Social Networks Turn the World Upside Down

While developing Farmfoody.org over the last two years, we came up with a very similar idea independently. Most sites designed to help you connect with local organic farms require you to search for farms in your locality. We thought that people shouldn't have to search for stuff, it should come to them automatically. If you wanted some fresh locally grown tomatoes, instead of searching for for farms with tomatoes for sale in your area, you just check your own profile to see if any of the local farms you are friends with have tomatoes available. This might be through a map of local farms or through a farm you have become friends with that has put out a bulletin about their new tomato crop. We decided that a social network was the best way to direct and filter this information to the consumer and enable them to make unexpected connections with farms and foodies whose interests and connections mirror their own. People could explore the world of small independent farms and the people who love good food.

The strange thing about comparing Myspace to Facebook is that they are almost opposite worlds. One is completely open with everything literally hanging out all over the place and the other is completely closed without much showing, like an iceberg. Facebook is a set of private networks without any need for the public to be involved or view their content. This could also be true for Myspace. There is really no need for Myspace profiles to be public any more than Facebook. Except that people and musical groups for example use their profiles as public faces, as advertisements and ways to communicate with the public beyond their circle of friends. There really is no way to search Facebook for user criteria other than as a person. One Myspace there is nearly unlimited criteria about the person and their interests to search. Our site, Farmfoody.org will have to seek some balance between these two.

When I go to Digg, I am presented with stories that have been voted to the top. "Voted on by who?" I ask. Every Tom, Dick and Harry? I find sites like Digg (or kuro5hin, Slashdot and other pioneers) filled with content moderated by voting systems unsatisfactory because I do not know or trust who voted on them. What I think would be a better solution is to receive content other people belonging to the same group think is important. This is the facebook model, which could be extended to all kinds of information. I would be much more likely to use a Digg-style site that showed me all the feeds or stories my friends found interesting than a general news site. Why not use the Google Reader model within this context?

Why not take it further? Why not build a site where people read RSS feeds and then share them within a social network instead of the public? Then I could see what my friends think is worthy of sharing. They could vote on the "interestingness" of items in their own feeds and profile and these could be automatically displayed in my profile. Any content they contribute could be monitored from my profile. Any number of layers and methods could be used to "mashup" the content appearing in my profile, either for public or private consumption (depending on the orientation or facing of the site). The social network is a way of utilizing the implied stamp of approval friends give to filter content. Instead of randomly searching about the web or looking at content voted on by idiots. I believe we will see more of social networks being used to filter content.

The Swicki: Collaborative Search

I've long thought that the fatal flaw of what library science calls "finding aids" is that they only organize information according to how it relates to other information. What I've always wanted is a search that relates information to what I care about, to my interests, to me. I've thought about "personalized searches" but the trouble with this approach is that it is time consuming to express to a computer exactly what it is you want. You must set up some kind of criteria and the the search returns results for you based upon it, such as the simple eBay search notification. If lots of people are going to use this with the efficiency they now get from Google, something else is needed. We don't have expert systems and artificial intelligence yet, so what is a possible solution?

Some are experimenting with attention. By tracking what you look at online, a profile of your interests can be built, which can then drive a personal search engine. People are really bad at expressing what they really want (as product developers and marketers have discovered) so the non-intrusive method of observing behavior may just work.

Another experiment takes a different approach. Why not let other people help refine your search? That is what the people behind Swicki seem to have done. If you could gather like minded individuals into one location where they could influence the accuracy of the search, the "search in a can" model could be improved. It goes farther than that. By becoming an aggregator of search results the system can ride on top of the web and use it as a database in a way similar to Yahoo Pipes. The most revolutionary aspect of Swicki is user created search engines. Instead of needing millions of dollars and massive servers, Swicki piggy backs on existing search results to enable anyone to create a web search engine. This kind of democratizing is a defining quality of web two point oh applications.

I see how the canned search model can be turned inside out, by allowing a group of users to collaboratively refine the canned search to improve it. Instead of empowering the computer to be smarter, it empowers people to create a smarter resource. It definitely becomes a kind of search-wiki. It competes in some ways with the idea of folksonomy. We have now user created taxonomies and now user created searches. What I like about both developments is how it democratizes the organization and finding of information. The folksonomy enables people to create their own vocabularies, perhaps multiple vocabularies for the same subject area. The wiki search enables people to create alternative search results for the same subject. My background is in a subject where unresolvable disagreement is commonplace. It's called genealogy, where there are no facts, only interpretations and sometimes two families claim the same individual. This is not something for concern in genealogy and I like the way more than one truth can exist within the same framework, it's much better than declaring one view right and all others wrong and working hard to keep your opponent's views out of view. Despite what some may claim, there can be more than one version of the truth. Let an idea gain mindshare on its own merits.

I've thought before about a search engine where you could search the web by creating predefined searches, but never thought of letting everyone edit your predefined searches, that is novel, just as with social bookmarking

You can see the Swicki I created in a few minutes in the sidebar of this site (as long as it's there).