Well, this is cute.

Someone asks you a simple question and you send them a link to this site with the question they asked. Then they feel silly.

Example:

How many feet in a mile?

Answer:

[ How Many Feet in a Mile | letmegooglethatforyou.com ]

I’ve been struggling with a problem for a while now. The problem is how to properly display on my site everything online that I create vs. everything online that I find and enjoy. The issue is that these two types of content need to be differentiated to provide maximum value to readers.

So here are my requirements.

1. I want to be able to instantly send any content that I’m viewing, regardless of medium, to my website as a link. So if I’m reading an essay/article or watching a video clip, I want to hit a single button and have it highlighted on my site’s sidebar under Discovered Content.

2. And I want the same capability for any content I create myself, but that would happen automatically as I posted it. So if I post an essay on my blog, or I send some images to Flickr, Tweet something, or I write a comment on Reddit, I want a link to that content in my site’s sidebar as well, but this time under Created Content.

I think the best distinction you can make regarding content is whether you made it yourself, or whether you’re simply passing it along as part of your input stream. Created vs. Discovered. Output vs. Input.

So here’s what I’m proposing: a service that separately collects together everything you create vs. everything you discover online, and then builds an aggregate syndication feed for each, and then gives you a simple javascript block that you can drop into your site to display each.

So it’ll:

• Collect your content (both created and discovered)
• Aggregate each into two distinct feeds (think Yahoo! Pipes)
• Give you a javascript snippet that you can use to embed it in your site/blog

Here’s a simple mock-up of the architecture as I see it:

This is very rough right now, but if I still think this is a good idea in like a week I’m going to contact some people at my favorite services, e.g. Google, FriendFeed, to see if they’d be interested in implementing it.

Any thoughts? Does this sound like something people would be interested in?

A humorous new Internet meme. Well, perhaps not new. But humorous.

You don’t have to be an ego-freak to wonder if others are talking about you online. Egosurfing, i.e. the act of looking yourself up in search engines, is something most regular Internet users have done at least once. It’s very human to want to know if we’re affecting the world we live in.

So the old way to egosurf was to simply search for your name on Google whenever you remember to. Fun perhaps, but rather inefficient. There’s a better way.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service that lets you enter search terms (like your name or your website) that Google will monitor for you 24/7, across multiple types of online media. When someone mentions you Google will notify you immediately or at the end of the day, as desired.

And it’s customizable. You can look for yourself being mentioned in just news, blogs, video, web, or you can have it look through everything via the “comprehensive” option.

How to Get Started

1. Head over to Google Alerts
2. Put in the stuff you want to trigger on, e.g. your name (remember the quotes)
3. Set the media you want Google to search within
4. Set how often you want to be notified

That’s it. And here’s what an alert looks like.

Enjoy.:

Links

[ Google Alerts | google.com ]
[ Egosurfing | wikipedia.org ]

FriendFeed is a relatively new service designed to let you stay in contact with your friends in a more complete way than other services. Twitter is an excellent service because it allows one to microblog and push updates via sms, but this doesn’t show your friends everything you’re doing.

Someone wanting to follow your blog posts, your Twitter updates, Picasa/Flikr photos, or your Amazon wishlists would have to add those things separately.

FriendFeed solves this problem by consolidating updates from all these places (and many more) into a single interface. It’s basically a better way of doing what you’re already doing online, i.e. following the lives of your friends on the Internet.

Just go to FriendFeed, sign up, and add the services that you use, e.g. your blog, your FaceBook, your MySpace, your Twitter account, your Google Shared items, your Picasa/Flikr account, etc. Once you’ve added your accounts, you can continue using those various services like usual, but when update one of those services FriendFeed will update as well.

So there are really two steps to enhancing your connection to your friends via FriendFeed:

1. Get your friends to create FriendFeed accounts and add their various services to it. This way you can follow them.
2. Make your own FriendFeed account and add your services to it. This way they can follow you.

Example

Here are the services I have in my own FriendFeed:

• My Blog
• Twitter
• Google Shared Items (shared links)
• Google Picasa (photos)
• My Amazon Wish List

So all someone has to do to keep up with me is subscribe to my FriendFeed feed, not to all those different services. Not only that, but it also has a full vote-up and comment system where people can give input on the content you publish.

It’s an extremely powerful platform for staying in touch with friends regardless of what types of social networks they use. Have a go.

Links

[ FriendFeed ]
[ Twitter ]

This is the type of thing I’ve been looking for for a long time now, and the iPhone is the platform that will bring it to us first.

So picture this: you’re walking around on in NYC’s SOHO district and are able to see the chatter for everyone within a certain radius.

For anyone interested, Mars Volta just showed up unannounced to play a set at my favorite bar.

And of course you just click on where they are to get directions. This is the kind of app that defines the new Internet. It’s a promise that people have been talking about for like a decade, but it’s just now becoming possible. I can’t wait.:

Our society is about to change drastically, and not in 20 or 50 years, and not because of cybernetics or nanotechnology. It’s about to change due to lifecasting.

Lifecasting in its current form is where people broadcast, usually via a mounted camera at home, a significant portion of their lives. Justin.tv is one of the most successful examples of this form of expression. But this is just the first stage of lifecasting; the real impact to society, which is about to come, requires a particular condition to exist.

That tipping point will come when a significant percentage of society is broadcasting their lives, nearly continuously, from mobile devices.

You might be thinking, “Ah, that’s just another “social media” trend, i.e. “something those crazy Internet kids are doing”. This is true of lifecasting in its current, infantile stage, but not in the stage it’s about to reach. Within the next 5-10 years lifecasting will change the way people interact with each other in nearly all settings. Lifecasing will redefine how the rules by which we expose ourselves to the world.

More Than the Sum of the Parts

The reason lifecasting is currently being overlooked is because the technologies that will power it are rather unremarkable by themselves. It’s basically composed of three pieces: 1) mobile video via mobile phone or some other highly portable camera, and 2) the ability to send that video out in real time to the Internet, and 3) the ability to quickly parse the incoming content into usable chunks. Nothing major, really. In fact, two of the three are already being done.

The issue is scale, and that’s the part that’s about to change. How many devices can stream live video? How many mobile phone carriers support the constant upload of a video stream from their entire user-base? And finally, how many services are out there that take in these videos and tag them, make them searchable, integrate them with social networks, etc? Very few.

A Visible New World

Once these elements change (see iPhone/3G/4G LTE) our world will change with it. Here’s how it’s going to play out:

1. All phone carriers will start supporting all-you-can-eat data plans, and they’ll get much cheaper.
2. The bandwidth (both download and upload) on said services will increase very rapidly, e.g. the next network upgrade after 3G is going to be scary fast (try between 100-300Mb).
3. All mobile phones are going to do video, and they will all ride these newer, faster networks.
4. Within the next ten years a significant percentage of people in first-world countries are going to be broadcasting every moment of their waking lives (and in many cases their sleeping lives as well).

This is a friction point for some. Why would people want to broadcast their lives? Won’t it only be a few fringe people and not a “significant percentage”? No. It’ll be a massive number. Many forces will influence the adoption of “casting” by the masses. Here are a few:

1. Youth. The world is getting younger, and young people will naturally be drawn to the idea of sharing everything about their lives. It appeals to the sense of self-importance present in most young people.
2. It makes sharing your life with loved ones infinitely more easy. In order to see what you’re doing, they don’t have to contact you for an account of what happened, or even what is happening. They just tune into your view of the world. They see what you see. They hear what you hear. There will be pressure from loved ones to continue casting in order to allow others to feel close to them.
3. Financial incentives. There will be an explosion of services focused solely on harvesting interesting events from everyday lives. I’ll go into these services in detail later, but the point is simply that there will be financial benefits to participating.
4. Civic reasons. The government will offer incentives to “casters” because your set of eyes will help find and apprehend criminals. More on this later.

Impact

Now we get to the core of it. So what, right? Why should we care?

Ok, so let’s assume you’ve accepted that the numbers will be there. Let’s consider the implications. Millions of people uploading their actual life perspective with sound and video, and all of this content will be stored, tagged and made searchable by Google, Microsoft, etc. — instantly — as it’s coming in. Oh, and add to it the fact that most of it will be geotagged as well. It’s staggering to even think about.

Consider the sheer number of things that take place during everyone’s daily lives that are lost forever. Well, no longer. As lifecasting becomes mainstream, public places will become 24/7 broadcast zones. If anything at all happens worth noting it will be discussed, propagated across the Internet and the people involved will be unable to the ramifications of the events they were a part of.

The Camera is Everywhere

He notion of being unable to show any sort of negativity without it being shown to the world (with your name, address, and place of business) will have a staggering effect on society. Here are a few scenarios to think about.

One improper comment out of your mouth can now get you fired, or even aired on CNN. A single off-color joke about wanting to “do” some woman at work, or maybe you made fun of a handicapped person as they walked by. A simple funny face would be enough. Or maybe you’re a racist who makes some mouthbreathing comment about black people while eating in a restaurant with a friend.

The person didn’t hear it, and nobody was offended (then), but unfortunately for you it was captured by four different people who were lifecasting near you at the time. Oh, and the guy at work that hates you caught it on the Internet and just sent the link to your VP, who is black.

Fail.

In short, everything you do will be subject to scrutiny by the entire Internet. And any undesirable behavior that is captured will be easily distributed for ill-effect. You will be able to quite literally cuss someone out while driving to dinner and have someone send you the video of you doing it (titled “This guy’s an asshole”) as you’re being seated. Who else is getting a copy of that video showing you inventing new ways to be vulgar?

The list of bad behavior that we all do constantly is nearly endless, but now it’ll be visible:

• Rudeness
• Dirty looks
• Bad Jokes
• Foul language
• Cruelty
• Maliciousness
• Snobbery
• Condescension
• Enjoying the Misfortune of Others

Everyone is a Reality Show Star About to Have a Big Break

But it won’t be only bad things that are captured; the ever-present cameras will also catch the positive things:

• Random acts of kindness
• Heroism (did they know they were being casted?)
• Rescues
• Extremely strange, unlikely events, i.e. freak occurrences
• Humorous scenarios
• Baby and child cuteness that would have otherwise been lost

The Concepts of Time and Location

A particularly scary thing about this is the fact that any place with lots of people will be under what equates to constant surveillance. And virtually all video will include highly precise time and location metadata. Hanging out with that other guy or other girl in public will get a lot more difficult. “What the hell! Someone just sent me a cast of you at the mall with Cindy!”

It’ll be possible to simply type in a location and watch as various views of that place stream in and out. So the screen is black for a little bit because nobody is around, then all of a sudden you see the place from the north, and it passes quickly (someone in a car). Then you see it from the right, and it’s bobbing up and down (someone walking), plus you hear a conversation. Then the screen splits because you’re now seeing two different views of the same place. And you can even see the two people casing now, because their cameras are catching each other.

Customer Service Feedback?

One of the things that got me thinking about this was being the recipient of abominable customer service. I’ve seen people absolutely ignore me while shouting and playing with friends in the back — while I was clearly visible, only to come to the register, not look at me, and mumble, “Watchu wuh”

Imagine these types of events being captured constantly, with the option to instantly upload them to a given drop-off point to be reviewed by staff for that given company. So you clip your cast and send it to the URL for McDonald’s review service. It goes into a queue and gets acted upon immediately depending on severity.

Or even better, how about McDonald’s having staff that simply scan lifecasts that are coming from their stores’ locations. So while it’d be kind of weird to put up full-time video cameras in their stores to track employee behavior they’d be able to simply query Google for all video coming from their stores’ locations. They could get paid to just sit there and watch those feeds and look for corporate policy infractions.

So a customer gets a dirty look, or the lines are WAY too long at a particular location. A form isn’t filled out and mailed in by some customer a week later. No. It’s seen in real-time, escalated, and two minutes later a corporate manager is calling that store manager saying, “WTF?” Instead of saying, “some customer said one of your employees was rude.”, the manager will say, “I’m looking at a video of one of your employees being rude to customers. Take them off the line and fire them immediately.”

As with the other types of behavior, poor customer service in this new environment will have instant ramifications.

Crime Fighting / Government Surveillance

This is a big one, and it’s scary too. Ok, so we already see here what all is going to be captured. Now imagine law enforcement tapping into it. So many crimes that would have gone unsolved will now be trivial to take care of. Suspect grabbed a purse at location x then ran off to the north. Ok, show me all Google lifecast video for the area he just ran to (remember, most all video will have location metadata in it).

Parsing lifecasts will become a regular part of crime fighting.

Now add the government to it. Think of the NSA walking in to Google and demanding a full feed of their data. Now imagine their face, voice and other types of recognition software being trained on the full feed of incoming casting data. It’ll be like tapping into millions of sets of eyes to look for and track somebody.

The order to the computer will be: “Find Daniel Miessler.” At that point the interface will be irrelevant. Whether it’s phone, a static video camera or a lifecaster — it’ll all be the same — all being fed into the same search/analysis algorithm that can find my identifier tokens, e.g. credit card numbers, phone numbers, my voice, my facial characteristics, my license plate, or even someone browsing the web the way I tend to.

Castwatching as a Service

An entire new profession will arise from this. Castwatchers. People watching lifecasts for various reasons. You’ll have people watching lifecasts looking for celebrities so they can report on current locations. Imagine a Google Maps mashup called Oceans 17 — it tracks all celebrities that were in the movie, i.e. Brad Pitt, George Clooney, etc. and displays constantly updated markers on a Google map.

Of course, you roll over the icon and get their current activity. Like, drinking coffee — and the text is a link to buy the coffee they’re drinking. Oh, and on the side you can click to view the casts that are updating the location. In other words, here’s Brad Pitt from two tables over. Here’s Brad Pitt from the perspective of the waiter.

Then you’ll have reporters watching for new stories they can pounce on. In fact, there will be pools of trained analysts who can spot interesting behavior. And that can be sold as a service. So people will subscribe in order to look for blackmail-able offenses. So if you see someone that looks rich acting guilty while interacting with drugs or sex, research who the person is and give me their location.

Think of what the tabloids will do. Find me racism. Find me suffering. Find me sex. They’ll be paying these kind of services to dig up garbage that will sell.

Security and Privacy

Being in information security one of the things that freaks me out is that many people, if not most, are going to keep location-tracking / metadata enabled for at least their friends and family. And many are going to keep it enabled for everyone. People who get no attention can scarcely believe the “too much attention” problem even exists, so they’ll lifecast continuously and allow anyone and everyone to know exactly where they are. What could go wrong, right?

Facial Recognition

This one’s a bit farther in the future, but not too far. One of the most significant applications of lifecasting will be widespread use of facial recognition technology. This point is best made with an example. Let’s say you’re sitting in a restaurant near the door, and your casting camera has a view of people as they come in. Well, your device (your personal computer), which is currently called your phone — will take a picture of the person as they come in, try and get any other angles of the person if they were just uploaded by people in the same restaurant with another angle, and then it will use both/all of those images to perform a search on Google for that person.

Think about this. Every person you see, and hence your device sees, will get queried against Google for a match. If it finds the person, their identity information (whatever’s available) gets sent to your device. Your device will then perform its matchup algorithm on the data pulled down vs. your data that it already has. Where are they from? What do they like to do? Etc.

The next and most interesting extension of this functionality will be an addition to the crime fighting piece. It’s also the most scary. Carriers will offer subsidies for your service fees if you volunteer to use facial recognition at all times and allow law enforcement access to your uploads. So in other words, everyone casting with this service turned on will be helping the police, FBI, DHS, etc. catch the people they’re looking for.

They’ll be able to send profiles to your device and use your device (passively) to scan for those profiles. This will either be mandatory (depending on where our society is when this happens) or it may be a service that you choose to take part in as a “good citizen”, with a reward of reduced cost for your other addons.

Accidents

Imagine the video that will be available of car (and other vehicle) accidents. If you thought the video on “Crazy Car Crashes” was extreme, wait till you have visibility to 100,000% more crashes.

Drama

We’ll start being exposed to some of the most touching and heartwrenching scenes ever witnessed. Real stuff. Imagine the scenarios that happen in the movies and on the TV shows, only real. All that stuff really happens; it happens every day, but it’s never captured. But now it will be, and many of the subjects of the “best” drama will become instantly famous.

“She was the one in “the breakup”. Imagine the whole Internet watching a breakup between a couple that they didn’t know was being recorded. Millions will want to know about their lives. What are they doing now? Are they dating again? Who will pay to watch the “casts” of their first dates with their new boyfriends and girlfriends?

Also, aside from breakups, imagine the lovers in Paris. The handholding. The sweet words. The smiles. The laughs. These precious moments that have hardly ever been captured other than in Hollywood will now be regularly brought to billions. And once again, the participants will have the option to become famous, even if only for a moment.

Fights

Simple. Let’s say we’re currently only capturing a millionth of a percent of all fights. Now let’s bump that up to 3%. Now add knife fights. Attempted muggings. Shootouts. One defender, multiple assailants. All this stuff that there’s very little video on will now be captured on a regular basis.

Instant Celebrity

People who used to be unknown will quickly be discovered. That super fat guy at Arby’s? He’s online now. 140,000 views in 5 minutes. Someone just submitted his name. Here’s where he lives. Here’s his username on eBay. Oh, another caster is walking up to him now and asking him if he knows he’s famous. That’s being casted as well. Etc.

Perspecive Sharing

One of the coolest consumer benefits of this kind of thing is going to be the social-networking aspect. Right now we can call our friends, text them, send them email, and that’s about it. In Japan and Europe you can do a bit of video on a mobile phone, but it’s not all that ubiquitous yet.

Well once this is commonplace you’ll have another option for staying close to friends and family — changing to their perspective. Basically, they share out their camera to a group of people (I’m looking at you, identity services) and if you are in the group then when you click on their contact in your mobile device you’ll have multiple options:

1. Voice call
2. Video call
3. Text
4. Email (will merge into others soon)
5. PerView (perspective view)

This gives a whole new meaning to, “Dude, check this out.” When you send that to a friend now, via voice or text, it will be a prompt to change to your perspective. And it won’t matter if you’re on the other side of the country, or the world. You’re sitting in a restaraunt and a gorgeous woman is at the next table over. You are just eating your burger but you want your buddy to see how fine she is.

“PerView Ping Brian”, you say to your device. Brian is sitting at work and vocally accepts the incoming PerView ping (which he has setup to automatically begin a voice call as well) and he immediately sees the woman that you’re looking at. “Damn, dude…go ask her out. I’ll watch.”

Countermeasures

There’s no doubt that there’ll be a total backlash against casting (lifecasting). Many places will have signs displayed: “No lifecasting allowed.” Why? Because it’ll scare away customers. People will demand establishments to become safe from the eyes of the Internet. People will get wanded for cameras (which mobile phones will have anyway) when entering certain areas. Plus, who’s going to consent to having their mobile devices taken from them at the door? People will constantly be looking for who’s watching them. For who’s recording them.

In fact, many organizations will not only search people (that’ll be largely ineffective) but will actively jam the frequencies of the mobile devices to keep them from lifecasting from their environments.

The game will become figuring out how to cast from places that don’t want you casting from them. Remember, people will be going to these places to do the things that they don’t want anyone seeing. Now factor in the people who are paid to catch those same people doing those things. And a new arms race will begin.

Language

So what’s the lingo that will surround this new phenomenon? Here are a few obvious/unimaginative options. I’ll rely on readers to come up with better ones. First, for lifecasting itself:

1. Lifecasting
2. Casting
3. Shooting
4. Being “live”
5. Streaming

Then for going offline, i.e. NOT lifecasting.

1. Going Dark
2. Unplugging
3. Dropping Off
4. Deadening
5. Hibernating

Conclusion

I’m only barely touching the first few layers of this thing. It’s just massive. I’m kind of overwhelmed right now and just need to post this as-is despite it being a jumbled mess of word things. I’ll continue to work on the organization of the idea and add examples as I remember/think of them. I’ll also update it with ideas from the comments.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the idea, i.e. do you think it will be as big as I think it will? If not, why not? What specifically will stop this from becoming reality?

My answer? Nothing.

Notes

• Thanks to Zed for helping me think through the concept over some chicken wings.

Check out this story and tell me if you notice anything weird about it.

[ Some Story About Depression Treatments ]

Did you catch it?

One sentence per line.

Is that not the ultimate in readability / lack of faith in your readers’ attention span?

This seems to be the trend in quite a few places — shorter and shorter paragraphs.

I guess this is the epitome of that trend; you can’t get any shorter unless you break the paragraph right in the middle of the sentence.

Interesting.

The information security community is a relatively small one, and it remains so even on the Internet. It feels good to get noticed by your fellow infosec enthusiasts — especially when they’re known for being sharp themselves.

Some kind words recently came my way from Mike Rothman, of Security Incite. Speaking about my recent post on OS X and Firefox security, he says,

This post is actually a great piece of analysis from Daniel Miessler. It’s so simple and elegant, I’m pissed that I didn’t come up with it. The post is short, so read it yourself.

Wow, that’s nice. And it’s nice to be nice.

So, in the same spirit, here’s the link to his blog again (securityincite.com), which I find to be quite excellent. And I’m not just saying that either; I don’t play that game. I’ve been subscribed to his site for quite some time and his commentary is genuinely insightful (sorry).

Here’s a link to his podcast as well, which is now available via iTunes.

Oh, and if any of you out there also have security blogs (or any other kinds of blogs that you think I’d find interesting), post them in the comments. Sharing ideas is the game to be played.