Musings on Timeline

-
I assume you've switched over to Timeline by now, because if you haven't, you should.  It truly has fulfilled its potential to be the online equivalent of a scrapbook.
What gives it extra street-cred is the contexualization of information, i.e., its not just the conversations, status updates, pictures, video, etc., its the fact that the timeline automatically gives you metadata about the content. 
Oh yeah!  That was the status update we took just before Jane walked into the glass door (the next item on the timeline is a picture of Jane Garfield-ed against the door).  
Add to this the ability to add location tags to this content (which, as Matt points out, happens automagically if you update from your mobile device), and you now have the ability to fix this data in time and space.
Its your life, summarized in Facebook.
Powerful stuff indeed.

PostNote:  What I want to know is where this leaves Foursquare.  If i'm location-tagging all my entries in Facebook (which I'm much more likely to do now), why use Foursquare?  The only thing I can think of is that they might be able to use the data they've collected thus far for BigData/Analytics to help people figure out what they should be doing.  But, thats the subject of a different post...

Comments

Matthew Smith said…
You don't even have to location tag your entries in Facebook, it does it for you provided you posted via a mobile device. When Melanie activated timeline yesterday, she had a big WTF moment when she saw a Google map of where she'd been - and then wondered how that information got there.
January 3, 2012 at 12:50 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cannonball Tree!

-
Image
Spotted this one just outside the Ravindra Kalakshetra in Bangalore .  Its called the Cannonball Tree , but is - technically (i.e., in Latin, if thats your metier) - Couroupita Guianensis , or ನಾಗಲಿಂಗ ಪುಷ್ಪಾ  in Kannada. The fruits look like Cannonballs (well, d-uh), and the flowers are really quite amazing, and pretty ludicrously distinctive...
Read more

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her...
Read more