mishmap

Small Worlds and the group web

Posted on May 31st, 2008 by Brian.
Categories: mashups, social networks.

I’m impressed by Small Worlds, the virtual world (now in Beta) by New Zealand based Outsmart. Unlike worlds like Second Life, Small Worlds is an in-browser flash application that works without an audience diminishing separate download. As I’ll explain in this post, it has the potential to bring a new social dynamic to the masses.

After creating your avatar, you choose a room and populate it with furniture and gadgets including a radio streaming last.fm, artwork displaysing your flickr feed, YouTube videos or Twitter tweets, and arcade games to challenge your friends. Click on a pool table or a chess board for a quick casual game. The mashup possibilities with other popular Internet services seem endless - I’d love to see an in-game map or globe where I can pinpoint previous or future travel destinations.

But I’m most excited about how easy and natural it feels to interact with other people. The last 5 years of social networking have demonstrated a progression in interactivity. First it was your individual profile - you create a page of self-description (favorite quotes, bands, etc). Then came the testimonial or public wall where you left messages to be discovered by others trolling your page. We then graduated to the Facebook newsfeed, where you can keep tabs on your wide social circle in a less time consuming way (no need to click each profile for the latest updates).

But while a sense of community was formed, it wasn’t real time. With an avatar based paradigm like Small Worlds, it’s natural to communicate with many people in your virtual room and participate in real-time group dialog. The learning curve is much lower than Second Life, where it takes hours to acclimate.

I experienced an AHA! moment, where I envisioned myself sending friends and new contacts a URL link (all rooms have their own web addresses) instead of an email address or Linked In invite. Once clicked, they enter my room and get treated to an online representation of Me - my design aesthetic, latest ideas, projects, photos, playlists, favorite restaurants and reviews. Ringing a bell might alert me through my IM client that I have a visitor so I can open up Small Worlds in my browser and catch up, maybe inviting a few mutual friends to plan a BBQ next weekend.

We haven’t yet reached Snowcrash technology, but Small Worlds is a step closer to a web less about Me and more about Us.

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event recommendations by mobile social networks

Posted on May 19th, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: mashups, mobile, social networks.

A mobile social network can recommend events of interest by analyzing information from users with similar profiles. For example:
Miguel, a gay 30 year old New Yorker vacationing in San Francisco, wakes up on Sunday morning wondering what to do. His cell phone beeps with a text message suggesting that he visits Dolores Park later that afternoon.

This suggestion was made because his social network has data that on hot and sunny Sunday afternoons in San Francisco, hundreds of gay men in a social network spend time in Dolores Park.

Let’s deconstruct how the social network arrived at this conclusion:

• In the past 6 months, hundreds of people used their mobile device to access the network from Dolores Park. It knows this because the phone communicates the user’s GPS coordinate. Many phones already have this capability, either built in or through a bluetooth connection with a GPS.
• Whenever a member accesses the social network, it logs the time. Many of these accesses from Dolores Park occur on Sunday afternoons, between 2pm and 5pm.
• On each access, the network contacts an online weather service and logs the weather condition and temperature. Many of these accesses from Dolores Park on Sunday afternoons occur on sunny days above 65°.
• Many of these network accesses correspond to gay men between 25 and 40 years old, as specified in their user profile under “orientation” and “age”.

By collecting data about how and when members use a service, social networks can creatively analyze and find patterns useful to the community. Furthermore, when Miguel arrives at Dolores Park, I would expect the network to facilitate a meeting with other like-minded members nearby.

Update: Related to this, check out this posting describing GyPSii, a social network that tracks users’ GPS location

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Geohana - location based web services

Posted on April 4th, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: geography, mashups.

At BigTribe, we’ve developed a compelling web service that allows any publisher (bloggers or website owners) to instantly become a destination for services like:

• booking restaurant reservations
• golf tee-times
• hotel rooms
• inviting friends to events
• checking weather conditions
• finding interesting places nearby

Our product is called Geohana, its name inspired by taking Hana, which means “family” in Hawaiian, for a geographic spin. A central vision for Geohana is to give people tools to communicate more effectively and act socially based on their location.

You can play with Geohana right here on this blog! Check out the Geohana widget with the map on the right side of this page.

In addition to adding relevant geographic content on your website, you can also earn revenue with Geohana. By embedding Geohana on your site (with minimal javascript!), BigTribe shares commissions with you whenever a user on your site makes a restaurant reservation or a golf tee-time. We call this Geographic affiliate marketing and you can read about it at the BigTribe website.

It is easy to add a Geohana widget to your blog or website. Follow this link to customize its functionality and the way it looks. You can personalize your widget to:

• Ask the user to enter an address
• Start off with a specific address
• Display a list of your favorite locations
• Choose the location based services made available to your readers (restaurant reservations, golf tee-times, hotel rooms, weather)

If you are technically inclined, Geohana comes with a full API with which you can closely integrate Geohana web services into your page. You can build store locators and display your own location based content (reviews, ads, etc) by catching Geohana Javascript events. Check out some examples in our demo section.

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