Yostivanich

Sorry for the lack of post­ing over the last few weeks. I had finals and yeah that is ’nuff’ said. Some­thing inter­est­ing has been occur­ring over the last sev­eral weeks though with regards to Face­book. I now have just about the entirety of my fam­ily whom I com­mu­ni­cate with me on Face­book, even my mom and grand­mother are now on Face­book. Which is inter­est­ing in the since that now my fam­ily can fol­low pas­sively every­thing that I do online, which is quite a bit.

I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a friend yes­ter­day about this phe­nom­ena. The idea that soon you will be able to fol­low every­one pas­sively with every­thing that they do online and what hap­pens at that point. First though what needs to hap­pen for this to occur is for all infor­ma­tion of what you do online needs to be aggre­gated, eas­ily and effectively.

This is hap­pen­ing with sites like Friend­Feed that take your activ­i­ties at sites and then dis­plays them for peo­ple to see. How­ever the lim­i­ta­tion with sites like this is that you will never be able to encom­pass every sin­gle site that a per­son vis­its or inter­acts with.

Leav­ing a com­ment on a blog is a per­fect exam­ple. In most cases the com­ment that you leave on a site, stays on that site and isn’t asso­ci­ated with you except by you sign­ing the com­ment as your own. But no where can I go to see all the com­ments that you left around the web. Dis­qus, a blog com­ment­ing plu­gin that I use, does aggre­gate com­ments across blogs, but there will never be a time that all blogs will have this sort of thing installed, it sim­ply won’t hap­pen. So every­thing that you do at every site needs to be aggregated.

When that hap­pens, which who knows if it is even pos­si­ble, it will sim­ply be astound­ing at the amount of infor­ma­tion peo­ple will have on each other. Myself you could find out where I am, who I am with, my mood, all kinds of dif­fer­ent things sim­ply by ana­lyz­ing this infor­ma­tion. There is a cool site www.tweetstats.com that ana­lyzes your posts to Twit­ter and pulls out all kinds of infor­ma­tion.

Some of the coolest for myself to look at is my Aggre­gate Hourly Tweets, or how many posts I have in each hour of the day. The weird thing is that I have none basi­cally between the hours of 2 and 6am, so I’m asleep. Also I almost always have a tweet out by 7am except on Sun­day which runs to around 9am. How­ever Sun­day morn­ing I am still up till around 4 or 5 am. So I’m sleep­ing some­where around 4 hours a night every night, even on the week­ends, I just shift my sleep­ing time a few hours.

Or if my sleep­ing habits aren’t inter­est­ing what about what I talk about the most (in no par­tic­u­lar order): “work, apart­ment, bed, face­book, home­work”. Some­how for not sleep­ing all that much I sure do talk about my bed an awful lot. That tells you what my big focuses are in life, and the things that I find the most inter­est­ing. Far more inter­est­ing and telling see­ing what I talk about rather than just what I list in some social net­works pro­file under interests.

It’s not that I don’t have a sense of pri­vacy, I’m actu­ally a very pri­vate per­son, but this is esen­tially low value infor­ma­tion. Why should I care if some­one knows that I am going to bed, or work­ing on home­work, or out on a date? If they are a friend of mine, I want them to know that sort of infor­ma­tion and they may wish to know what I am doing. If they aren’t a friend where is the harm?

Soon it’s not just going be those of us on the cut­ting edge of tech­nol­ogy and early adopters who will be stalk­a­ble on the web. Soon we all will be, because soon we will live on the web. Devices such as the iPhone with the abil­ity to have the inter­net lit­er­ally in your pocket will be com­mon place. At that point you are going to lit­er­ally be on the inter­net eas­ily 12 or more hours a day. You enter­tain­ment, shop­ping, research, com­mu­ni­ca­tion all will occur through the inter­net, sim­ply because it’s there. And then sooner then you think you will be stalk­a­ble just as much as I am today.