Not your average social networking site

I have been participating in the alpha/beta for a new site designed to connect you with your friends and help you find new ones. In addition, the site has become an excellent source for discovering new content. The site however, is very different then its predecessors in that it has stronger social tools like contacts, comments (something delicious lacks), votes (another piece delicious lacks) and just added “teams”.

The site is called Wis.dm and to be honest it is this “wis.dm” (or wisdom for you non-2.0 lovers) which truly separates this site from its collective siblings. The content on this site is actually really good and I have “met” many people who share the same love for the Internet as I do. In addition I have found many new sites (blogs, marketing sites, forums etc…) to get new fresh content from.

The changes in this site have been phenomenal over the past 6 months and its semi “organic” growth has been fun to participate in. They have scratched their “Web 2.0″ look and, while at first I was disappointed the look of the site has grown on me. What works for me is the sites functionality and while they are still in Beta I recommend you join so that you can see for yourself. Like any social networking site, you get out of the site what you put in. I will demonstrate what works (and doesn’t work) for me on the site and discuss why you should join

General Concept
The general idea of the web site is actually a few layers deep and in fact I have found it easier to participate on this site then I have with sites like MySpace or Facebook (both similar sites). For me, the idea of “hollering out” to my homeys on my website and having 145,983 “friends” that send me messages like “sorry we missed you while you were in town” is so superficial to me. Wis.dm offers a layer of networking which to me works:

1. Find a website (or post or whatever) that you find interesting and add a link to it. I use Firefox and they have created a very unique link which “pops” up a window (Figure 1) that will collect the information for the site (Title, description, tags and optional team). This tool is one of the best “add” tools out there. It really makes it easy to add links to Wis.dm.

2. Instantly your link (originally called “interests”) is available for people to see. In addition, your link gets one “vote”. While I disagree with this the nice thing about the site is that this may change (seems that the path of the site is being driven somewhat by the users which is great). People can now go to the page, vote on your link (currently +1 or -1) and add a comment.

3. Your activity on the site (links voted and commented on) in addition to the people you invite effect your “Points”. Points help you understand how active a person is (and it there is a little bit of fun watching your points increase) and how “reliable” their posts tend to be.

4. Join a Team. Just added a day or so ago, this feature is very interesting. I have been interested in Marketing lately and more specifically how marketing is changing in this new consumer content based marketplace. So, I created a group called “Marketing redefined”, gave it a description and invited some people that seemed to also be interested in marketing. The group is small but what I hope to accomplish is the ability to have a concentrated group of people that will help define my impression of what is going on today. When adding links, we can target the link to the team and hopefully we will create a small community within the community where we can invite like people. Should be interesting.

Finding Content
Another major task on the site is finding content. I will have to say that this part of the web site that I find difficult (or at least it was when I first got stated). The ideas are simple (and this is where some of the design is laking – more about this later) you tag you content (this part is easy) and so you can search by clicking tags in both your profile and the “popular” cloud. Both implement the common font size increase familiar with most link sites.

Additionally, you can “free text” search for content links by using the “Search” box which appears on each screen. The search feature seems to be pretty quick and the search results are pretty accurate (you would surely expect this at this point).

Probably the most effective way to find new content is to camp out on the “popular” page which is essentially the home page to wis.dm. This is where the most popular (currently I think all content comes through here) links are highlighted. At some point I would imagine that this feature of the site will work much like digg.com works today with the community pushing links to the top.

A nice feature that they have added is the “Recommended” option. It is designed to look at all of the content you upload, all of the links you comment and vote on and offer some example links that you may find interesting. So far, I have found some good links by keeping an eye on the box. Very helpful.

Dislikes
So of course I have an opinion (everyone is entitled to one). I think that there are a few things that don’t work so well in the site:

1. The top navigation. I know that the owners of the site are trying to build the “atypical” Web 2.0 application but I think that they have done themselves a bit disservice here. I know that craigslist has been popular by emphasizing the content vs the tools but I find their implementation of “tabs” in effective. See below – the word “Explore” is slightly larger then “my wis.dm” or “submit”. They need to have a better signification of being in a section of the site. In addition, the sub section links (which are difficult to separate) also are displayed as “on” with a different color (red).

2. Tagging. When you add a new link using both the JavaScript button in Firefox or the submit option on the site, the tag adding process is not supported with “helper” tags like you get on Del.icio.us. I am not saying that wis.dm needs to copy the process directly from Del.icio.us, but I am saying is that they need a new process. The difficulties arise the first couple of times you tag. Invariably you are going to tag something with “Web2.0″ only problem is in order to get your tag supported by others you need to make sure that you choose the correct terminology is it “Web2.0″ with one word or “Web 2.0″ with a space. Luckily they did add an option to edit the links after the fact but it becomes difficult to remember your tags and so you sometimes end up double tagging something.

3.Wis.dm team posts. I know that theonly way sites like this are successful is if they attract users and that content attracts users. Since you have people that you are already paying, why not offer incentives for them to post to the site. Sometimes what happens with these posts is they become inside jokes which eliminates the opportunity to collaborate on comments.

Company Challenges
1. Finances. What has become unclear (maybe because I have not asked) is where this company tends to make its money. Will they continue with the advertisement route which they appear to be travelling down currently (as the site is free to all users) or do they take a different approach and charge for use of the site.

2. Numbers. In either case, the number of users has to increase way beyond where they are today. Probably need 5+ million users to be considered as an elite social networking site (Facebook has 17+ million and MySpace has 100 million). The true beauty of viral networking is that the best survive. And they grow fast. We are all familiar with the explosive growth of sites like YouTube. In order for this site to grow the content and social services need to be top notch.

3. Performance. Some grumblings have been heard around the blog sphere about performance at Facebook and MySpace are attributable to their massive growth. So what happens when the site gets its 5th million user? Will their site fall to pieces. I am confident that the team they have assembled should be capable of handling this.

If you would like to join click the link below to join – I think you will find the time you spend is completely valuable.

Join Wis.dm

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Best Web Application of 2007 (possibly ever)

Ok, the web is changing, web applications are becoming more sophisticated, social networking is growing …

Yes, we all know this, but I have to say that Geni has the best interface of any web application that I have ever seen, ever (so far)! I found the application yesterday while perusing through some new news feeds I found whilst I was constructing my new PageFlakes page. The company has been around for a few months now and has already secured $100M $10M in funding (yes million). An astronomical amount of money for a 12+ person company.

When you use the application it is very clear to see why this company is garnishing this much praise (and money). The company is lead by the former COO of PayPal, David O. Sacks so I am sure he has the ears of a lot of people in Internet technology.

My Experience
I am going to try and contain my excitement about this application and explain my experience as I built out my family tree (at least as much as I could). The process of adding my account was simple, First Name, Last Name, Email Address and Password (password confirm field as well). So, simple I forgot how I did it (hopefully I can remember my password). I was instantly “logged in”. No need to retrieve a temporary password or confirmation URL. Nice.

I then got started adding people and by the time I got to my mother the application was put the test. My mom is divorced and remarried. Handled that like a champ. I was surprised but I guess if you are going to build a genealogy application in an era where divorce rates are high, you better handle that well. They did. When I got to my Sister who has been married twice and had a child with two different people it handled that smoothly by presenting me with an option to choose which mom/dad combination created this child.

I could not stop, I was completely addicted and I am not sure if it was because I was having fun or I was interested in seeing my family tree in the “tree” layout which looked so good.

I started adding every family members email address that I had, my mom, my aunt, my wife’s aunt as far as I could reach. I wanted to see what they thought. It has been less then 10 hours (slept 5 of those) and I have already received very positive response. I am hooked. I can not wait to see how this grows (hopefully someone will hold my Grandmothers hand through the program so that she can add her family lineage).

Organic growth
Although I started this family tree, this is not mine. I participate in this with my family members which is great. My sister in-law started adding details to my wife’s side of the family and I saw the real power of the application. Everyone participates in this. She had added a great uncle and all of his details, added a picture for my father in-law and it appeared she was hooked as well. I think that this will not only be enjoyable but I think that this application will actually bring my family closer together and offer my children a birds-eye view of our family (something that I can honestly say was difficult to do before this). Don’t get me wrong I did enjoy it when my grandmother brought out the manila envelope which contained the several pieces of graph paper with the family lineage she constructed.

I recommend that you give this application a chance, if not because you enjoy genealogy then simply because it is fun and it may help you understand how to organize information on the web.

Breaking Dunbar’s Number

I first learned about Dunbar’s number when I read “Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell (highly recommended).  The basic idea (described in detail here) is the number of people one could have stable relationships with.  The number as stated in the book and at Wikipedia is “150″.  So I ask then how can someone have over “350″ (399 to be exact) connections in LinkedIn?

After some thought and some research on the Internet (I found this post from 2 years ago: Dunbar’s Triage: Too Many Connections) it led me to a very interesting post from more than 5 years ago.  Back before the popularity of MySpace, Facebook, Linked and other great networking sites (new favorite includes Wis.dm)

Edge: The World Question Center
“How do we scale up the number of quality human relationships one person can sustain by many orders of magnitude? In an increasingly connected world, how does one person interact with a hundred thousand, a million or even a billion people?”

So, based on the above post the general idea would be that the software revolution that is occurring now will help us expand our network.  Somehow the blogs, linking sites, bookmark sites etc… will allow us to keep in touch with more people like the email we use has allowed us to communicate with more people then we used to when we just had phones (which in turn allowed us to keep in touch with more people then when all we had was written letters).

In order to believe this, you must truly believe that a human can connect with more than 150 people.  That all of our social interactions that occur on a daily basis can be “enhanced” by using the online world and these new applications that seem to be popping up on a daily basis.

I put my life into three main categories – my family, my friends and my job (If I am a good excellent time manager I may be able to slice a bit off the top and apply it to me).  With all of my time going to these three categories I find it hard to believe that I can have meaningful relationships with 150 people.  Logically this means 50 in each category.  Since I have a descent sized immediate family, I can see 30 there, and work certainly has 30-40  that would leave 80 or so friends.  I think that I would be a lucky person if I could have 80 people in my life at some meaningful level.

While I guess some of the tools available lets me maintain relationships but today, most of the people that I interact with on line are people that I interact with off line.  So, what part of this new communication architecture is a bit of sensationalism and what part of it is real?  Maybe for us (people in my generation) there are a lot of people who would disagree – those that find it comfortable meeting people online in anonymous chat rooms and through posts to sites.

The real answer is that people of my childrens generation will be a lot different.  They will live on the Internet.  All of their communications will be with people, they will not care of their location.  They will meet people online just like you meet someone at a bar or in a supermarket or at the local laundry mat.   They will not care that the individual lives 5 minutes away, 2o minutes away or across the world.  They will simply know “This person has something in common with me, because we have posted on the same blog, linked to the same article or have common connections through work, play or family”.

Before I wrote this I had no idea whether or  not I believed in the Dunbar number or if applications can enhance our communication with others.  After some thought (I sometimes do this through my writing) I can say that I  do believe that we are capable of enhancing communication and that we may also be able to extend our relationships beyond 150 people.  While I don’t think that it will be just the applications I do believe that we are changing.

Software as a Service

I had some time today to catch up on my “links for you” (links your friends post to their account they believe you would be interested in) at del.icio.us. and I cam across a link to an article a friend of mine had sent to me a week or two ago on the RSS reader. The article entitled: Death of the RSS Reader / Software as services was written in December 2005 (Yes) by Phil Waineright who rights an “Applications on demand” blog for ZDNet (I added his blog to my list because he is dead on here). While I am not sure that he has captured the full value of “Software as services” (which I believe goes way beyond RSS) I think that he has a point.

Software as a service (SaaS)
The idea of software as a service has been around for quite some time. SaaS is well documented on the web and has its own place even at Wikipedia: SaaS. I was involved in a few startups that were early adopters of the idea except we called ourselves Application Service Providers or ASP’s. Back in the day we built applications and “rented” the use of those applications out to companies in return for a monthly fee (the holy of all holies – recurring revenue). These applications were maintained by us. We handled the server and network architecture (we obviously outsourced this), we updated the software and managed the data. The client simply opened a Web browser and worked with their data.

There is however, a big difference in SaaS to the business (b2b) and SaaS to the consumer (b2c). A while back the industry thought that the b2b software industry was going to explode. Services between companies have certainly moved to the web and that continues to increase, but not nearly as much as the b2c side.

Today you can see software as a service almost everywhere. Google and Yahoo compete for the consumer’s attention all of the time with their applications which help you do everything from manage links and video to email and favorite TV shows. There are also many other smaller applications (who are continually swallowed up by larger organizations) that offer niche market applications like Flickr and Dandelife to name a couple.

I think a notable Software as a Service in the consumer space is PeaPod. While you may not think about it as a traditional SaaS, for the consumer it is most definitely a contender. What better services then the ability to virtually attend a supermarket, order some goods and have those goods delivered to your home. On that same level, you could include Netflix, Blockbuster and the like in their as well.

While the RSS Reader online can certainly be considered a service, I am not sure that he has done justice to the explosion in SaaS on the consumer side.

I want it all back!

Yeah that’s right, you heard me I want every interaction with every website that I have ever done back. It’s mine isn’t it. Even with an article that you right for an online (or not online) publication, you have the right to own a copy of it.

Here is my thought, I have a blog, I have some images that I post on Flickr, I have some links that I keep on del.icio.us, I have some entries that I keep in my Google Calendar or Google Documents and let’s say I have some interests I keep and comment on at one of my new favorite sites Wis.dm.

Now I really want to get involved with a new site Dandelife but I am just getting sick of all the URL’s all of the passwords all of the different UI and bits of information that I have out there. All of the sites that I interact with are all a part of me (jeez I did not even mention YouTube). They make up the collection of information out there that is me and what I am interested in and what I know and who I interact with. I want it all back. Yeah that’s right, it’s mine and I want it back.

So I know that the ebb and flow of the Internet follows many patterns that have been on going in technology in general. Terminal Computers – VT 100 (Centralized) then Personal Computers (Distributed) then Thin Clients like Flash, Flex and even Ajax applications (Centralized) …

The number of “social networking” sites out there is so staggering and the landscape is so saturated it is hard for good ideas to get any real traction. There are more applications out there then there is attention time available. Participation applications are popping up all over the place and it becomes more difficult each day to spend quality time interacting with your peers on particular subjects.

Solution – lets shift the paradigm here. Let’s get this whole home computer piece working in the reverse direction. Let me keep all of my data on my machine in my on way. My videos, my posts, my pictures, my responses etc… After all they are mine. Then let me choose to share this information with other sites. Like this:

I go to my mikull.com and find a post or a discussion thread of interest that I want to participate in, I add my comments or my thoughts and instead of the information being stored on his blog on his computer the information is on my computer in my house. The applications would talk to each other and essentially what I would be giving mikull.com is the ability to subscribe to my thought. Essentially, an RSS feed of my thought with a uniqueID (URL) would be given to the post or discussion thread for it to display. In the process, some sort of service level agreement would be made between the two trusted systems which would give me rights to my thought with mikull.com having rights to display the thought as they see fit (essentially a copy of the thought). This way I would keep a record of all of my interactions with the web sites out there (maybe my home computer would enter into an agreement with mikull.com so that I could have a copy of the post for reference).

I like this idea, a lot, who is with me?

Forget January … 2007 is the year of the connection

Yeah you heard it here first (although trendwatching.com is predicting it for the month of January) this year will see the advent of connecting on line as the premiere method for communicating with people that are both located in and out of our immediate proximity.

Don’t get me wrong the connections we have made without technology will not go away, we will just enhance those connections through tools on the Internet.  You will learn more about the world through people then you will the Internet.  What you get from these new web 2.0 applications that are popping up is trusted views of what is out there.  Your Aunt Jenny’s web links will be available through her del.icio.us account and your long last friends blog will let you know what he was up to over the last 10 years.  This is the year.

Today I was contacted by three people within the course of an hour and a half via LinkedIn to connect with them.  I know that may not seem like such a strange occurence but take into consideration that the last time I was contacted from someone on LinkedIn (after they found my profile) was over 2 months ago.  3 people contacted me within an hour and a half.

My question, and the krux of my post, did they read the article posted at trendwatching.com (or similar prediction from someone else) and think to themselves “Hey you know what, they are right I need to connect with some people” or better yet did they say “If this is THE thing to do this month, I better get a head start and not be left behind, nobody likes to be late to the fad party”.

Either way I am satisfied because like a good glass of beer, no matter how that pint got into your hands, eventually you will like it.  I am glad to see that people (in the mainstream) will be using these tools for communication with their networks, proves that our applications work.