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Distributed identity

By , on May 3rd, 2005

Many of us use social software or sites such as del.icio.us, to store and share information about ourselves, and most of these have RSS feeds. I intend to make a “me” page that has all of the feeds on one page, so you can see all of my recent activities at once time, should you have the strange desire to do so. In the meantime, here is a list of some of the sites I use to share with the world.

del.icio.us gives a list of all the links to other sites I have created.
flickr lets you see pictures I have taken recently.
Audioscrobbler is probably my favorite. It works through a plugin in Itunes or Amarok or whatever music player you use and transmits each song you play, to be compiled into graphs and stats and such, and then computes musical neighbors for you based on similar tastes. You can then listen to last.fm to stream music from your neighbors’ libraries. It is surprisingly good and accurate. (thanks to Elouise Oyzon for this)
Netflix. Become my friend and see what I’m renting, what I’ve rated etc. There are RSS feeds for Queue and Recommendations, but I’m not going to post those right now.
Update: And don’t forget my Amazon Wishlist.

Even Yahoo is getting into the game with My Web. I’ve imported my bookmarks, but I don’t think I’m going to use it, as I don’t see what makes it better than del.icio.us.

I don’t know what it is about these things. Is it exhibitionism? A desire to be understood? Simply an easy way to share? As we become more networked, our identities fracture, perhaps revealing more about our lives to more people, but in selective, sometimes more self-reflexive ways, and in some cases, in different ways to different audiences.

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  • dkp

    All those things, I think. For me, such things allow for control over my representation, with a bit of play involved in the construction. And social software definitely helps with networking, whether connecting voyeuristically and/or interactively. It’s a way to offset how I sometimes feel disconnected to those people, activities, ideas, etc. with which I most want to engage.

    Plus, I just really like learning the cool things people do and experience, hopefully for my own (mis)appropriation.

  • sutrix

    Hi, I got this link from your comment on Julie’s blog.

    I think it’s not so much exhibitionism as it is to be remembered. By any tangent, the internet will live on as long as we humans do, and perhaps even longer than that. All these blogs we write, they’re just footprints, a life–or a specific experience of that life–in words and hyperlinks.

    It all comes down to leaving a record for the future–a trait humans have exhibited since ancient times. Witness the Egyptians, for example.

    Is it bad? Considering how much we have learned about those ol’ Sun worshippers, I don’t think leaving a record is bad at all. The more you leave, the more they can reconstruct you.

    It’s a humbling thought, at least for me.

  • Doug

    I heard a rumor one time that when the telephone first was introduced to the market, "experts" of the time predicted it would remove all social interaction…Much to their surprise, quiet the opposite occured. People were now able to call one another before swinging by, and were able to free up time for seeing friends by doing the menial tasks over the phone.

    I think that the internet, for all of its temptations to become a recluse, will go down in the books, as a social/instructional tool. Not a "real-life" replacement. We are simply in the puberty of its growth into our lives.

    These various sites are the first fruits of leveraged global connections that will surely come with the quickness, once compression rate allow larger modes of communication (read: video chat, large file transfers, widescale remote access to computers, allowing people to BE together even while working).

    Just my .02

  • Wesley Struble

    I think the comment sutrix left, regarding keeping a record is quite impossible… especially in the digital age. Maintaining a digital heritage is going to prove to be one of the most surmountable feats of our generation. Considering the shelf-life of current media, ever-changing formats, and hardware failure, unless we start mirroring our data in carved stone (or some other yet-unannounced archive media), the records we all hold dear are going to prove rather fleeting.

    In my case, I use such outlets to share my excitement in my interests. I think it’s the sense of community and being able to discover new artists, ideas, etc. via the medium that is important.

  • sutrix

    Wesley, the answer really depends on two things:

    1. Will blogger, or computing as we know it, ever shut down?

    2. Will what we write ever even have a future audience?

    Now, almost all of recorded history faced these two dilemmas; Egyptians had no way of knowing if their carvings would stand the test of time or if a random disaster (an earthquake) could just wipe off all their scribbled walls. They also had no way of knowing if they will have an audience–predicting the future of a planet’s dominant species is rather impossible, especially if we are to consider an optimistic viewpoint.

    So, yeah, what you’re saying is not wrong, there is no guarantee that all these blogs will even survive long enough to become a record for future historians (assuming there are any), but surely, there is no harm in hoping they will, is there?

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  • http://boinc.vanderbilt.edu/CSB/view_profile.php?userid=1660 mark

    Very interesting site, Hope it will always be alive!

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