augmentations

I've had a chance to encounter a service on the web called 'tumblr.' So far I like it.

Tumblr is a service that's somewhere in between the constant microbursts of the twitter and full-scale blogging of the wordpress. Only more modern, not in sense of any aesthetic faux pas, but in sense of integration with the user, like being able to post animation/picture directly from one's cell phone, rssing different services on the web and etc... More media centric friendfeed would also be a reasonably accurate description of the Tumblr service.

While I am somewhat tired of such deluge of 'web 2.0' applications that are practically everywhere these days, I do feel that the whole experience is a posititive one. Some people might argue that broadcasting one's own thoughts and lives are somehow 'arrogant' or something such because no one would care about their lives in the first place anyway... Well people who argue that point must not have enough friends. :P

Seriously though, I do not see services like twitter and Tumblr as a channel to reach out to people. Rather, such web applications are augmentations of modern human mind, something physical technology is hard pressed to catch up to. Augmentations of memories and visions one would encounter in the daily life, recording bit and pieces of 'experiences' that are separate from carefully mediated thoughts that permeate the decent portion of the web these days...

A rough continuum created to fill the vacuum left by the lack of physical technology of memories and experiences.

And when you tinker around with one of those services, you are tinkering with an augmentation service for your mind itself, albeit in crudely executed form that requires multiple intermediaries.

It is interesting how then the user's lives get increasingly intermingled with the web, as the experience of the living stands next to the fantastic shapes and movements scrounged from the remotest corners of the infosphere.