Hey all. My question has to do with the goal of this project. But, before I ask, I'd like to preface it.
For online purposes, there's facebook for college (and other) interactions, flickr for photos, linkedin for professional contacts, myspace for friends and bands (and annoying webdesign), del.icio.us/digg/technorati/etc... for tags and blog searching, numerous blogging services (blogger, myspace, xanga, windows live spaces, etc), and many other online services and mini-communities around which people gather.
And they are all competing to be the main means of communicating with others online. Facebook just added a 'share' feature, flickr is more than just photos, google, windows, and yahoo are putting on a full-court press to try to be the one place people go to create their online presence and are providing the means to share it with others. Billions of dollars are being put into this industry and huge corporations are working to allow their consumers to everything online through their service.
So, with that out there, what does a directory look like for the People of Praise? Nick mentioned in the initial email he sent out that the bare minimum is a basic directory with a profile picture. He then stated:
But we think we can deliver a lot more. We'd like to give people the option to submit more about themselves: e.g. more photos, documents they'd like to share, brief biographies, listed hobbies, etc.... And perhaps a little ways down the road we'd to add a chat client, maybe shared calendars.
Is this directory a/the means by which we want to communicate non-geographically, or is it just an online directory? For either option, how would members of the People of Praise actually end up using it?
Two options I see:
1) Keep it really simple. Make it easy to use. Don't provide for the means of many types communication, just the basics.
2) Give it everything. Make it so it is the way a member of the People of Praise can be non-geographically present to others. (the google+facebook for the People of Praise).
I've got my ideas, but I've talked long enough already. Your thoughts?
kitchen sink or can opener?
I recently read a blog post about working towards more open standards with online communities, such that you're not trying to manage a separate profile on each of the popular sites, just because so many people you know use it.
OK so I just remembered where I read it. It's about a project that Blake Ross, teen innovator originally behind the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox phenomenon, is now working on. He's calling it Parakey, and it's not ready to be unveiled yet, but the details he provides speak a bit to the 2nd paragraph of your post, Abe.
IEEE Spectrum: The Firefox Kid
I think the basic gist being, we don't necessarily need to be either tiny or huge, that if we provide robust import/export capabilities, we can avoid frustrating peoples' online efforts. Nonetheless, I think you're right on the money: we shouldn't necessarily reinvent the wheel. Do what we need to do, and actively encourage the use of other services that do other things far better than we would.
RE: On Online Commnunities
I would have to agree that we aim for (1) -- keep it simple based on Nick's 'kernel' suggestion. There's a few reason for this and I'll probably post them as new topics, should others have individual responses, but the primary gist is:
Most other projects (facebook, flickr, etc.) are funded by companies and/or have their own employees. They're underlying objective is to make profit for the company - be it yahoo, facebook, google, or whoever else. I would assume that our underlying objective is to create the best technology to improve non-geographical communication, but as always -- up for dicussion.
Although most "Online Communities" seem to target high school, college, and post grad audiences as the next-gen to find most interactive technology, in the end I agree with Abe that it seems to simply end up as a battle btwn development companies. I would add that an objective of this battle is not necessarily to produce the best form of communication, but perhaps more so an effort to get the most popularity among the audience and win over the marketing departments of other big companies (ie. cell phone providers, computer distributors, music producers, whoever else, etc.) to offer the service of posting advertisements on "the most popular sharing/community site" out there.
I also agree we don't need to re-invent the facebook wheel, pop-style, but I think we should certainly consider our objectives, set them and stick to them for fall '07 completion. Scope creep is no good for deliverables and timelines. For learning group open-source developers, a simpler release to start may be the best approach beginning approach with room for additional perk/feature-driven releases for the future.
More posts to come.
__________________________
Hugh Springer, Jr.
People of Praise
Branch/Division: Servant
email: hugh.springer@gmail.com
AIM: hughlspringer
(h) 651.698.4958
(c) 612.750.1230
Too Early to Tell
Abe,
It looks to me like there are actually two pretty different questions in your post:
1. What's the end state for this project?
2. How are we going to communicate non-geographically in the People of Praise?
The second question is a great one, but I think it bears a lot of discussion and we don't have to answer it in order to build a successful directory. This project is without a doubt taking place in the context of the People of Praise communicating non-geographically, but it doesn't need to be the sole means of such communication in order to succeed. It just needs to be another new way for us to be a community.
To answer the first question, I suggest we turn it on its head. I think we need to develop this project modularly and incrementally, rather than trying to define at the outset what the finished product will look like. We've already started work on an initial checkpoint for the project (the sine qua nons). When we've built a directory system that can successfully provide that information for 200,000 people, we will have achieved a certain minimum level of success. Once we've reached that initial checkpoint in the project, we can ask ourselves what other cool features we want to add to the directory system.
David Salmon