While my guitar gently weeps,
while my coffee slowly brews, and
while my code obediently runs
let's try and whip up a dig[1]
Shell to self-activity
This is to present an idea and hopefully incorporate some feedback about whether it sounds cool or not. We all know we spend an inordinate amount of time online which is probably far better spent traveling, listening to music, meeting new people or far better drinking. But personal rant aside - I've always been curious to analyze my own activity online (and be depressed by it). But how about an intuitive interactive way to play with it.
so let's say on our facebook/quora page, we have a shell. yes, you heard it - a shell that let's you type commands in - geek stuff. And this shell lets you control what you see and presents you with information you might want to query.
for instance, let's say i'm casually browsing facebook,
and I want to see all the posts by my very best friend Bill Waterson. (Heck yes, this is my world, and in this world, Bill Waterson is my friend.) So since I find my friend Bill to be very interesting, I just type
posts.fetch_all_by(bill) // Obviously this has autocomplete all the way through to bill.
By default, this brings up only the top 10-20 posts, say. But since I'm feeling adventurous, I might do something more. I vaguely remember him sharing something insightful about painting a few months back.
posts.fetch_all_by(bill).between("today").and("march 2013");
or
posts.fetch_all_by(bill).within("last_2_months");
// Side note to Chomsky ninjas. Yes I know this isn't proper grammar for the language. I'll fix the interface later. stay with me.
In fact I can do this for photos I'm tagged in, by venue/location. You get the idea.
photos.fetch_of_self.within_months(2).tagged_with("Bill").near("Skibo");
I can also say. filter my current set of posts.
posts.filter_remove("Hunger Games"); // Cos I'm tired of looking at those topics.
I could query how much time I've spent over the last 2 days - how many posts I've liked etc. It would make for something very insightful about myself.
This same shell could run across websites. FB, Quora, Google. Tell you about all your browsing activity etc. Plot graphs for you in d3.js (because you know d3 is awesome).
Just a thought.
Though some of the negatives I can see with this are -
1. facebook is already kinda trying this with the graph query language and API etc. Though their smart bar is worse than shit.
2. Bad stalkers can use this for perpetrating all kinds of shit. Though this could be plugged into facebook's privacy mechanism - for what it's worth. (NSA can see shit anyway).
Blog over.
