« The discHub | Back to Home | Web 2.0 »
March 12, 2005 Web Content and Social Networks
The social network is a means, not an end. That may be a simple idea, but if you think about it within the context of Friendster my bringing it up will make more sense. Friendster popularized social networking software, which is built around Stanely Milgram's "small world phenomenon": we're all connected to each other by at most six degrees of separation. The idea is that if we all tell a database who we know, I can network my way over to Bill Gates or some cute girl that I want to ask out via my friend network. It's simple, fun, and promising; Friendster took off. Then we got a whole host of other social networking sites: Orkut, LinkedIn, Tribe, MySpace... the list is dozens long. Some were focused on business relationships, which kept out the twelve year-olds leaving love notes for each other... others like MySpace embraced it. In the end we were left with a lot of options for telling the database who we know, but little that would revolutionize how we share, collaborate and communicate with the people we care about.
In parallel with the social networking sites we've had a host of other products to help us tackle that last issue: instant messaging, blogs, photo sharing, peer to peer file sharing, Bloglines, and iPodders.
So what if we could slam all this stuff together in to a well-designed, unified package? It'll be fast, bug-free, and easy to use. When it's all done we'll call it Xanadu and spend our days drinking tea and playing backgammon with Ted Nelson.
Although I haven't talked to anyone in the company, this sort of mentality and ambitiousness seems to be what's driving imeem, a new application that allows you to create personal, private networks, chat with people, share photos and files using peer to peer communication, and create your own blogs.
imeem is currently in a private beta, but I started using it yesterday after a friend at Google sent me an invite. The minute I realized this was a client application and not a website it clicked for me that these were people who thought like I thought. Once I learned that the co-founders, Dalton Caldwell and Jan Jannink, came from Stanford the it started to make more sense to me. I feel like the students at Stanford understand the web better than students at other schools (thanks to Google and Yahoo!, this un-researched claim is easier to defend). And part of understanding the web is understanding that not everything needs to live in a web browser.
imeem has that 1.0 feel: lots to love, lots to hate. I applaud them for their efforts and wish them the best. Now I need to get back to work on my latest project, which is similar in spirit.
Posted by johnnie at March 12, 2005 07:01 PM
Comments
Post a Comment
