Please make me one of these: Universal read count

Crossthwaite ViewsI see information in many streams, email, IM, twitter, RSS reader, etc. Unfortunately my brain isn’t good enough to remember everything that I have already read so I regularly find myself going to the same piece of information more than once.

Within each stream I’m unlikely to go back more than once because I get visual indicators that I have already read it. The main problem is between streams. That’s not to say, though, that people won’t send me the same piece of information more than once in the same stream.

I’d quite like a service that handled the read status for me, across all of the streams.

I should get a visual indicator that a link in twitter points to the same content as the blog post in my RSS reader, and they should both show anything that I have already consumed from a browser. Oh, and while I’m at it, it needs to do that across any one of the devices that I’m likely to use, and it needs to handle shortened urls.

My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) does a reasonably good job of keeping the read count in-synch across devices, but nothing between streams.

What I am looking for is to be able to mark parts of the Internet as “read”.

I’d also like this status consolidation capability to be searchable, especially by date. I am reasonably good at remembering when I read something, but not so great at remembering where I read it.

I’m sure there are a load more functional requirements that I would surface if I had time to think about it, but for now, this will do.

Has anyone done anything like this?

Idea herding

Swans, swans, swansFor a few days now I’ve been thinking about issues of reuse and exploitation.

How do we get people to reuse things?

How do we get people to exploit what is already there and expand upon it?

The phrase that keeps going through my mind is “herding cats”, so I’ve decided to turn my thoughts to “herding ideas”.

When it comes to idea I think that some are like sheep and some are like cats – that’s about as advanced as my thoughts have got so far.

Please make me one of these: Universal profile

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0I have identities all over the Internet, and internally; blog, flickr, linkedin, facebook, etc. each one of them have some form of a personal profile where I get to talk about who I am and what I do.

There are lots of very clever people working on the problem of how I get to these things without having to authenticate everywhere. But I want more than that, I want to be able to have a single place where I have my profile information.

Why should I need to tell each of these systems the same information? If I change my job it should be updated within the relevant systems.

The emerging identity federation model probably has a lot to tell us in this area. People started from the premise that identities should be stored in one place and every other system should trust that one place. This didn’t work, because there wasn’t trust between all of the systems. The same will be true for profiles. I don’t want everyone to see all of the profile, I only want the people to see the parts of my profile that are relevant to the access that they have and the system that they are using.

Technologies like Facebook Connect go someway towards resolving this problem, but I’m not sure that they have really learnt the lessons from the identity people.

I want to be in control of what goes where, but I don’t want to have to maintain the same stuff everywhere.

I’m sure that I’m not alone in thinking that this is a problem, and as the famous quote goes: “"The future is already here – it’s just unevenly distributed." – William Gibson. So I’m also sure that I have missed some form of amazing development in this area that has the potential to make my winging sound like the ramblings of an idiot.

Anyone else think that this is a problem we need to get resolved?