Gerd’s Blog

Yesterday I was out with two friends and we talked a lot about the computer industry. Of course on of the topics we discussed was the social web we are living at the moment. I mentioned that we have to maintain several profiles on the different social sites and that it would be nice to have just one centralized profile where you can decide which information goes to which channel. Of course Google did some step in this direction about two months ago when they introduced Open Social but for me the ’standard’ they introduced is far away form what we need. After some discussion we identified two main fields we need to have in the future to be able to maintain just one profile and distribute the information.

1. Authentication
   There need to be a mechanism for Single Sign on to different Social Sites. I mentioned OpenId some posts ago which would provide such functionality
2. Centralized Data Management
   At the moment User don’t care that there information is distributed over several Sites and Content providers but if you have to maintain more than one profile (e.g. you change your job or your hometown) things become difficult. First of all you don’t remember all the sites you signed up for but believe me some of your friends will and will complain that the couldn’t find the information that you have changed your job. On the other hand maintaining your profile is fare to much work (in my opinion).

An other important point for centralized data is that you can’t trust ever provider to take care of your data. And some have build up amazing profiles on websites they don’t want to loose. The amusing part here is that I read about this issues we discussed yesterday in an posting from Robert Scoble about ‘Facebook disabled my account‘. Of course they just disabled the account and he will get his profile back, I’m sure about it, but in the end there can be situations where you will not. The nice thing about it is that he point’s in his post to DataPortability.org an community that tries to use protocols and ’standards’ out there to give user the possibility to use an system I described above.

Let’s see what the future will bring, I am just tired to maintain my profiles:

Blog, Website, Xing, Google Profile, Facebook, StudiVZ, …..

As already mentioned a few posts before i’m using Google Reader as my primary tool for reading news on the web. Fore some times now, i also use the sharing functionality to publish my Link blog on the web for friends, colleagues and every one who is interested in. Hopefully your are and will subscribe if you don’t have until now.

I deeply believe that the News providers in the Internet as we know them today (e.g websites of news papers, TV stations, ..) will change completely in the near future. Sites like them can only provide very abstract content because of the big differences in their customers. The problem here is that these providers have only very limited time to provide content dedicated to special needs.

I never liked or used features like digg, del.icio.us or Stumple. In my opinion they could not work because they need further investigation from the user. If we take a closer look to news i would argue that there is a much more intuitive way to let others now about your favorite news - sharing.

Take a little look a the figure below. Lets assume that the bigger cyan bullets are users and the smaller blue ones are communication channels for shared news items the base of course are several news feeds of the web. If such channels can be used as input channels the persons that provide them can be seen as filter units of information.
At the moment Google Reader supports one channel of every person (account) in my opinion this is not very practicable at all. Normally persons are not just interested in one area. Tagging is a very common method for organizing informations. I would like to see that Google provides a possibility to share also icons for specialize tags. An other type of categorization may be the importance of news. Information that is more important (maybe stared could be an indicator for the Google Reader) can be provided on an different channel too.
With such an infrastructure every user will be able to select the information channels he wants to subscribe much better. Of course every one can choose if he will be a content provider or not. In the picture above we don’t see if the information that flows over the channels is more generalized or specialized. This depends on the content providers and the subscribers.

In this first stage i was just taking about sharing content. Several days ago i came across the Website of share.opml.org which i think could be very useful. At the moment most of the readers do not have the possibility to publish the opml file of their current subscriptions.
The orange points are now the publishing channels of the opml file. As you can see there are several persons that are much more interested in the content that is read by others that they even use their subscriptions as input for their information unit which means that they subscribe to the same channels.
In this figure i have also removed the base of old news feeds because there is no base any more. It doesn’t make any difference if the content provider is a Blog a old school News website or an person filtering content for you.