Personality Portal

Well, it has happened, not quite as I thought, but it has happened. My theory about reiterative, endless loops is pretty close to how I imagined it to be. I currently have two copies of each and every tweet showing up on my Facebook wall. What a mess! Feeds feeding into other feeds can really get out of hand. Somebody needs to design a feed manager! Not just another feed aggregator, but something that can manage the flow of your feeds so that you don’t end up with stupid “feedback” loops.

I think the cause of this problem on my Facebook wall was the addition of Cliqset to my collection of online presence aggregators. Cliqset allows for simultaneous feed input and updating outwards, so using Cliqset, I can take my Twitter updates feed and push them through to my MySpace page, to my Facebook, etc. I’ll have to go back and review that decision now, as it seems to be causing a problem. Wouldn’t it be great if I could visually see the relationship my feeds have to one another, and where they flow to. If anyone knows of a piece of software or a web service that already does this, please let me know!

I’ve been making some bold decisions this week. I have chosen where I will be studying this coming semester, and where I’ll study from next year onwards. These “real life” decisions are just as important to me as my “online life” decisions, as I see my cyberlife as being an extension of my real life. I have made a major decision for my online life as well, this week. I’ve chosen a new “home” on the net. The thing with having a presence on the internet is that you can be in many places at once, spread across the far reaches of cyberspace. Aggregators are all very well, and they certainly help to organize your “presence”, but many of them are not all that customizable. You can’t express yourself very well with an aggregator.

Rather than grinding out some HTML for a personal homepage, going to the effort of finding a good and cheap webhosting package, and configuring an FTP client to upload my pages, I have decided to use a personal portal as my new “home” on the net. A lot of personal portals these days, such as the new iGoogle service, are based on putting content into little boxes of predefined shapes and sizes. You can decide where the boxes go on your page, and what goes into the boxes, and even what color the boxes are, give it all a nice background or theme, and there you have iGoogle’s version of your stuff. I don’t like being dictated to like this, and prefer to do things my own way. I’m into freeform design. If it is going to be how I express myself online, then I want to express myself my own way.

I used to use a freeform web portal back in 2007, and it was everything that I could hope for in freeform design. I am talking about Zude, the now closed beta release of Fifth Generation Systems groundbreaking technology. I have now found a similar service, Scrapplet, which has been created by some of the same people who were behind Zude. I have started creating my freeform web portal using Scrapplet, and it is so easy to use (but then, I’m a geek, so don’t take my word for it).

Using Scrapplet, I can drag and drop pictures, videos, music, and widgets onto my page and position them where I want them. There are some default objects on the page when you start, as a guide to designing, but they are easy to remove and replace with your own “stuff”. It is a totally blank canvas, and you just add to it whatever you want to. If your style (like mine) is straight edges and neat rows, then you can have everything lined up. If you express yourself through chaos and disorder, you can just dump your “stuff” anywhere on the page, even have things overlapping each other.

My personal portal is a work in progress, but do take a look, and even try out Scrapplet for yourself. It’s free and fun. You’ll find my main page at http://www.scrapplet.com/frittmann and I have many other Scrapplet pages under it, for my interests, for my current studies, etc. I love having a blank canvas to work with.

Second Class Citizens on the social web

In this blog post, Fred Stutzman examines further the issue of whether Twitter has become the hangout of the 20-plus generation, and if it really is not as popular with teens, as a recent study from Pace University and the Particpatory Marketing Network suggests.

Fred considers the question of “connectivity” from two perspectives: the tradtional interpretation (that of “the ability to access the internet”); and also of how “connected” we are once we are on the Internet. From this viewpoint, Fred asserts that the younger generation have the upper hand, as they are more geared towards migrating their real-life friendships onto the Internet. He also mentions what I would call the “coming out” of the older generation on social network sites.

My basic theory argues that as social norms and personal networks reward non-deceptive identities, people are more likely to share and participate in online communities. Put another way, as it becomes more OK to share (it stops being weird to use your real name on your Facebook profile), and more of your friends do it, you’re more likely to extend this type of participation to other parts of the web. Notably, the driving force of this theory is simple connectivity, which establishes the preconditions for the social shifts. For Twitter, there is a whole new old generation of web users coming online and embracing social software – because it is now socially OK to do so, because they have the connectivity and connections they need to feel worthwhile sharing, etc. And it just so happens that a lot of these people seem to have found Twitter.

This is something that I totally agree with the writer on. I myself fall into this category, someone aged 30-plus who has been “connected” for longer than the Internet has been fashionable and popular, who was a nerd and a geek from the 1970′s, but of whom you will not find much information about online prior to 2009. I have only recently “come out” from behind my aliases and have started claiming my own name at last. Fortunately for me, my surname Frittmann is fairly uncommon in the English-speaking world, and I have not had much trouble claiming my identity on the Web.

Stutzman also mentioned in his post that he’s planning to do a long-term study on the effects of age on user’s loyalty to online social communities. I hope to be part of this study… “If you are an older user of social software and might like to participate in my research interviews, keep watching this space for announcements.”

Reiterative, endless loops

“The foot bone is connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone is connected to the leg bone and the leg bone is connected to the knee bone…” as the old children’s song goes, everything is connected, just like it is here in cyberspace. But the world wide web today is a very different landscape than it was twenty years ago. It is no longer just about hyperlinks connecting one website page to another. These days it is also about feeds, those streams of data that we generate over a period of time. A classic web site from the 1980′s may have been a single page, perhaps with a picture or pictures on it. Today’s websites are as different from that 1980′s page as a motion video is different from a photograph. A photo shows a snapshot of life, a freezeframe. Whereas a motion video shows life, action, the progression of time. This is what a feed is in the modern interweb.

One great example of a modern-day feed is the micro blogging phenomenon known as Twitter. You can generate a progressive stream of information by repeatedly answering the question, “What are you doing?” Each time you tweet, you add to your Twitter feed. Each individual tweet may not be as elaborate as that 1980′s single-page website we mentioned earlier, but collectively they add up to give readers an overview of you that is much more detailed than a static web page.

There are many, many sites these days that generate a feed like this. For instance, the blog that you are reading has a feed output. You may not necessarily be reading this post at the site where it is posted, but you’re possibly reading it from the comfort of one of your own web sites, or within a feed reader such as Google Reader, or even on your mobile phone. The point is that you can subscribe to feeds, using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and then put them wherever you like.

While a lot of today’s web sites generate this type of feed, there are a lot of modern sites that also accept a feed as input into their content. For instance, on Facebook, your Wall is a feed in and of itself, and you can add feeds into it. I have my shared bookmarks from Delicious added to my Facebook Wall automatically, so that my friends on Facebook can see what sites I have been bookmarking.

With all these sources of feeds available on the Internet these days, it is a good thing that there are now also feed aggregators, that merge all of your feeds together into a single stream, such as FriendFeed. The output from a feed aggregator is also a feed.

Status updates are an interesting breed of feed themselves, and deserve a further mention here. With such technologies as oAuth, you can cascade your status messages to other sites. This means that rather than having to update your status on Twitter, Facebook, Brightkite, Bebo, Myspace, and others, you can just update your status once, and it will cascade to all of them. Brilliant!

So, now we have a feed, such as your Twitter status updates, which can be pulled in to an aggregator, such as FriendFeed, and merged with your other feeds, such as your blogs, your Facebook status updates, your bookmarks on Delicious, your latest diggs on Digg, and they all get aggregated together into a single feed, which you can then add to the input side of your services, for instance, adding a FriendFeed to your Facebook Wall.

My concern here is, what happens when you tweet with Twitter? It will update your Facebook status as well, if you have it configured to. The updated status will be added to your Facebook Wall. The feed from the Faceboook Wall will update the FriendFeed, which also had the original update from Twitter, so now you have it twice in the FriendFeed, right? Then if you have your FriendFeed as an update to your Facebook Wall, the FriendFeed itself will update your Facebook Wall with the latest updates, including that you have updated your Facebook Wall, and around and around it goes! Reiterative, endless loops.

I remember creating endless loops in Atari BASIC as a child. It looked something like this…

10 PRINT "This is an endless loop"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

…and when you run the program, it fills the screen continuously with the words “This is an endless loop”, and it just keeps doing it until you interrupt the program. What is stopping this type of endless looping from happening with my feeds and status updates? I haven’t actually had this happen to me yet, but with the number of services that I have been registering on lately, I am worried that it may happen soon.

I will investigate this issue further, and see if it really can happen, find out what would prevent it from happening, and how to avoid it happening to you.

True Likeness

I opened my email today to find a complaint about me. Yes, it seems that I have been a reprobate. I have used an avatar on a website where I should have used a photo which is a “true likeness” of myself. This is an ongoing debate, so I will not reveal which website this particular grievance occurred on.

I have written a reply on the web site’s support page to the effect that I have searched their Ethos and Best Practice Guide, and also their Privacy Policy, Use, and Terms of Membership but cannot find any reference to the terms “photo” or “true likeness” anywhere. I have removed the offending avatar and am waiting for their administrator to point out to me the exact rule that I have broken.

The avatar that I have used is the same avatar that I use everywhere on the internet at the moment. I have crafted it myself on Meez and it is as near a “true likeness” as I am willing to get on the Internet. I use this same avatar on every website that I register on, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Amazon, eBay, and even here on my WordPress blogs. It is how I choose to identify myself online.

There is so much information around these days about the perils of posting photos of yourself, of your “true likeness”, on the Internet. We educate our children on Internet Safety and how to protect our identity online.

Here in New Zealand we have a local brewery, Tui, that has an ongoing advertising campaign based on the common Kiwi “Yeah Right” slogan that implies distrust of a given statement. For instance, “Politicians never lie…. yeah right!” I recently saw one of their billboards on the side of the Northwestern Motorway which really amused me, and shows how well known the issue of online privacy is becoming.

These photo's won't end up on Facebook. Yeah Right!

I choose to keep pictures of myself off the Internet as much as possible for privacy reasons. Funnily enough, the same website that censured me over this issue has as the first statement in their privacy policy: “Because your privacy is important to us…” Makes you think, doesn’t it?

A social commentary on online identity issues

This blog has spawned from my main blog, Frittmann Forensics. Unlike my other spinoff blog, Psyber Psychology, this blog is not here to follow the progress of my studies. Cyber Presence is a social commentary about the issues surrounding online identity, online presence, online privacy, and the policies of different vendors, governments, and Internet governance bodies that influence these issues. A lot of the subject matter covered in this blog may also be covered in Frittmann Forensics or in Psyber Psychology, as there is a lot of overlap in these areas.

One of my favorite mashups is the Mashable! social media guide. I will no doubt be referring to their posts often here. On a recent visit to their site I came across Josh Catone’s post entitled 5 Ways to Share Your Social Media Identity. In his post, Josh reviews the sites Retaggr, Geek Chart, DuckDuckGo Karma, DandyID, and FriendFeed. The one that particularly took my attention of this collection was DandyID. One of my pet peeves is generating consistent profile information on the various sites that I visit. To quote Ivan of CreativeBits, in his excellent post “Securing your online identity“…

Ideally you should implement one consistent online name that can be used across many different platforms. It’s best if your online name is the same as your offline name, but you may find it necessary to make them different for certain reasons. You may also decide to use a different name for your business presence and your personal communications. Generally the higher the consistency you can achieve the better.

Ivan goes on to suggest that consistency in choosing a graphical avatar is also very important. I tend to take this a step further, and try to achieve consistent profile information also. You don’t want a prospective employer or a reference checking agency to find inconsistent data on the web about your employment history or qualifications! Enter DandyID, which is basically an online identity aggregator.

I have been creating my account on DandyID while writing this blog post, and have been very impressed with what I’ve seen of it so far. Once past the basic account setup, I was taken to a page to connect to my various identities. The selection available is huge, and users can suggest additional services if they don’t already exist. I was easily able to add my Facebook, WordPress, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, and other common social service profiles, and the fields for each one have most of the details already presented, such as the http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id= part of the Facebook profile URL, so that all you need to add is your unique ID number.

I was unable to add my Geni online genealogy profile to DandyID, as they do not have it listed, so I submitted it as a suggestion, which was just as easy as adding a known service. No doubt someone at DandyID control is analyzing the URL that I sent them, to find out which part is static and which part is unique. It will be interesting to check back and see how long it takes them to add Geni as a service.

I then moved on to creating my profile. The avatar was a snap, as DandyID automatically recognized my Gravatar from the email address that I entered when I created my DandyID account. I could also have chosen a default icon or specified a URL to another image to use as my DandyID avatar. Entering the profile details was just a matter of going to some of my sites and grabbing the info, such as from my LinkedIn profile.

So, what does all this achieve? Well, for one thing, I apparently have a social rank of Silver 59, which I presume increases as you add more services to your DandyID profile. Some services can provide ownership assurance, and I assume that undergoing this process will also improve my stature. DandyID creates a centralized HTML Public Profile with a simple URL address, http://www.dandyid.org/id/username. There is a WordPress plugin, for those hosting their own WordPress blog. DandyID also can display your aggregated profile information on Blogger and Squidoo, and they announce a Facebook Application coming very soon. There is also a set of Javascript widgets, or chicklets, or whatever you want to call them. Finally, there is integration with PeoplePond, which will be the subject of my next blog post.