Our lives may become like Stan's garden

Valley view: Our lives may become like Stan’s garden
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: May 28 2008 01:25 Last updated: May 28 2008 01:25

Stan, my 91-year-old next-door neighbour in Marin County, never throws anything away, his habit extending even to his random thoughts.
His backyard is an amazing collection of stuff that has ceased to function in his house but has found new life outside amid his cacti collection.
There are washing machine innards fashioned into a weather vane, car wheel hubs turned into plant holders and an upturned bath that serves as a sheltering shrine to a plaster saint.
There is much more besides and the garden is annotated: etched in some concrete paving he was laying nearly 40 years ago is the day’s news: ”Man on Moon 1969”.
More mundane events are also recorded. Last week, he turned over a picture frame he hung more than 50 years ago in his living room to show me his notes on the back:
“Tuesday February 11 1957 – [son] Walter practising guitar, [wife] Antoinette working, [son] Bob out with his portable radio, Dad fixing this picture, Just took [pet parrot] Loreeta out of the rain. I am 39 years old.”
Stan would struggle to identify a computer, let alone use one, but if he could, I fancy a service like Twitter might interest him.
This is the microblogging service I wrote about in this column in March last year and wondered whether broadcasting one’s thoughts to the world in 140 characters or fewer would be a passing fad.
It seems to be more than that. The Hitwise research firm says traffic to Twitter’s website has grown eightfold in a year but it still has a niche audience.
However, it cannot measure the Twitters sent by mobile phone or instant messaging, which probably account for the bulk of traffic, and it does not take into account the companion services that have grown up around Twitter, signalling its growing popularity.
At the last count, there were more than 80 Twitter-related services and scripts, ranging from the addictive Twittervision map of the world with its pop-up Twitters to the equally compulsive Twistori’s poetic filtering of Twitters, showing the use of the verbs love, hate, think, believe, feel and wish.
I have thus far failed to succumb to the Twitter bug but, with my bad memory, I might be tempted by something like Twistory, a new Twitter application that converts Twitter streams into an iCal format.
This means the dates and times of all your Twitters can be imported into an application such as Google Calendar.
In years to come, you can act like Stan and turn over a virtual photo frame to see your thoughts and actions on any given day, an archive of snapshots of past events and feelings that can touch off memories.
I used to think my entire life might be contained one day on a single compact disc. That was in the time before such online services, when I wrote in small text files and took pictures on non-megapixel cameras.
At Sun’s JavaOne conference held in San Francisco this month, the folk-rock star Neil Young described how he was putting together an archive of his work on Blu-ray discs, using the new updatable BD-Live features.
He will release the first period of his career, 1963-1972, on 10 DVDs this year. At 50 gigabytes per dual-layer disc, that could be an initial 500GB of material, followed perhaps by four more instalments, making it a working life of more than two terabytes of data that could be constantly updated.
Young said he had been waiting for Blu-ray to come along so that he could offer high-definition video and sound along with digitised memorabilia of photos, notes, concert posters and tickets.
The demo he gave looked beautiful, with a timeline interface that opened dusty filing cabinets of material.
While few of us may merit the big production number and organisation that Young is managing on disc, our lives are being spread out instead across networks and then being stitched back together in ever more elegant fashion.
Twitter is also an example of lifestreaming, a wider category for recording your thoughts and interests in a chronological fashion.
Lifestreaming can include a person’s mini-feed of activity on Facebook or be represented by a site that aggregates the different services of its users.
Friendfeed is the hottest new service in that last example and is perhaps a better prospect than Facebook because of its open nature.
It can track and list entries such as photos posted on Flickr, status updates on Twitter, music listened to on last.fm and bookmarks saved on del.icio.us.
Other users can comment on items in your lifestream and you can follow their streams.
In this area, the internet is becoming rather like Stan’s garden. A mixture of apparent junk is being repurposed into something new, coherent and meaningful, in a place where we can all leave our thoughts on wishing and hoping and life and love.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008