Soylent Red

This post is copied and pasted. It started life as a response to an email from Ronan asking for my take on a New Scientist article on the creation of passports to transfer avatars from one online world (like Second Life) to another.

Seems to be representative of the upcoming (or current?) shift from centralised social hubs to open standards for social interaction. This is why I keep saying Facebook should sell. It's going to be dead in a year or two if it keeps the current walled garden design. The walled garden didn't work for Adam and Steve and it's not going to work here either.

We're not going to have a single repository of friends lists and personal details which we laboriously migrate from one old and busted service to the new hotness every six months. The next round will be open protocols that let you describe your relationships once and use that in any service that supports it, whether that's photo sharing, music recommendations, event invitations or whatever.

It all starts with OpenID for decentralised identity verification, which is already gaining traction. Every AOL subscriber already has an OpenID, whether they know it or not. So does every Live Journal user. How long before Yahoo!, Google, and MSN follow suit? Conservatively, I predict that by the end of next year there'll be at least one university, probably in America, that assigns students an OpenID along with their email address.

It only makes sense that the virtual worlds would follow the same path, and for the same reasons.

I do not know what's up with the Dutch.

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Is anyone using Jaiku? I signed up a day or two ago and so far it seems a lot more useful than Twitter. Jaiku has a similar idea to Twitter—to post brief (140 character) snippets about what you're up to so that people can keep up with what you're doing without you having to compose a full blog post. People can subscribe to your updates so that they're sent notifications when you post something new.

Like Twitter, you can post to Jaiku by SMS or from the Web. There doesn't seem to be an instant messenger option yet (though Twitter's IM is down most of the time anyway) and I don't see a way to receive updates by phone, which is definitely something they'll want to work on.

The big advantage of Jaiku though is that it will pull in feeds from elsewhere to keep all of your updates in one place. I have it pulling in my Soylent Red feed, my Flickr photos, my Last.fm music information, my del.icio.us bookmarks and even my Twitter feed.

Jaiku doesn't pull the full content from all of these feeds. It shows just enough for you to know that there's new information from one of those sources.

If you're interested, here's my Jaiku.

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