Saturday, November 22, 2008

My [Split-]Personal[-ity] Internet

Up until now I was avoiding from writing more than one post a day. Although I have some topics I want to write about prepared, I prefer to stay focused.

So while still avoiding the periodically annoying pop-ups, I was reading Yevgeny's latest post. The first thing I thought is that I'm glad something I wrote inspired such an excellent post by Yevgeny. But by the end of the post I had some more serious thoughts about that topic. So serious, I couldn't write them in a short comment.

While Google remembers what one is searching, and offering more relevant results in future searches, such a feature is problematic as well, and I'm not talking about privacy.
While I'm at home, my Google searches are typically around topics which interest me in my leisure time, such as gaming, Linux, funny stuff, etc. While at my work, my Google searches are focused around stuff which is relevant for work, such as security flaws, vulnerabilities, exploits, hacking, etc. While having one Google profile for my personal life and one for my work does the trick of not mixing the results (some topics collide with each other), this is very not comfortable, since I want to access my private GMail inbox, without logging out and then back in with a different account. And vice versa.

So my profile actually has a split personality which I rather avoid. I've seen Nokia's solution for this problem with their latest E66 smartphone, where they set up two different "desktops", which can be easily swapped, one for work and one for home. Although different "desktops", the phonebook and the rest of the personal info remains intact, and is always accessible. Having the same ability with my online identity (Google, LinkedIn, Blogger, etc.), would make the Internet much more "mine" than it currently does.

3 comments:

  1. Another solution (I did a project on that topic in my B.Sc. so I couldn't resist commenting) would be to take into consideration data specific to your workstation, the local cache for instance...

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  2. Interesting Idea. This could have work, only that for testing reasons, I clear the cache as often as you type a SELECT query.

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  3. Don't write that many SELECTs anymore, but I get the point :)

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