OGQ = Old Girlfriend Query. Look out, because when Dave thinks this stuff up, the next thing you know he’s actualizing it. Dave says:
Let’s say I used to date a woman named Tammy. From time to time I wonder what’s up with her. So I do a search, and find the same old links. I want to find all the new stuff. I don’t just want to search blogs, so it’s not what Technorati does. I don’t just care if she makes the news, so it isn’t what Google News does. For extra credit, I’d like it to come in RSS format so I can teach my aggregator to do this for me automatically.
BTW, once we get this feature, I predict the same kind of backlash that came when Facebook added rich RSS support. All of a sudden lurkers will have a new advantage, and the lurkees might not be happy about it.
I wish he hadn’t named her Tammy. Or contextualized the idea in the coffin of a dead relationship.
What do you think Dave? Do you really want further to empower cyber-stalkers, and stalkettes?
(If Dave doesn’t build it you know somebody else will. Dave… if you build it, please supply the anti-dote!)
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
I just see another example of DW’s relevance having slid of the edge of the abyss into the past. I’ve vowed to leave any actual entanglements with said DW to Mitch Ratcliffe, however, if seconds come into play, I will most assuredly watch Mitch’s back.
Oh, lordy. When I was a youngster, we stalked without all these gizmos. Things were different then. We had pride and we knew the value of breaking a sweat in our morally reprehensible activities.
wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way to check up on Dave. oh, wait… there is…
http://krugle.com/kse/files?query=dave+winer
heh
what KC says …
Well as a member of the 1950’s generation, I am proud to say that I have no idea what you are all talking about, but am willing to learn.
If Dave knows whats good for his health and his relationship with the IRS, he’ll keep this under wraps until after the 2024 Prez selections. OGQ would be grabbed up by the Bush Abomination as just the kind of tool they want for further snooping on the citizenry. And of course, the grabbing, and Dave’s sudden disappearance would all happen in the name of homeland security…
And I am thinking, hm … my family and friends often call me “Tammy.” Yikes! Where does that leave me, I wonder?
Am I missing something? There are already so many easy ways to track people online that I don’t see the point.
As it happens, there’s an old boyfriend in my life whose work I like keeping an eye, and I get all I need to know, with no effort, through a Google Alert and a Technorati Watchlist.
Ew… just ew. At least, I think it’s ew - it’s kind of hard to tell. Is this just a really, really bad simile obscuring a useful idea? Or a completely useless idea wrapped up in an unnecessarily creepy simile?
And anyway - if all you want to know is “all the new stuff”, isn’t that just called a date-ordered search? Like Ronni, I wonder if I’m missing something…
Like Michael I’m saying ew, but at this comment thread, not Dave Winer’s metaphor.
There were kids in my neighborhood with a SEKRIT clubhouse, who made kind of a hobby of tormenting one unpopular boy. They thought they were so funny, but they weren’t.
And you’re not.
I’m saying “ew” at the need to personalize this, Betsy. I thought OGQ was a pretty outre idea, but I like Michael’s query, “Is this just a really, really bad simile obscuring a useful idea?”
I thought it was outre, perhaps a bit bizarre, because if I want to find out what’s up with an old friend or lover, I give them a call or jot them a note. But that’s just me and I haven’t caught up to the nuanced use of the internecks. I don’t even use an RSS aggregator, though many people do, I’m told.
I’ll be interested to hear more of what Dave has to say about this idea, if it isn’t just a throw-away… and a lot of ideas ARE just throw-aways. I invited Dave to comment here, but I can understand if he’d rather avoid the aggravation. Your contextualizing this thread as homogeneously anti-Dave ill becomes you. “SEKRIT clubhouse” my left foot.
Like it or not Dave’s work has made him a very public person, particularly in the blogosphere. Over the last few years he seems to me to have grown more introspective and capable of accepting valid criticism and shrugging off the ad hominem. I could be wrong. None of my friends have personalities cast in lucite, unchanging and unchangeable. From time to time we all will rub one another the wrong way. (Wiggling eyebrows… I like the part better when we rub one another the right way, but that just shows that I’m the adolescent you think I am).
Dave Winer opens himself right up over at Scripting News. He shares what’s inside him. We know what he’s thinking. Sometimes his weird stuff embarrasses me because I recognize some of it in myself. Sometimes his stuff isn’t that weird. In fact sometimes it’s inspired.
Dave was noodling about search and old girlfriend tracking and I just had a flash of that creepy thing…
ewwww
Start a collection and get him a hooker.
There’s a theme behind Dave’s wished for feature that he has repeated a lot recently:
Show me recent updates to text on the web based upon a precise search criteria and make the result accessible with RSS.
Dave has asked for this when discussing Memeorandum/Techmeme. It strikes me as a request for a somehting a bit like a Technorati search combined with a time sensitive Google search.
The trick of course is defining the search criteria with such precision to meet Dave’s needs and sustaining a business model to support the service if it is an RSS feed.
You certainly can’t blame Dave for asking smart people to give him services and enabling access via RSS… he’s been doing that for years with great success. He’s got a gift for moving thought leaders along the same paths… good ideas take on a life of their own.
Betsy - you obviously know Dave as a person… too many of us only know Dave from his “web” presence. He can be a bit of bully on line and the messages simply state that many avoid text exchange with the man. He’s a complex personality and plays the victim on occasion. He can be remarkably generous and in turn be remarkably insensitive to people in a short span of time.
This thread, like many others, has carried on longer than the relevance of the individual merits. I’m turning up squelch, focusing on signal, and just not listening to noise. Otherwise I’ll say something nasty.
What’s old John J. got to do with it. Other than he too tends to drone on endlessly with off-the-edge commentary, when the audience was lost back up the road a ways. He ain’t preaching to the choir. He’s preaching to an empty choir loft.
Guess I answered my own question. Never mind…
Alan Herrell (above) said we should get him a Hooker. I thought…
EEWWWWWWW!!!!!
a sweet cream lady, a geisha, a paid companion,
anything but John Hooker…