Dyepot, Teapot

My first impulse, upon seeing a ‘down for maintenance’ page on Twitter… is to send ‘Sad that Twitter is down’. To the service that is not currently online. Probably not going to work.

About a month ago I followed a link from a post on Web Worker Daily that mentioned Emily Chang. I hadn’t heard of her before, so I was curious. The first post on her blog at the time was about building a personal data stream, also referred to as lifestreaming. The idea is that you mush all of your personal content, Flickr and blog posts and Upcoming.org events and Last.FM data and so on, all into a single feed or webpage.

Emily says,

I kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about?

Since then I’ve been playing with various tools to do this. I’ve already posted about Twitter more than enough, so I’ll just add that if you were to post about absolutely everything that happened during your day, it could accomplish Emily’s goals above. But I’m lazy, so I’d rather find some other way to collect things.

I signed up for Jaiku. It has similar short message and friends features to Twitter, but you can also import your other feeds. It’s not a bad site, but I haven’t found it terribly useful. The only contact I have on there is Stowe Boyd, and that’s because I saw it on his blog.

After that, I decided to try Tumblr. Pretty much the same features as Jaiku, but I like the page layout better. Also, when it grabs multiple posts from an imported feed, it shows each one separately. I don’t spend that much time on their site, but I used Feedburner to plant my last 10 Tumblr items on my main webpage, replacing the previous “current status” script that was months out of date because I kept forgetting to write an update.

And that’s probably where this experiment will stop, aside from adding feeds to Tumblr. I don’t know how useful it really is to aggregate all of this on to one page. No one else seems to be subscribed to the meta-feed yet, either. I like having it on my main page, so that people who happen across my site see recent activity, but otherwise?

The thing I really want, as a next step, is to aggregate all of my inbound content into a single pool. Mail, calendar entries, the feeds I subscribe to, friends on Livejournal, my web stats… It would be really nice to have a single location for everything I read or monitor. But that’s a pretty big data organization project.

I just finished reading Accelerando, with main themes including the pace of technology, generation gaps, and our ability to cope. When I put down the book and went online to catch up on news/email/etc. I discovered that there’s been another flare-up of discussions about Twitter, reflecting a slice of the same issue.

Twitter lets people broadcast small pieces of information about what they’re doing throughout the day. Some people love this, as exhibitionists and voyeurs. Some people think it’s asinine. There’s also a large group in the middle, using it because it’s kind of fun, and it fills one of the gaps created by modern computer-driven lifestyles: a lack of in-person contact with people throughout the day.

I think we’re in the middle of a technological and cultural shift that’s both very alien and very familiar. If the 50s and nuclear families put us into small, isolated social bubbles, then email and IRC and the web and everything else are bringing us back the other way. (Sort of. But the caveat can wait for another post.)

Having this kind of always on contact with other people is noisy. It’s invasive. Modern computing allows it to happen at a much faster pace than we’re used to registering. But–when you grow up with it, you adapt. I spent every free waking hour possible from ages 15-21 immersed in an online social environment (a set of MOOs, less popular these days due to a lack of a graphical interface). It was addictive. It had a huge impact on what happened in my life during that time period, good and bad. It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t have access to a laptop back then, so I had to take breaks when I left the house. Eventually I logged out because it didn’t feel healthy anymore.

I don’t usually talk about that, because it feels sort of embarrassing to admit you spent your teenage years online, but certain aspects are immensely useful in retrospect. Having overdone it at one point means I know how much isolation I need to do mentally intensive work, and gives me a sense of how many streams of information I can process before I’m overloaded.

And this is also why I think all of the debate over Twitter is really silly. People are confusing the medium with the event. What’s happening is that we’re learning to negotiate always-on connectivity. Some people are going to need more distance than others. Some are going to opt-out completely. But I think people who grow up with this sort of thing just take it for granted. They still struggle with information overload and needing personal space and so on, but I suspect that the actual services that provide all of these things are going to seem irrelevant except in terms of “does this give me the kind of connectivity that I need?”

I don’t play futurist often, because it’s too easy to lose the larger context. If Twitter is a small slice of the pace of technology and how we cope, that issue is an even smaller piece of modern life, even in my own geographic community. I like to have my feet on the ground most of the time.

Somehow I managed to sign up for Twitter the same week it started to get attention everywhere online. I don’t think me signing up and all the other attention is related. I decided to try it because Tara Hunt mentioned that her office now had a Nabaztag, and that they’d set it up with an account on Twitter, which reminded me that I was kinda curious about the service and might as well sign up and see what it was about (I want one of those rabbits too, but they cost money and all this travel has killed my toy budget). And then the next day everyone seemed to be talking about it, which is one of those things that happens to me a lot, and always makes me feel like I’m about 12 hours ahead of the zeitgeist, which is not really far enough to be useful. Instead I get the annoyance of discovering something only to immediately find it on a dozen blogs and sometimes even the NYT or NPR.

Anyhow.

I think it’s a fun little toy, but I’m not entirely sure why it’s getting so much attention except that people like to discover something and then hype it up (er, am I guilty of that too, by posting this?). The idea is that you send short messages, either by SMS or IM or a web interface, that are then rebroadcast to whoever signs up to receive them. There’s also a public timeline of all messages, which is interesting if you ever wonder what random other people are up to at this moment. The entertainment value of that particular feature is probably limited, though.

Services like this have a lot of potential beyond the goofy “huh, my friend Kari is flossing her teeth right now” voyeurism that’s going on right now. If you have a dozen people on vacation or at a conference who want to spend the day wandering around semi-independently, this lets you keep in touch and plan lunch together without having to schedule everything in advance. I could also see it working for a group coordinating an event, where people are off getting things done but need to stay connected without being interrupted by a radio message or phone call. Not all communication requires an immediate reply, sometimes you just need to have a log of what’s going on in your pocket.

Anyhow, there’s a little Twitter display widget on my blog for now, and you can go to http://twitter.com/spinnerin if you want the web page version, or have an account and want to add me. I can’t promise it will be interesting, or that in a week I’ll still be sending updates, but I’ll keep playing with it for at least a bit longer. Maybe until the public timeline gets flooded with new people posting “testing… does this thing work?”.

If I can make time, I want to follow up on this with a post about handling all of the streams of information available to us these days. I’ve been using the internet for about 12 years, and in that time to amount of content we interact with online has increased immensely, as have the variety of ways we can receive that content. I think I might have something useful to say about managing information overload.