Lifestreaming and your Federated Identity

Lifestreaming is a term that was coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter at Yale University in the mid-1990s to describe "...a time ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life, every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream." The oldest posts or the tail of your stream contains documents from the past and more recent documents are toward the present. These are atifacts such as electronic mail, pictures, movies, voice mail, reminders, calendar items, to do lists etc. Today most of us have information scattered all around the internet, or now known by its metaphor as 'the cloud'.

How do you manage your identity and logins to all these resources? You have many more than you may think. Your bank, insurers, travel company, the government, online stores etc and thats not to mention life streaming services like:

Bebo - Delicious - Digg - Diigo - Facbook - Flickr - LinkedIn - Orkut - Twitter - Tumblr - Blogger - fblike - Google - Yahoo - FriendFeed - Youtube - Last.fm - Plazes

What we all have now is a federated identity or the virtual reunion, or assembled identity and this information is stored across multiple distinct identity management systems. Sometimes these are linked together by a common token, usually a user name if you use a common one for multiple systems or services. You are authenticated across multiple systems or even organisations. Your identity is distributed and accessible.

Not everyone has a constant flow of their recorded information posted both online and offline and its a mistake to think about this by limiting the concept your digital life as only a sum of the feeds you publish. Flickr and Youtube are ways of displaying your life in the offline world that may be there forever.

Market Research and Social Media

Do you use twitter lists? Twitter Lists are groups you make and is a new way to organise the people you’re following or find new people. Its a way for you to collect together other users on Twitter into groups so that you can get an overview of what they are all tweeting. These Twitter streams give you a snapshot of the list by viewing that list’s page. Lists allow you to organise the people you’re following into groups that make sense to you, and even to add people you’re not following.

This got me to thinking about developing a capability for using social media for market research. The Internet is fundamentally changing how market research and data collection is done. Using social media tools to ask questions is part of a broader trend called crowd sourcing and is tapping into the collective intelligence of the public. Low cost online survey tools like Survey Monkey make it easy to design, and conduct survey research. Even easier is using social media sites and tools to ask questions and bloggers have long used their blogs to ask questions of their audience, but if you don't blog you can still ask questions online.

LinkedIn has a section where users can ask questions and Twitter can also be used for market research in addition to getting a lot of answers and good information if the number of Twitter users following you big enough. Used by companies like Innocentive and Amazons Mechanical Turk which uses crowd sourcing to solve corporate research and other task oriented problems.

New third party services like Brizzly have a fun approach to understanding the world's trends. Brizzly allows you to see why topics are trending on Twitter, and edit their descriptions yourself. No longer wonder why a certain event or company is suddenly in the news.

Speaking of research I have just read a very interesting book, The Abc Of Xyz: Understanding The Global Generations by Mark McCrindle and Emily Wolfinger. With marketers so interested in generational attitudes the book makes the tidy little definition of what a generation is, 'generations are people of a comparable life stage and age who's attitudes were shaped by the same developments, events and trends'. This short synopsis from the publisher "The Abc Of Xyz is designed for educators, business managers and parents who want a brief and useful introduction to Australia's living generations and how they interact. It begins by exploring what a generation is, how its definition has changed, and the trends that are emerging for the future. It goes on to examine specific generational conflict in schools, home and the workplace, and the ways in which they can be understood and resolved. Interspersed with useful tables and figures, the book also offers insights into how our generations compare to their counterparts in Japan, the US and even Finland, and what might lie beyond Z". ISBN: 9781742230351

Evernote, does it do it for you?

This little gadget is popular and maybe it's useful. I'm undecided at the moment but I will use it for a while and see. I have seen mixed reports.

Evernote allows you to capture information and makes it accessible and searchable on the web from your desktop on your phone (iPhone ;-} ). Stuff you put into Evernote are your memories and are available to access wherever you are.

Never forget things, just capture everything now so you will be able to find it all later. Things you can capture are tasks and to-dos, notes and research, web pages, business cards (pictures of them OCR's), scribbles. photo's etc.

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