Hola folks, I figured I'd ask if anybody has any input on 'Citybot' - a small project I'm trying to do. I may present it at wherecamp here in PDX in a few hours although the project itself is only a few weeks old and hasn't had more than 4 or 5 hours of code put into it.
The background on Citybot is that it is basically is a minimalist attempt to build a social network on top of twitter that lets people barter and trade things more easily. I have it hosted at http://citybot.org and I have few posts and comments on it at http://makerlab.org as well as some help / about information on the site itself. The big picture is that I'm interested in "signaling networks" between people. I want to let people see through walls. My interest in social cartography stems from that as well. Many of our social ills seemed to be connected to a lack of transparency, and an undue focus on proforma privacy. Institutions, priesthoods and the like seem to hide and hold power and it feels important to democratize participation, especially participation in community, not to encourage say voting, or rallies but to encourage direct action. Clearly one could build out any kind of social signaling network; one could throw up a server, write some small iphone app, let people message each other... but there an existing infrastructure now via twitter and like services... and so much of making ideas succeed seems to be minimization of barriers, using existing infrastructure and the like. Twitter has a critical mass that is hard to beat. So, in any case, thinking out loud this morning - and hoping for input and direction - as a preamble to possibly presenting at wherecamp: Citybot effectively creates groups within twitter. It re-echoes all statements that are sent to it - updating once a minute - effectively creating a shared group where you can hear from voices that are not necessarily voices you explicitly subscribed to. One of the holes in twitter is that it requires everybody to explicitly know everybody else - you can't "join a room" and "listen in on the conversation" - instead you have to make explicit friendships with each of the persons in a conversation one by one. It means the act of finding people to talk to is much aggrieved and a constant process of scouring - lest you only get half the conversation. As well you see pathologically large collections of follows and followers attached to each person because it is not humanly possible to scale this approach. The concept of 'groups' answers this problem - although they have their own problems - but groups are a concept that has worked well for a long time, and follow an observation "the more that service is like IRC the more successful it will be". If twitter had groups then there would be no point to citybot in its current incarnation. Folks could listen to a room called "Portland" or I dunno "Boston" and be done with it. There is some merit in perhaps offering automated room creation - in that you ask citybot to echo all messages not to say the citybot channel but a specified channel for which it had login permissions. But likely twitter will add groups soon. * In any case emulating groups isn't really where I want to go with citybot. What I want to try to do is to provide a new signalling network across Portland (specifically I want to focus on my geography these days) that connects people over complementary needs and helps rewire the city in a way that ordinary folks can do better during the current economic fluctuations. Like Craigslist I'd like to offer search services that don't just reinforce existing social networks and friendships but help create new ones. I admire this about Craig's project. Also, again like Craigslist, I really want to solve real problems for real people; not just talking to a ditherati. Our social networks need to be repaired - due to a legacy of an institutionalized capitalist infrastructure that says every person is an island and should acquire goods and services through dollar transactions and marketing and the like. We trust walmart more than we trust each other. But unlike Craigslist I'm really keen on this being real time. And keen on better geographic information. And would like least some kind of filtering; not to the extreme that Twitter does it - but with at least a basic respect that our social network graphs are too easily invaded by predators. I'd like to be able to have second and third degree orders of trust; so that if messages were from folks who were entirely outside the social network that they didn't get as much airtime as messages from people you trusted. Like for example if you had a cap of 100 messages per day - then the priority should be on messages from folks you can trust. So. My feeling is that in its current incarnation Citybot doesn't provide huge value yet. But I see features I can do to get closer to what I want: 1) I can offer more groups - this is a low priority... it is something I could do. I do feel a failure of groups is that they work too well and people disappear into them instead of staying in a broader conversation... I like to limit how many groups there are. And I think twitter will solve this soon. 2) I can actively matchmake complementary interests - there is no matchmaking yet at all. This I think is good and a good next step. I would like to have humans as matchmakers however rather than just robots. I can imagine a lot of "cb junkies" that will hang out on the channels and connect folks together - the same way that some folks hang out on cb radio channels in small towns near truck stops and connect truckers to important information about their landscapes. There is a lot of the street watching crowd that would help in a passive way here and might even get points for it. 3) I could actively scavenge social friend networks by traversing the social graphs of people that message citybot and use that as a basis for filtering any active matchmaking that I do. This would even work for corporate messages and could help fix advertising. I've earlier pointed out what I call "the pizza problem" - finding a good pizza late at night. If you could signal that you wanted pizza then some corporation that had pizza that was friended by your friends would be able to message you. I also see this as important in inverting the kind of google search model - where even if you have the money you have to engage in the burden of search. If you have dollars, and you stick your hand up, the people who want your dollars should be able to reach you in a filtered way - you should not have to carry the burden of search. 4) I think there has to be a marketing and promotional effort if this kind of project is going to succeed. Many projects which at least I thought were quite good ( such as http://thingster.org ) were failures. I suspect better outreach and participation is needed. 5) Privacy support - it would be good to have this because often people want to signal each other discreetly for things that are socially unacceptable or the like. In the early stages of delicious Joshua decided against privacy (for delicious) - and I agree with that - it was the right thing to do - privacy slows the growth of a service because it hides its activity. As a later feature it may have value. The real question is - what to do first - what is best - what is most critical? Can this idea succeed? What does it take? How can I build support for it? I'd like to find ways to make my communities work better; it feels like this is in the right direction. - anselm 415 215 4856 http://hook.org http://makerlab.com http://meedan.net
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