Archives for September 2007

(A sneak peek at tomorrow’s entry for Now is Gone)

Wow, what can I say? I guess “Now is Gone” will have to be a posthumous best-seller.

Geoff Livingston was the tragic victim of a Web 2.0 incident last night. The police haven’t ruled it an accident or intentional, but sometime around 1:30 am he did the unthinkable. He plugged his Tumbler RSS feed into his Jaiku account – then took his Jaiku feed and aggregated it within his Tumblelog. Sadly, Hollywood has warned us about the dangers of such a Lifestream disaster for decades:

Dr. Egon Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That’s bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

Who knew Social Media could be so deadly?

All joking aside – there is a bigger issue lurking out here. As we get more ability and empowerment to “play” with our data, we’re bound to run into some pretty dire consequences. The idea of “nimble data” is crucial to our digital freedom. It allows us to aggregate and mashup in new and creative ways. It also tempts us to try the latest and greatest gizmo, app, or website in an effort to become ever more the master of our digital identities.

As time goes on, we’ll see an inevitable rise in the number of services and offerings we can submit to – and the operative word is “submit.” When you “submit” your data, you are literally ceding control over what happens next. Where are the standards for web-development in this regard? Is there a universal off-switch in the monkey-brain of every coder, that prevents Geoff Livingston from dumping his Lifestream into a Moëbius Loop of eternal RSS? Where is the undo button?

The more Web 2.0 playtoys there are, the greater likelihood we’ll have of a bad marriage – two APIs locked in a battle, and your data is the killing field. Don’t say that it can’t happen – that programmers are too polished or professional. First of all, too much of this stuff is Open Source. Don’t get me wrong, I love Open Source apps. I can live with the occasional bug or burp along the way, knowing the community will squash it or squelch it. What I fear is we’ve taken too many of these services for granted. Seriously – does anyone bother to read the technical specs before signing up? We don’t even read the EULA anymore, and more than half the time don’t read the FAQ.

A responsible web service developer would know to check for self-recursion, to prevent an idiot from plugging his Output feed into his aggregator’s Input. But we’re not dealing with ordinary idiots here. I know for a fact that Geoff Livingston uses a lot of services. Once you wash a feed through a Tumblr or a Feedburner or a Yahoo! Pipe, all traces of the origin are gone. All it takes is a faulty pass with the timestamping, and you’ve got duplicate entries multiplying like rabbit-shaped coat-hangers in the fertility closet. The next internet worm won’t be passed through e-mail – it will be a Web 2.0 service that goes supernova, belching out self-replicating data packets to every other service scraping that feed.

I’m not calling for you to shut off your accounts and book the next buggy to Ludditeville, but just be careful when brandishing your brand – or you might end up where Geoff did.