Where’s the Flow? Where’s My Control?

There’s a meme going around about where my information is. Loic wants it back. I started on this process some time ago thinking about lifestreams. Then Stowe chimes in with it’s all about flows. Both are right. We are learning to reconfigure how we capture and share expanded lifestreams in an accelerated environment. It’s also about peripheral vision. We seek detail when it’s triggered. A flow strategy is paying off in that regard, however, it’s not replacing more thoughtful conversation. See also this post on ReadWriteWeb on comments.

Concurrently, we want more fine grained control over what goes where and to whom. Somehow I’d expect Marc Canter (in fact he sort of has on March 28th) and PeopleAggregator to weigh in on this one. What we still need is a useful and effective identity construct that enables us to share and expire content and relationships. Then broadcasting might become lots easier, be in context (yours and mine) and by relationship.

/Message: Beyond Blogs: The Conversation Has Moved Into The Flow

Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social….Twitter and other similar apps are based on the web of flow: information of interest comes to us, not the other way around. And it flows through people, through relationships: it’s not a bunch of clicks on URLs, scrolling, and so on. It’s a move away from hunting and gathering and into relationship agriculture: information grows in our flow applications instead of us spending time hunting it down