Oooh.

[randomling]

I am really, really fascinated by ThinkUp which showed up in my RSS reader today.

I don't have $120, of course, but if I did...

Maybe when I get a job I'll sign up.

Comments

[liv]

Can you expand a bit on why you're excited about it? I looked over the webpage and it kind of looks like every other startup that's going to be the next big thing in social media!!!!! What am I missing?

[randomling]

The thing that sparked my interest was actually this blog post by Gina Trapani, the co-founder. The quote that gets me particularly excited:

"Twitter and Facebook and Google’s advertisers aren’t the only ones who should be able to learn about me given my online activity. My social data is mine. Not only should I have a living, breathing, constantly-updating copy of it, it should live in my own database so that I can query it for my own purposes."

I have four (!!) Twitter accounts, plus a Facebook account, a LinkedIn account, multiple DWs and multiple blogs on Tumblr, and right now I'm kind of desperately trying to figure out what belongs where and how to make all this social media stuff make sense to me. And... I guess what I liked about it was the idea of getting to see all my data laid out in one place and figure out what I want to know about it, rather than the stupid popularity contest deal of something like Klout. I don't care about my popularity as much as I care about figuring out how to make all this work for me.

I'm not sure you're wrong to be sceptical! I think that my excitement is probably more about me than the service itself - about my need to make sense of how to create an online life that actually works for me. I'm really nowhere near there right now and it's frustrating me enormously.

...that was more than I intended to write. You ask such good questions! ♥

[ephemera]

I kind of want to sigh up just because I want to support Gina, but it's a fair chunk of money and I don't know that I'd really use it. Do you have server space where you could roll your own with the open source version?

[randomling]

Ooh, I hadn't thought of that!

I do in fact have a RasPi, which might well work for this purpose once I get it up and running, though I'm not sure I could make a promise that it'd be always online for everyone else's purposes, and I don't know how much space/processing power the open source app would need. But it's totally something to look into! And maybe when I have a bit more of an income, I could look at renting server-space somewhere for these purposes...

Thank you for the idea! <3