Geekbox: Tribe tips. Interesting observations at Geekbox on ridiculously easy group-forming and the advantages of transparent membership and free-for-all taxonomies. (see also this previous post about Tribe.)

[Seb's Open Research]

These folks totally groks it..... (their names are Grant and Cyndie Berg.)

back and forth over the social portal play. Zawodny on the point missed: Stokes misses it not just once, but twice.

Om nearly follows him off the "they just want my rolodex and why should I give it to them" cliff, but veers at the last instant and manages to strike a glancing blow at a worthy target by alluding to social networking services embedded in client applications -- and spawns some interesting comments. Marc Canter's beating the FOAF drum again. I'm looking forward to peopleaggregator's next rev. Sifry's apparently working on FOAFing up Technorati, too. It isn't an accident that Sifry's tagline is web services for bloggers.

Anyway... back on topic...

Look, Friendster didn't get $10m solely on the basis of its current business model. It sure as shit didn't get it on the basis of its software / infrastructure [and I hope they're spending some of that money on some engineers].

They got it because, as Jon Udell and others have pointed out (can't find link -- may be misattributing), user-contributed data is a valid currency for the next generation of online [web] service[s] businesses. And anyone who can succeed at being a primary conduit for user contributed data which has bearing on purchase decisions and product / technology adoption/popularity has a great opportunity.

What Stokes seemed to miss, which Jeremy alluded to initially and Marc re-iterates from another vector:


"The place to make the money is by adding value added, functionality, tools, services - what have - AROUND these most basic of all instinctful notions. Not by charging for the right to do them - in the first place!

So a PeopleFinder or FriendRanking or Introduction manager or Private email or IM enabler kind of platform - would be augmented with value added tools - to become a new business model. This what I mean by 'new kinds of tools."


... is that web services technologies are going to enable a Friendster, an Amazon, and a Google to operate in a unified manner delivering synergistic services to groups of connected (define it any way you want) people with shared interests.

This is what people are hopping up and down about, and I think there's some solid cause [lineofsight - code + words + pictures]

I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy.  2004 is looking to be pretty interesting.

Cory on a rant.  See my response below....

Towards a non-evil social networking service. Within an hour of the launch of Orkut, Google's new YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service), I had written a mail filter that silently discarded invitations to join (it's the same filter that tosses out mail from Ryze, Friendster and all those other services, which drive me completely bonkers, since I already know who my friends are, am not actively trying to get laid, and don't need the "service" of having to risk offending near-strangers who want me to confirm some notional "friendship" between us a dozen times a day and I certainly can't think of a good reason to entrust some commercial outfit with my personal relationship data).

Do these things have to suck? Damnifiknow. I know that there's a bunch of stuff I'd like from a social network analysis of my own inbox, voicecalls, and so forth. Today, I have an iTunes playlist ("Old friends") that just plays highly rated songs that haven't been played in the past 30 days. Why not a smart to-do list that reminds me to email old friends that I haven't called or written in the last season (credit: Alice)? Hell, how about something that gives me a distinctive ringtone for calls from out-of-touch old pals and the option to define attention-grabbing behavior (a chime, a prioritization, coloring) when they email?

Foe Romeo talks about how Google could have launched a YASNS that actually provided a useful service that end-users could still control but that Google could add a lot of value to: a FOAF explorer:

Google would not create its own closed social network, Orkut, but would instead make FOAF one of its quick searches, so that FOAF:Fiona Romeo would return my FOAF file as the primary search result, with friend and location filtering options. (Content about Fiona Romeo would also be returned but would be differentiated.)

Perhaps Google could add value by introducing a sense of authentication to FOAF, by indicating reciprocal links between FOAF files. I know that this result for Fiona Romeo is the correct one because her friends link to it. Oh, and I know that Matt Jones is really a friend of Fiona Romeo, because he says so too. (Plink, a FOAF search tool, gets this bit right.)

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Congrats to Thomas Madsen-Mygdal on the birth of his son last Monday.  3900 grams.

Mikel Maron (who used to work at MyYahoo) gives his insider perspective as to the new RSS enabled MyYahoo.

For me, this is all key - as now our PeopleAggregator can have a personality - that's a MyYahoo account.  That personality can then sit next to similar 'external' personalities - importing not only traditiobnal FOAF people-social net info, but also web links, classified ads, blog posts, email, RSS feeds, and even internal messages.

Having MyYahoo work in this universe is the first step to a world of inter-connected distributed presence on teh web.

some thoughts on My Yahoo RSS Headlines Beta. some thoughts on My Yahoo RSS Headlines Beta

Congrats to everyone at My Yahoo -- this means big things for Yahoo and the Web. I have a scattering of accolades, criticisms, tips, and next step suggestions.

The module is very useable, particularly with the great faq's and surprisingly good (still with room for improvement) RSS feed search. Technically, the back end must be solid for this to go beta -- we'll see how it scales. Nice touches with OPML import (though no play friendly OPML export), and update API.

One thing that current RSS users will immediately jump on is the 25 feed limit -- however the real limit is 150, as I'll show, which should satisfy most human beings. You can add the module to any page at http://my.yahoo.com/preview/ycontent.html. Each page has its own list of feeds and you can add up to 6 pages to My Yahoo. Users will quickly want a single page to manage all their feeds.

This is the presentation that inspired myRadio. More presentation options are needed in the module, particularly order by date and hiding read articles. However, both of these features would increase the computation load significantly.

When Yahoo Clubs merged with Yahoo Groups, My Yahoo lost a great module. Though, RSS Headlines provides a stop gap -- just add the RSS feed for your Yahoo Groups subscriptions. One problem is that Yahoo Groups produces RSS is reverse order, so you'll see the oldest messages first. Maybe with this new architecture in place for RSS, it will be easy to resurrect the Groups module.

Companion is calling out for integration. It could display a Subscribe To icon when it autodiscovers RSS feeds during browsing.

Wonder why this rdf feed doesn't work for the module? Wonder if they'll support Atom, and blogger? Would that require a name change for the module?

Many users are moving from a browser-centered world. Will My Yahoo grab this next opportunity with more haste? My Yahoo has lots of great content - quotes, weather, sports, movie listings, ski reports, tv - that would make great RSS feeds. There is a business model, as part of a Premium Package or in feed advertisements.

But whatever I ramble, it's a great great thing to see RSS in My! [Brain Off]

Harold Gilchrist is getting specific about his ideas.  I wonderif he'll plop a SoundBlox in his gutter now?

The benefits and the reasons why we need SAM!.

As I was writing and updating the draft of the SAM spec today, I started to draft a section in the SAM spec titled "The benefits and the reasons why we need SAM!".

The section needs more work.  Below is what I have written so far:

The benefits and the reasons why we need SAM!

• Present audio message data published and embedded in html on the Web today is incomplete, inconsistant and complicated to parse out.
• Present publishers of Web and Interenet audio messages need a structured XML file format to publish easily discoverable data on the Web about the pre-recorded audio messages they upload to the Internet.
• Publishers of audio message links, need a format that supports clear original audio message credit and proper media rights data.
• Consumer audio applications need a efficient format to discover recently uploaded pre-recorded audio messages to the Internet.
• To create a potential for a new class of audio message consumer applications.
• To allow publishers a way to advertise the existance of their audio messages in a near realtime time efficient manner.
• The new XML feed namespace will allow consumer applications of audio messages the ability to read and analize the audio message data before deciding to interact with the audio message.
• There is a need to create a consistant audio message specification compatible across all audio formats.
• To support multiple language audio message publication and detection.

[Audio/Mobile Blogging News]

The absolute best thing about Orkut - is that it was one of those memes that starts off on a Friday morning in your Inbox and by TGIF time - the whole blogsphere is talking about it.

When things starting heating up Friday night/Saturday morning - I could feel the repercussions echoing off the bank accounts and business plans of all those 'venture backed' social networking plays.  "Was this the end of Friendster?" - was all anybody wanted ot talk about.

I created a couple of Communities in Orkut and immediately had over 100 members in each, but nobody seemed to have any time to post anything on ANY boards.  They were too busy signing up friends, in a mad dash toward social networking heaven.

So then why join a 'Community' in the first place?  Folks were CREATING Communities without even posting anything! I mean "Come on?"  Why would you want to start an on-line Community and then not do anything with it? It's seems ludicrous.

Unles of course the Icon or image of that community, sitting in your Community List actually meant something.  All those people joining up to be in YOUR Community - somehow meant something.

This is the exact same behavior I noticed on the Tribe as well. People would start up or join Tribes (which is what they call Communities or Groups or Networks..... on Tribe) for some sort of prestige, glamor or bragging rights.)

And that's what happened when we formed the Social Software Alliance last spring.  150 people showed for a BoF at Etech - less than 12-15 participated on the mail list and within two months it was forgotten about.

Talk about short lengthed fuses.  These Internet memes are getting stronger and more intense nowadays. 

So when word came (thanks Bopus) of Orkut's shut-down, a smile came to my eye.  It lasted till Sunday - not bad, I thought.

And as to all of you speculating on what Orkut's business model is - please stop. There is no business model. It is not for making money.  Social networking is now a feature. It is not a market.  Remember multimedia?