LinkedIn, the social network for professionals (think Facebook, but more serious), has launched a new service called InMaps that visualises your ‘connections’ to other people as a single network graph. I had a play with it earlier and here’s how my network of 163 people who I’ve connected with through work looks like:
In this age of ubiquitous connectivity there is very little we do which isn’t tracked and stored in some form or another be it active (something we request) or passive (something which is happens automatically behind the scenes). This data is used for a variety of reasons; for marketing, personalisation, recommendation, law enforcement, research, capacity planning, trend analysis, performance enhancement… – the list is almost endless. It spans both our online and offline lives, whether we like it or not, and is becoming evermore sophisticated in its reach and depth. Being a bit of an analytics junkie I decided to take a look at what all my favourite applications/services offer by way of being able to visualise some of this data – WordPress blog…
“Philosophy As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together. Mission To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.” Finally a credible move towards being able to move personal data between services. Whilst the reality of this is still a way off it’s good to see the likes of Google, Facebook & Flickr on board. Small steps towards a more…