Lifestreaming

The details of my life are quite inconsequential…

Okay, so I’m no Dr. Evil, but I do have this odd desire to share what’s happening in my life and what’s bouncing around in my head with people. Sometimes the ruminations have a focus, other times they just reflect current personal events and whatnot.

Even though I don’t update this blog very often, my Twitter feed does get a lot of activity. So when I do write something here, usually I prefer to make it something more than a quick blurb. And the folks that want to see what’s happening want more than just that; photos, videos, etc. all figure into the mess. In short, I want a lifestream (or the equivalent of my Facebook updates).

A few months ago, I thought FriendFeed might provide the answer, but now I’ve found a service I think I like better: Storytlr. The presentation looks a lot nicer and they have some advanced options like using a CNAME record (so your site looks like it really is your site) as well as backing up your data from other services.

For those interested, I still use Feedburner, so you can still just get the same URL no matter what. Then again, you might get inundated with my Twitter updates…

Via Anabubula

Note taking in the cloud or on the desktop

Why would I use a local note taking app over one on the Web? A recent Linux Format article covered a number of such apps on Linux, but I really can’t see why I’d use one over Google Notebook or Backpack. Availability with these two has never been an issue for me and I don’t have to synchronize any devices. This includes my mobile, which has great access to both. They could stand some improvement, like editing existing notes from my mobile, but overall this weakness is overcome by the ability to easily access them from anywhere.

I might give one or two of the desktop apps a spin to see what’s missing, I suppose.

Test post from Flock

Messing around with the new Flock beta and testing tflockhe blog post functionality.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

FriendFeed

I’ve started using FriendFeed to gather all my various bits of web activity into one place. Those subscribed to the feed here might prefer the feed there instead, as it also includes my activity on del.icio.us and a few other places as well. But feel free to subscribe here as well.

I need to figure out how to merge things together a little more smoothly. A bit at a time.

Initial thoughts on Twitter

So I’ve started using Twitter a bit more recently. It’s had a few uses thus far: keeping in touch with family members, particularly those that live far away. I’m starting to have a few more “geek” conversations as well. In terms of immediacy or maybe synchronicity, it lives somewhere between email and IM. It’s sort of like SMS for the web (although it can work just fine with SMS as well).

ReadWriteWeb had an article about using Twitter for self-promotion. The only things I really thought were useful out of it were the ideas to synchronize your avatars and maybe have all your various social network profiles include links to one another. Frankly, I can’t stand it when folks seed a thousand places with links to their most recent post. Maybe it does drive traffic, I don’t know. But if what you have to say really is interesting, people will pick up on it, comment on it, and over time your reputation will grow.

There have been some recent availability issues, evidently due to scaling as well as spam. A lot of Web 2.0 sites seem to really struggle with this, and I’m not sure if it’s because of poor architecture at the beginning, the fact that this area is still fairly cutting-edge, or just that traffic increases so much faster than their ability to add back-end resources.

They do seem to have some level of data filtering, as at least backslashes have some trouble. But I haven’t spent any time yet understanding the parameters there or what work has been done in this area. It just seems to me that this is a pretty useful attack vector given how many different ways there are to send out tweets to so many different people.