Traffic And Flow

Emily Chang has announced her consolidated "data stream" all posted in one place, courtesy of an ExpressionEngine plugin by Andrew Weaver. The specifics, and her terminology, are less important than the motivating desire:

[from My Data Stream]

For now, this activity stream idea is providing the start to a holistic view of my activity across online networks: both my own and the ones I use. In turn, this acts as a conduit for you, the reader. Rather than just a static “recommended links” page or a blogroll, the data stream opens up my activity to you in semi-realtime and at one website.

I have been working on something (hush hush) that winds up providing similar capabilities, although not limited to a plugin for one blog technology. And more importantly, I think, it moves away from the concept of a chronology of posts, toward an acceptance of what I think is the core dual elements of future social applications: flow and traffic.

Social applications are -- at their basis -- a means for us to communicate. Not just point-to-point communication, as in email or in IM, but increasingly a more general communication from me to the network of others that believe that I matter. This is what blogging affords us, and Flickr streams, and even Twitter.

We are sending all sorts of traffic -- different sorts of messages -- flowing through the various implicit and explicit social networks that we define ourselves through, and through which we discover meaning, belonging, and insight.

This traffic flow -- made more liquid by RSS and instant messaging style real-time messaging -- is the primary dynamic that I believe we will see in all future social apps. Yes, we will want to have our traffic cached -- for search and analysis purposes -- but we will increasingly move toward a flow model: where the various bits that we craft and throw into the ether -- blog posts, calendar entries, photos, presence updates, whatever -- will be picked up by other apps, either to display them to us, or to make sense of them. We want to consolidate all into one flow -- a single time-stamped thread -- that all apps can dip into.

A pal of yours is having a party? He will create the event using some social application site, and the event will be cast into his traffic. Your flow-aware calendar app might snag the event from the traffic, and ask you if you'd like to confirm. You agree, and the agreement is thrown into your traffic, for your buddy and others to make sense of, downstream.

This world of traffic will change things like blogging: instead of commenting at someone's post -- a static, page-centric system -- I might simply create a commentary with a link to the original (which I may have discovered in my inbound traffic, not necessarily by browsing his/her blog), and I drop a comment into my traffic, where it flows out to all those who want to see my natterings. Yes, sure, I might archive that comment (as well as the inbound post), or maybe push the comment into a conventional blog post: but the basic perception of what is going on shifts away from pages and static URLs toward flow and the elements that make up my traffic.

Obviously, I see this as based on RSS-style XML and microformats, but the nuts and bolts aren't the key issue: I think we already have all the bits of tech that we need. The key issue is a shift in esthetics, in perception: the web community has steadily been moving toward flow ever since instant messaging appeared, but the widespread availability of RSS is now the precipitating lever that will change the basic nature of how we think about and use the web, and the applications that we are going to make, going forward.

My sense is that small advances like Emily's single stream represent the inchoate and pent-up need for a traffic and flow model to crystallize, and change the web, fundamentally.

Comments

[Alan Keister]

Thanks for pointing this out. This is almost exactly what we have built into AIM. Check out AIM Buddy Updates where you can enter your flickr, delicious, youtube, personal blog, and any feed about you. I left some more detail in a comment on Emily's blog.

[Chris Saad]

Heya Stowe - Manual Trackback:
http://www.touchstonelive.com/blog/2007/02/attention-streams-your-life-in-feed.html

[Nik Cubrilovic]

This world of traffic will change things like blogging: instead of commenting at someone's post -- a static, page-centric system -- I might simply create a commentary with a link to the original (which I may have discovered in my inbound traffic, not necessarily by browsing his/her blog), and I drop a comment into my traffic, where it flows out to all those who want to see my natterings.

Isn't that just track/linkback? All that would have to happen is for each of these apps and aggregators to support it properly, rather than having yet-another-app that works as the glue

[Michael Griffiths]

Sounds a lot like an expanded version of the Facebook News system; given friend notifications, syndicating events, wall/"notes" (blog) comments and posts, status changes (i.e. Twitter) and so on.

[Chris Kenton]

Not to put on my black hat, but when I used to send out an invitation for a party, and that invitation "expired" without a trace, what was lost that Emily wants to permanantly archive in a MySQL database? I mean, I get the idea of flow, but what about dealing with the noise to signal ratio of raw data? Buckminster Fuller famously archived every document of his fascinating life. I've seen the boxes and filing cabinets. And for arguably one of the most interesting human beings to ever live, I have to say most of it is not particularly interesting. In fact, I personally think a lot of this data makes it harder for people to find information of value. And quite frankly, search engines aren't doing a good job of serving up relevance. I wish we were seeing more happening on the information management front.

What am I missing?

[Benjamin Bryant]

It seems that Traffic and Flow information handling makes sense only because of the huge amount of non-essential, throw-away information that people are able to create and disseminate now. I find that I skim most feeds (be they from blogs, social networks, eventspaces, etc ) and skip most all the conent as it is. Now I have even more evanescent stuff coming at me from X number of 'life feeds'? I feel that the technology has outstripped my appetite, perhaps starting with Twitter. I get it, its interesting; but somehow it seems purely academic. The light at the end of the tunnel (the change in lifestyle, presence awareness, relation to information, etc.) is too dim for me to commit this time. It is as if we are all involved in the grand calculation of a limit. As we divide our lives up into smaller and smaller slices, we need more and more of them to achieve the whole, ad infinitum. Will the hypothesis hold, as the pieces get smaller will we achieve a better approximation of the 'curve' of our lives? Or must there be a new math, something more integral?
Perhaps instead of Traffic and Flow, I will try a bit of Channel and Flow. Channel my energy into producing something substantial or comprehending something substantial. Let the unimportant details Flow by me.

[Ilona]

This world of traffic will change things like blogging: instead of commenting at someone's post -- a static, page-centric system -- I might simply create a commentary with a link to the original (which I may have discovered in my inbound traffic, not necessarily by browsing his/her blog), and I drop a comment into my traffic, where it flows out to all those who want to see my natterings.
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That is the point that rose my interest. I have my own Software resource and plan to create a blog for my site. Could you please expand on mentioned above subject or advice something to read?
And thank you for your article:)

[Mike]

It's very beautifully.

[Alex Moore]

Hi Stowe, Another manual trackback:
http://blog.snagsta.com/2008/04/25/living-a-life-of-contentment/