by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Absolutely no one listens to me, so I’ll be brief. Some time ago, I thought out a very feature rich social media network. If you go to my Instagram account, you could see me think it through hundreds of little videos. In hindsight, it was all a huge waste of time, but given that Facebook is in trouble AGAIN, I thought I’d give you a brief overview of what I came up with.
The point is, if you used Usenet 25 years ago, you may remember how, in its own way, it was pretty feature rich. A lot of the concepts of Usenet are now used by Reddit. But the social media platform I was thinking of would be different than Reddit because it would be a direct competitor to Facebook.
The idea is, everything with this service would be based on some of the core features of Usenet that made it so much fun to use. First, everything would be based around a “Group.” That would be the basic element of the service. You would, as part of the on-boarding process, be forced to group all your friends into Groups.
This would be a way to keep different parts of your life separate. This is a real problem with Facebook at the moment. So, that problem would be fixed. But, as I imagine it, this would be a very feature rich aspect of the service, so you could create Groups on the fly that would be about subjects as well as relationships.
Next, within each Group, you would have Posts and Threads. So, you within a Group, what on Facebook is a Status, would be a Post. And all of your Posts inside a Group would be threaded. So, if you posted something really interesting about your life in your Politics Group, if things got really animated, then you could at least keep track of what was being said.
Even more interesting, a Post would be very feature rich. Each Post would have its own Slack-like channel and the ability to have up to four people in a recordable video conference. And, what’s more, you would have the ability to in-line edit each post so it would be absolutely clear what you wanted to say.
This brings up an interesting possibility — you could have content providers push their content into the service using the existing formatting from their individual Website AND that content could be inline edited by readers in a way that preserved that formatting.
Anyway, I’m well aware that the social media space is cold as Pluto. Silicon Valley has moved on to VR / AR and other newer, more sexxy technology, so lulz, nothing will ever come of this. But it’s too bad. Facebook is really weak right now and if you could get some startup cash, this idea is cool enough that you would probably get some traction.
