One of the challenges in using social media services such as Twitter, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Facebook and LinkedIn is figuring out who to follow.
There’s certainly no lack of choice but it’s difficult picking people if you’re looking for friends/followers other than people you already know. In particular, what’s missing are tools that give you insight into people you might want to friend/follow based on specific interests.
Let’s say, for example, you want to friend/follow people who are passionate about travel. How do you effectively find people within various social media communities that you may want to follow?
Within Twitter, there Twellow but it’s difficult to navigate and takes too much time to sift through the results. Meanwhile, it doesn’t look like there’s this kind of feature in Friendfeed, Jaiku, Facebook and LinkedIn, although Facebook and LinkedIn offer recommendations on connections with other people within your networks.
As result, most people build replicates of the communities they’re already part of. It provides a good base but if friend/follow with the same people in every community, it could get pretty dull after awhile. It’s like going to different parties, and the exact same people are at each one.
What would be great is a smart social recommendation tool based on interests. This could be done using information that you provide within a profile, or by doing a search using keywords, categories, location, etc.
It would hopefully generate new and different people to friend/follow – people that you would never have found through your existing network or word of mouth. This took would expand and open your horizons and networks in new and exciting directions.
As much as I would hate to give away an amazing start-up idea (it strikes me as an idea that Y Combinator would do), what I’m describing is a smart social media recommendation service (aka SmartSocial), or an aggregated social media search tool.
Here’s how I think it would work: the user would register and provide information about themselves and all the social media services that they belonged to. Then, they could do a search on a single network or multiple networks based on keywords, categories, etc. that would scan each of these social networks, and come up with recommendations on who to friend/follow.
So, what do you think? Would it strike you as useful/valuable, and it is a plausible service?
Technorati Tags: facebook, jaiku, linkedin, friendfeed, Twitter
This would actually be good fodder for a blog post instead of a comment, but I’ll try a comment.
It seems to me that you are describing a kind of compatibility application (eHarmony without the romantic angle?) to help you find potential contacts/friends. It may have imperfect information, based on what’s out there in the cloud and what this application asks the user to contribute, so it’s already a bit hindered.
It certainly seems possible. Will it work well? I’m skeptical.
Mark,
I agree the information would depend on how much information people would be willing to provide. Another angle might be if this search tool was able to crawl someone’s social media activity to pick up on keywords. At the very least, it would give people another way to find friends and followers.
Mark
Here’s the difficult part of it… So much of the searching for “friends” outside of existing networks is about promotion more than any kind of search for genuine connections. I’m not necessarily referring to out-and-out spam, but more just the extent to which more and more of us are blurring the lines between social and commercial worlds.
Is this a bad thing? In general, yes I think it is. The reason it’s hard to find who to follow / friend on Twitter, etc., with the kind of genuine intentions you’re describing, is because most of the social media interaction patterns are a tiny fragment of what it takes to form real relationships.
Recommendation engines seem to kind of be growing in popularity. Obviously, Digg has theirs which suggests stories and friends to you. I’m a bit wishy-washy on it though. I think a lot of those new groups to play in will show up on Ning.com. That’s still very early in it’s adoption by the masses, but it allows for niche social networks around specific topics. Then you don’t have to go looking for friends quite so much because the topic draws you together. For instance: http://socialnewscentral.ning.com/
Mark, I am really struggling with this issue myself. I get anywhere from 5 to 15 new Twitter followers a day. I really don’t know any of these people. Do I add them? Do I take the time to investigate? It’s sort of crazy. What I have been doing is adding people who “@” respond to me, or who I know. The rest will have to wait until I can get to seeing whether I want to add them or not. Not a great use of time…
- Stuart
Searching for Search’s Holy Grail | Mark Evans
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