The crucial issue for me is this can’t be a conversation about Twitter. That’s just one tool, and a private enterprise at that. The answer will arrive in an open source tool, something that nobody but everybody owns, where we we architect its creation and construct its evolution. A place with zero rules but as many rules as one wants. That’s the Common. Twitter is merely the metal used to craft the key.

Imagine a group of people who are dedicated to supporting each other and, most importantly, themselves. Healthcare these days seems to be all about how can other people make the most money by you suffering.

My goals for healthcare have to do with experiencing the joy and happiness of life. As people start to remember how awesome life really is, then health happens. Our natural state is health. We often forget this thanks to the media and the aforementioned corporations. Health – the state of original purity that is our birthright, our natural state. Health is not something we get from a pill or an operation. There are definitely times when these thing are helpful and possibly even necessary, but these times are rare.

I think the social networking movement has a lot in common with where I’d like to see our healthcare system going. People are taking responsibility for themselves. They see opportunities to experience the fullness of life, take a chance with a new opportunity, reach out and support another.

If we could generate the same enthusiasm for living a healthy life, we could recapture control over our own health and revitalize a seriously dis-eased healthcare system.

My website has more info about my feelings on health and I plan on having my blog up and running over the next few days. I’m on twitter at originsofhealth

Thanks everyone. Be Well!
Tom

Thanks for the interesting article. There are some great concepts and comments here. I agree that finding ways to centralize identity with the ability to contextually understand the identity’s attributes and relationships is key. Ultimately, I think that multiple networks are the future. I think that while there will be some unification; we’ll find that the networks as a whole will represent different types of relationships between users. As an example, I have a much different relationship with my friends on Facebook than I have with my contacts on LinkedIn.

I recently wrote a series of blog article on how you can use today’s technologies like a virtual directory to build an abstraction layer for applications to integrate identities across social networks:

http://www.chatterboxhq.com/blog/?p=67

I would love to hear if you think this type of a model addresses some of the points raised in this post.

Thanks for the time.

Todd

So many practical uses but it takes mass adoption of it in order for this to work.