Erik Marshall

Back in May of 05, I wrote about distributed identity, and posted links to a number of sites with which I share information about myself, such as last.fm, flickr, etc. I mused about exhibitionism and sharing, but the problem then is that if anyone were actually interested, for some reason, in following my activities, they would have to go to each service and subscribe or return repeatedly. What was missing was a place to aggregate them, and now a few have come around. Doug alerted me to friendfeed, which includes all kinds of data. I have also looked at swurl, which seems to do the same thing, but I haven’t really investigated it yet. Both are remarkably simple to set up, involving little more than typing in your public username for each site (which means for me typing “emarsh” over and over). Friendfeed also has a facebook component, which I haven’t used yet, but which might be a good way to alert friends to new blog entries and other events.

On the flip side of this phenomenon is Whoisi which also lets you track people, but perhaps in a different way. It’s basically a search engine to which one can add people and associate their names with sites. On the one hand this is an intriguing way to build collaboratively a database of individuals. On the other hand, it may be a sinister avenue for outing people’s anonymous blogs, or slandering people by assoicating their names with unsavory sites.  There’s nothing for me yet, and I don’t think I’ll create anything, but this site has some interesting, if unsettling, potential.