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December 31, 2003
Ideas for Social Software
Posted by David Weinberger
Seconding
Liz's linking to Matt Haughey's ideas for
useful social software.
Matt suggests "Epinions + Friendster," which sounds a lot like a company that
Paul English,
Rick Levine and I tried to start a few years ago. Matt puts the problem well:
Last summer I moved to a town in a place far away from where I've spent the past few years, and one of the first problems I had to solve was finding the perfect everything. I quickly amassed a bunch of questions that took months of trial and error to answer through a network of new friends and neighbors. Where could I get a good haircut? Which one of the local dentists would be most understanding of my dental anxiety? Which store should I shop for food at if I want a lot of organic, natural, and meatless food? Are there any trustworthy mechanics in this town? Which one of the two Thai places is "the good one?" Where should I go for a nice night out here? Which theater plays the art house movies? Which one of the furniture stores should I trust with my money?
We bought the url WordOfMouth.com and set up shop in Boulder, CO. The initial idea was to provide a way for webs of friends to share information about local services like the ones Matt describes. You'd list which services you use, and rate, review and discuss them. You'd also be able to indicate who you know and trust, and join clusters of the like-minded. We hooked up with newspaper sites, integrating with their yellow page services. And then the company went broke. The newspapers loved the service so long as it was free to them. Getting them to pay was a whole 'nother issue.
I still think the initial idea is solid; hardly a day goes by that I couldn't put a service like that to some use.
Comments (5)
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1. Bill Seitz on December 31, 2003 10:27 AM writes...
Maybe if we combined MarcCanter's fixations of FOAF and OpenReviews...
I don't think you have to think about *writing* reviews just for a narrow group of friends (though maybe you don't want to hurt someone's feelings), the filtering comes out of the FOAF network with some TrustMetric ratings added...
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/ReputationManagement
Permalink to Commenthttp://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/TrustMetric
2. Charles on December 31, 2003 10:55 AM writes...
This gets me thinking about Andy Baio's http://www.upcoming.org
...entirely user driven, I can browse/subscribe to the metro's and/or venues I am interested in, or to the event lists of friends (who I trust).
Now make it places and things rather than events, add some rating metric, and provide me with a simple search interface which lets me be as broad or as specific as I want.
Permalink to Comment3. Teller Coates on December 31, 2003 1:22 PM writes...
I just noticed that Emode (big self-assessment site) is now Emode + Friendster. Dating as the alleged killer app...but meanwhile, few people appreciate the humble BBS--the "other" approach that goes unnoticed during all this Friendster hype. Maybe it's because there are so many of them and relative few are actually thriving communities...or because BBS's don't archive well...dunno...
http://skelecosm.typepad.com/blog/2003/12/emode_attempts__1.html
Permalink to Comment4. Kushal Dave on January 4, 2004 11:45 PM writes...
Interestingly, Rotten Tomatoes -http://www.rottentomatoes.com - includes a My Friends section, which really becomes a sort of Friendster + Epinions. The work on putting review metadata in to weblogs -http://www.pmbrowser.info/wiki.pl?RVW - or using trackback to collect them -http://www.jacobsen.no/books/ - is also relevant.
(A fun fact I ran across in hunting down that link...Xanga started out as a site for sharing reviews - http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1400391,00.asp )
Permalink to Comment5. Kushal on January 5, 2004 4:36 PM writes...
For that matter, this paper - http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.IR/0205059 - about how collaborative filtering is really just a social networking problem is also very related.
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