NEWS: FriendFeed, The Centralized Me, and Data Portability

FriendFeed, The Centralized Me, and Data Portability

It’s definitely FriendFeed month in Silicon Valley. The company, founded by ex-Googlers, let you aggregate information and activity streams from all of the various services that you use on the internet - Flickr photos, YouTube videos, blog posts, delicious bookmarks, Twitter messages, and other stuff (33 services total to date). Your friends subscribe you your stuff, and see a stream of data on their home page coming from everyone they follow.

Ed: Is FF about Centralized Me or Centralized We? Granted that narcissism may be a strong motivator, my FF page and the Facebook app shares the lifestreams of friends. This seems to imply a Centralized We model. 

Of course, if more friends imported their blogs into Facebook and use the Notes application to read shared notes, the FF river may be redundant. LinkedIn and MySpace needs to add notes, shared notes, and notes import. A FF Open Social app would accomplish the same Centralized Me or We.

Is Data Portability The Anti-FriendFeed?

The Data Portability Project may turn out to be the answer that people are looking for. And it may turn out to be a sort of anti-FeedFriend. The whole point of Data Portability is to get social networks talking to each other and exchanging user data, with their explicit permission. Want to add your flickr photos, twitter messages and YouTube Videos to your blog? Data Portability is working to help make that happen through consensus driven policies and procedures. In essence, data portability embraces the Decentralized Me, but lets users re-centralize it wherever they please.

Ed: Data portability is the decentralized me. It exports me (or my blog) to many social networks and media portals. (FEEDS, WEEDS, READS, AND USER NEEDS) It's a river delta (or magazine rack system) that distributes content closer to circles of friends in different communities.

Rivers, streams, and river deltas are a different metaphor for the confusing acronyms in social media. 

View	NEWS: 35 Lifestreaming Applications