Tag: lifestream

  • Brand-streams

    Last week, I got a beta invite from a new lifestreaming service called Memolane and I’ve added my blogs and quite a few services I use to it. You can check it out here. I’m quite a fan of lifestreaming – as a concept. Though I have seen quite a few web based services perish, I persist. In the meantime, I maintain my own twitterstream (though I started it 2 years after I began using Twitter) and even used Sweetcron to try out a self hosted stream sometime back. These function more as activity streams than anything else and only faintly show the connections to other people.

    When I saw my stream, I was reminded of a thought from a couple of years back – a post I had titled ‘Communities and Brandstreams‘. Though I’d referred to quite a few posts then, in this context, the two significant ones are @misentropy‘s “The future of: user generated advertising” and RWW’s “Brandstreaming: What is it and who’s doing it?”. The former is about the concept of an open source product/brand wiki and the latter is about how a couple of brands used Friendfeed and other services to stream their content.

    Now that I am revisiting this, and with last week’s thought on ‘the structure that would hold the identity of a brand together’, I’m wondering if a brand-stream might be a way to approach it. So if we mash the idea of a lifestream – connecting the individual nodes of interaction [in my case, it would be the web services like Twitter/Faceb0ok/Foursquare/Flickr/YouTube etc, but for a brand, it would not just be its web services but also apps and even ‘real world’ data collection via sensors or the Internet of Things or say a variation of  barcodes/QR codes/ stickybits] with a brand wiki we could do at least a couple of things. One, if we open it out for users/consumers to share (with the brand-stream, as well as with their own community) how they interact with these nodes we could then capture and use data by time, kind of activity, user profiles, services used, ‘reach’ of individual users and so on. The entry to the stream could be across platforms. It would  make it easier for a user to not only experience the brand through a medium he’s comfortable with, but also check out ways in which others are experiencing the brand and suggest new ways for the brand to interact with others like him. Two, on the other side, users on the enterprise side could also connect to this stream basis various contexts (brand, customer service, operations, even HR) and make the business truly ‘social’. Sounds interesting? (see this for a vague visual cue 🙂 )

    until next time, streaming out loud 🙂

    PS: On Lifestreaming, on the personal blog. Check related posts for more. 🙂

  • Taking the fall

    ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ is probably a book I might have related to a whole lot better if I’d read it a few years back. Ok, probably a decade 🙂 Be that as it may, it still has areas which still appealed to me.. a lot. One of them is this segment of the conversation between Holden, the protagonist and narrator and his (earlier) English teacher Mr.Antolini.

    This fall I think you’re riding for, its a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement is designed for men who, at some or other time in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they really even got it started.

    and later in the conversation

    …if you want to, and if you look for it and wait for it – to the kind of information that will be very very dear to your heart. Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.

    Sometimes, I can identify with the first, and thanks to the internet and the life streams that I come across, sometimes, luckily, the second too. 🙂

    until next time, there’s no catch 🙂

  • Watermark

    Sometime back, while trying recollect the name of a Chinese restaurant in Koramangala which existed circa 2003, I got stuck. Despite different mashups of the various terms used typically for Chinese restaurant names, nothing sounded right. It was a small mom-and-pop joint and since the net didn’t then feature all the resources it has now, I was well and truly stumped. It was quite disappointing since we’d had many a meal there. It didn’t help that I have this ‘thing’ about remembering such places, events and people. I feel as though I have betrayed them in some way. Yes, weird, thank you. :p  The book, for once, couldn’t help either. I finally got the answer by checking with a friend who’d been in Koramangala long enough. Once I got the name, I even managed to get an image on the net – Szechuan Garden. 🙂

    A few days later, I watched Pakal Nakshatrangal, a movie about a script writer – director played by Mohanlal. The narrative is from the perspective of his son, an author, who writes his father’s biography, and in the process tries to solve the mystery of his death. The movie begins with the demolition of ‘Daffodils’, the cultural hub of the previous era’s intellectuals and the scene of Mohanlal’s many exploits. There is a sequence in which a television newsreader reports this and we can see different people viewing it from different places reminiscing about their experiences there. A group of people connected by a place.

    A place or an event in that place – that means something to a set of people – something only they share. And when they cease to exist, the memory disappears. Its as though whatever they shared never existed. A bit like the Garden State quote that I often end up using “Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”

    It reminded me of another Malayalam movie I’d seen a while back. Kerala Cafe, an anthology of ten short movies, with the place – Kerala Cafe, a coffee shop in a railway station, serving as the connection. But more than that entire movie, I remembered my favourite – Island Express, written and directed by Shankar Ramakrishnan. (Part 1, 2, seems unedited, and has incomplete subtitle help!!) [Spoiler] The story is about several people who were in some way affected by the Perumon tragedy in 1988, and their meeting at the fateful place a couple of decades later. Its narrated by Leon, who  lost a lot himself, but makes a photo-book of it after seven years of efforts. I realise that Leon’s phrase, that remained with me long after the movie, is what this thought is all about.

    As time passes, and life moves on, some of us are left holding the memories of these places, sometimes by choice, sometimes because we have no other choice, and sometimes by chance. But there’s no doubt about the transience of it all. Its after all, a matter of time. Perhaps the entire idea of a lifestream – the things I share here, and everywhere else is all about the phrase that Leon uses – ‘a memory with a watermark’.

    until next time, memories without shelf-lives

  • Life…streamers

    Sometime back, I read an extremely interesting post by Chris Messina – how we’re now hit by a plethora of data and information on the real time web, which our brains have not adapted to, and how, in order to process this, we’d require an augmentation of our existing abilities.

    The information overload has been happening for a little while now. Between reading blogs, writing them, microblogging, Facebook and all the shiny little tools that keep coming up, it’s a constant juggling act. I’ve been on Twitter for over a couple of years now. I can see a drastic change in the relationships there already, as compared to the banter of the initial days. New people, new thoughts, old people who’re changing with time, old thoughts recycled.  A simple @ tag connects lives. Meanwhile, its not just relationships and thoughts that change, but also behaviour – the need to share an experience, attention deficit, and so on. These would obviously vary with an individual’s usage of Twitter, facebook etc, but I’m sure there are more like me.

    While I’ve been dimly conscious of the vastness of the Twitterverse, I had a more tangible realisation only after i came across a tool (from an article shared by Shefaly). As I sat watching the pictures streaming across the screen on Twitcaps, I felt I was somehow connected to all of them across the world sharing images – from parties to churches to landscapes to death to raunchy stuff to coffee mugs and so many many other things. There are multiple images being shared every second, and I had an acute realisation of the magnitude of change happening, in terms of connectedness and sharing. The population of the world, the population of your own city, the number of people working in your office/living in the apartment complex- as the numbers come down, the people slowly change from a blurred intangibility to a focused person. But as we get more and more networked, the number of persons who become tangible are increasing, the arguments about their relative importance to self notwithstanding. As Chris says in the article, can human beings cope after a point?

    Sometime earlier this year, I remember writing a post about speciation – the evolution of the human species, and how replacement of body parts and advancement might finally end up in a being that may not match our current concept of human, or even living, like the Cybermen in Dr.Who. In that post, I had also mentioned Homo Evolutis, one of whose characteristics was networked intelligence.

    As the information deluge gathers momentum, there may be those who choose not to be part of it, who are comfortable not being part of this vast stream of consciousness, while there may be others who use their abilities and the augmentation to embrace this. These are obviously two extremes, and its quite possible that humans would figure out a middle path. But I already see this divide happening – some leaving it by choice, some left out by circumstances. The learning curve is becoming so steep that after a few years, it might be difficult or even impossible to catch up. And that’s how I begin to wonder whether we’re rapidly approaching the point when the species will diverge. Maybe not in my lifetime, but within a couple of generations?

    There’s another aspect of all this that I wondered about. With the increasing amount of information and the speed at which we’re forced to process it, will we have time to acquire more perspectives, or continuing that cycle, accumulate more baggage? Will that change the way we behave with people, and the way we live life? Will we become more objective? Or will we become more biased, relying on notions we don’t have time to change, and behaving accordingly?

    As I write this there is a stream of thoughts running in my head – of times, friends and relationships. Poignant moment as I realise the vast yet connected nature of the universe and its inhabitants. In the miniscule amount of my lifetime that I have spent on Twitter, I realise that people and relationships have changed, perhaps irrevocably. The lifestream will be an interesting read for me later, if I do manage it. Meanwhile life flows, faster, faster, until each second and beyond is accounted for, with streamers in between, so that we might remember…just..

    until next time, you’re here..now..reading post #700..thank you 🙂

  • Visage.. envisage

    In the first book of the Ramayana series, Ashok Banker uses a line, a statement made by Rishi Adhranga to Lakshmana, as the brothers are about to enter Bhayanak van, where Tataka resides – “Over time, truth becomes fact, fact is rewritten as history, history fades to legend, and eventually, legend remains as myth.” In the myth 🙂 , these words are  spoken in the Treta Yuga (the Age of Reason), which follows Satya Yuga (the Age of Truth). The character also states that by the time its the Kali Yuga (the Age of Darkness, which is last and after the Dvapara Yuga), devas and asuras would be just race-memories and dismissed as fantasy by the rational and the scientific.

    In science fiction, there are many stories of the ravages of time. One, where, man comes across computers and other technological specimens, but does not know how to use them, since the lack of energy had made humans de-evolve. Another, where man discovers that the canals on Mars were made by a race of humans, ten thousands of years back, in an older ‘cycle’ of evolution and de-evolution. Interesting? 🙂

    So the other day, I was thinking about facts, truth, history and stories. It further led me to thinking about these blogs of mine, the lifestreams on Facebook and Twitter and on the blog. The digital snapshots of our lives, the way we are storing our life almost by the second, for many reasons. Our experiences, our thoughts, our desires, our emotions, our fears, our happiness and sorrow, and so many more things. To share, to look back….. to create an image of ourselves for whoever sees it?

    In Cochin, at home, there are these old albums with black & white and sepia photographs. The ones with which we, as children, had fun trying to identify Mom and Dad in their childhood photographs. There are other characters in them – grandparents, uncles, aunts and other relatives, friends of theirs. While many of them are easily identified by the earlier generation, some remain unknown, or rather, ones who aren’t remembered. Either ways, other than direct interactions, these photos are perhaps the only remains of people who lived a few decades back. Ever wonder who they really were, as persons, what were their thoughts, what did they think of their life, and others’, did they question their existence, or were they busy running a life, as we are? Did they think that someone, somewhere in the future would look at their photographs and peer into their lives beyond the confines of the frame? Would they have smiled a bit more if they knew, or would they try to look more serious? Maybe they wouldn’t have cared enough to strike a special look or pose?

    With the advent of the web, there are now more means than ever to store ‘life’. Sound, pictures, videos, enough material to make sure that a life is much more documented than the two dimensional photographs. Though my lifestreaming purpose is limited to my life, when I read posts about what happens to a person’s blog/Facebook account etc after his/her death, I can’t help but wonder about the future of digital lifestreams.

    With relationships getting redefined on a  regular basis, will there be anyone later who cares enough to go through another person’s life. After all, with the explosion of user generated content, an individual’s lifestream is just a statistic. (yes, even otherwise, it might just be that, but these are perhaps our efforts to move from being an irrelevant statistic  to a relevant individual). Yes, perhaps truth won’t become facts and so on, though the objectivity of truth itself can be questioned. But meanwhile, I am reminded of the science fiction tales. Maybe no one will be able to access all this content. Or it could be a deviant of this scenario. I have quite a lot of music cassettes. While I can still easily find devices to play it, a few years later, that might not be the case – either that, or the tapes would be in no state to be played. There are many tracks in these which I can’t find online. In the near future, they will be lost to the past. So in essence, technology might advance so much that those data items which have not been updated might be inaccessible anyway.

    A life. A lifetime of experiences, which defined not just what happened to a single person, but also to those around. Multiple lives. A web of existence. Humanity. Statistics and non-stories. All of which would be rendered inaccessible or meaningless in the future, but without which the future would not exist. An endless stream, which may have the larger picture of its origins, but has only hazy notions of the details. Makes me wonder. About the construct of our lives.

    until next time, streaming out loud…