In fact, why stop there? You could imagine similar needs for blog posts and all sorts of other structured data. Maybe a basic distrubuted triple-store server, with various plugins (written in scripting languages - python, ruby, perl) to handle specific types of data (FOAF, etc.).
You could do very similar things using SPARQL update, but I think that having a server with plugins (as mentioned above) would make it much easier to build domain languages for different business objects. This would allow a greater level of abstraction for developers, which would speed up adoption as it would be both useful and trustworthy/open/transparent.
One of the major reasons that DNS is so successful, and that OpenID seems to be catching on, is that they allow any person to set up a server. Each client decides which servers to trust, but servers can be set up by anyone at all. It seems to me that it will prove difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to make social graph data portable, so long as each company develops their own tools to provide an API to their data. Even if most companies adopted FOAF as a standard for exporting their social graph data, any new companies would need to develop new libraries to import, export, and use that data. I believe that a distributed social graph server, a-la OpenID, that served up its data as FOAF, could provide a nonpartisan solution that would be adopted very quickly.
Thinking tools, in increasing order of complexity and utility:
- Freeform text (Pen and Paper)
- Paper & Diagram Techniques (Three Column Technique, IBIS, Systems Thinking)
- Dedicated software programs (Compendium)
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Issuu
Neat little gadget - lets you publish animated, embeddable magazines.
I like to call this site the ‘smile game’. They claim to be backed by years of research, and frankly, I believe it. I’ve been playing the Matrix game - very simple idea, seems too simple really - they present you with a grid of faces. Some are smiling, some neutral, and some frowning. Your job is to click the smiling faces. Tiles shuffle, time runs out, and all-in-all they manage to make it pretty challenging. It’s not the most fun game in the world, but I feel like it really helps build confidence, and reduce anxiety for me. It strikes me as funny - a simple game like this could have a big impact on how I feel day-to-day. We aren’t so far from apes, after all.
Mindhabits.com
I imagine I could write a neat book about this topic.
Believe it or not, it already
exists. It’s funny what you’ll find when you go looking.
If FLOW takes off, perhaps I should build a recommendation engine. Hmm.. I wonder if one already exists for Drupal?