Dataportability Soon at a Cinema Near You - VIDEO

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.


This amazing video was lovingly hand-crafted by Michael Pick, from Smashcut Media, to outline and demonstrate what Data Portability is all about. If you've been under a rock and haven't heard of the Data Portability Workgroup, this ought to catch you up real quick. ;)

It's amazing work. Thank-you for your great work Michael.

Calling all developers: Time to get the graph back!

The DataPortability Workgroup is sponsoring an initiative called 'GraphSync'. Here's a snippet from the site:

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it...

1. Pick a silo of proprietary social graph data
2. Write some open source code to extract the data
3. Place that data into the open formats listed below.
4. Link to the code repository on the DataPortability Wiki.
5. Win the love and admiration of a grateful community

So the idea is to build something much like the LinkedIn/Facebook/Spock 'Import your contacts from Gmail' feature in an open-source way. Instead of importing from Gmail, the hope is to get data out of social networks, IM buddy lists and more and store it in open standards.

Jump onto the site, join the google group and get into it. Please don't forget to re-blog or tweet this to help spread the word.

More at www.graphsync.com

The Me Meme

Brian Caldwell over on EponymousX has written a fantastic and poetic post about the Me Meme.

He writes:

Our own personal lifestreams, or "public timeline's" if you prefer, are slightly more mundane that the one from Final Fantasy, however it can still be pondered in an analogous manner. Our lifestream threads together everything that we are. Where we go, what we say, who we interact with, how we express ourselves, concepts inside artwork that we create, symbolism that we identify. All can be considered "us" or "me" in some, hopefully non-banal, way.

We say "me" a lot in our lifestreams. Not always directly. Indirectly also. Off the top of our heads. Well thought out over hours of writing and editing. At the snap of the shutter on our iPhone. While visiting at parties and gatherings. By connecting/friending/following through social nets. Generating our APML wake and bow waves through the public timestream. We are the social seed for our downstream online and offline, everyone has a built-in personal wetware network and many people let this stream filter back online, forming a personal lifestream wake.

It's a great read full of all-too-familiar names and experiences. It reminds me of the little rant we posted at AreYouPayingAttention.com.

He also makes an interesting point. If the question of 'What do you do' becomes redundant at conferences, maybe we can move on to deeper conversations more quickly when we meet?

I know that I regularly talk with people I have never met. I trust them as much as people I have known in person for years. They are my advisors, my confidants, my partners and my friends.

The social consciousness is humming now. Can you feel it? Our Lifestreams and APML files are bursting at the seams. The best is yet to come. As our reach and reflection grows, maybe so too will our influence and insight into world affairs - both mundane and monumental.

Yes I love alliteration.

Emerging Social Fatigue

My friend Marianne Richmond has pointed me to a great video by Jeffrey Sass and a post by Jeff Pulver.

The video is a great little parody of the information and social deluge we are all experiencing trying to keep up with the million social graphs and applications we are participating in.

Jeff writes:

As real-time social media continues to evolve, I will know where my friends are, what they're facing, if and when they need help, when they have discovered something interesting and many other things they care to share at any moment. The people in my social media communications circle represent a group of people I feel much closer to than some other people whom I've known for a long time but never really have gotten to know. Sort of the difference between a well developed character in a novel as compared to someone whose character never gets really developed.

The parody video is supposed to highlight, however, the lack of scalability for all these social interactions. The mainstream will never participate in all these platforms at the same time. They will likely choose a few key apps and stick to them.

The key, however, is to make sure that our Social Graph is portable and our AttentStreams are syndicated.

As Jeff writes:

Over time this experience will only get better as the current high "signal to noise ratio" problems that many of us experience get solved with the advent of widely available social media filtering tools which will be able to be applied against the people/topics that matter the most to us.

A filtered stream of notifications is exactly what we need. Thank heavens for my Particls sidebar.