown or at the very least a proliferation of pointless content.  Aggregators and microblogging applications beware!

It’ll be the blog equivalent of spam!  Maybe it should be called Aggregation Feedback

I think we need to revisit how programmers for things such as friendfeed are going to consume content from other sites.  Without it, we could be in trouble on the net!