What flickr/Twitter could learn from HypeMachine

others' faves should be 1stclass streams
with a variety of views

who-subscribes-to-who should be public

more-than-onebit blogs
should be supported too
(eg featuring a content-creator a day
giving background on them)

merge subscriptions to new content
and subscriptions to others' faves
into one stream

prominently feature the count of faves
for each content-item
and conceal/reveal the 1st dozen or so faver-names
within the content-stream

clicking on a faver-name
shows their faves stream
and offers their subscriptions-list
and a single click adds/subscribes-to them




a few things hypem should add:

visible indication of which tunes
you've already tried

onsite user blogs

suggestions of users/blogs/bands/tunes
you'd likely like

 
 
 
 
.

Filtermath 2

web2.0 sites' target
should be to offer each visitor
a stream with all interesting content
(most interesting first)

they need to track (forever) what content
each visitor has already seen

they need to model visitor tastes/preferences
to anticipate content-ratings
matching visitors with similar tastes

discovering the dimensions of taste
identifying content-prototypes
that can quickly map visitor preferences

ideally recognising five ranks:
A B C D F
where Fs offend you
Ds turn you off
As you want to share

with an 'emulate' mode
when you find a visitor with similar tastes
that lets you zip thru their As and Bs
inheriting their ratings as default

 
 
 
.

Web 2020

what i'd like/expect to see:

• html replaced by simpler e-markup like _italics_
  
  
• links remember their chain of 'via's
  
  
• commenting is globally unified-- you don't have to remember where you've left comments
  
  
• article/page/post/bookmark distinction erased, just views of data
  
  
• multiple links to same content automatically collated
  
  
• automatic comparison of tastes/favorites to recommend likely similar author/bloggers
  
  

Web3.0 = favorites-matching

there's a simple shared solution
to the problem of
optimising one's datastream

(best pix best vids best tunes
best science best news best gossip
etc)

a web app needs to
monitor your preferences
and match them to the closest
other people's prefs
in each domain

this is not at all like
aggregating scores for the 'best' posts
which results in mediocrity rising

instead it's like creating
networks of individuals
with partly-shared tastes
tuned on a person-by-person basis

so twitter needs to compare
everyone's favorites
and tell me whose tastes
are most similar to mine
so i can subscribe (or not)
to their favorites feeds

and ditto for flickr
and imeem and youtube
and googlereader
and slashdotdiggredditmefi
etc etc etc

 
 
 
 
.

Twitter suggestions

twitter currently uses decimal numbering
of individual tweets:
http://twitter.com/robotwisdom/status/1139780124
(10 digits = one billion+ sold)

but by switching to alphanumeric numbering
(like TinyURL.com's)
a billion tweets would require only
6 characters ((26+26+10)^6 = 56,800,235,584)

so links to specific tweets
could be embedded concisely:
eg "//1Qa4rF"
unpacked by tweet-readers to (eg)
http://twitter.com/posts/1Qa4rF

while your reader could/should also unpack
mentions of '@username' into two links
one (as now, the username)
a link to that user's aggregated tweets

but the other (presumably just the '@'?)
to a search for all tweets mentioning '@username'
(mostly replies)

and a similar @-search should be offered
(somewhere in each tweet)
for replies to the tweeter herself

nb four compact links:

cshirky: @robotwisdom No, I don't have an active blog. I seem to have two native formats at the moment -- 140 chars and 250,000 chars. :( 7:11 PM Jan 5th from TweetDeck @

 
 
 
 
.

Tastemakers 2.0

the general challenge
for 'blog science'
is to present a surfer
with a content stream
that grows more and more relevant
as that surfer's tastes
become known

tastes in music
tastes in movies
tastes in books
tastes in poetry
tastes in pictures
tastes in politics
tastes in humor

evolving a set of substreams
for each surfer
for each of these domains

comparing all surfers' tastes
and offering substream-subscriptions

with adjustable rates of flow
(casting wider in dry times
filtering the best during floods)

 
 
 
 .

The usual url/bookmark story

bookmarks
are the primary currency/coinage of the Web

so if we want to
nail the bookmark entitytype
into its usual-story-historical framework
for semanticweb purposes

we need to sketch
the usual url-bookmark story

the creator substory:
content conceived
content created
content posted
url shared

the consumer substory:
surfer has motivation
surfer has methodology
methodology ranks url-sources
surfer offered url by url-source
surfer notes offer mentally
surfer notes offer physically ('to-read' list)
surfer visits url
surfer partially consumes content
surfer rejects content, erases notes
surfer extends notes for later
surfer wholly consumes content
surfer passes-on url with comments
surfer acknowledges url-source(s)

the derivative-work substory:
surfer conceives related new content
surfer acknowledges url's influence

the historian substory:
broader path of url traced/reconstructed
traced-path posted




of course
there are almost infinite variations
on this skeleton

but a true semantic Web
will only become possible
when every stage
of every bookmark's history
can be tagged with its appropriate
story-context




Real post date: 15 Oct 11:20am
(Blogger no longer lets me
finesse my linkblog to the top
via postdating
so my nonlinkblog posts
will now be 'pre'dated)

Autobiography 2.0: a 'person' microformat experiment on del.icio.us

the semantic web movement is 8 years old
and has delivered little more than
a microformat for business cards [Wiki]

and nothing to rank with
roget or lenat

so i'd like to propose
using del.icio.us for prototyping
much more ambitious
microformat-like linksets

starting eg with
prototype person-profiles
[Jorn Barger]

replacing pagetitles with microformat fieldnames

using Wikipedia placeholders
if the fieldvalue isn't already a url

using del.icio.us tags
to sort fieldtypes



other possible prototypes:
website-profile microformat
webpage-profile microformat
blog-profile microformat
video-profile microformat
song-profile microformat
porno-profile microformat

(each of these should be
summarizable
via heraldic barcodes)

A plurality of one

isn't it odd
how you can have
zero cars or two cars
but never 'one cars'?

this
artifact
of natural language
(or of english?)
must account for the common error
of using singular tags
redundantly with plurals
when the plurals alone
would suffice

(avoid the 'car' tag
instead use 'cars'
maybe with suffix-numbers
if needed:
cars:0 cars:1 cars:2)

 
 
 
 
 
.

Tagportal: suggestions

Blogger GgGroups GgNews GgWeb GgPages Wikipedia Flickr tagging Gmail iMeem rss html gizmos enviro community compsci

Blogger.com suggestions

1. Messing with carefully crafted ascii-art wrapped in PRE tags is lame-as-microsoft. Keep yr mitts off!
   
   
2. after you click 'publish post' you get a page with TWO 'view blog' links, neither of which shows just the one post-- this makes it hard to link it from delicious, and it's problematic if you keep extra (postdated) 'floater' posts always at the top
   
   
3. Authors have a lovely list-view, filterable by tags. Let visitors see something comparable, too. (And let them choose most-recent-first or -last.)
   
   
4. Offer a tag-cloud page. Let authors customise the 'tagportal' page that each tag in the cloud links to, writing a guided overview instead of just listing the tagged posts.
   
   
5. Add a button next to 'Post time and date' that resets it to current date/time.
   
   
6. As the author adds tags, pop up a list of other articles with each tag, and let the author check off which ones are most closely related, to be linked in a 'related articles' list at the bottom of the post.
   
   
7. Let some posts be designated 'floaters' so they stay on top on the homepage (not in the feed, though).
   
   
8. Let each blog automatically spawn a GoogleGroup, and each post to the blog spawn a (potential) thread on GgGroups where comments can be posted.
   
   
9. Offer an automatic link-maintenance service where links within posts are monitored for linkrot, and substitutes offered (via Wayback, if nothing else, or save a cluster of search-keywords that will find similar pages).
   
   
10. Start compiling a library of standard post-types (cf microformats?) like reviews, memoirs, lists of favorites, etc. Automatically maintain an index-page for these. (In general, support more structure in the archives.)
    
    
11. Integrate a del.icio.us-alike database of bookmarks. [more]
    
    
12. Merge full GooglePageCreator functionality.
    
    
13. Maintain version-histories for each page, and traffic stats.
    
    
14. Let some content be designated for-friends-only.
    
    
15. Let some pages be opened as wikis, for-friends-only or for-all.
    
    

Google Web suggestions

1. the ten-item default is insulting
   
2. calculate the quantity of content on each page and allow sort-by-quantity (or include that in the basic ranking)
   
3. recognise a wide range of META headers, and implement search-keywords for them (esp. doctype, persons, places, things, yahoo-category)
   
4. Wikipedia article-titles could be used to standardise person/place/thing-names
   
5. 'DATE' meta-headers could be used to sort search-results by date
   
6. when people use the asterisk-wildcard to search for 'snowclones', do a count of each variant and display the results most-common-first
   
7. index comments separately, eg with search-keyword (reducing false hits, spam)
   
8. start compiling a separate 'page' of metadata for each webpage [post]
   

Del.icio.us suggestions

1. ability to search for all pages from a given site
   
2. button to reset bookmark-date to 'now'
   
3. don't encourage lazy use of page-titles as default linktext (they're more noise than signal)
   
4. 'hint' others' titles/comments the way tags are hinted now
   
5. don't force the link to come first-- it's less readable [eg]
   
6. encourage citation of host-sites, source/referers, and potential problems like popups or pdfs or slow/phat pages
   
7. make it easier to find similar deliciousbloggers [post]
   
8. memetracker timeline [post]
   
9. star-ratings for each bookmark (or even for each tag on each bookmark) so tagportal-type pages can be sorted best-to-worst
   
10. add a 'via' field so linksources can be discovered
    

Consumer electronics suggestions

1. since the chinese can deliver a solar-powered calculator with battery backup for a dollar, can't rechargeable batteries have a little solar panel that recharges them when they're left on a windowsill?
   
2. since generic pdas with alphanumeric keyboards are around for under $10, can't we have a hackable model that lets you load your own apps?
   
3. these should support thumb drives for data transfer
   
4. one-line, ~40-character displays should be acceptable for reading etext if you can finetune the speed at which it flashes short lines or single words at you (there must be a Flash demo of this trick around somewhere? Michael Stutz?)
   
5. a handheld device for (casual) Flash games [post]
   
6. independent rss-feeds for every device you own [post]
   
7. devices with small screens and acceleration-detectors could emulate a large screen seen thru a magnifying glass [post]
   

Google PageCreator suggestions

1. merge with blogger.com
   
2. expose some version of the dashboard-view to visitors, with sort-by-date, etc
   
3. if author deletes a page, request a redirect url (redirect automatically if they change the name)
   
4. Google should check for broken links and (at least) substitute Wayback versions, and/or prompt authors to fix them [post]
   
5. Google should encourage authors to include links to related pages of their own at the bottom of each page-- if each page has tags, these could guide the what's-related process
   
6. support for 'overview pages'-- sitewide, topicwide, webwide
   

Tagging suggestions

1. given the choice between 'poem' and 'poems' or 'pic' and 'pix', the plural is usually the right choice because when you retrieve everything with that tag, you presumably want/get a plural number
   
2. clicking on a tag should get you an author-customised tagportal (that places the important ones first, and includes text intros), not just a mechanical list of the items so tagged
   
3. Can we figure out standard 'parts-of-tagspeech' that add something like a suffix to distinguish (eg) a post ABOUT mp3s from an actual mp3?
   
4. genre-tags like 'reference' are useful and should be standardised/conventionalised if possible
   
5. in general, uniform tagging styles should be debated and promoted
   

Google Groups suggestions

1. IMPLEMENT 'trn' (THREADED READNEWS) IN AJAX-- make it faster than the original, with fancier killfiles
   
2. fix the bug that always #-jumps to the wrong post in a thread
   
3. treat tags everywhere on the web as virtual newsgroups (so if i tag anything 'drewbarrymore' it shows up in a virtual drewbarrymore newsgroup)
   
4. offer an oldest-first sort-order, for 'archeological' research
   
5. encourage visitors to rate posts, to blog them, and allow them to view posts in highest-rated-first order
   
   

Google News suggestions

1. offer a catalog of all indexed periodicals with an easy link to the rss-feeds
   
2. support all sorts of filtering of GgNews feeds, like excluding specific sources
   
3. newspapers sort articles by department-- GgN search should understand this (eg filter out 'sports')
   
4. GgNewsArchive search should let individuals and libraries narrow search to just the magazines/issues they own
   

Community suggestions

1. revalue US currency so $10 old = $1 new [post]
   
2. save-the-world social software? [post]
   
3. standalone emergency communication system that can be deployed instantly in a disaster [post]
   
4. NetScouts merit badges to encourage mastery of Web/Net skills
   

HTML suggestions

1. in addition to #-links, browsers should support %-links that jump down X% to end of page, and #?-links that jump to a matching searchpattern
   
2. every html style should have a standard ascii equivalent (like _italics_ and *bold*)
   
3. a newpage tag should delay scrolling