Lehrblogger

http://wanderli.st – wander the internet, bring your friends

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.

One of the best things about living in New York City is being able to walk everywhere, and walking is much more fun when I am not carrying anything (other than, say, a notebook and maybe an umbrella). I had been lugging my aging MacBook Pro back and forth between my apartment and work/school for well over a year, and I was tired of the physical and psychological weight (i.e. if I am going out after work, do I want my costly computer with me at the bar, or should I leave it at work and suffer with just my iPhone for a night).

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!

http://webideas.uservoice.com

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!

cross-posted at textonic.org

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

The Internet, when I first started using it, felt like a social desert. People had email, instant messaging, chat rooms, and discussion forums, but these channels for communication felt separate from everything else and more like alternatives to existing real-world channels. Communication was isolated from destinations for the consumption of content, from tools for the creation of content, and from platforms for the publishing of content.

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?