ID
Luke recently asked me to help him find a new name for his online identity. Eh? That never occurred to me as something that would happen. A new online identity? What was so abhorrent about his old one that he needed a new one? Ah, I thought, he was being a teenager. I have a handful of online identities, each with a different purpose (real me, pseudonym, throwaway) and I’ll probably be using them until the end of the Internet.
A quote from another blog:
Sara created a MySpace using an email address that she made specifically for that purpose. After vacation, she couldn’t remember her MySpace password (or her email password). She created a new MySpace page using a new throwaway email address. When i asked her if she was irritated that she had to do this after investing time in the previous profile, she said, “nah.. I had too many Friends that I didn’t know anyways.”
Throwing away accounts every few days seems very, very wasteful to me (think about those poor databases people!). If people don’t seem to value their creations, its because they can do nothing with them. What’s the point of signing up to a really cool web 2.0 service if you can’t do anything with the data you create. Data is the single most important thing to a user. More needs to be done to provide access to this data, rather than concentrating on the functions to create the data. Otherwise, what’s the point of it?
(”I had too many Friends that I didn’t know anyways.” - and people are surprised by pedophiles managing to “groom” young girls…)
It’s already happening
One of the great things about this web 2.0 thing is that this is already happening. Like someone said, “If web 1.00 was for people, web 2.0 is for the computers”. Syndication is great at getting your data out. As are APIs and interfaces to your cool new web app (yay REST!). Whilst it initially may seem that syndicating data will enable people not to use your service, as you’ve lost your “lock in”, people will keep on coming back because their data is now worth a lot more to them. As I’ve shown above, there is no real benefit to locking the users such as Sara into your service, they’ll just go somewhere else. However, if they can use your data with another app’s data, they’ll come back to add more. And if they don’t, it’s because there’s something better; not much you can do about that then.
Twitter: an illustrative example
- Twittercal: Update your Google Calendar from your Twitter. It’s as simple as:
- Remember The Milk: To-do list. As simple as:
d gcal metting with paul tomorrow at 7pm.
d rtm return library books in 2 weeks
Not only that, but since Twitter has a SMS gateway, you can access these services from your phone, great!
Hopefully in the more meaningful, yet seemingly unattainable, web 3.0 (yes Alex, web 3.0) data access will be like nirvana. Until then, semantic HTML will have to do.
Related Note
On a related note, I hope that the general move towards unified identity and password-less authentication will help this situation. The allure of something as easy as CardSpace is only lessened by the fact that it is a Microsoft product. OpenID on the other hand may seem slightly too geeky currently. Ideally there should be (hopefully there will be) a unified architecture for authentication on the server side; who knows, I might get round to writing some sort of PHP class sometime.
Or, teenagers may create new identities each and every time because they are experimenting with who they are (yay for psychology).
“teh funneh”
I leave you with “teh funneh”
(Only the Turkish didn’t let them in, Troy used to be in Turkey, by the proverbial way)
Stupid Wordpress
Had a bit of a scare today. Loaded up the blogs…and I get a WP DB error. I instinctively knew WordPress was lying, so I enabled real php errors instead of the user friendly WP one. And sure enough I get lots of PHP errors which have nothing to do with DB’s at all.
Interestingly, all the errors were at “Notice” level, so I…err…just hid them :p
So now we have no errors. What a story!
UPDATE: It seems to be an intermittent DB connection error, same thing happened just now; it fixed itself after a while. Never fear, the Media Temple ninjas have been called in!
It’s just not fair!
I was going to do a “Hello World!” post, but WordPress took care of that, so I don’t have that much to say…
Well aside from: “HOW THE HELL DO YOU MAKE A CNAME FOR A SUBDOMAIN WORK???”
So WordPress ยต… its been working quite well I suppose…does what it says on the tin, so to speak. I’m probably going to be installing all manner of plugins to play around with. I actually haven’t had a WordPress blog until now, prefering to use Simple PHP Blog (that was my first experience of a WP link add, nice bit of JS, can’t say much for the interface though). It’ll be fun I think. I’ve already installed Site wide tags so the plugining has already begun.
I’ll end with a clarification: All blogs are on mango6.com (I’d like to say I made that decision of my own accord, but I’d be lying, I was forced into it by unruly DNS) but I’ll probably get together some sort of link with mangosix.co.uk. Personal blogs are [name].mango6.com. Barnaby’s blog is our “corporate” one for company announcements and such. Finally, mango6.com itself is just for linking all the sites together.
Those of you with an RSS fetish can access a Site Wide RSS feed.
As always, I’ll leave you with “teh funneh”:
CLICKY (I normally would have embedded here, but WP doesn’t seem to allow HTML…)
Hello world!
Welcome to Mango6.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!