I think Stowe Boyd is a very clever man he's thoughts behind social tools run very deep. And rightly so, while the rest of us were trying to grapple with social anything, he coined the term social tools and understood the power of these tools and the conversation. I kind of liken him to people like Doc Searls and Howard Rheningold but instantly more accessible.
A lot of people don't like his presentation style which is more a jumble of mini-thoughts and pointers. So when someone pointed me at Phil Windley's piece about Stowe's latest thought, I knew what the bulk of the post would be about.
Although Phil may not have enjoyed the talk much, I certainly did. It also got me thinking.
He shows his desktop: Snackr,
Friendfeed flow UI, Flickr, Twitterfox, and so on. These are all
flow apps. There are dozens of streams now and there will be lots
more in the future. These differ on the basis of the social
interactions they enable. There will be 5 or 6 themes, but lots of
implementations.This leads to a model called “lifestreaming.” People are continually
broadcasting their life to groups of friends and even strangers.
People know where you are and ask you questions about things in your
life because of life streaming.
If you take a look at one of my desktops from yesterday when I was watching the us elections (go obama). You can clearly see some common elements between Stowe's and mine.
In Stowe's talk and screenshot he's got the friends activity stream as a page up on the right but using rss there's no need to have that at all. Actually I noticed my microblogging client Gwibber supports not only microblogging services but also Facebook and Flickr. I think with some hacking around in the Python code I can get it to have a generic RSS input too. Another interesting element is snackr, which is the scrolling rss driven marqaue at the bottom. If we could get Gwibber to spit out rss too, that would be cool for snackr. But I can't help but feel the guys are Faradaymedia have already venutured into this area before with Touchstone/Particls. Unfortuelly having the attention engine on your machine wasn't the best of ideas. Which is where a combination of something new I also heard about at Web 2.0 expo could come in useful in relevency area.
Not one to hide my ideas but this time, I want to try hacking around with some software to see what I build either into Gwibber or Snackr.
