James Tauber : James Tauber's Blog 2007/08/18

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Thoughts on the Social Graph, DataLibre and Aggregation versus Hosting

The recent activity stemming from Brad Fitzpatrick's Thoughts on the Social Graph reminds me of something I was thinking a lot about back in 2004. See especially Mark Atwood's post Five billion social network sites, each about one person on the Social Network Portability list.

The idea I had three years ago was the notion of people hosting their own data and the social networking sites merely being aggregators.

Actually, the way it occurred to me first was in the context of DOAP and the next Advogato but I then generalized the idea in Aggregation Versus Hosting.

Steve Mallett started a mailing list and a website about this same idea, calling it DataLibre. Unfortunately the site no longer exists but here is an announcement of the original site: http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2004/09/datalibre_update.html

Steve really drove the vision but I posted numerous thoughts on the idea. Because my blog didn't have categories at the time and I haven't gone back and categorized my old stuff here's a list of my relevant posts:

Brad's article (which is a lot more concrete than anything I ever said) seems to be rejuvenating discussion about this sort of thing. See, for example, the post More on social network portability on Plaxo's blog.

by : Created on Aug. 18, 2007 : Last modified Aug. 18, 2007 : (permalink)

Blog Stats

I've posted here every day for the last 10 days straight. I wondered if I'd had such a writing streak before, so I write a quick program that generated a bunch of stats:

(not counting this post...)

I've blogged 721 entries
I've never missed a month
Worst months were August 2006 and April 2007 both with only three posts the entire month
Best month was March 2005 with 47 posts
Most number of posts on a single day was six on 14th March 2005 (pi day!)
Of 477 blogging days, 303 had one post, 118 two posts, 45 three posts and 11 four or more.

and...

I also had a 10 day streak starting 9th May 2005
Longest streak was 11 days starting 10th March 2005

by : Created on Aug. 18, 2007 : Last modified Aug. 18, 2007 : (permalink)

List-Unsubscribe

I tend to swing back and forth with my mailing list subscription habits. The two endpoints of the pendulum's path are:

I rarely read this list, but a have a rule that puts it in its own folder so it's always there if I ever do want to read it
I rarely read this list and it's cluttering my mailer with 10,000 unread messages so I'll unsubscribe

I'm currently on a swing to the second one.

In one case, I wasn't immediately sure how to unsubscribe from the list, so I looked at the raw headers for the List-Unsubscribe field (described in RFC2369). Sure enough, it was there.

It would be really nice if more mail apps supported this. Okay, it would be really nice if Mail.app supported this :-)

by : Created on Aug. 18, 2007 : Last modified Aug. 18, 2007 : (permalink)