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The New Tweetconomy™

Want a new mixtape, but the economy has your pockets feeling kind of empty? Would you pay a tweet for it? At this site DJs TRV$ and DJ-AM are charging fans a tweet to download their album. Interesting. The price of entry for free content used to be your contact information; now the price is a tweet. I think this speaks to how far marketing and Twitter have both come. Are you tweeting yet?

Streamy

Facebook + OpenID = Huge

As reported on ReadWriteWeb, Facebook is allowing users to log in using OpenID. Some folks get how big this step is, but for the folks who don’t, you should read this post by Chris Messina. Essentially, as my co-worker Alisa Hansen is constantly preaching about, it’s about data portability.

I won’t regurgitate the RRW or Messina posts, but the short version is that while the web was designed to be social, it was built to share documents. Sites (i.e., social networks) have devised their own ways of creating, storing, and managing identities, assets, and interactions - data. A popular idea is that the time has come to standardize and commoditize these components, including how they interact. While some think this could hurt innovation, others see it differently.

There have been arguments about whether or not you own the data in these social networks (you do), but that’s not the critical point. Not only does the data belong to you, but so too should the ability to freely access, distribute, share, move, send or otherwise manipulate the data as you see fit. That’s not easily possible right now because each site has devised its own way of doing things. Have you ever tried to move your pictures from Flickr to Facebook or vice versa? It’s a huge hassle, but it doesn’t have to be if standards existed to support seamless intra-service interaction.

And it’s not just about the data itself. Acting on your data by viewing a pic, sending an IM, watching a video, generates more data; not only about your data, but direct and tangential data belonging to other people, brands, etc., all of it trackable and measurable. Shouldn’t your actions belong to you too? Shouldn’t you be able to determine who can see what you’re doing, what is being done with it, how it is stored - and if it’s being used as the basis for advertising - how much it is worth?

The reality is that it’s a nascent industry, and everyone is making it up as they go. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a standard for representing a person and their data, in whatever form it exists?

Look, social networks are fun: part interaction, part news, part entertainment, and when someone figures out how to properly monetize the huge amounts of data being generated, there is an equally huge revenue stream; it’ll happen, it’s just a matter of time. Until, however, the users of these sites understand that they get to make the rules about their data - all of it - the status quo will never change. Standards-based open initiatives such as the Data Portability Project and OpenID are critical to freeing your data, and why Facebook, the largest and one of the most closed social networks, allowing OpenID as a login method is HUGE.

I'm still here...

Work + Life = Busy.

Be back soon!

The Death of FriendFeed?

Facebook has released the Open Stream API enabling developers to bring your personal activity stream to the outside world. This has some very large implications, including - my prediction - that it will kill off FriendFeed, but not Twitter, and that it further establishes the groundwork for a Facebook advertising platform.

Why will FriendFeed die, but Twitter live? FriendFeed’s identity is an aggregation platform, and while can do everything that Twitter can do (and more), it’s lacking the one essential quality that will carry it into the future… personality.

I'm an R rated individual

Or, you’re an adult. Here’s the text of the blog post:

I’m an R rated individual

by David Heinemeier Hansson

I’ve found that the fewer masks I try to wear, the better. This means less division between the personality that’s talking to my close personal friends, socializing with my colleagues, and for interacting with my hobby or business worlds.

Blending like this isn’t free. You’re bound to upset, offend, or annoy people when you’re not adding heavy layers of social sugarcoating. I choose to accept that trade because my personal upside from congruence is that I find more energy, more satisfaction, and more creativity when the bullshit is stripped away.

This means that it leaks out that I love listening to Howard Stern, that Pulp Fiction is one of my favorite movies, that I laugh out loud at Louis CK’s Bag of Dicks joke, that I whole-fully accept my instinctual attraction to the female body, that I think drugs should be legal, that I really like the word fuck and other gems of profanity, and on and on.

Now I get that lots of people find much of that crude and primitive. I’m okay with that. I do take offense when yet another lame stereotype is thrown out (like that porn by definition is misogynistic), but I’ve learned to deal with that.

What I’m not going to do, though, is apologize for any of these preferences and opinions. I’m happy to be an R rated individual and I’m accepting the consequences of the leakage that comes from that. If you can deal with that, I’m sure we’re going to get along just fine.

The Path is not difficult for those who have no preferences.

— Jianzhi Sengcan

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