mobile geo social

Thought for the day… if my Facebook status is updated by my Twitter feed, or Jaiku, and gets reported in my Plaxo Pulse, which is spotted by my FriendFeed, which sends an update to Twitter, which updates my Facebook status again, can I somehow create an infinite social feedback loop and crash the internet?

Here’s the Logitech Harmony 1000, a universal remote control with something for everyone:

Rita will enjoy the usability which is task-centric, rather than being organised around different components. You tell it you want to watch a DVD in the rumpus, or listen to the radio in the lounge, and it works out what it has to do with each of your components to achieve that. Like when MS-DOS grew into MacOS I mean Windows.

Jack and Luke will not enjoy that it does infra-red and also radio frequency (RF), meaning that all of the components can be hidden away in the cupboard under the stairs. Or at least the US version does RF. In Australian, Logitech hasn’t yet secured the licensing for the right bit of radio spectrum. eBay sellers in the US will happily provide an international solution to that one.

And finally… my neighbours: here’s offering my blanket apology to my neighbours for whenever their RF garage door opens randomly in the middle of the night.

For a while I’ve had a niggling problem with social networking sites.

I’ve already set up my LinkedIn network and my Facebook friends, so why should I have to do it all again on every other site that has decided to go social on me?

When I heard the OpenSocial announcement last year, while I was F5ing the API URL, waiting to see the campfire video, I was imagining that the problem had been solved, by allowing any social networking site to share its social data with any other.

But the first incarnation of OpenSocial, actually the 0.7th as I write this, is more aimed at developers re-using code to make applications more portable, rather than data portability.

Then Plaxo released a LinkedIn sync feature which looked promising, but that was just two social sites, what about all the others?

Now it looks like Google has provided the solution, not as part of OpenSocial but with its new Social Graph API. Social data becomes portable simply by adding some XFN tags to the hyperlinks between your pages and your friends’ pages and your other pages (view the source of this page and search for rel=”me” to get the idea), then letting the Googlebot spider those links to work out the connections. Very simple and powerful. The internet is the platform.

This must upset Facebook, because the social data representing all those friend connections is a big part of their crown jewels. If Facebook changes profile pages to become publically available (or less revealing profile summaries, as LinkedIn has done), and adds some XFN tags, then that social data and the ad revenue extracted from it will start to trickle out onto the wider web. How long can Facebook resist?

Anyone could start to work out who knows who by using the Social Graph API. Reputable sites will put the decision of how to use that social data in the hands of the user. But there’s also a privacy risk here. Perhaps the answer to that is something along the lines of OpenId which puts the user firmly in control of how portable their identity data is.

My mind spins with the opportunities and challenges created by this great innovation. My favourite: combine social graph data portability with always-connected location-aware mobile devices (“phone”), and you can mashup the social landscape with the physical landscape you’re walking through.

Maybe that’s what Judge Dread’s helmet did.

Okay so we all know about digital photo frames by now. But this is the next gen.

This wonderful thing includes a wi-fi connection so it can connect to your home or office network.

Why would that be useful? So it can receive photos sent to it by email or MMS, using a special email address.

Why a ’special’ email address? Because you should only reveal it to trusted friends and family! Definitely not an email address to publish on your blog and attract Viagra spam.

And it does RSS, so you can subscribe to your favorite Flickr feed for a regular supply of fresh photos.

Just swap all those cables for a decent rechargeable battery and slim down the form factor (maybe we need to wait until Apple launches the iFrame…) and I’m in.

And video streaming would be good too so I can watch my new and excellent YouTube Radiohead subscription. Check out Jigsaw Falling Into Place: