Back to the Future?

In April 2008 I wrote a blog post called FW: A question on what the ‘future web will resemble’ where I was trying to predict (well, give my view…) how I saw the web would pan out in the near future. My conclusion, which was based entirely on my own personal experiences and views, was that I would be looking for something somewhere that enabled me to manage “my web”, either on the web or as a desktop application, and which would bring my web to me, as opposed to forcing me to go to all these other sites and services to do various tasks.

I was reminded of that post today when I was reading this article on ReadWriteWeb regarding a “central dashboard”, which in turn linked off to both an originating post by Marc Canter, as this very much ties into the conclusion of my old blog post.

Today however, one year later (give or take) I have expanded on the idea…or “brainchild” if you like, heavily inspired by attending various conferences and listening to people like Tantek speaking about Microformats and hCards, the guys from Dopplr talking about controlled sharing between services etc which has led me to add things to my wishlist, so Marc, if you would be reading this, can we add a few things, not only to the DiSO but also to the services?

One Centralised User Profile

Complex

For example, I would like to have one online profile to update. Not two. Not 20. Not 200. One. It should be possible to synchronise that profile between whatever various Services I would be using. If I add another service, say Upcoming, it should ask me if I would like to start a profile OR if I have an existing profile that I would like to import.

Now people would, rightly so, point out that there most probably will be data disparity between the two services, and what might not be an input field at all on my profile for say last.fm might be a mandatory field on Upcoming, and this is obviously where it turns…tricky (please note, I wasn’t saying this was simple wishes, heck I didn’t even say they were possible) seeing as the amount of stakeholders between services in theory could be nigh on infinite. Just because it is somewhat tricky doesn’t mean I doesn’t want it though, and this is my wish list.

As the “Matt’s” from Dopplr pointed out though, quite a few things on profile pages for the various services we already do use, basically contain the same stuff, at least at the rudimentary level. Besides, the amount of data on a profile page is hardly that heavy nor scary, so if all services could incorporate a flexible system for adding a bunch of fields I think we’d find rather quickly that we have reached a general global profile need quite quickly, and the sites themselves could instead add a “Settings” page (or similar) for the data that is of interest to them and to no one else regarding the function of their service.

One Centralised Friends List

My Facebook Network by dennisar

On that note, another thing I also would like would be One Friends list, that would be easily imported/exported between the services. In my case I have about 400 Facebook “friends”, about 200 Twitter friends (or people that I follow), another 200+ on LinkedIn etc. The vast majority of online friends actually are in that Facebook list though (which is bizarre as that is the service I use the least) and the duplication of friends is massive. It would be awesome if I could manage and maintain one friends list which highlighted when they added a new service, or indeed the other way around, if I added a new service (possibly from seeing some of my friends using it) I could just easily re-connect with these friends in the new service.

This, again, is where it turns tricky though (but as stated above, this is my wish list, not a blueprint, if you don’t like my wish list either complain in the comments or write your own), as there is one thing I know for sure: I do NOT want to share everything with everyone. Grouping of friends is really important, and to be able to allow me to target my content to those groups would be absolutely crucial, seeing as I have my mum, my boss, most colleagues, my heavy metal friends, my old role playing buddies, heck I even have (the few) “normal” friends on there somewhere etc on the various services and I most definitely could imagine sharing things with some of those groups that would be downright inappropriate to share with another group.

Also, as with Twitter, there might be people who I think I’m “friends” with and they think I’m not really their best buddy, and therefore they might not want to read my updates.

Fictional Example

So…say that this is the normal behaviour of Services in the future. A typical (but fictional) usage example might go something like this:

half empty half full by the|G|™

I sign up on Upcoming. It asks me if I would like to use my OpenId or create one, and I pick my existing OpenId. When it comes to the profile it offers me to either create a new user profile or to import one from my existing services. I choose to import my last.fm profile and Upcoming takes me to last.fm, where I again login with my OpenId, to verify that I allow Upcoming to in fact use my profile data.

I tweak my Settings page on Upcoming, which is now (this is the future, remember?) separate from the profile page, to make the site behave like I would like to. I then would like to find some mates. Again I am given the option to import a list of friends from another service, and I choose Facebook (that is where everyone are after all and it could be my One Central Friends List), and Upcoming takes me to Facebook, where I of course login with my OpenId and get to a page where I allow Upcoming to use my friends list. I don’t want to import ALL my (400+) friends to Upcoming though, only the select 30-40 that I choose to import. All is well, my 40 mates are in, and I get to split them up in 3 separate groups, “Metal Heads”, “Uber Geeks” and “Photography friends” to allow me granular control over what I share with which group.

Then I add my Upcoming details to my (DiSO?) Dashboard and I can manage the whole thing where I am, when I want. Or something. Over course: a few weeks later a couple of newly found friends have connected with me directly via Upcoming. When I login on Facebook it detects that I have “new friends” and asks me if I would like to import “the difference”, which I do.

…not really a conclusion on this one…

Happy ending?

Those are the two big additions I have, at least for now, but hey, in Social Networking/Apps/Media one could argue that your user profile (ie You) and your friends list (ie Your Network) are quite important and…umm…big.

If we could add that functionality to the various services it would make the DiSO Dashboard even more powerful, in particular if I could manage it all from it.

Thoughts? Comments? Scroll down.