Personality Portal
Posted by Robert Frittmann on 26 June 2009
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.
