Tag: rebelmouse

The killer application for distributed social networking?

How do we make things move along quicker in the area of distributed/federated technology? Things are moving very slowly although it seems most of the components are in place.

When I wrote the blog about Rebel mouse, I found some interesting links to some distributed solutions which could see the end of the likes of twitter and facebook.

OStatus is an open standard for distributed status updates. The goal is to have a specification that allows different messaging hubs to route status updates between users in near-real-time. This spec took over from the OpenMicroBlogging spec of old.

I remember writing about wordpress’s distributed solution a while ago.

The weird thing is I logged into Diaspora again today and not only is it a ghost town (not like G+, but really like a ghost town) but it got me thinking whats different about Diaspora and G+? Now the hype died down, its time to see some very cool uses of Diaspora. What have they got to loose? Dare I say it, wheres the killer application? Wheres the thing which will make people sit up and take note once again? Heck whys no one doing cool stuff with the API?

So what is the killer application which will tip people over? I have some thoughts but what ever it is, please let it happen soon before we’re all forced to beg twitter, facebook, etc for our data back.

Could Rebelmouse be used in distributed dating?

There is something which has been in the back of my mind for ages. Its the concept of distributed and dating.

It drives me crazy to see how closed the online dating world is and even if one breaks the glass, there sharply put out of business or bought. Wheres the innovation, really? I already wrote my rough idea which I believe could change the way online dating is done for the better (I won’t even point out how useful the Okcupid journals are)

On top of that is the problem of being stuck in a silo or stuck on one platform. Wheres the data portability? Wheres the interchange? Look at whats happening with Twitter and the whole controlling yourself or owning your own words.

Anyway, I was reading my feeds and came across Rebelmouse.

The service bills itself as “Your Social Front Page” and while it currently only offers up the ability to connect Facebook and Twitter to power your Lifestream, it does provide some unique features worth discussing.

So I gave it a try and its not bad, certainly a step in the right direction of what I was proposing with my online dating idea. The problem seems to be is its lack of inputs right now, which there working on. So you can only import from Twitter and Facebook. If they had generic RSS too, that would be great. The best part I like is the ability to control the flow (yes flow rather than creation) of subsets of the data. For example I can set twitter hashtags searches to…

  • save tweets to draft, ignore retweets
  • publish only tweets, not retweets
  • publish tweets and retweets
  • save tweets and retweets to draft
  • save tweets to draft, ignore retweets
  • just show timeline

So you can really craft/curate the page with minimal effort… which means you can’t just insert content unless its coming from somewhere else. Imagine if Facebook or Google+ had the same thing instead of deciding whos going to see it. I would suggest this is the more realistic way to manage a timeline because if its online, everyone sees it anyway (imho). But I digress…

I created one as a test for Perceptive Media…. and you can easily see how I could create one for myself or as a replacement for my dating profile, if I wanted too… So the next stage is to move all the stuff away from a central server and on to my own domain. Something I’ll be looking deeper at in the near future.