by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
So, what would it be like to actually use this service on a daily basis?
Well, as I see it, what would happen is something like this. You would log-in to the service and see notifications of what people you follow have posted in your newfeed like feature. It’s possible that if you service grew large enough, you might even be able to limit this to different Groups.
But, in general, there would definitely be a Facebook vibe to it in some respects, only everything you were seeing would largely be from people you had no real-life connection to. You would move those people to Facebook should you meet them in real life.
Anyway, after glancing at that information, you might look up to see who had followed you. People who followed you would get notifications of everything you had contributed to the system. This would be a way to cut through the enormous amount of information pumping through the service, should it grow large enough. But once you got past that, you would look at your newfeed more closely and you would begin to interact with the things you saw there.
One interesting conundrum this service might have is how to implement social media concepts that people have grow used to because of Twitter, Reddit and Facebook. I honestly don’t know how you might favorite or share posts you liked. I just don’t know how that would work out yet. I have to give it more thought. I don’t know what the consequences of all of that would be. But those features would be there in some respect. You would have to be careful not to make the service too much like Reddit, Twitter or Facebook in that respect, but that type of feature is something people have grown to expect so you would have to have it.
Now, one interesting thing is, if you interact with stuff in your newsfeed, does it take you to the Group where it was posted? That’s another question I haven’t answered yet. Might initial thinking is, yes. This whole concept is so strong that that is not too difficult to figure out, especially if someone with some design experience would actually listen to me.
But, as I keep saying, I have no money and no one cares what I have to say, so I’m just mentally jerking off about this obsessively for no other reason than I’ve had too much coffee tonight and I am enjoying writing too much.
Anyway, one interesting question is how you would implement discovery of Groups. My initial gut reaction is there would be a feature rich search feature where you would find Groups through either a keyword or the person associated with them who created the group as part of their Verified Account. So, in a sense, for someone coming from Twitter the end experience would be very similar. But it couldn’t be too similar because, well, you don’t want to get sued.
So, you find a group and you join it. You would follow it like you would a person. You could also, I guess, follow an individual person. That is an interesting aspect of this concept — you could follow a Group and not follow the person who was responsible for its creation.
I really think people would really enjoy a service that was much like Twitter but significantly more feature rich. Or, put another way, this service is designed for people like me who want something like Twitter, but don’t really want to use Reddit, either.
Once you joined a group, you would see inside it a IRC-like stream of live text on a portion of the screen. You would dip in an chat some, and if you really wanted to, you could click on a thread and interact with that content as well.
This is a really strong concept. Too bad I’m not only broke, but about 10 years too late. Typical.
