Since my body and mind are refusing to do any productive work today, I thought I’ll spend some time to post this thought that has been ringing in my head for quite a while. As is pretty clear these days to any social media specialist, there is a very strong personal identity management aspect to the web today. The first thing that any HR worth his/her salt will do on receiving your resume, for example, is google your name. Secondly, they might use tools like Pipl, 123People or Spokeo to get deeper insights into what you’ve been up to on the web. If you’re on friendfeed, you can make their task a little easier and aggregate your online activities at one place. And, all of us are generating tons of stuff on the web for these services to aggregate and search. Try searching for your name on Pipl. If you are in the core demographic of the people who read this blog, I bet that you’ll find something in the results that you didn’t expect to see. And you can’t delete it.

And that’s the thing about the web and social applications, which is not necessarily bad, but its something that not everyone understands. It’s hard to remove your footprints.

Which brings me to what I really wanted to share in this post. It’s an imaginary scenario that popped into my head the day I installed Twitkut on my Orkut profile. (Disclaimer: The author of the app is my younger brother. I am giving his app free publicity here in the hope that he’ll stop asking me for a MacBook for Christmas.) It’s an app that shows my tweets on my orkut profile and in my orkut update stream. As soon as I installed the app, I realized that it wasn’t the smartest idea in the world. You see, I post a lot of stuff on twitter that I expect only a small set of people to read. I know any one can read all of my posts by simply going to my twitter home, but I don’t expect them to care enough to go there, or to even know enough about me to go there. I certainly don’t expect my mom to go there. And I know she never will. She’s a normal person who uses a computer only for utilitarian purposes that include email, skype and browsing photos. That’s it. And Twitter, as a smart person I know once said, Twitter is still this underground movement in the whole scheme of things, and sometimes its surprising to the ‘tweeter’, as it may, when a more mainstream audience gets access to and comments on the tweet.

Now, Orkut is a social network that is becoming increasingly and scarily mainstream in India. I have school friends, ex-bosses, cousins, relatives and even past teachers as friends on Orkut. (I have my advisor as a friend on Twitter, but that’s another story) And my tweets aren’t meant to be read by all of these people. Especially the relatives. Because that brings them from the online social domain to the very active Ahuja family network domain. Here’s a potential scenario:

I’m willing to be my guinea pig and wait for this to happen some day. When it does, I promise to report in full detail. Till then, enjoy tweeting and friend-feeding, and remember to keep forgetting to keep those wild party pics private. It’s so much more fun to browse through photos when you know you are not meant to see them.

I read the news of the blasts today, and it brought back bad memories. I was in Delhi the last time the city was victim to an act of terrorism of an even greater scale. This is what I had to say about it then. I just wanted to post a note on this blog reiterating the same feelings.

If the cowards’ intention was to cause fear; then my city was a wrong choice, is a wrong choice, and always will be a wrong choice. We’ll be distraught, angry, strained, even broken. But not afraid. That’s just not how we roll. What they should really be praying for, is that they don’t fall into the hands of one of us.

A few days back, I stumbled onto this TEDTalk by Lawrence Lessig. It’s by far the most convincing description that I’ve come across of the state that our culture and law finds itself in today. Watch it and decide if you’d like to vote for drafting him into the Congress.

For a couple of weeks now I’ve been monitoring what I do on my Mac using two tracker tools: Wakoopa and RescueTime. Both have unique approaches to the theme of tracking. Wakoopa builds a social network around the applications that you use. It lets you build ‘teams’ of people and see what your friends have been using. The other two significant things that it does are statistical visualizations, and recommendations of apps based on what you’ve been using. So if you’ve been using a lot of TextEdit lately, it might recommend TextMate as a ’similar’ application. This, according to my guesswork, they do by matching application tags.

The other way to do these recommendations could be to match people based on their application sets (or better still, their activity sets. If app = Microsoft Word, then Activity = word processing); and then provide recommendations based on what other people who have similar appication/activity sets are using, that the current user isn’t.

Anyways, Wakoopa does provide a simple API to accessing its data, and that is a great thing to do. That’s something that RescueTime hasn’t done yet, but they promise to do the same soon on their site. RescueTime has a unique approach to this whole domain. They aren’t building a social network (at least till yet), and this is how they track your apps: If you are using a standard application, the RescueTime tracker records its usage as any other tracker. If, however, you are on a browser, the tracker records the website that you’re visiting as an ‘application’, which makes some sense in this era of online applications. You can then go to the website and assign ‘tags’ to applications. These can later be visualized to see how much time, for example, you spend ‘Watching Videos Online’.

So anyways, I’ve been itching to use the incredibly simple to use GChart APIs with an interesting enough data-set, and Wakoopa stats are sortof interesting (at least for me…), so last weekend I cooked up a script to make a pie chart of my recent application usage. Its available here, and at the point of writing this post, this is how my stats looked:

Which, I suppose, is a pretty reasonable graph. Half of what we do on our computers these days is more or less on the web (50% of which is on YouTube, which is, IMHO, the greatest time sink ever invented). Mail takes about 20%, and the actual work takes the rest. (Source after the jump)

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I got the link to this excellent post during my first InfoVis class at VT, it’s a great collection of Information Visualization projects on the web. A must-bookmark for anyone interested in visualizations. The web is like the melting pot for such applications, and that’s understandable, if not for anything else, then for the sheer number of data sets available to visualize.

As I was browsing through them, I enjoyed some more than the others, and that led me to wonder if I can setup an experiment to rate them. That’s pretty difficult though. If providing a “higher insight” is considered as the ultimate goal of a visualization, then it becomes rather hard to rate them. Insights are a function of so many things that even an experimental setup may find it hard to extract the “Interface driven insight” part of them. Especially when the visualizations themselves are about such diverse subjects. However, what attracts me to visualizations is the fact that they are so much like works of art, and hence, some of them just stand apart.

The stand apart for me was the Hans Rosling talk at TED. You’ve got to watch it.