My Online Social Map

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?

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Related posts:

  1. My Online Social Map Visualization
  2. An Unquiet Mind of A Social Geek
  3. Law of Social Censorship
  4. Techno-Social News Tidbits

July 16, 2009 – 11:36 AM | By Mahendra | Posted in Personal | Comments (17)

17 Comments

  • HyperActiveX wrote:
    Jul 16, 2009 at 12:48 PM

    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

  • Final_Transit wrote:
    Jul 16, 2009 at 6:47 PM

    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)

  • Dev wrote:
    Jul 16, 2009 at 9:12 PM

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

  • vigneshjvn wrote:
    Jul 17, 2009 at 11:25 AM

    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?

  • Mark Essel wrote:
    Jul 26, 2009 at 4:15 PM

    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).

  • Derek Showerman wrote:
    Aug 3, 2009 at 10:44 PM

    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!

  • Stories in a Stream « Gaizabonts wrote:
    Aug 6, 2009 at 2:46 AM

    […] thanks, with­out doubt, is to Mahen­dra, who is so won­der­fully involved in social media, he is an inspi­ra­tion. His is indeed an unquiet mind and I am so grate­ful for […]

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Jul 16, 2009 at 7:04 PM

    Hemant, thank you, once again!

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Jul 16, 2009 at 7:22 PM

    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. :)

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Jul 17, 2009 at 7:18 AM

    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! :)

  • Dev wrote:
    Jul 17, 2009 at 8:37 AM

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

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Jul 17, 2009 at 5:38 PM

    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 wrote:
    Jul 19, 2009 at 11:11 AM

    Ah, great!

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Jul 28, 2009 at 4:59 AM

    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!

  • Mark Essel wrote:
    Jul 28, 2009 at 5:21 AM

    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).

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Jul 28, 2009 at 5:40 AM

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

    I really need to take a look at your stuff…

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Aug 4, 2009 at 6:18 AM

    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!