Metadata on Metadata- A Great Idea!
If you are even remotely involved in the “bleeding edge” of the ‘net, then you’ve probably heard of FriendFeed (I’m not linking to it, find that bag-of-echo yourself). But in case you haven’t, it’s a lifestream aggregator that went a step further and has in-house commenting on every item… it’s the lovebaby of the blogging world right now, and the giant echo chamber it’s a part of really makes me sick.
The pitchfork is intentional.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned previously that I stopped following my archnemesis TechCrunch (and now Mashable too) because it’s just a bunch of worthless crap, and the names “Twitter” and “FriendFeed” popping up every 3rd post was making me want to vomit. So imagine my surprise this morning when I caught this lovely piece on RW/W, one of my favorite blogs that has been teetering on the edge of echo chamberism.
A service that does what? Repipes FriendFeed? Oh, yes, it’s metadata on metadata!
Data, set a course for Sector 9. Warp speed.
Huh?
To make it simple, when you repipe, aggregate, and comment on an item from any one of those enticing things of Web 2.0 shininess, that’s building metadata around you and that item/object. But when you repipe that, add tags, etc. … that’s building metadata on top of, you know, pre-existing metadata.
Oh Yes Another Interface!
If there’s one thing we learned from Twitter, it’s that you can’t be successful without giving all your data away for free and allowing someone to completely circumvent your UI, and just use you as a database query endpoint. Totally.
Please! Use our phallic-looking API! We implore you!
Which makes complete sense then as to why you would need a filtering system of some sort to put on top of all this aggregating… I mean, honestly, who doesn’t want to see Robert Scoble’s latest Ode to My Awesomeness? Not via his blog though. I want to see it twice-removed from his blog! And I want to see his Twitter post telling everyone he’s got a new blog post!
Insanity
All of this crap is insanity, and I hope it ends tomorrow. And by “ends tomorrow”, I mean that all these investors will wake up 24 hours from now and realize they’ve wasted their money… the end result being they demand their money back from 95% of Web 2.0 under penalty of death.
