Facebook changes I would like to see Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann
Jul 23

The River: A strange dream and the death of repeated friend requests

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I sometimes have strange tech-related dreams that stick with me. At first I ponder them, and then normally I curse myself for not dreaming about something more interesting.

A couple of nights ago I dreamed about creating a new product called “The River”.

In the dream I realised that email, rss, igoogle, facebook, etc are all the same thing at a high level. They are all about events coming into a stream with different views of the data. Facebook does well as it has a nice river of information so you can login to the main page and you get a good view based on time and friends. Email does it well too, for the use case of people communicating. Feed readers do a good job at reading peoples thoughts (although they can catch many other events of course).

In the dream I developed an application called “The River” that was a filthy rich UI that showed your one main river of events, and various rivers that would run into the main one.

The river would contain:

  • Incoming email
  • Status events from fb, twitter, pownce, Cool.Next
  • Event invites
  • Blog entries via rss
  • Photos uploaded
  • etc etc.

The user can configure all of this, so normally you would see tier one events which for me would be:

  • Email to: me, and a few lists that are important
  • Blog entries from a trusted set of friends (note: not ALL friends)
  • Status events from my good friends (note: not ALL friends)

As a way to get people sucked in, dream Dion did something quite smart. When a user signs up, they are asked for their FB/gmail/linkedin id to find people / invite them. Most services do that right now. However, there is an extra check box which states “if you see me connected on another network, automatically connect me here”. This means that you don’t have to keep accepting friend invites from the same people again and again. You should virally, quite quickly, get all of your contacts sync’d up. This is a small but important feature, and is one that services should implement. It drives me nuts to meet a new interesting person and then have to join up on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. It is such a pain that each person normally only joins together on one of these sites, and fragmentation happens. It doesn’t make sense that I have 10 times as many connections on LinkedIn just because I have been on that site for longer.

Also, all of The River data is open, so it can become the place to hold your contacts. It sync’d with Address Book. It outputted FOAF and XFN.

I wish I had time to implement it!

13 Responses to “The River: A strange dream and the death of repeated friend requests”

  1. Simon Brown Says:

    I don’t know how to send you a TrackBack, but I think The River is a fantastic idea. :-)

    http://www.simongbrown.com/blog/2007/07/24/uber_feeds.html

  2. David Precious Says:

    Nice idea!

    Sounds like Mugshot[0] on steroids :)

    Don’t know how well Facebook would play along with making data accessible though… perhaps there could be a Facebook app which exposes your data, friends lists etc in a usable format (XML or something). Now there’s something to write, if it’s not already done….

    [0] http://www.mugshot.org/

  3. andhapp Says:

    You are very creative… estimable…

  4. David Hayes Says:

    It’s a neat idea. I’m reasonably sure Facebook is going to be the social site to end all social sites. Perhaps the thing to do is implement The River as a facebook app?

  5. David Hayes Says:

    You’d have to call it Rivr of course :)

  6. David Roussel Says:

    This is similar the Timeline page in Trac, where all commits, page edits and opened and closed ticket events occur on there. I’ve written a plugin that implements the ITimelineProvider (or something like that) so that now I have all continous integration builds show up there too.

    This a per project developer version of your vision, and not so filthy in it’s richness.

    David

  7. David Roussel Says:

    This is similar the Timeline page in Trac, where all commits, page edits and opened and closed ticket events occur on there. I’ve written a plugin that implements the ITimelineProvider (or something like that) so that now I have all continous integration builds show up there too.

    This a per project developer version of your vision, and not so filthy in it’s richness.

    David

  8. Anthony Eden Says:

    @David Precious:

    “Don’t know how well Facebook would play along with making data accessible though… perhaps there could be a Facebook app which exposes your data, friends lists etc in a usable format (XML or something).”

    Facebook already has an open API – is there something about the API which would make it unusable for the purpose described by Dion?

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  10. Brad Neuberg Says:

    This is a very powerful, interesting idea. Right after I read this a part of me wanted to go in a corner and quickly hack together a prototype of this… Email (and attention streams in general) desperately need some shaking up…

    Best,
    Brad

  11. Brian Kenyon Says:

    It would be great to add voicemails to this stream as well. I am personally using http://www.callwave.com that emails every voicemail as an mp3 attachment to every email. My only issue with this is that I still need to go to callwave.com to clean out the inbox or check it with my phone and this doesn’t sync with my gmail account.

  12. Rey Bango Says:

    This reminds of the Snowl extension that Mozilla was working on.

  13. Jeffery To Says:

    Sounds like Raindrop: https://mozillalabs.com/raindrop

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