chi.mp and Social Networks or How public do you want to be?

[Pat McCotter]

This started out to be a poke at Puke's expense but after reading chi.mp's About page. I figured I'd turn it into a discussion.

(chi.mp appears to be a webhost provider and is an OpenID provider. It appears they purport to do a mashup of your online social networks and allow you to "centralize your identity" )

How public are you willing to make your identity?

Or is that even the right question?

Please bear with me as I run around a couple of bushes.

How public is your identity?
We hear about identity theft all the time with respect to our credit and Social Security Numbers and yet people lay their lives out for everyone to see on facebook, myspace, twitter, etc, etc, etc. Is it your identity or the list of people you know that is important here?

How do you move your contact info around?
My son had to replace his cell phone a few months back and groused at the hassle of having to re-enter all of his contacts. I asked wasn;t there a way to back them up on the net and transfer to the new phone and then thought that maybe there isn't a data standard for these phones, yet.  I'm not a cell phone user but having done desktop development I always used the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) method of data entry. If it's in electronic format somewhere, don't make somebody type it into the same or a different format somewhere else - transfer it. I designed with this in mind.

Do you share your contact info?
Working with data sharing between machines in process automation, this was not a problem. The problem cropped up with companies and people who want to control their data/information. People did not like to lose control of their information. But I look around me now and people are falling all over themselves to let facebook use their contact list to send an invitation to a cause or an app or some such thing. Just a couple years ago sending e-mails to everyone in your address book was the kiss of death for internet users.

Where do you save your data?
Web 2.0 or "cloud computing" takes this even further by having us use applications served on the web - somewhere - and having data from those applications saved on the web - somewhere.

I don't know. I will put this out there for others to comment on and possibly steer me to the right question to ask so I pursue the proper road for study.

[K. Darien Freeheart]

Is it your identity or the list of people you know that is important here?

I use Social Networking sites almost exclusively to inject liberty propaganda into a "socially accepted" medium.

I asked wasn;t there a way to back them up on the net and transfer to the new phone and then thought that maybe there isn't a data standard for these phones, yet.

Actually, yes, there is. With two US exceptions, the vast majority of phones have a single place to store contact data and even applications. It's on the SIM card. Other than Sprint/Nextel and Verizon, every cellphone in the world is compatible with this standard. Verizon is moving to GSM (and will make use of SIM cards) by 2012.

I look around me now and people are falling all over themselves to let facebook use their contact list to send an invitation to a cause or an app or some such thing. Just a couple years ago sending e-mails to everyone in your address book was the kiss of death for internet users.

Facebook, in my opinion, should be taken about as seriously as bumperstickers. The general opinion I've gotten from others is that it's pretty much the same.

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/05/21/100-bumper-stickers/

Where do you save your data?

I use web services or "cloud computing" but I also have local copies of anything that actually matters to me (pictures, music, documents, my websites, server configs). Sometimes I mirror it between various could services and sometimes I keep a hard copy in the form of a hard drive.

It's impossible to prevent data loss AND secure the data. I don't even aim to make that my goal. I merely attempt to mitigate the most likely losses. Multiple cloud providers protects me from that provider going belly up. Cloud providers help me mitigate against my apartment burning down. Encryption helps mitigate the likelyhood that the cloud providers use my information without my existence, and does the same on my laptop in the event it's stolen.