Yak Shaving

I have been interested in social networks for a while and have been struck more than once that my updates (and those of my friends) are stuck in silos.

These silos are perfectly understandable, if you use foursquare its only logical they want your data to themselves. Nearly every big social network now has an API to provide access to this data and this got me thinking. A list of Facebook updates isn’t that interesting on it’s own but when combined with other updates to other services say your last.fm scrobbles suddenly a world of data mining and analysis opens up.

I loved the idea of being able to mine my updates and find out new things by playing with the raw data. This idea took and root and with the help of @1stvamp www.projectcausal.com was born.

Working with @1stvamp and our ever patient and brilliant designer for hire Matt (you should hire him to do stuff) we created Gargoyle Me.

This is a hosted version of Project Causal code which you can find over at GitHub. We made the decision to open source the underlying platform to allow people to help and improve how we fetch and work on the data. Gargoyle Me is a hosted version of this code base, created mainly top show off the platform.

Go and give it a try and if you like it follow us on @gargoylme, @projectcausal. All comments and patches gratefully accepted.

There are number of similar projects that are kicking off in a similar vein: Locker Project and ThinkUp App. These projects are aimed giving the user the ability to backup their history on these social services.