blog (January, 2008)
persona aggregation based on viewer's preference
This week I stopped letting Twitter update my Facebook status. First, because it prepends "... is twittering", which Facebook folks not familiar with Twitter misconstrue as me being flamboyantly gleeful, and second, because it is a different medium, which means a different audience and, (to misconstrue McLuhan,) a different message.
Chris Herbert just wrote in Aggregating My Online Presences about both consolidating [and cascading updates through] his various online personas, as well as aggregating them using FriendFeed.
I think of jeffschuler.net as a hub for my various web tendrils: my locally-hosted blog and an increasing number of off-shore services: Last.fm, Upcoming, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, social networks, etc.
(Last week a professional acquaintance noticed that I've got "a lot of kooky stuff on there.")
I present many of these facets as widgets. While I appreciate that the widgets allow for content that isn't flat or normalized (like FriendFeed) -- each service shouldn't have equal footing or the same "shape" -- the page gets awfully busy as more info-sections are added. So I simply link to, rather than embed, certain services.
But what if these models (both the hub-of-widgets, which Facebook Apps also supports in building profiles, and the aggregation stream) would take into account the viewer's preferences?
For example: I, viewing your homepage (or "profile" or "personal hub") like to use Last.fm, so my browser expands your Last.fm widget. Likewise, it hides or collapses a side of you in which I'm not as interested.
Keep the distinct shape and texture of different services, and allow for dissemination from a single place without overloading the viewer.