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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Paul Jones is Strategic Consultant in Informatics at Intrahealth International as well as the director of ibiblio.org (the site formerly known as MetaLab and SunSITE UNC). In addition to speaking and writing engagements all over the world and the internet, Paul teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Media and Journalism.
Authored Comments
The choices are a bit old and from an early rev of my message. I've been and early member of Diaspora and yes it's on the message list.
Status.net tells me: “Subscription Confirmed: Congratulations, you’ll be one of the first to experience StatusNet 1.0! In the coming weeks we’ll be sending you an exclusive invitation to the Private Beta, and we’ll be looking forward to your feedback.”
I've also spend some serious time looking over the projects in Open Social but none of them are quite there yet either.
I should have listed indenti.ca as I have had an id there for sometime, but so few others that I communicate with do that I have abandoned it pretty much.
My inbox has over 100 new messages that I could delete and feel no loss over in the past 12 hours. Lots of reasons, but that's what I mean about control. And that's not counting what my aggressive spam filter tossed out.
I want to invest my time where I also get return. email is a net loss and has been for years. It's my hope that activity streams that integrate a variety of services as Mugshot and FriendFeed once did will help me and others manage our various services. It would be nice if there were some great open services and hyperaggregators in the mix to choose from.
From a purely and somewhat dodgy technical viewpoint, you are right. But from social and cultural constructions you are not. We use all these systems differently and we get different rewards and pay different costs. And as you start to point out a there are differences even technically.
I would argue that FB Messaging is closer to the future of activity streams and hyperintergration that I'm talking about. Email is not the center of that universe -- and as you notice you have some control over who you communicate with and how. This last part is giant and really differentiates that activity stream from the others you mention.
I am constantly amazed that people think they have some sort of control over their current email structure. Look at your inbox. There is evidence that you don't right in front of you.
I would be delighted to see something like Mugshot or even FriendFeed or some variety of Open Social to help bring these activity streams (including varieties of messaging systems) together (that's the hyperintergration part). Point me to something like that. Please! I'm serious.