My Online Social Map

by Mahendra Posted on July 16, 2009

This is a visu­al­iza­tion of my online social life. Click on the image to visit it online, from where you can directly jump and con­nect to any of my online pro­files. Read the descrip­tion below.

Mahendra_Social_Map

The Ecosys­tem

This is not at all as com­pli­cated as it might first appear. The red lines are my man­ual activ­i­ties, blue lines show the RSS feeds, and the green lines are auto­matic notifications/pings/updates. The idea is to auto­mate as much as pos­si­ble, keep­ing in mind long term data porta­bil­ity goals.

I write here at An Unquiet Mind and at MakeUseOf.com. I main­tain a pro­fes­sional pro­file on LinkedIn, a per­sonal one at Face­book. My @SocialGeek Twit­ter account is for tech­nol­ogy focused top­ics, while @Palsule is for per­sonal use. I use Friend­feed and Chi.mp for lifestream­ing and aggregation.

Create-Share-Discover-Collect

This model is one way to look at my social life. I cre­ate con­tent on two blogs. I share this con­tent via Twitter/Friendfeed/Chi.mp. I dis­cover new con­tent on Friend­feed, Twit­ter, Google Reader, Blogs, and Face­book. I trea­sure the con­tent I like via book­marks, favorites, etc. My trea­sure is auto­mat­i­cally shared via my Lifestream.

Man­ual Activities

When brows­ing, I book­mark or favorite var­i­ous links on the social net­works like Digg. I also visit Face­book and Friend­feed. Links in tweets also lead me to new links in my browser. I use dash­board appli­ca­tions like Tweet­deck / Seesmic / etc. for Twitter.

I have hid­den obvi­ous event flows (such as links clicked in email/IM) in the inter­est of over­all clarity.

RSS Feeds

An Unquiet Mind feeds go to LinkedIn, Friend­feed, Chi.mp, and Face­book (when it works). My MakeUseOf feed is shown here in the side­bar. I sub­scribe to feeds using Google Reader.

Automa­tion

I use Back­Type to track com­ments I make across the web. When­ever I com­ment on your blog, or any other site, my com­ment is picked up by Back­Type, which sends me a link every day list­ing all the com­ments I’ve made. Back­Type also tweets this link auto­mat­i­cally for @SocialGeek. I can fol­low inter­est­ing people’s com­ments around the web by fol­low­ing them on Back­Type, and oth­ers can fol­low me too.

When I update my LinkedIn pro­file, or share an item in Google Reader, it gets pushed to Friend­feed and Chi.mp. Friend­feed auto­mat­i­cally tweets the link for @SocialGeek. When­ever I tweet using the Dash­board, Friend­feed posts it to my feed.

When I Digg, Stum­ble Upon, or book­mark on Deli­cious, it gets posted to my Friend­feed and Chi.mp. Sim­i­larly when I upload or favorite a photo/video in Flickr/You Tube, Friend­feed and Chi.mp catch it.

Prin­ci­ples and Objectives

I am wait­ing for Twine to let me import my Deli­cious book­marks as I’m excited about the seman­tic web. I am root­ing for Open ID, data porta­bil­ity, and the seman­tic web.

There was a time when ‘ME’ meant my blog, the place I felt was my home on the web. That changed with book­marks, pho­tos, posts on other sites, var­i­ous dis­cus­sions via com­ments on other blogs, social net­work­ing sites like Orkut/Facebook, etc. We entered the decen­tral­ized era. But I would still like a place to call my home. That is why I like my Lifestream (to which you can sub­scribe, just like RSS).

I am not an advo­cate of Face­book. It is a data silo wield­ing enor­mous power and I do not trust it. Friend­feed is an excel­lent aggre­ga­tor, and net­works me with many inter­est­ing peo­ple. How­ever, it is also a data silo, as it does not com­mit to data porta­bil­ity. Hence, I am presently root­ing for Chi.mp. With my own free domain name (mahendrapalsule.mp), it aggre­gates my social pres­ence, while remain­ing com­mit­ted to data porta­bil­ity. It is still a new ser­vice, and I am hop­ing they will add more fea­tures as quickly as possible.

Ques­tions? Com­ments? Feedback?

Digg This

Related posts:

  1. My Online Social Map Visualization
  2. An Unquiet Mind of A Social Geek
  3. Blog Updates Sum­mary Post
  4. Law of Social Censorship

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  • http://hyperactivexs.blogspot.com Hyper­Ac­tiveX

    Very cool! I am going to post this on my face­book page. I was only half-joking when I asked you whether you had mapped out your own per­sonal infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture for social net­work­ing :)

    It’s always nice to know one has inspired some­one to do some­thing inter­est­ing, if not some­thing great. And dou­bly nice when it is pub­licly acknowl­edged by that some­one! Thank you, Mahen­dra! May your tribe increase!

    And oh — based on your arti­cle in make use of, I went ahead and got myself a chi.mp domain etc., and also explored some of the other use­ful stuff you’ve reviewed. Thanks for that too.

    Cheers,
    H

  • http://priyank.com/travel/ Final_Transit

    OMG. If my mother refers to me as one of ‘those inter­net peo­ple’, I won­der what she would call you!

    I think I use about a third of the tools you describe here, and the ‘shar­ing’ and ‘col­lect­ing’ parts are vir­tu­ally absent. How­ever, I did not under­stand the ratio­nale behind hav­ing the .mp web­site (prob­a­bly because I didn’t think enough). You could elim­i­nate flickr n picassa once you have a per­sonal domain too, but they are nice to have.

    I like the over­all focus of your online pres­ence — I feel it revolves more around dis­cov­er­ing and shar­ing. You are also try­ing to make most of the process sus­tain­able by using auto­matic noti­fi­ca­tion. But I am curi­ous, how long will you be able to sus­tain these net­works? And which of these are crit­i­cal paths? (say from tomor­row you get to spend only x/2 hours online)

  • http://lallopallo.wordpress.com Dev

    Man, this is heavy stuff for me. It seems I need to learn a lot from you on this stuff.

  • vig­neshjvn

    Won­der­ful work, and it’s very com­pre­hen­sive. And I see that Google chrome hasn’t fea­tured in your series of browsers. :) Any­thing in par­tic­u­lar against it?

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com Mark Essel

    Won­der­ful frame­work for sys­tem­atiz­ing your social pri­or­i­ties Create/share/discover/collect. I liken my blog to my social web home. Of course there are com­ments and other data on many other blogs and social media sites but I’m fine with leav­ing that infor­ma­tion there.

    I really enjoy friend­feed, and since every­thing is pub­lic it is portable although not as pack­agable as I’d prefer.

    I share your inter­est in seman­tic web. Last month I started a project that uses a seman­tic extrac­tion tool (Zemanta at thr moment) on user social media data. It can pro­vide inter­est­ing util­ity like clus­ter­ing con­ver­sa­tions by topic when com­bined with real time search (see victusmedia.com for a very crude pro­to­type). On the busi­ness side I’m hop­ing to match more rel­e­vant adver­tis­ing to users as well (used google adsense search for that rough example).

    Ini­tially used Twit­ter name search to graba tweet, now added oauth/friendfeed API (in the works), need to do the same with face­book. Once that’s squared away I can begin work on the data­base (sim­ple tags and weights) for users that­cre­ate account, hope­fully with sin­gle click from their other autho­rized social site(s).

    I have a busi­ness cen­tric friend help­ing work that angle but am actively search­ing for folks that live and breathe web pro­gram­ming and are will­ing yo work for sweat equity (founders).

  • http://derekshowerman.com Derek Show­er­man

    Mahen­dra,

    Great post! I tweeted it and referred a few new clients to the visual as a ref­er­ence to get them think­ing the right way. As a fol­low up, I think it would be great to share how you used your ecosys­tem to share this great visual in numer­ous social media avenues. Well done!

  • Pingback: Stories in a Stream « Gaizabonts

  • http://mahendrapalsule.mp/ Mahen­dra

    Hemant, thank you, once again!

  • http://mahendrapalsule.mp/ Mahen­dra

    Priyank, :)

    The ratio­nal behind the .mp web­site is noth­ing but Lifestream­ing. It is my home on the web, the cen­ter of my social pro­file. What­ever I do online, gets to my site (auto­mat­i­cally). Once chi.mp improves fea­tures, I might move my blog­ging to that domain instead of here, for exam­ple. Then my blog posts will be streamed into my over­all lifestream.

    The con­cept of lifestream­ing sounds new to some at first, but essen­tially, Twit­ter (what are you doing now? what did you just see and like?) and Face­book (what is on your mind?, what is your ‘sta­tus’?) are just lifestream­ing. Prob­lem is Face­book and Twit­ter are sep­a­rate domains with sep­a­rate net­works. Chi.mp aggre­gates both, just like Friend­feed. If Friend­feed does it, why Chi.mp? For rea­sons related to data porta­bil­ity that I mentioned.

    The rea­son aggre­ga­tors are use­ful is because not every­one is on every net­work. For e.g. some folks share my book­shelf on Shel­fari, some on GoodReads, while some share my movies and book col­lec­tion on iTrack­Mine. With chi.mp, you don’t need to be on any of these net­works to see which new book I read, or which new movie I added to my col­lec­tion and read my book or movie review. With Friendfeed/Chi.mp you sim­ply sub­scribe to my lifestream with­out join­ing any other network.

    I liked your ques­tion regard­ing crit­i­cal path. If you see it only applies to my man­ual activ­i­ties, since the rest is auto­mated. Book­marks and favorites are just single-click affairs. In the Create-Discover-Share-Collect model, the share-collect is vir­tu­ally instan­ta­neous. How I spend time between cre­at­ing and dis­cov­er­ing is crit­i­cal and depends on per­sonal choices, life sit­u­a­tions, and so on. If online time reduces, I would reduce both cre­ation and dis­cov­ery. If there is hardly any time to cre­ate, I just dis­cover. In short, sus­tain­ing these net­works doesn’t take any effort at all! In fact, I’ve omit­ted some iden­tity pro­fil­ers like Retag­ger, Gaiz­abonts, DandyID, etc.!

    Thank you for observ­ing the focus of my online pres­ence. Yes, I am online because it enriches me. It enriches me only if I enrich oth­ers. The more you give, the more you get, online. :)

  • http://mahendrapalsule.mp/ Mahen­dra

    Dev, noth­ing heavy here from a user per­spec­tive. This visu­al­iza­tion makes it look com­plex. When you start using these indi­vid­ual sites/services, it’s just like nor­mal web browsing!

    Inte­grat­ing it all to make sense and opti­miz­ing it is what geeks like me do for a liv­ing. With­out any scripts to write and any films to act in, we have ample of free time! :)

  • http://lallopallo.wordpress.com Dev

    LOL. And not to men­tion that, in between that, I have a full time job too!!

  • http://mahendrapalsule.mp/ Mahen­dra

    Oh noth­ing like that! I couldn’t find any other suit­ably sized image depict­ing browsers in Gliffy, where I cre­ated this! :) I love Chrome.

  • vig­neshjvn

    Ah, great!

  • http://mahendrapalsule.mp/ Mahen­dra

    Mark, I am curi­ous about your project, and will surely take a look at it. I recently met the founder of hover.in, with whom Zemanta has tied up.

    All the best for find­ing the tech­ni­cal folks to accel­er­ate development!

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com Mark Essel

    Thanks for the well wishes Mahen­dra. Small world you meet­ing up with hover.in founder. In the mean­time while search­ing for like minds (but with deeper web pro­gram­ming exper­tise) I’ll keep on coding.

    I was pretty psy­ched about the net­flix prize as well. Their per­son­al­ized sug­ges­tion tool fits well with the type of algo­rithms I’m inter­ested in (I just tried enter­ing a lit­tle too late and with­out enough con­fi­dence to push).

  • http://mahendrapalsule.mp/ Mahen­dra

    Re Net­flix: Me too! Too bad you entered late, it would’ve been great…

    I really need to take a look at your stuff…

  • http://mahendrapalsule.mp/ Mahen­dra

    Thanks, Derek.

    I thought the post above suf­fi­ciently elu­ci­dated how I use the ecosys­tem. I’ve already shared it with every­one I know and wher­ever I can :)

    Thanks for refer­ring it to your clients. I’d be happy to know of any­one who finds it useful!