2009-07-04
Ephemerality
[This was an experiment in live note taking. Please see the follow-up, On Taking Notes.]
Gavin Bell at OpenTech
What I want from the web in five years. Self documenting lives. Happy with the idea of throwing away information, like newspapers. Twitter and Flickr disagree- have archives including social data but not real time; Twitter don’t make available past 3500 messages.
Will I want fourteen years of data? Benefits of forgetting. Amusingly forgets the name of a book about someone who can remember years-old data but couldn’t summarise plots. Brains remember significant activities. Stuff that matters. What to forget?
Aggregation is key (meant here as grouping of items onto clusters, not my meaning). iPhoto events. Abstraction services- photos for upcoming, possibly in future grouped by friend. hAtom? Date based URLs. Favouriting etc. Social tools to prune networks and renewal of identity through new networks.
Finding significant enents. Overview of important events. “Abstracting it for you wholesale.” Favouriting and similar single-click methods of approval. Social bleedthrough- Friendfeed likes. Looking at the past. Twitter social atlas? Preserving context around content and favourites.
