I got tagged (by Rowan Stanfield) in a game of blog tag a while ago and I only just got around to doing this. So here’s 8 random things about me.

1. I’ve done a round-the-world trip twice. My favourite cities have been Melbourne, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver and New York (and of course Brighton!). New Zealand is over-rated. New Delhi (and surrounding area) is depressing. Hawaii is full of tourists. Fiji is beautiful but full of honeymooners and Christians.

2. I am impressed by films involving aliens, robots, zombies, gore, explosions, and big guns.

3. I am scared of the dark. Possibly due to over exposure to things in point 2.

4. I am constantly looking for a new job, even when I like my current one. I think I like to keep up to date with what opportunites exist, and how much I *could* earn.

5. despite point 4, OKCupid.com tells me I am unambitious. I think that’s because I put lots of things before money/ownership, but I think OKCupid has ambition confused with materialism. I’ve been on OKCupid for years and years. It’s good for self-obsession but nearly everyone on there is really ugly.

6. I play World of Warcraft. My main character is currently level 45. I don’t obsess over it, but have been known to play for about 5 hours in a row on occasion. Even though I find it repetitive, it’s quite a good way to unwind. When I was about 16 I had to ban myself from playing Doom because I started to tense up when approaching a corner in real life, envisioning flaming skulls coming at me from the other side. I went cold turkey on it.

7. I’m totally fat-ist. I think people should know when to stop eating and just not be fat. If you eat too much, you are greedy and weak. It’s a sign of lack of self control. I just don’t like looking at fat people. I know this is hypocritical because I’d quite like to gain about a stone and I find that hard. Oh well, I’m a hypocrite and a bad person.

8. I did a Biology degree and specialised in evolution and mating behaviour. So I know lots of strange facts about slug mating rituals, field mouse penises and how environmental resources relate to monogammy/polygammy. I do tend to apply my knowledge of evolution to understanding human behaviour, relationships and flirtation.

OK so now I have to tag 8 people and they can do the same if they like (but they don’t have to):

Jeremy Keith (adactio)

Christine Hennessey (evilolive)

Shannon Ritter (micala)

Dave Stone (builtbydave)

Josh Russell

Trevor May (antikewl)

Richard Bacchus (dubnacious)

Paul Burgess (delarge)

Andy Budd

You can now basically do anything you’d ever want with the new privacy controls within Facebook. So, if you want to make a list of ex-boyfriends and stop them seeing certain information about you, you can! Or, if you make a list of hotties, you can make a special photo album just for them!

Lists kind of work like groups as far as communication is concerned, but at the moment people don’t know what lists they’ve been put into by other people – they are for an individual to group/categorise their friends, for their own purposes.

I only hope the ways I’ve categorised my friends within Facebook never gets revealed to my friends!

Interestingly, this blog suggests that you can “shield your friend list from any or all of your friends and networks”, whereas this blog says the opposite, that “Friend lists are “private groups” of your friends. No one can see the friend lists you make.”  Hopefully the first blog wasn’t talking about these new friend lists that a user creates and names accordingly, but was talking about a user’s main, complete, Facebook friend list.  If a user’s main Facebook friend list is called a friend list and the lists a user creates to organise their Facebook friends is called a friend list, talking about this could get pretty confusing.

Lately I have noticed that with more and more people getting used to RSS, and more services allowing you to send content in and out of them, content is flowing in so many different directions and things haven’t settled into any kind of default situation. For example – I use Twitterfeed to send updates to my Twitter account whenever I update my Facebook status, write a blog post, or add images to Flickr. This saves me the bother of updating Twitter AND Facebook, and Facebook friends will get the same content as Twitter followers. I do it this way because I go on Facebook more often than Twitter, and sometimes I want to Twitter about geeky things that I don’t want to bore my normal friends with (yes Twitter friends, you know you are all geeks). Most people I know who are on Twitter seem to flow content in the opposite direction, sending their Twitter status to their Facebook, I’m assuming because they spend more time on Twitter. However, people who are Facebook friends AND Twitter friends, see the same content twice. Boring!

The duplication of content gets particularly annoying when you use feed aggregators to view stuff. There are two types of aggregators I’m familiar with:

1. The stalker feed aggregator: These make stalking your friends super-easy. You can stay on one page and see what’s going on with everybody on all of their sites. An example of this is Spokeo, which works really nicely because you can rename your friends who have various online names so you remember who they are, and you can merge profiles for the same friend on various services into one. You can also delete boring friends just on Spokeo, so you don’t hear about their rubbish life, and you still remain friends with them on whatever external site they use, so you don’t offend anybody. Although Spokeo’s UI is really easy to use, it looks terrible in my opinion (oh, I just logged back in for the first time in a while and they’ve had a redesign, and they’ve gotten rid of a whole farmyard of small furry animals from the site). Socialthing is another example, and looks nice and clean, but you can’t merge people’s identities at the moment, and you can’t view all the content from a single person like you can on Spokeo *see below. These would be fine if my friends didn’t port their content all over the place, resulting in something like:

‘John on Facebook: John is Twittering: John is at home’
‘John on Pownce: John is Twittering: John is at home’
‘John on Twitter: John is at home’
…etc

2. The ego feed aggregator: If you throw pieces of yourself all over the internets, and you want to make life easier for your fans, you could make a page that aggregates all the information about you and your life into one place, so people don’t have to check in on you on lots of different services, but can just read this one page. Lots of people do this semi-manually on their blogs, adding feeds and badges from their various profiles across the web. I’ve kind of done this here, but have missed a few out, like Twitter, and I’ve preferred to just list links to my various profiles. I’ve now tried out (but haven’t put on my blog yet) ShowYourself, a widget-creator thing that creates a list of links to your various profiles in a semi-automatic way. Using Twitterfeed or similar, results in this kind of aggregated ego.

Friendfeed does both of these things, with a ‘Me’ tab and a ‘Friends’ tab. The ‘Me’ tab can be seen by anyone (here’s mine). You can also view your own updates in the Friends tab if you want to. But there’s still the problem of duplicated content. I had a bad case of duplicated content for a while when I let the Facebook Friendfeed application post updates to my Facebook Mini-feed: Updating my Facebook status would automatically update my Twitter status and send an update to Friendfeed and my Facebook Mini-feed (Mini-feed update 1); then Friendfeed would tell my Facebook Mini-feed that I updated my Facebook status (Mini-feed update 2), Twitter would tell my Friendfeed that I updated my Twitter status, then Friendfeed would tell my Mini-feed that I updated my Twitter status (Mini-feed update 3). Phew! That must have been annoying for my friends – I was probably spamming their newsfeeds. Also, the Friends tab only shows people who are also on Friendfeed (as far as I can tell), unless you go through the process of creating an ‘imaginary friend’ for each of the friends you want to follow. I.e. it doesn’t automatically import all of your friends from each social network.

I think the next step for these aggregator sites is to scan for duplicated content and filter it out. *I just discovered that you can merge people’s various profiles into one on Socialthing, AND it removes duplicate content and still tells you the sites they updated:

Brilliant! Are any other sites doing this yet?

The last couple of weeks I’ve been using Flock (full review coming soon), which can function as a stalker feed aggregator if you set it up properly, and it’s been nice to have my friends’ updates in a side panel of my browser. Duplicated content is still a problem here though – I wonder if they are planning on doing the Socialthing thing and filtering duplicates and/or merging people’s identities when you view ‘All’ updates?

Related post: The Web Profile Aggregators (by Frank Gruber)

I have about ten fifteen things I want to write about asap on this blog, and it’s getting out of hand, so I’ve decided to list them all before I forget one. Also in the list are other web-related things I need to do.

1. I went to Barcamp Brighton 2 this weekend and there are lots of sessions I want to mention.

2. I went on a PHP for beginners course last week and I want to put my notes from that online. √

3. I need to delete my self-hosted (and dead) copy of this blog so that it stops coming up in Google in case people comment there by mistake. √

4. I haven’t even mentioned my work on the University of Sussex Second Life campus project, and it seems everyone else has been talking about it this week.

5. I need to re-organise this blog so it has a page for illustrations, contact details, print design work and web design work.

6. I need to get screen shots of all of the things I’ve built in Second Life so I can start building a portfolio from them.

7. I want to make a better hoodie for my SL avatar (who is currently wearing the result of my very first attempt at creating any clothing in SL), and then make lots of clothes and sell them. I haven’t really seen many stylish avatars going around, so I think I’ll just copy my own wardrobe, what with me being such a style icon

8. I just discovered a few really awesome links which I have tagged in del.icio.us, and I want to talk about them. I might even create a del.icio.us page on my blog or figure out some automatic posting of daily/weekly links as I’ve seen other people do.

9. Mostly on my mind is the issue of social friend aggregators and social profile aggregators, content portability between networks and content duplication issues. √

10. There’s some out of date examples of work I’ve done in the past floating around and I’m still linking to them. I need to get rid of those because they aren’t relevant any more, and I can do much better stuff now!

11. I’ve been using Flock for the last couple of weeks and I want to talk about that.

12. I have brown hair now and need to update my avatars all over the place. This should probably come last because it’s not that important but since I’m so vain I’ll probably do this first. √

13. In a game of blog-tag, I got tagged. So I need to do the post thing and tag other people.

14. Flock just got confused and told me that all my friends were called Tim Vernon.

15. My queer computer: Last week I witnessed the fantastic bug in Second Life where a bunch of male avatars develop breasts. Bearded ladies aplenty. I now know why, and I’d love to tell you.

I don’t know where to start!