roy

This is a passing thought that's been kinda in the back of my mind for some time ... gotta write it down or I'm never gonna be able to think through the whole thing.

As more content gets added to the web, the main goal for the next generation of web tools is to organize and bring you relevant results. Google's search was a great first step of organized the anonymous web, but now that literally everybody and their mommas are contributing content to the web, finding relevant items is becoming difficult. Spammers are also making finding relevant items more difficult as they game search results in their favor.

Speaking from personal experience, I'm finding the actual number of relevant searches I do is diminishing. If I want to learn anything, I just look it up on wikipedia. I've bookmarked w3schools for css stuff, and I use slow-as-molasses-in-january Songmeanings for lyrics. Once I find a site that I "trust," I stick with that. I would hazard a guess that more people are acting like this.

I've never liked "social networking" sites like Friendster and Facebook because they require opting-into a site whose sole purpose is defining your social networks into tangible connections. My main gripe with these sites is they offer nothing to the user; the user has to adopt to the site simply to remain in a social network. I've always been a stronger proponent of building tools that are legitimately useful to users, then extrapolating social networking information from that. Perhaps the properties of social networks are mutally exclusive like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle; the more rigidly we can define and understand social networks, the less useful information we can understand.

Of course, the three "slap in your face" examples where social networking has succeeded is from delicious, which allows you to share bookmarks, flickr, which allows you to share pictures, and livejournal, which allows you to join communities and share writing.

The immediate value of sites like these is they build inherent trust. Delicious and LJ users build trust in one another through sharing. For stuff like links and websites ("are these merchants good?") nothing can replace the word-of-mouth from someone that you know - even if it's just through Tabulas (Yush recently wrote about this). Fundamentally, social networks are about building trust in one another. And the best "social networking" sites are those that offer the tools for tasks that people WANT to accomplish - finding relevant links and sharing information about one another.

So one of the underlying goals for Tabulas 3.0 was to build the basic sharing and aggregation tools. The "friends" page is something that almost everyone can immediately grasp (but try to explain "RSS aggregation" to the layman and be prepared to be met with blank stares). People LOVE their friends pages. I love mine. I check mine compulsively to see who's updated. But why is it, in Tabulas 2.0, you can only view your friends' entries? Why not their links? Or galleries?

There have been situations where people have asked me for cool links regarding photography (for those shutterbugs who are just getting started!). I used to have a tons of links on my old computer to sites with great photographers and great tutorials (this was before delicious) ... so lately I've been trying to find these sites and adding them into my Tabulas link list ... because the next version of Tabulas will allow you to more effectively share and show these links to one another. Want to know some good articles I think about globalization? Want to see what links I've been reading? No problem...

Recently, friends have been noting that the birthday reminders tool in Tabulas is wonderful - simply because it reminds them quickly of people whose birthday they might forget. They can send a quick birthday note and show they care, with really no work. If a tool could not only provide you a simple fact like birthday, but also push to you all the updates of someone's life (pictures/text/links) ... now that's really great.

I understand I'm just one person, and I unfortunately have this complex with Tabulas that doesn't let me allow anybody else to help me with this project (this is my baby so stay the hell away!) ... so the tools won't be the best. Hell, I'd even be surprised if people said they were even remotely on par with the leaders (flickr/delicious/lj) ... but the goal is to build something that people can use very basically for the beginning; I can always expand these features later.

Hopefully I can add in API support for Flickr/Delicious in the same way I offer crossposting features from Tabulas to Blogger, LJ, and Xanga. This way your information won't ever be simply stored on Tabulas, but also be kept in sync with other services ... so in the case that Tabulas lags behind these services, it's easy to switch. I noticed Yush has started xposting to LJ and Blogger, which I think is a fantastic idea.

Word?