I have 787 friends on Facebook. On Twitter I am following 216 people and am being followed be 285 people. I have 1,190 cards in Address Book, all of which are synced with my Google Contacts and my iPhone. I have 49 friends on Foursquare, 33 connections on LinkedIn, 18 friends on Goodreads, 8 contacts on Flickr, 1 contact on Vimeo, 0 friends on Yelp, and 146 buddies on AOL Instant Messenger.

If I want to sign up for some new website, it’s not at all easy to re-use these existing relationships: I can go through and add people individually; I can ignore the security risk, enter my Gmail login information, and selectively choose which (or all) of my 1,190 Google Contacts need an email invitation to the website; I might be able to connect with my Twitter account, but the nature of the information shared on Twitter results in the people I’m following being a strange subset of my social graph; I might be able to connect with my Facebook account, but I rarely want to publish a summary of my activity on the new site in the news feed of every single person I know on Facebook.

My social life on the Internet is somewhat of a mess, and it’s becoming increasingly unmanaged and unmanageable. Social networking websites are not going away, and I want better tools to consolidate and manage these myriad representations of my real-world relationships as I wander the Internet…

(photo of me at the xkcd book party by insunlight on Flickr | CC BY-NC 2.0)

Wanderli.st will be my attempt to solve this problem. I want to take my existing friendships and relationships with me wherever I go on the Internet. I want more powerful tools for managing my contacts, I want this private information to sync with a giant social graph in the cloud, and I want websites to access subsections of this social graph based on the permissions I grant them.

More specifically, I want Wanderli.st to help me organize everyone I’ve ever met using a simple system of custom tags (‘ITP classmates’, ‘bit.ly coworkers’, ‘Scala programmers’, ‘SXSW 2010′, etc.) and lists that are combinations of these tags (‘all of my family and photography friends, but none of my ex-girlfriends’), and then let me use those lists to automatically specify my relationships on social websites. I want an intuitive yet powerful address book application with standard fields for phone numbers and mailing addresses but also with dynamic fields for usernames on social websites. I don’t want Wanderli.st to bother with actual content – let other websites specialize in the sharing of photographs, videos, status updates, long blog posts, short blog posts, and restaurant reviews – Wanderli.st can simply be a social graph provider.

I want my social data to be device- and website-independent, and I want to be able to export all of it to a standardized XML file. But I also don’t want to worry constantly about importing and exporting, and instead I want to be able to make one change in one place whenever I make a new friend, and I want that change to be pushed automatically to all of the applicable social networks.

I’d like to be able to sign up for a new social photography website, assign that site a list (i.e. some combination of tags), and then have the option of inviting friends to that website based on some other combination of tags (perhaps I have a tag named ‘people it is okay to invite to random websites’). If I make a new friend who is interested in photography, then I want it to be sufficient for us to only have a) exchanged email addresses and b) associated our usernames on various photography websites with our Wanderli.st accounts – it will then seamlessly create our connection on those websites and automatically add those usernames to each other’s personal address books, with no “Steven has added you as a friend on Flickr” emails required.

I want to have the option of managing my privacy simply and intuitively at the level of the website, and not at the level of the individual piece of content: you can see the pictures of me drinking in college if we are friends on the site on which they are posted, but if I don’t want you to see them then I simply won’t be your friend on that site, and I can use a second site (or second account on that same site!) to share my other pictures with you.

Wanderli.st will also make it easier for me to move among social websites. Both established and fledgling websites will benefit from this because it will be easier for them acquire new users and provide existing users with the best possible social experience. Furthermore, there have been mass diasporas of users in the past as people have moved on from Friendster and MySpace, and I predict Facebook faces a similar future (more on this in a future blog post). I’m willing to re-create my social network only one more time after I’m ready to move on from where I am now (and Facebook still won’t let me export my data), but after that I want my data to be open and portable and mine so that I never have to re-friend a thousand people again.

I also intend to make Wanderli.st my ITP thesis. I have been thinking about the project for several months, and wrote up and presented an early draft of the idea in Kio Stark’s When Strangers Meet class last Spring. I think that Wanderli.st should be compatible and complimentary with existing standards and upcoming proposals (OpenSocial, Portable Contacts, WebFinger, etc.), but I think it is important that the project be a new site in and of itself that hosts the data and popularizes the platform through actual successful use cases.

I’ve read that the best software is made by people who are building the tools for themselves, and I’m excited to create Wanderli.st and improve how I socialize on the Internet. If what I’ve described here sounds like something you’d like to use as well, comment below or enter your email address at http://wanderli.st – I’ll let you know when it’s ready for beta testing.

I had been vaguely considering getting two identical computers, keeping one in my locker at school and one at my apartment, and syncing everything (files, applications, operating system, all of it) between them, but the expected technical headaches/failures made it impossible to justify the cost of two shiny new Macs. The combined stimuli of a) hearing from lots of people who love Dropbox, b) a growing number of friends at ITP with Hackintoshed netbooks and c) an offer of an iMac to use at bit.ly when I started contracting work (as opposed to the previous internship work) made re-examine the problem.

I decided to keep my MBP at home nearly all of the time (to prolong it’s lifespan), use the iMac at work, and get a netbook off of craigslist as an experiment to keep in my locker at school (I ended up getting a Dell Mini 9 for $215; installing OS X was mostly painless). I’d install OS X (one Leopard, two Snow Leopard) on all three computers, install my favorite applications (I was unwilling to use another operating system primarly because I like my Mac-only apps so much), synchronize crazily and seamlessly, and walk without being encumbered. (The fourth computer is my iPhone 3GS.)

It’s now been four weeks, and my scheme has been working well. I’m doing different things for different applications, as described below:

• Gmail is in the cloud as it always has been, but this becomes especially important when you’re using multiple computers. I have Mailplane installed on all three computers to access it, but that doesn’t have any data of its own to sync.
• Evernote handles syncing itself between as many devices as you want, or so it has so far.
• Address Book and iCal are being synced by MobileMe – I haven’t had to pay for it yet, and am not thrilled about the $99/year, but it’s also nice to have these things automatically synced to my iPhone even when I don’t plug it in. I might switch over to some sort of free Google-hosted solution instead. (Note that MobileMe had all sorts of problems when I tried to sync my keychains on Snow Leopard. I ultimately ended up turning off that sync, restoring to a pre-install backup, and re-installing the OS… I don’t really need to sync my keychains, but it was a pretty big hassle.)
• Things stores all of it’s information about my various to-do lists in an XML file in it’s Application Support folder (which is in the Library folder of my user directory). I quit the app, moved its folder into my Dropbox folder, and then made a symbolic link (or alias) to that folder from it’s original location (using a Terminal command similar to “ln -s /Users/steven/Dropbox/Things /Users/steven/Library/Application\ Support/Cultured\ Code/Things” on all three computers. Things doesn’t know that the files are in a different place, and they have synced so far without any issues. The iPhone sync on Things is still broken though – hopefully there is a fix coming soon.
• Adium needed to be synced so that I could have all of my AIM conversation transcripts in one place (or, really, in all places). Putting the Application Support folder in Dropbox did the trick.
• 1Password also syncs between computers with Dropbox as described above and syncs beautifully over a wifi network with my iPhone. (Note I ran into some trickiness with the Firefox extension – it expects the actual application to be in the same directory on all three computers, which is only a problem if you try to organize your Applications folder into sub-folders, which you should never ever do for unrelated reasons that I won’t go into here.)
• Firefox is the finishing touch – I have my Application Support folder for this in Dropbox too, and this syncs everything: current tabs, bookmarks, history, AwesomeBar, extensions, all of it. It was essential that this application sync properly for the whole thing to be feasible (I use the AwesomeBar constantly), and it’s amazing. It even recovers my tabs nicely if it fails for some reason. (An added benefit is that my puny little netbook can’t handle lots of tabs, so it forces me to keep things to a reasonable minimum.)

Note that I am very careful to quit all of these applications and let Dropbox do its thing before I shut down any of these computers to go to another place, but it keeps ‘conflict copies’ of the files in case I forget. I’m also not doing anything at all with my music beyond keeping a good chunk of it on my iPhone, and that hasn’t really bothered me yet as I don’t often need my whole music library at work or at school.

It’s hard for me to accurately describe the psychological freedom that comes with having all of my most important data easily accessible at whatever computer I might find myself in front of (in theory, I could install everything on a new machine without having any access to the others and be up and running completely comfortably relatively quickly). I’m enjoying it and have been quite satisfied.

And one more thing – I love my netbook. Train rides aside, it was incredibly practical for traveling in Europe for two weeks with my family, it’s super-easy to carry casually in one hand around the floor at ITP, the three hour battery life seems absurdly luxurious (in comparison to the ~30 minutes I get on my MBP), and it was sooo cheap.

Let me know if you have any questions or want help setting this up for yourself!

Nearly a year ago I posted about this blog’s “web idea” category, and wrote:

During conversations with friends, I regularly have ideas for websites, services, or other technologies. These conversations happen in person, over email, on instant messenger, via text message.

[...]

Ideas, I have found, are relatively commonplace; the real work is in their execution. Sometimes people guard their ideas, keeping them secret out of fear that they will be taken and implemented by someone else first. None of that here. Please, take these ideas, and please, bring them to life. I have more of them than I’ll ever have time for, and even if I were to eventually have time for all of them, they would have long-since lost their relevance. If you find yourself with sufficient knowledge, time, and interest to start work on one of these, I would love to talk about it and hear what you are thinking about what I was thinking.

I’ve continued to have these ideas, and I scrawled some of them in my notebook, left some of them in instant messenger conversation logs for later searching, and saved many of them in Things. I’ve been dissatisfied with how private all of these storage media are, and have been inspired by Alex Payne’s posts on http://ideas.al3x.net/. I’ve considered doing something similar, but I’ve worried that the formality of the text boxes on a proper blog of any sort (whether it’s here or on Posterous or Tumblr) would discourage me from regular and casual posting.

UserVoice to the rescue! Built as a robust user-feedback tool for websites, I realized that I could re-purpose it as a tool for organizing these ideas in a public and collaborative way. Anyone can post ideas, anyone can comment on them, and anyone can allocate one of their limited number of votes to indicate that they like an idea. I hope that this will provide a mechanism for bringing the best/most-desired ideas to the top of the list and act as a useful metric for prioritizing projects.

(Note that there are several other sites that do this sort of thing, but the others are either not free to use or do not have the same collaborative vibe. Full disclosure: betaworks has invested in UserVoice as well as in bit.ly, the startup for which I work.)

There isn’t much on http://webideas.uservoice.com yet, but I’ll be adding more as I migrate over my old ideas and come up with new ones. Feel free to contribute, and please take one and build something!

Cory Ramey has published an article about Textonic at MobileActive.org – we’re excited about the press, and please let us know if you want to help out with the project!

When People, not Computers, Sort SMS Data

Eventually, sites for the social sharing of content appeared, and each of these maintained separate representations of the social graph. Over time people collected contacts on Flickr, friends on Facebook, and followers on Twitter, and such sites became oases of social functionality. At first these patches of green built walls to keep out the marauding hordes of anonymity, but as they grew larger they also grew more open, and they started to trade content amongst themselves.

Each real-world individual, however, was forced to maintain a separate existence in each of them simultaneously. It was difficult for people to travel with various aspects of their digital identities between walled oases, and it was nearly impossible for them to take their friends with them when they did. As a result, people were forced to duplicate their selves and their relationships. Some walled gardens tried to build roads to connect with (and undermine!) the others, but nothing really improved. Everyone had to maintain a copy of themselves in each oasis in which they wanted to produce and share content, and life was a mess for everyone. It was time to build something new, a sort of subway under the blossoming desert, so that every aspect of every person could be wherever it was appropriate for it to be, all the time, all at the same time…

- – - – -

The Internet has outgrown its social infrastructure. It’s becoming increasingly inconvenient and infeasible to create and maintain multiple copies of our networks, with all of their social complexities (friends, family, coworkers, acquaintances, ex-girlfriends, etc), and with all of their nuances of interaction (friend requests, @replies, emails, wall posts, blog comments, etc). Tools such as Facebook Connect are hopelessly hindered by over-saturated social graphs, pre-existing notions of privacy, and misguided attempts to pull content back into single cluttered interfaces. Identity and content aggregators such as Chi.mp, Plaxo and Friendfeed don’t provide the tools for web-wide social graph management. Put simply, we need new tools for the modern social Internet.

What will they be like?
Who will build them?

Towards the beginning of his aforementioned blog post, John Borthwick writes:

what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages

I think that this progression of metaphors is moving in the right direction, but it needs to be taken further. Streams consist of web content that is delivered directly to the user (to a Twitter client, to an RSS reader, etc), and this is in direct contrast to content that lives on specific pages to which a user must navigate in a web browser. Streams are dynamic, up-to-date and are delivered in (near) real time, while pages are static and not necessarily current.

Streams, however, are just collections of individual pieces of content, or packets. Tweets, status updates, blog posts, photos, mp3 files, and video clips are all discrete packets of content. These packets are the units which a user actually consumes as information, and streams are just a way to group those packets over time, usually based on on source (such as a specific blog) or topic (such as a search term on Twitter). But there are potentially more potent ways in which these packets can be organized than by their original source/topic, and this is important because these streams tend to be overwhelming in their aggregate. Borthwick continues about the future of content delivery via streams:

Overload isn’t a problem anymore since we have no choice but to acknowledge that we cant wade through all this information. This isn’t an inbox we have to empty, or a page we have to get to the bottom of — it’s a flow of data that we can dip into at will but we cant attempt to gain an all encompassing view of it.

I suspect that there is a more optimistic solution, however, and that there are better-than-random ways to organize the flow of content from our collections of streams. There will be some packets in these streams that are more important to individual users than others, so I want services that surface the best ones and hide the others. I predict a future in which streams are cut, rearranged, reordered and remixed into a single source of content that always has that moment’s most important/relevant/enjoyable packet at the front of the queue. The future of content on the web will be based on tools that focus on perfecting the delivery of these individual packets of information to users for consumption.

I agree with Borthwick, and think that the re-conceptualization of the destination web of pages into a real time stream of pages is the next (or current?) big thing. But I think the re-conceptualization of those streams as collections of individual operable packets is the big thing after that.

Update: I’ve written more about this topic in this subsequent post.

Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
- Milan Kundera, Czechoslovakian novelist (1929 – ), in The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I have vertigo. My somewhat lofty goal is to read and digest all of the information that interests me, as it is created in real time, regardless of medium. My desire to fall is my desire to abandon all of my information sources, not bother keeping up with anything, and fall endlessly into ignorance. And this terrifies me; at the very least, the Internet could come equipped with better handrails.

I am interested in information from a variety of sources – blogs, people on Twitter, email lists, search terms in the NY Times, etc – and I subscribe to these things because I think they are worth reading. Although I wish I could read all of it, I know I can’t. But I want a better way to read only some of it, without having to face the infinities that I don’t have time to read, without having to make painfully arbitrary decisions about what to read and what to ignore, and thus without having the subsequent vertiginous desire to give up, declare email bankruptcy, and read none of it at all. So the question is, then, one of designing a sturdier handrail that I can grasp while observing information on the Internet as it streams by. And that handrail must be a tool for filtering content, not a source that recommends even more.

Recommendation sites/services such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon have (as far as I know) user-preference modeling algorithms to make selections of what content to show to users, based on what those users and other users with similar past preferences have liked in the past. Netflix does something similar to make movie recommendations. They’re good systems, and have some cool machine-learning stuff going on, but I find their application to be fundamentally conceptually inverted.

I want to read the blogs of danah boyd, Jan Chipchase, and John Gruber. I want to follow Alex Payne, Jorge Ortiz, and 180 odd others on Twitter. Yet it’s too much. As Clay Shirky pointed out at the Web2.0 Expo, our filters have failed, not because of ‘information overload’ of ever-increasing magnitudes, but instead because of ‘filter failure’. Content was once primarily filtered by the editors and publishers, yet those systems are crumbling and I no longer have effective filters for this smorgasbord of carefully selected and professionally prepared feeds.

And I certainly don’t need Digg/Reddit/StumbleUpon to make additional recommendations. But given that I’m already not going to see all of the things I know that I care about, why can’t those same algorithms be used to filter incoming content instead? These information filtration systems would ideally have a few particular characteristics:

• They would be cross-platform and encompass all sources of information, including RSS, news, Twitter, Facebook, email lists (but not email addressed specifically to you), etc.
• The user could make adjustments to the aggressiveness of the filtration algorithm on a feed-by-feed basis.
• Filters would operate on a per-item level – i.e. I might be shown only one photo from an album of sixty, or one tweet from a day’s worth of a dozen. The content filtered out would not be less-than-worthwhile (you might really wish you could see all of your aunt’s vacation photos), but if the user simply doesn’t have time for everything, something must give.
• Users could build their preference models both passively and actively. The system would strongly take into account rating systems (number of stars, voting up/down, etc), but would also take into account how many seconds a user spent looking at a specific piece of content. Eye tracking would be preferable, but that’s tough and requires a camera at the very least. Instead, content delivery applications (such as RSS readers and mail clients) could measure how long a person spent with a piece of content open, adjust for word count and relative time for other pieces of content from that source, and assume that more time spent implies more engagement.
• Preference models would be partially social, but not exclusively. If a friend of mine liked something, it would be more likely to pass my filters. In addition, if some piece of content was enjoyed by a random other person who had shown similar past preferences to myself, it would be more likely to pass my filters too.

I don’t see this problem of perceived information overload (and consequent vertigo) getting any better on it’s own. Are there other solutions I’m not seeing? Anyone looking for a new giant software project?

Click through for a smaller version on Flickr, and never sleep.

Hi,

I’ve dreamed about having a tiling window manager for years, and I was fortunate enough to see Alex Payne’s tweet making a similar lament; I found SizeUp as a result. I’ve been using it for a week or two now, and I love it. Both on my 15″ MacBook Pro, and when the MBP plugged into my 30″ external display. Nicely done.

I have a suggestion though – I wish I had slightly more control over how windows were sized. I understand how it could be a user interface and/or Mac OS X nightmare to let users specify custom sizes or behavior for how windows snap to other windows. But at the same time, I’d love to be able to assign windows to a grid location occupying less than a quarter of my screen. For example, Adium chats don’t need that much screen real estate, even if iCal and Firefox do.

Rather than use the arrow keys to indicate location, what if you used the physical QWERTY keyboard locations of the letter keys? In it’s most simple form, W S A D could correspond to Up Down Left Right. But you can do more interesting things too, and split a screen into a six- or nine-rectangle grid using Q W E A S D or Q W E A S D Z X C. Any one of those keys would place a window in the respective corner of the grid, so [shortcut combination]+Q on a six rectangle grid would make the window use one sixth of the total size, with a width equal to a third of the screen’s width and a height equal to half of the screen’s height. If you wanted a larger window, you could press multiple adjacent letter keys simultaneously – [shortcut]+Q+A would make the window take the leftmost third of the screen, and [shortcut]+Q+W+E would have the same effect as the current [shortcut]+Up. It might make sense to use shortcut keys on the right side of the keyboard with these letters (shift+option seem to be sufficiently unused in this context), or you could use a different set of letters and keep the shortcut keys where they were. In the SizeUp Preferences, users could even specify the number of rows and columns in the grid they wanted to use and the keys they wanted to assign to each screen location.

(This idea is somewhat reminiscent of a still-incomplete project I was doing a few months ago: a Javascript portfolio website that used the keyboard for navigation, had a representation of the keyboard on the screen, had all content exist on that visual representation of a keyboard but at different zoom levels, and used the physical keyboard keys and spacebar to zoom in and out on the on-screen keyboard to view content at different levels in the hierarchy. There are a few blog posts about it here.)

Sorry that was so long-winded, and please email me if you want to discuss further or need me to clarify.

Keep up the good work!

Best,
Steven Lehrburger

Textonic.org is now live!

Recognizing that Textonic was a larger project than I was going to be able to finish in my free time over the summer (or that my group was going to be able to finish in our collective free time), I decided that the project would benefit from a more formal web presence than a handful of blog posts and a GitHub page. I registered a domain, set up WordPress, presented what we had accomplished, laid out what there is to be done, and tried to create a place where people could express their interest in getting involved.

The Conversation page on the new site is of particular interest. I’m using a Twitter search for the term ‘textonic’ as a sort of guestbook or message board. People who find the site and are interested can look to see who else has been there as well as when they expressed interest. Twitter itself can serve as a way for them to get in touch. The intransient* and public (since all of a user’s followers will also see the tweets) nature of these expressions of interest will help to catalyze the formation of a community around the project.

Credit for this idea goes to @n8han (who writes the blog Coderspiel) – I first saw it on his site for Databinder Dispatch. In addition, recent ITP graduate @joshbg2k created something similar for his Überbaster project.

*Note that Twitter’s search API only exposes that last ~3 months of tweets, so at some point I’ll need to archive the messages so that the entire conversation history is displayed.