Syncing our online lives

Larry Borsato — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:26:02 -0700

I've got a problem. I'm a compulsive joiner of online services. I have an account with practically every Web mail provider, file-sharing service, media site, and social network on the 'Net. Every one of those services has at least a little bit of my data, and many store lists of friends and their contact information as well.

That's not all. The daily blizzard of messages from these services is astounding. This morning I woke up to a few hundred email messages from my four primary email accounts. I also received two LinkedIn updates, ten Facebook messages, and five Twitter follow messages. As for new services, I signed up for two more today, which generates more messages. You know there's a real problem there when there's even a term -- bacn -- to describe the reminders, notifications, and email you get from these kinds of services.

Frankly, many of these registration-required Web tools haven't kept my interest for longer than a week and, truth be told, I simply can't keep track of them all. If I didn't get the occasional email from services such as Ryze I wouldn't even remember I have active accounts. In addition, I can't remember which services have relatively current data and which need to be updated.

My editor told me how he keeps track of what services he belongs to, but I think that tattooing is far too painful, and I'd run out of space pretty quick [You're fired -- Ed.]. Loic Le Meur apparently keeps track by writing them by hand in a notebook, which is not much better.

So, what's the best way to organize people's online tools, interests and communications? FriendFeed and SocialThing have been extensively discussed in the past few months. They keep track of a few of the more popular services such as blogs, Twitter, Flickr, last.fm, and YouTube, but they come nowhere near to solving my problem -- the inability of these services to share common data and to aggregate all of the message flows. Dataportability is a partial solution, but that just allows me share my data freely -- it still doesn't provide a way for me to find and update all of it. In addition, this service won't improve social networks, as the value-add comes from making connections between my data and that of other users in the same networks.

Why isn't there a common repository of up-to-date information that these networks and services could access? There are precedents for this, such as the Domain Name System, which keeps the Internet running. I use Keychain on my Macbook to store all of my online passwords, but that only reminds me of the sites I have visited since I switched to the Mac.

When it comes to the wider universe of personal information used by online services, there is no such central repository. I'm not asking for much -- just a single definitive list of my contact information, my friends and business contacts, and all of the services I belong to. Such a service would need to have an API that other service providers can use to access the data using privacy controls that I set.

Surely it isn't a trust issue that is preventing the launch of such a repository. We've already given away plenty of information to the services we already belong to, and most of us would be hard-pressed to remember who has what. And before I'm assailed by privacy advocates, I'm not suggesting we keep social security numbers or credit card numbers in a huge centralized database; just the same information that we already store online, but in a single place so that we can see, update, and control it all, using a strong privacy policy that clearly states who can do what with my data.

Consider OpenID. Wouldn't it be so much more useful if it not only provided a secure identity, but also a secure location for the rest of the information that goes with that identity? I -- and I am sure many others -- would pay for such as service.

But before I get more worked up about this topic, I've got some business to attend to -- the inboxes of my four primary email accounts, those LinkedIn updates and Facebook messages, and the five Twitter follow notifications. Some of the information may be out of date, but some of these messages just can't wait.

Larry Borsato has been a software developer, marketer, consultant, public speaker, and entrepreneur, among other things. For more of his unpredictable, yet often entertaining thoughts you can read his blog at larryborsato.com.

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