Well a “Personal Living Environment” – I seem to have finally a purpose for my Social Networking tag as it’s certainly getting lots of traction of late.
This morning I was on Facebook to retaliate to the latest volley of pokes that come my way (Oh the Humanity! When will it stop?? Will someone please think of the children!) and spotted Picnik is now an application inside the system.
I’d read elsewhere that the biggest feature of Facebook has been it’s photo sharing and that Facebook is indeed the largest photo sharing system on the face of the planet (don’t know what the mole men are up to – and here it is from fb’s own mouth). Even though it’s a cludge compared to Flickr or other photo dedicated site, just as Facebook is a poor version of a blog compared to WordPress and not the greatest means of “presence” monitoring like Twitter (which seems to have twittered out), it does do the job well enough for millions. These millions don’t need or want the more refined tools, they just want something that does enough to get the job done.
While I was poking around earlier, I was trying to see if there was any way to get the “news” to feed out via RSS, finding only a third party hack that has you enter your account info into a third party site. What I did find is that you can import your blog feed into the Facebook system and people can see them as notes (and leave comments) and you can export the stream of your friend’s notes out to an aggregated RSS feed to any reader that you wish. This feature is limited to having only one inbound and one outbound feed.
A solution to this one in, one out? Applications. So Picnik can access my photos on Flickr, Picasa and elsewhere, and (I would think) pull them into Facebook.
So where is all this heading? Well, even though Facebook is starting to be a personal portal it seems. Unlike Web1.0 portals trying to do many things and being masters of a few if any, Facebook seems to know/understand within it’s business plan that there are others out there that do specific things much better than they can and as opposed to Google who will Gooble up everything it likes and wants to integrate (the refined version of the Microsoft assimilation), Facebook seems to be inviting other applications via a Web2.0 mashup idea. elgg and other similar systems have tried to do this as well, but they are too geeky/academic to catch on with students outside of school.
By inviting applications to be developed, Facebook personalizes – or at least is seeming to – to the individual, allowing only the parts of the portal that are important to the the individual to bother said individual and not wasting money chasing features. To me, this seems like the start of a Personal Living Environment.
Now all that facebook needs to do is improve the layout of the information – you seem to have to move between home and profile to see what is going on around you (I wish there was one place to see comments on your content) – and increase the ways that feeds can flow in and out. If that can be done, you could hook it into elgg, Vista or any other CMS and open the door to the Personal Learning Environments that many in ID are trying to discover.
EDIT – it seems like Machlanations was thinking the same thing a few days earlier.
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