Damek.

A short list of apps that I’d love to see for a more streamlined life/workflow:

A simple, beautiful, semwebby, linked data-enabled …
… feed reader
… address book
… calendar
… email inbox (with a bot that removes junk based on SPARQL rules)
… lifelog (private posts, project posts, status updates, location changes)
… online profile generated from all my data
… alert tool for selected topics/discussions on Twitter, IRC, and mailing lists
… photo organizer

Stuff I want:
* I want my instant messenger to talk to my address book and reconcile who’s who.
* I want my instant messenger to be able to talk to other people’s computers, via Jabber, so I can SPARQL them if I want to.
* I want the Kevin Bacon agent, which just like on facebook suggests ‘people you might know’, by recursively indexing the address books of my friends and smushing.

Why did everyone jump on the myspace/facebook bandwagon? Because the Internet is great, but fundamentally we’re all people who like to relate to other people. Myspace made it easy for someone to create an “identity” for themselves on the net, without having to know how to set up a website. Facebook made it even easier and brough Web 2.0 cleanliness and speediness, with the ability to share short updates and comment on everything.

At base, both are simply a way for people to 1) set up a unique identity on the net to associate with everything, and 2) connect with other verified identities. And 3) not have to worry about updating information on those other identities – in other words, it’s like a big, shared address book where you don’t have to manage the contact info of everyone you know, because they all do it for you.

Unfortunately, all these advances require you to sign up with a specific company, and hope that you’re with the most popular one so you are connected to all the people you want to be connected with. Whereas, with email, it’s a commodity standard. There’s nothing exciting about it. You can go to any service provider anywhere and get email and an address book. And for Instant Messaging, there at least *exists* an open standard, Jabber, which Google uses for their chat network.

So. OK, how would one take the advances that social networking sites like Facebook have given us, and make them a commodity standard that you can obtain from any service provider?
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Hahahahahaha hahahaha Hahaha Ha Hahahahahaha.

*deep breath*

AaaaahahahahaahhaahHAHahahahaHAHAhahahaha

I don’t think I’m done laughing yet…..