Content Matters

Open source developer Christopher Blizzard has just released a small app called Whoisi. 

 Whoisi is a social media tracker like Friendfeed but with a clever twist. While Friendfeed and similar apps require a user to upload all of their RSS feeds and accounts, Whoisi takes a wiki-based approach allowing anyone to update the accounts of anyone else.  In a way, it's like the Imaginary Friends function in Friendfeed but taken to the next level.

Whoisi allows you to add all the various feeds for any person(s).  For example, my Whoisi record includes my feeds from twitter, friendfeed, flickr, my Content Matters blog, my LinkedIn profile and even my recently played music tracks from Last.fm.

As Blizzard points out in his description of Whoisi, most social media sites are organized around accounts rather than people. Whoisi flips that model and allows you to track people. And, with a wiki-based model, those people records can be updated by the person themselves or by others who track them. In essence, you can add people like you might add RSS feeds to a reader, while leveraging the effort of the crowd to get more of that information updated.

Whoisi does not require a user ID - just visit the page and start to add.  However, it's cookie-based, so if you want to use it on multiple PCs, be sure to click the Login Later button in the upper right, which will give you a URL to return to your profile. While the site does not have login information, it does use IP info to track changes to each listing.

Of course, there's an open API. While the API documentation does not yet exist, there's an API call that allows you to extract the entire database.

Whoisi is largely an experiment right now, or as Blizzard describes it, an evening hack.  Playing around with it, I find it a pretty useful tool, thought I'm not sure that it will become my primary feed for friend info. If you want to get a sense of how Whoisi can be used today and where it could be headed, spend a few minutes reading through the comments on Blizzard's blog post. The open source community is all about sharing and lots of interesting ideas are posted in the comments.

If you want to know what I'm up to, you can follow me on whoisi at http://whoisi.com/p/1658 (all whoisi URLs use a TinyURL form).

Another neat utility I've been playing with is Retaggr.  Retaggr is sort of the flip side of whoisi, answering the question "what are all your social media accounts?".  Retagger allows you to enter all of your social media accounts then creates various badges to display them.

You can see my Retaggr badge by clicking on the mini badge in the right sidebar (just above the tag cloud). It looks like this. 

My full retaggr profile is shown below.

At some point, there will be an open social graph and it will be much easier to find friends and colleagues and to help them find you. In the meantime, tools like Whoisi and Retaggr help to bridge that gap.

It appears that at least three current members of the House of Representatives are actively using Twitter.  And, unlike some of the early political blogs which were ghost-written, it appears that these are the actual members, not their staffs.

Guitar-playing GOP congressman Thad McCotter (R-MI) can be found at @thadmccotter.
Democrat Tim Ryan (D-OH), who showed up last week on Mr. Scoble Goes to Washington, can be tracked at @timryan.
Texas Republican John Culberson, by far the most active tweeter of the three, can be found at @johnculberson.

It's interesting to see how they are each using the technology.
Ryan is not following anyone; he's simply using it as a broadcast tool to his 333 followers. But he seems to get the technology. He's not pushing out campaign messages; instead, he uses it to simply answer the initial twitter question "what are you doing?". Ryan is a newbie and only has 43 tweets to-date, but looks as though he's tweeting a few times a day. A few of his recent tweets were:
Voting on the price gouging prevention act.
and
I just voted against the fisa bill. Our Constitution is a sacred document. The fourth amendment barely exists now. Let's stand strong here.
Ryan generally posts via his Blackberry using Twitterberry, while the others are using the web client.

McCotter is following 400 people while he has 254 followers. I'm surprised that he is following more people than he has followers. He's only posted 48 tweets so far and most are just his speaking schedule, such as:
tune in tonight at 5:15 on Fox's Just In with Laura Ingraham
or
currently on Dennis Miller show

Culberson is the grandaddy of the congressional tweeters, having posted more than 530 tweets. He's the only one of the three who seem to be having true twitter conversations and many of his tweets are @ replies. Culberson is the congressman who posted a Qik video interview last week - you can see the full details on his Qik page.  Looking at how he's willing to debate users via twitter, I'm only surprised he hasn't yet weighed in on the Shel Israel - Loren Feldman feud (or maybe he has).

Is any of this meaningful? Probably not. But during an election campaign where one candidate acknowledges that he's never touched a computer, it's good to know that some of the folks in Washington are early adopters.