Whassup? -- The Buddylist Is The Center Of The Universe
Two recent posts have me thinking about social relationships and using them as the primary way to make sense of the world. The metaphor I use for this is "the buddylist is the center of the universe", because I think the instant messaging buddylist is the best way of visually representing the relationships that define our connection to the world.
Fred Wilson talks about a major rethinking of the user experience at Facebook:
[from A VC: Facebook's Feeds]The other morning my oldest daughter Jessica, a Facebook fan, said to me, "Dad one of the great things about Facebook is that they are constantly adding cool new things". That's one of the things I believe is critical to do with web apps/services - always add new stuff, surprise your user base.
So I asked her to show me this cool new thing. It was an feed of activities of her contacts on Facebook. Instead of having to navigate around Facebook, she was being presented with her daily newspaper of activity. She saw, for example, that one of her friends had just broken up with his girlfriend (he changed his status from taken to single). It was one of those moments where you see something and realize you are looking into the future.
[...]
I did some reading up on this new move by Facebook and found this quote from Mark Zuckerberg on Forbes.com:
"Before, it was an encyclopedia model, but now we’re changing to a news model"
Or, perhaps, from a pull (reading blogs) to a push (rss feeds) model. But at any rate, the new mode at Facebook satisfies one side of a desperate need for all of us: what are my favorite people up to?
The other side of the same question is something Ross Mayfield is wondering about: what are people (especially my favorite people) reading, and what do they think about it?
[from Between Popular and Personal there is Social]Every time I see Gabe Rivera of TechMeme, I ask for the same thing -- MeMeme. Give me TechMeme where the core index is based on who I read, about 150 people at any given time, to show me what my friends are interested in. I used to ask this from people who make Newsreaders. Because simply somedays you are too busy to read everything, but you want to make sure you haven't missed something big. That's the real value I derive from TechMeme today. But what I really want find something that is big with my friends, which in the larger blogosphere is actually something small.
Today we have two new and seriously great kinds of attention tools. Newsreaders give us the ability to personally personalize. Combined with persistent query feeds, you can follow the people and things you know you want to read. Similarly, social networking services with a purpose let you aggregate the objects of your friends, be it pictures with Flickr, or posts with Vox. Tagging then lets you pivot for social discovery, but that is digging deeper than you often have time or interest for.
TechMeme and others show us mass popularization. Different communities help things bubble up. In Social Software, you first saw this with Blogdex and DayPop. What in the blogosophere has the most attention within a given time period. Now we have Digg, del.icio.us/popular, Reedit, Netscape, Technorati, YouTube, Dabble, Last.fm, Flickr Interestingness and a gazillion other increasingly rich examples. This is a Wisdom of Crowds we couldn't gain before for discoverable knowledge.
But Ross is suggesting that we we really want to be able to do is reach in that one degree of separation, and find out what our favorite (or generally most popular) people are reading and thinking. And Fred's daughter wants to know what's going on more generally in their lives.
Ross wants a MeMeme, and I want Nerdvana: a massively integrated instant messaging style buddylist, providing MeMeme capabilities:
- Blog or Social Networking Status is Just A Kind Of Presence -- You've changed your Facebook status from "married" to "it's complicated"? It's just one of a dozen bits of status, like new blog posts, or geolocational information that should be hanging off your icon on your buddies' buddylists. And of course, we'd like this carefully managed by privacy constraints, since people don't want their estranged lovers knowing where they are hanging out.
- What they are reading and what they think about it -- I would like to know what my favorite individuals are reading and their take on it, but I'd also like some way to surface things that are interesting to a lot of my favorite people (a la MeMeme), some kind of sidebar to the Nerdavana buddylist, perhaps.
Six Apart's Vox offers some aspects of this desire to integrate your network with your blog, but it's really more sensible to socially inflect the tool you use to read blogs, rather than inject the social network of the author into the blog posts: the real reason for the acquisition of Rojo, perhaps?
I am looking for Yahoo, Google, AOL, and yes, even Microsoft to offer these capabilities in future generations of instant messaging clients. But why, why, why do I seem to be waiting so long?
"I would like to know what my favorite individuals are reading and their take on it, but I'd also like some way to surface things that are interesting to a lot of my favorite people"
We talked about this a lot at the first barcamp in the women's discussion where we were trying to come up with our dream app. We wanted to know what our favorite people were paying attention to, broken down into categories. And instead of trusting people, trust them on different axes so that you might weight your trust for a friend's restaurant reviews differently than what blogs they are reading. So your trust for, or wanting-to-know of people's attention is more like constructing an algorithm than it is reducing your opinion of that person's opinion to a simple thing or an on/off switch.
Posted by: Liz Henry | September 11, 2006 at 11:56 PM