Ted Leung discovered the core problem behind Orkut, LinkedIn, and all of the other social network apps out there today: the social network is pointless as an end itself; it's only value is integration with other communication channels:
If these things ever get really useful, you are going to want them to be open all the time on your machine. If that happens, then the connection data is just a data stream for whatever application sits on your desk. I know that I don't want to leave a browser window open for this. The experience just won't be interactive enough.Ted thinks Orkut needs to be plugged into your IM environment, and the data needs to be available for all of your desktop applications (much like Apple's AddressBook is shared across Mail, iChat and other apps).
I think Ted's onto something. (He's also working on Chandler, so that influences his viewpoints ever so slightly.) My first impression about Orkut is that it has the potential to be a better usenet - more signal, less volume, and no spam. But in the end, nothing particularly earth shattering.
And yet the potential is much more vast. Imagine a little applet on the desktop that comments on the web page or email message you're reading:
The author of this message has 1800 RespectPoints (tm), 83 fans, and a trustworthiness index of 89.32. In your immediate network, this author has 32 RespectPoints, 2 fans, and a trustworthiness index of 42.3. The author of this message shares the following interests with you: Perl, Belgian Beer, and Trainspotting. You are connected to this person through 12 paths, with an average distance of 9 hops. The author of this messages comments frequently on the topic of "functional programming".
Imagine editing a document with annotations from some of your colleague's, you'd like to discuss one of them. You find his number and call him. You talk about the document, he finaly gets a grasp what was it, but does not have it on his drive. You sent the document, he opens it, you direct him to the page and paragraph and finally he has all the information to talk about his annotation. This is whole lot of steps involved. Now imagine the editor was integrated with some Instant Messaging client. The annotation would be signed with your collegue IM address. You click the address and you connect to your colleague. He sees your invitation, accepts it and the document is automatically transfered to his computer and opened with cursor set in the same place as in your copy. Isn't this more user friendly?
The scenario was taken from: Collaboration in Context
I have some vague thought that this could be done with wiki and the Mozilla IM client.
You could also just IM the URL to your wiki page, provided the page itself is private
Steve Boyd on that concept: What does Contextual Collaboration Mean, Anyway?. >>I favor the term "in context" rather than "contextual" because I believe it better conveys the real benefit of collaborating "here" rather than having to go "there". "here" is where the whole context is, but I believe there can be grades of 'in context collaboration' - so it does not exclude collaborating "there".
