On the train last week, I started work on what I think is a cool tool, that is a bit like FriendFeed but takes a very different approach. It assumes you/we can’t keep up with stuff. This for me is the only tenable starting point for creating web software nowadays. For example, how well-kept is your RSS reader? How many great information sources do you find yourself back at realising you haven’t subscribed yet? How often do you feel that you won’t bother subscribing to something because “you’ve got enough” feeds to last you till Thursday afternoon?
So I put it to you, that a site/service that you need to explicitly maintain is doomed to failure (in terms of subscriptions). It will simply not work, or become too much work… take your pick.
And the tool is aiming to do this… Work out what the components of identity are, such as…
A blog
A Flickr account
A Twitter account
A Facebook account
A Delicious account
A YouTube account
An Upcoming account
A LastFM account
An email address
…and many more. Now the interesting thing is, is that everyone is different. Wouldn’t it be great if you could assume a blog was someone’s identity and from there crawl to find what their Flickr username was etc… but many people don’t blog, but do Twitter or both Delicious and StumbleUpon.
So, here’s the plan and premise…
Peoples’ identities are made up of content created on an ever-expanding collection of sites and services. Expect this list to be at over 100 within the year for geeks like us. There will be attempts to consolidate systems (like Facebook did) but new facets and tools will keep emerging. Having a “Add service A/B/C” feature is not the way to go, because people will have created their own service “X/Y/Z” by tea-time.
The people/information I would like to track is not a constant, it changes depending on context. So subscribing per se is a complete nonsense. I’m not suggesting that one can “discover” how certain peoples’ sites are connected, that way lies madness, but I would like to be able to both broaden and narrow my feed-space based on connections and usage.
I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that all of this is simpler than I just made it sound. Read between the lines
Google search stats:
1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) – approximate number of unique URLs in Google’s index
2,000,000,000 (two billion) – very rough number of Google searches daily
$110,000,000 – approximately amount of money lost by Google annually due to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button
24,400 – number of people employed by Google (December, 2008)
68,000,000 – the average number of times people Googled the word Google each month for the last year
$39.96 – the average cost per click for the phrase “consolidation of school loans” in AdWords (source: keyword tool)
Wikipedia stats
2,695,205 – the number of articles in English on Wikipedia
684,000,000 – the number of visitors to Wikipedia in the last year
75,000 – the number of active contributors to Wikipedia
10,000,000 – the number of total articles in Wikipedia in all languages
260 – the number of languages articles have been written in on Wikipedia
YouTube stats
70,000,000 – number of total videos on YouTube (March 2008)
200,000 – number of video publishers on YouTube (March 2008)
100,000,000 – number of YouTube videos viewed per day (this stat from 2006 is the most recent I could locate)
112,486,327 – number of views the most viewed video on YouTube has (January, 2009)
2 minutes 46.17 seconds – average length of video
412.3 years – length in time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)
26.57 – average age of uploader
13 hours – amount of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
US $1.65 billion in Google stock – amount Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for in October 2006
$1,000,000 – YouTube’s estimated bandwidth costs per day
Blogosphere stats
133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002
346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)
900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period
1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)
77% – percentage of active Internet users who read blogs
55% – percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)
81 – number of languages represented in the blogosphere
59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years
Twitter stats
1,111,991,000 – number of Tweets to date (see an up to the minute count here)
3,000,000 – number of Tweets/day(March 2008) (from TechCrunch)
165,414 – number of followers of the most popular Twitter user (@BarackObama) – but he’s not active
86,078 – number of followers of the most active Twitter user (@kevinrose)
63% – percentage of Twitter users that are male (from Time)
Facebook stats
150,000,000 – number of active users
170 – number of countries/territories that use Facebook
35 – number of different languages used on Facebook
2,600,000,000 – number of minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily
100 – number of friends the average user has
700,000,000 – number of photos added to Facebook monthly
52,000 – number of applications currently available on Facebook
140 – number of new applications added per day source
Digg stats
236,000,000 – number of visitors attracted annually by 2008
56% – percentage of Digg’s frontpage content allegedly controlled by top 100 users
612 – number of stories from Cracked.com that have made page 1 of Digg
36,925 – number of Diggs the most popular story in the last 365 days has received
Greatings, Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day!
Zoran
Hi, cool post. I have been thinking about this topic,so thanks for sharing. I will likely be coming back to your posts. Keep up the good posts