Tiles
When someone searches for your name on Google, you don’t know what they might find. They might find an article or two in which you were featured, or they might find a random post you made to an open source project. Or, they might find someone else and not know he is not you. The scattered information evaporates and confounds your online persona. You have a blog, but it might not point to your LinkedIn account, or your home-made balancing robot video.
What I need to be able to do is manage my online identity easily. Moreover, I don’t want my data to be hostage to a single company. But, that’s exactly the opposite goal of a company like Facebook or Microsoft. Ideally, companies want to trap your data entirely on their platforms so that you must use their services, even as they become inferior due to lack of competition.
Now, a knowledgeable guy like me could set up, for example, his own identity server and RDF Friend-Of-A-Friend (FOAF) page. However, most people cannot, of course. Moreover, such an technical, intellectual exercise would seem to serve no purpose. FOAF has not the following of Facebook.
I propose a service which I would value today, even if I were the only person using it. It may even improve as more people use it. Am I proposing another social network? No. Please, no. Facebook wouldn’t want you to link to your MySpace or LinkedIn accounts. No, Mark Zuckerberg want to be MySpace and LinkedIn. He even wants to be Windows.
I propose an elegant identity aggregator. You constantly create yourself and reveal yourself online. You want to make sure that people can see all that you created and all that you are. Additionally, you want to authoratatively say which sites are about you, so the imposters can stay hidden. You want this to be easy. You want this to be elegant. You want it to be open. You don’t want to sign up for another social network.
I envision a beautiful, simple way to aggregate all of your online personas onto a single page which summarizes and links to all of the others. Onto a single page, a single tile. Your tile shows small thumbnails and links to your Flickr photos, knows who you are on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, points out and highlights the best articles about your accomplishments.
It happens simply, you go to OneTile, tell it about your blog. Then, it intelligently searches for more about you. It guesses that you might be this user on Digg, and that user on Yahoo Answers. Eventually, it picks up enough information to create a personalized, flashy tile for you. The best content about you stands out, but it’s all reachable. Now, when someone searches your name, your tile comes up. It’s impressive, concise, and accurate. Plus, all the data you have collated is easily downloaded through RDF, not locked into OneTile.
As more and more people start using the service, it gains notoriety. I imagine a sea of tiles for everyone online. This is what I imagine the OneTile homepage could be:
It highlights the most fascinating tiles with the most interesting content. You can zoom in to have a closer look:
Slick animation zooms through the sea of tiles as you browse through people’s public online lives. Finally, you can choose one tile to examine closely.
When choosing a specific tile, one person’s tile, you can see their name and all the tiles that are theirs: their flickr pictures, their photo albums, their rss reader on the right, maybe some friends, links to social networks on the left, some research tiles in the middle.
Some people link to blogs when they mention their friends. I think OneTile would be more complete.
My friend Dan O’Shea sparked the idea for me. He described to me a similar vision, and I had this one. We might start building this soon. As I said, if I can make this nice, it would be useful for me myself. If I can help others, that’s just extra pasta.
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