It’s 2010. Where’s My Internet Dashboard?

With every­one debat­ing whether email is being dis­placed by social media, I find myself return­ing to a thought I’ve been toss­ing about for a while. Why isn’t there a sin­gle, web based dash­board for all my internet-​based com­mu­ni­ca­tion? It should act both as an aggre­ga­tor and as a mes­sag­ing cen­tre– a sin­gu­lar launch-​point from which I can see the lat­est news and quickly com­pose mes­sages that can be sent to any of my con­nected plat­forms: email, twit­ter, blog post, what­ever. #

I actu­ally expected this to hap­pen quite a while ago, and I know that there have been some attempts to pull it off, includ­ing Google’s increas­ing suite of apps (and the poorly exec­tuted iGoogle). I also had an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion about this on Twitter a few weeks ago, sug­gest­ing that part of Facebook’s suc­cess has to do with the dash­board. You access news, mes­sages, shared links, pho­tos and sta­tus updates from one con­ve­nient inter­face. #

I’m no pro­gram­mer, or I’d have built this by now. Despite that, I can tell you what would be required of such a thing if it’s to work: #

Data needs to live both on my com­puter and in the cloud.

This dash­board of mine should live on a mini server on my com­puter, syn­chro­niz­ing with the cloud when­ever changes hap­pen. My data needs to be portable, it needs to be acces­si­ble any­where, and I need to be able to own it. This means my lit­tle server would syn­chro­nize with servers “out there.” That way, I can still access the ser­vice through mobile devices and library com­put­ers, and every­thing will still be stored locally on my own com­puter. #

Peer to Peer Connections

My con­tact info should exist as my iden­tity on my per­sonal server and when I change any­thing, it should push those changes to my “friends” or what­ever you want to call peo­ple I’ve allowed to have access. This will always go directly to their per­sonal servers, when pos­si­ble, or through the cloud when needed. For larger files, I should be able to “post” them via a secure bit tor­rent feed. That way, every­one in my net­work shares the load of the file. Of course, I should be able to restrict auto­matic down­load of such files to a size limit, much like I do with my SMTP client. #

River of News and Single Composition Interface

The heart of the dash­board will be a river of news, but fil­ter­able in a vari­ety of ways, threaded and com­bin­ing incom­ing mes­sages from all my ser­vices, includ­ing email. A sin­gle inter­face will let me send email, post to my blog or update my sta­tus. It will default to what­ever mode I’m respond­ing to (if it’s a response), but I can select whichever ser­vices I want to push to. #

A Public Face

This would look some­thing like ClaimID, with an OpenID cer­tifi­cate built in and a but­ton allow­ing peo­ple to request access. #

I think the ingre­di­ents are all out there, just some­one more clever than me needs to hook it all up. #

What do you think? Can it be done? What else does this dash­board need? #

13 Responses to ‘It’s 2010. Where’s My Internet Dashboard?’

  1. It wasn’t until very recently with the recent push from HTML5 that this was pos­si­ble, at least from the offline stor­age capac­ity. Webkit, Firefox 3.6 and Opera now sup­port this golden fea­ture that allows you to bring your data with you once you’ve unplugged.

    It has been avail­able for some­time from Google, how­ever they’re really only con­cerned with Chrome (webkit).

    Two other issues that I kinda see in your con­cept: either A) you will need to have every­one join the net­work you’re cre­at­ing so every­one exists in the same net­work as your dash­board, or, B) you would need to amass accounts to all exist­ing net­works, and have your dash­board net­work mashup with them.

    It’s like the mother of all mash-​ups. Plus wrap­ping an HTML-​based IMAP/​SMTP client around your cur­rent email provider.

    This is quite the undertaking. :)

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  3. Some apps are try­ing to go this direc­tion, bring­ing together sev­eral social media sites and feed sources under one umbrella. The “Flock” browser, which is mov­ing to Chrome, and the “Socialite” app (which I use) are off the top of my head. They require accounts at all sites be set up, but at least it reduces the amount of pro­grams some­one has open and/​or jumps around to to keep up :/

  4. True. There have been sev­eral attempts at this (don’t know about GOtrieve), but none that I’ve seen that meet all the cri­te­ria I’ve listed here, and none that look like a com­bined aggregator/​publisher which Ross men­tioned in reply on the thread over on script​ing​.com with a PubSubHubBub. This is really what I’m get­ting at.

    I want a trustable pub­lic pro­file that con­nects with my streams and allows me to aggre­gate them and pub­lish to them. It has to be open and live on my machine, and like SMTP, when I “pub­lish” it should go into a queue that will go send when the ser­vice is open. For oth­ers on the same net­work, it can just go direct.

  5. This is why I can’t build it myself! But it seems like it should be sim­pler than this. You could even just start with a sim­ple aggre­ga­tor and a fancy form that con­nects to other services.

  6. True. Many of these are close. I’ve played with a hand­ful, and that’s why I think that one of the attrac­tions of Facebook is it’s sim­ple abil­ity to han­dle mul­ti­ple kinds of streams in one sin­gle place. Photos, Statuses, Email, etc. I just want that dash­board to be open and con­trol­lable by me, and con­nect to the ser­vices “out there” that I choose, rather than be cor­ralled within a gated com­mu­nity that has con­trol over all my interactions.

  7. This dash­board app was actu­ally released back in 2001 as a prod­uct called GOtrieve. It pro­vided a peer envi­ron­ment where par­tic­i­pants could iden­tify con­tent of inter­est to a com­mu­nity, share it amongt peers, and make sure that data was prop­a­gated not only to peers but also to repos­i­tory sites. There have been numer­ous vari­ant of this orig­i­nal app cre­ated since then and sev­eral are avail­able out there if you know where to look…

  8. Diaspora might fit the bill. Due end of the sum­mer. http://​www​.join​di​as​pora​.com/​i​n​d​e​x​.​html

  9. I’m hop­ing so. If they fol­low this kind of think­ing, that of a dash­board, instead of just another alter­na­tive net­work, I will be very happy.

  10. I’ve been really happy with Feedly so far. It pretty seam­lessly inte­grates your twit­ter feed with RSS aggre­ga­tion… Its miss­ing some of the fea­tures you want and oth­ers that I’d like to see as well, but its not a bad start­ing point.
    Another really inter­est­ing project that I’ve been keep­ing an eye on is the Cargo CMS (http://​car​go​col​lec​tive​.com/). It’s a port­fo­lio site builder that con­nects you with other Cargo users whom you can choose to fol­low and share your work with. They also use the sys­tem pretty uniquely to col­lect con­tent from hun­dreds of con­trib­u­tors for spacecol​lec​tive​.org (spacecol​lec​tive​.org/​r​e​cent). Its a pretty inter­est­ing con­cept.
    Again, not exactly what you’re look­ing for, but the UI design is extremely intu­itive and inviting.

  11. This is pretty much a ver­ba­tim descrip­tion of a project I’m work­ing on in my spare time. It’s called “HTFS” (Hypertext File System), and I started rough­ing ideas out about it about 7 years ago. What I’m work­ing on now is build­ing on top of a WordPress instal­la­tion, and it will effec­tively act as a Universal Aggregation Engine (tagline!), which pulls con­tent in and then allows you to sort/​filter/​pivot it all based on a vari­ety of fac­tors. I have a few ran­dom, very old notes here http://​dent​e​dreal​ity​.com​.au/​p​r​o​j​e​c​t​s​/​h​tfs/ They don’t really describe much of the cur­rent approach, but might be inter­est­ing regardless.

  12. That’s really inter­est­ing. I fig­ured some­one out there must be work­ing on some­thing like this. I just can’t fathom why no major project has emerged. It would have been a good idea 7 years ago, but by now it seems essential.

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