eincarsten's posterous

As an early adopter of social networks and such, I have my bunch of people who like me test a lot of new stuff (latest was path - very nice interface, good concept of "real friends". And the sleep tracker is cute). 

So I have all these people on all the networks. And all are tech.savvy enough to enable content syndication from one platform to another.

So, twitter tweets go to facebook, path goes to twitter and foursqare (but not from there to facebook, hm), youtube favs goes to google+ and maybe from there to twitter - I set this up but didn't test. Just some examples. I have a hard time keeping track of what is syndicated where, especially for these second level syndications as they behave differently. So sometimes I fail, resulting in double posts or missing syndication.

But that's not the painful thing.

The painful thing is to read the syndicated content from others again and again on different platforms. Of course I am kind of interested wether Falko is at Antipodes fr breakfast again - but it is enough to see that once. If I check path and twitter an facebook I'm likely to see the same message three times. And that stacks up, generating a lot of time consuming redundancy. And worse, the clutter crowds out the interesting posts from the people I follow only on that particular platform.

Most platforms want to know who my contacts are on other platforms to add them as contacts on the new one. That's ok, but falls short of my expectations of really "connected" accounts. If they have this information, why don't they use it to let me decide: "please filter out all posts/messages from people syndicated via platform x as you know I already follow them in the stream of y".

Even better: if between the platforms there would be an protocol/API for filtering based on the state of the message ("already seen"/"not yet seen" on x). I would happily give away this extreme detailed tracking/profiling data from me if in exchange it really reduces the "grey noise" of massive duplicate info bits.

So, social network designers out there - please collaborate and build a global "syndication redundancy reduction protocol" or whatever this will be called technically. My birthday is in may, but it would be ok to get it for christmas.

Thanks,
Carsten

As I normally don't do soothsaying, this is my question for 2012.

In 2011 I've seen life/activity tracking becoming more and more automated and more and more realtime (runkeeper, jawbone, path, facebook history, etc.) I get messages about my friend's and colleagues' actions in almoste real-time.

But this is too late. I mean, if you get the message that your friend xy just checked in at a bar that you have been walking by half an our ago - what a lost chance too meet.

So, it's time for the future. They (the apps/social platforms) should know enough about me to predict what I will do next. This can either be handy for me: "You are going to pass by the coffee shop you regularly check in at. Please resist this time as you already had too many #tasskaff today.". Or for my friends.

I'm not talking "minority report" here. But most people have sufficing routine in their daily life to be predictable to a certain point. For eHealth and behaviour change, this would be a good next step.

So I am happy to see some "will be..." posts in 2012.