I am filing this under the wish-lists. A thought just struck my head. A few days back I had recommended to you a couple of movie recommendation engines. It is then that it hit me, that how much labour goes into making some services work for us. Should things be this hard?
Imagine this. XYZ technology comes in. Promises to revolutionize the way we deal with certain aspects of our web-life. I am not talking about communication portals or search engines. I am talking about those services that require continual user input in order to provide better customized results. Now there is no guarantee that XYZ would be the best herein after. Or may be you like a very unique feature of ABC but don't like it completely to abandon XYZ. So now you are at cross-roads. What should you do? Spend fresh time and build up both XYZ and ABC or abandon the thought of using one or finally like most people end up settling for sub-optimal output from both the services, because you just didn't have the time to add data into these systems.
I wondered if it were conceivable to carry around this user generated data with us. It is not only our email or our blog posts or our IMs that make us who we are. There's the whole question of preferences. Thus I strongly believe we should be able to transfer such data and save a copy, wherever we like. Whether or not we liked a movie will remain independent of the site we are rating it in. Whether Opeth is my favourite band or not, is something I absolutely know. Nothing is going to change that. Then why, in a world of integration and portability of content we are okay with settling for lack of this simple feature when it comes to user experience content. What might be the hindrance?
I guess the principle challenge lies in the way the data is being gathered. It is all in an ordinal scale usually, however if you see some scales of ratings are descriptive and qualitatively obsessed whilst others are more into quantifying user experience. If there were a way to create profiles for individuals with this information life would be much simpler on the social web. We can carry over our friends, then why not our preferences.
I know, to some, having central identities and user preferences stored in such a way would mean a threat to privacy. But I am going to take that shot with the world knowing that I am a metal head who thinks Metallica was over-rated (given that only their early stuff were great), that there are days I am stuck with only one song playing in my playlist throughout the day. I have no qualms keeping a record that Ian Mcewan is my favourite author and I am dying to read his 2007 master piece On Chesil Beach and that nothing surpasses Coorg's splendour just after the rainy seasons in Karnataka. I am not sharing sensitive data here. I am sharing what I would share in a public space anyway, at any social forum that thrives on such data. I just need to be able to import and use such data that I have painstakingly put into in some place. I just want the web to be more intelligent at that.
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