Okay, I have to admit, I never really got into Friendster. It just wasn’t that interesting to me. The idea was almost right, but something was missing. Plus the implmementation was kind of poor.
Consumating.com is actually a dating service, but damn it’s cool. Very simple. Very effective. Also developed by a fellow austininte Ben Brown. Oddly, it has a ranking system that allows you to see how popular you are within the Consumating community. Not sure exactly what the algoritm is to figure that one out :)
It’s based on a fairly new concept: “Folksonomy”. Basically, it’s the first real implementation of the Symantic Web. The idea is that instead of a bunch of UI designers and developers trying to figure out the best way to categorize people, they let the people do all the categorizing. This allows for the community to define itself. The community then determines what (and in this case, who) is popular. You can see what people in the community are into. You can see what people that are “like” you are also into. Very intersting and very powerful.
Another example of this is a site called Del.icio.us. This is essentially just an online bookmarking tool. To see an example, check out some of my links on the right. Note that you can see all of the “tags” that I’ve given to the various bookmarks that I’m posting. The site then knows how to suggest sites to me that it thinks I might like. I can even “subscribe” to a tag so that whenever someone posts something, it will automatically show up in my bookmarks in Firefox. I always have new and interesting stuff to look at.
These are both revolutionary changes in the way that people view the internet, online communities and media in general. Why go to a traditional news source, when I can link directly to THE news source. How do I know it’s the source? Cause it’s the page that the most people around the world are looking at (and linking to) at a given moment.
Very, very cool shit.
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