Lucian Marin
Disconnected
I no longer use Twitter. It seems that I won’t announce earthquakes when they’ll happen again. I removed all the contacts from Flickr, I wanted to keep some, but I didn’t want to discriminate. I will keep using their service. I did the same for the Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, connections are more and more worthless online. I want to consume web and participate in conversations in a different way, in a way that doesn’t put me in center of action (attention) or at least I shouldn’t be aware of that. Well, that’s because I’m not that kind of person.
I’m a person that cares about every little detail, pixel you might say, and when the effect of abundance makes its appearance, you want to go back to basics for new start. The problem with technology and with web applications is that they are changing too fast. Yesterday you singed up for a service that you enjoyed and tomorrow that thing is completely different. Why doesn’t anybody cares about when I joined their web application (software) and provide me the very same experience? I’ll do like that. For example if Textpattern will change the user experience in the next version I won’t make the switch, because for me usability is what I’m getting used to.
The first idea
You now may ask: how the heck this guy sees the future of online contacts? Well, a while ago I had a very interesting idea and it sounded like: @lucianmarin needs (or wants to make) a site that bookmarks people and their online accounts (Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) including latest activity. What I wanted to say is that we need a piece of software that facilitates not only the new way of communication (you fill a profile and I subscribe to it) nor the old way (I fill a profile for you in my address book), but actually a mutual connection where both you and me fill a “profile”. I’m calling this people bookmarking.
HP is doing the same old thing one more time with its mobile social network. My idea works different, let’s say you are Leo Laporte and you just spoke with Mike Arrington. After that you can fill in his profile a comment line “What a jerk, I will never speak to him again” (it was for real). Mike Arrington can check what others said about him and founds the line. The beautiful part about this is that Leo Laporte will keep this in his web application data, and Mike will see it only when they are linked together. So basically, no link, no fun and no public embarrassment for neither of them.
The second idea
Oh man, this should be much more fun. I bet everyone knows about blogroll, that’s what makes your blog a little bit more “social”. Since the beginning of EVNO authors where listed different, they had a picture, their name and a status. That’s pretty static, you might say. But what if this was interactive? Like a distributed social network where everyone can hook up, if they have a site, a blog or they are already on a social network.
By the way, I got a new phone, it’s a dumb phone, but it has 1GB internal memory with microSD option and a very nice music player. I liked Opera Mini on Sony Ericsson K8OOi (this 3 years old phone has a better camera than the new iPhone 3GS; I had to say it); and I hope it will stay the same beautiful piece of software in the future.
After all that being said, he admits that this is a protest against social media (stupidity) abundance.