carolstimmel.net

As you can see by the temporal spread between today and my last post, blogging has been way out of my central focus.  Even my incessant twittering seemed to take a hit as my work load climbed, uncomfortable things happened in my life, and my energy plummeted. Just now recovering from hip surgery, my desire to care and feed my blog has re-emerged.

As most of my friends know, I love to read and write.  Being a “writer” has always been my dream from my days in college when I tucked my Sylvia Plath book securely under my arm, to the utter joy at the opportunity to produce a real book with Don Olson in 2001.  I seized the opportunity to write publicly even with twitter, and tried all sorts of little private social experiments, including tiny-lies and nano-manipulations (all in good fun, of course).  Sarcasm doesn’t always translate, by the way.

But at some point, the little shouts into the aether from my phone, the incessant influx of information, to the cynical tools available to leverage other people’s “content” for one’s own blogging advantage, I must admit began to discourage me.  But it wasn’t all bad.  In the face of personal tragedy and the loss of my new friend Kevin Haythe in July, it was indeed Twitter and SMS that kept me bouyed up.  People reached out to me in an immediate and meaningful way.  My relationships were indeed ambient, and as rich as a 140 characters burst allowed.

I’m not completely ambivalent.  The emergent social graph is only somewhat trustworthy, because I know that I can’t really always say what I feel, even when I want to.  It’s a form of psychological flooding and a transient moment can get trapped and absconded by robots and social silos.  Not to mention, misunderstood.  But, at the same time, even electronically-mediated communication doesn’t always have to preclude the beating of the human heart.  We have a new form of unity and togetherness that can be adopted for good.  I like that.

Lisa Reichelt at Disambiguity calls Twitter level detail where users pump their “real life” noise into the aether “ambient intimacy”. Reichelt says, It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like.

I bemoan the fact that people primarily now use twitter for social networking, lazy-blogging events they are attending, painfully detailed demarcations in their day, or incredibly obvious pumps to their ego. What bums me out is that people may tell the factual truth, but it’s always seems to be for an end-purpose. The medium would be so much more interesting if I could twitter, “wow, the drugs aren’t working today” without worrying about Twitter-tremors or seismic waves registering in my wetware life. The medium is so discredited in my mind that I find the Twitter Suicide Note refreshing.

Can I go as far as saying that Twitter and other activity-stream players, like Jaiku (now a part of Google) a bit boring? In some sense, yes, in another sense, it is endlessly fascinating to see how people work to control their online presence. Unlike Reichert who believes we draw closer to our twittermates through this endless streaming, my assertion is that intimacy is about love and friendship. Sharing your inner self crosses a heretofore silent boundary and I’ve observed this rarely crossed. And when one does, you might expect the police to show up at your door and lock you up in Bellview.

By the way, you can follow my lies on Twitter.

While publishing my online persona through Facebook, MySpace, Plazes or on this blog is now insanely easy through available technology that the question is no longer can I, but how out of control can this experience get?

First off, keeping track of all these sources is a blown deal for me, right from the beginning. I won’t do it, and I can’t do it. Spending my every waking moment traveling from source to source gets cumbersome, even with the beckoning to update my status.

The only true status I reliably provide is through my twitter stream because I can do it from my desktop and from my phone. And even that is not a guarantee. Using my Flock browser on with the people bar running, I can also update my facebook status (I haven’t yet begun to use SMS to update facebook yet). However, being an employee and fan of Me.dium, I tend to run the Me.dium sidebar exclusively prohibiting the use of the use of the people bar.

So, I chose to use my blog to publish all my sources, but how can I keep my sources easily updated? Obviously, all these social networks arent’ helping to keep me organized in anyway, but tend to provide an incidental look at my online activities. I want access to an aggregator that not only allows me to see my activity stream (actually, I already know what I have been doing), but allow me to interact with the items in the stream.

So far, I have tried SocialURL, Profilactic and Spokeo and am left feeling like these products are glorified RSS publishers with slick Web 2.0 interfaces. In fact, the closest I’ve come to what I’m looking for is Jared Polis’ Fuser, like Me.dium, another Boulder, Colorado startup.

It has taken awhile for me to be able to even test Fuser, because it has been so buggy. Yes, it’s in it’s Beta phase, but I couldn’t even use it. In fact, it’s still fairly buggy now and the interface is wanting, but I can see that they are moving in a unique direction from a simple aggregator by allowing you to access and interact with your network (only Facebook and MySpace right now) data complete with profile data. I’ll keep trying to use it, and hopefully there is velocity behind their development team, because my curiousity is piqued.