Hmm, just realized the subject of the post can be quite suggestive. But I'm sure my readers don't have as notty a mind as I do ;)
I've only recently Linked In. As someone who's usually an early adopter of web technology (on the Internet for 13 years, been online shopping and banking for almost as long, heard about and used Amazon and Ebay way before everyone else – if only I had the smarts to buy their stocks then!), I've been consistently late in using these so called "social networking" services.
Not that I haven't been following the trends. I heard about Friendster when it first started, but didn't sign on until last year. I still don't have a MySpace account. But maybe I'm too old for that. Plus I'm really not that social a person… I tend to lurk rather than contribute. Although Vox is doing a great job in bringing me out of my shell a bit…
(A good site that keeps abreast of social networking news is Mashable. There's also a List of social networking websites on Wikipedia though it's far from complete.)
Why do people join so many social networks? I can't speak for others, but for me it's mainly about connecting with people that I share something with. Friendster helped me reconnect with many friends from way-back-when… LinkedIn will (hopefully) build up my professional network… and I joined WAYN in hopes of finding people with as much wanderlust as I do — unfortunately there were more with just plain lust.
I've been eyeing Wikitravel for quite a while now, where I can read and even contribute to travel guides. (my Hawaiian posts are coming soon, I promise!!) But before I join yet another, I need to get organized. I'm getting too scattered, not just for my friends but also for myself…
In search for a Web 2.0 solution to my Web 2.0 problem, I came across Profilactic. It is known as a "digital life aggregator" that help gather all your contents and profiles from various social sites at one centralized place. So instead of giving you 10 URLs to check out my Flickr/Youtube/Friendster/VOX/Blog1/Blog2/moblog/…, I can hand you a Prophylactic Profilactic one (hehe).
However, this poses another dilemma. Do I really want all aspects of me readily accessible in one place? (Although I'm already doing it to a certain extent on the main page of my blog.) Do I want my Linked In contacts reading my personal blog? I don't think there's any harm… plus they can probably find it with a quick google, but doesn't mean I should make it that convenient, right?
So perhaps I can have two or three aggregated profiles, depending on my target audience. (Might want to pick a different aggregator – with a different name – for my professional links though…). Ack… now I need an aggregator for the aggregated profiles!! Like how they have index of indices, meta-metadatas, search of search engines etc… yeah, I'm one of those who love to make lists, and lists of lists, and lists of lists of lists…..
But what I do like about Profilactic is that besides collecting profiles, it also provides a mashed up RSS feed of your gathered content. Actually, that was what I set out to do in the first place. I have several feeds that people can subscribe to from my blogs and other services (Flickr etc.), but I update most of them only sporadically. Why not have one feed that combines all of them? I was going to program it myself, and then I thought, I'm sure someone has already done something similar. Maybe I'll save some time googling for one.
I think I ended up spending more time searching and finding out new stuff. And writing this entry. And I still don't have a combined feed yet! (Can't make up my mind which to use…). From basic tools such as FeedJumbler and RSS Mix, to something that gives you more options (Feed Digest, FeedBlendr) and more control (Feed Rinse, Blastfeed)… to the ultimate Yahoo! pipes.
According to Pipes Overview, "Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code."
Using Pipes, you can grab search results from google and yahoo simultaneously, read New York Times through Flickr, get a feed of apartment listings in a specific zip code, watch for an item in a specific price range on ebay…. the possibilities are endless. From the descriptions, the tool sounds easy yet powerful. However, the Pipes Editor is not very intuitive for first time users. I think a good piece of technology should be simple enough to get someone interested, and then offer the flexibility and complexity for more options and control. Granted, it's still in beta, so let's see how it develops.
In fact, an example of an aggregation that is simple (users don't have to do anything) and actually useful is VoxWatch! I use it frequently to get updates from my Vox neighbours instead of subscribing to 33 different feeds (at last count). It also keeps track of all comments left for me, as well as follow-ups to comments that I've left for others. Definitely well thought-out. There's also a blog-like version of my neighbourhood along with a combined feed. Great job, Vox!
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