23 and a half hours

I love when whatever I’m thinking about on a particular day is echoed by my social stream. There’s something inherently uplifting in the fact that other people are interested in or concerned with the same things you are.

Today, the issue at hand is my health. It’s a long story and I won’t get into it right now, but suffice it to say that I haven’t been happy with my health habits over the last few months, and I’ve been a failure at turning things around.

That doesn’t mean I won’t, but things have been a bit discouraging. Enter the captivating video above, shared by Anthony De Rosa on Twitter.. Visually pleasing and very relevant, I thought it a good decision to post here.

Now, off for a walk.

The effort required to tweet tells me that someone thought it was important. And I do care about that.

— via Mike Loukides

This isn’t the most novel idea today, but it sure would have been in the early ’90s:

A lifestream is a way of organizing digital objects—photos, emails, documents, Web links, music—in a time-ordered series. A timeline, in essence, that extends into the past but also the future (with appointments, to-do lists, etc.).

The issue these streams will have to address is that while time is one excellent way of organizing information, it’s not the only one. For example, I wouldn’t want my emails just thrown together with incoming tweets, because I need my emails to stand out. All data are not created equal, and organizational needs are fluid. The all-encompassing timeline only works if I can rearrange it and sort by some other factor whenever I need to.

— via The Wall Street Journal

Life is seriously crazy. I do not at all need one more thing to add the list, but here it is anyway.

More privacy issues with Facebook

I clicked on my Facebook timeline this morning to make sure I had properly adjusted the privacy settings associated with the Washington Post’s Social Reader app, and I was greeted by an interesting surprise: I have two Facebook subscribers!

First thought: Clearly, I’m famous.

Upon further inspection of my subscribers’ identities, though, I found they were the two people who had recently requested to be my friend and been denied.  One old acquaintance from high school and one account I think is some type of bot.

Let down. And, concerning.

This looks like the latest confusing aspect of Facebook’s increasingly complicated environment. When we ignore or otherwise do not approve a friend request, we get the feeling that we’ve made our intentions clear – this person shouldn’t be able to see what I post. Dumping them into the subscribers bin so they get notified of any public post is a bit disingenuous, methinks.

There are, to be sure, a number of ways in which this might not be a big deal – if you don’t publish any public updates, for example, your subscribers won’t see anything. Facebook, though, keeps making it tougher for its users – especially the nontechnical ones – to fully grasp the intricacies of its new products. Above all else, that’s just bad customer service.

For now, it’s prompted me to turn off all subscribing. Unfortunate.