Money For Nothing

From the word go, we weren’t entirely sure what we wanted to have in a user’s floe, and it went through several incarnations. I think the first idea was to have it be some sort of personal tv channel, and then it was going to be an interlinked weave of content, which led us to looking at linked data, which led us to eventually drawing up the WRFS concept document, which introduced us to a whole lot of new groups and cool people.

The most interesting part of any journey is not so much the destination, but the “how you got there”. Eventually we decided that we wanted a simple concept, but something that reflected the current trend of social media discovery weighted by your personal social graph. For example, I can see that Josh Lewis commented on a mutual friend’s photo today, and so that might get me to take a look at that photo as it might be from a party that we both went to. At some point in our conversations about this, I jotted down notes on one of my scribble napkins at lupis (our pizza joint / unoffical meeting place) the phrase

How does floe.tv make social media relative to the user? How is the media presented to the viewer such that they feel ownership?

Generally when I’m in scribble mode, sometimes I dont even know what I’m writing, I’m just writing, and at some point I may scan the 20 or so pages of notes I have bound together from the development of floe.tv, just so people can see the evolution, as I get a kick of seeing that from other projects. Anyway, sometimes the scribbles just pop out, and later on I have to think about what I was thinking about. And then decide if I made any sense. Fortunately in this case, it did make some sense since it was the beginning of me understanding why seeing what my friends were doing was such a driving force in social applications today. I mean, sometimes we think we know what we think we know, and then we … well… actually “get it”.

Media discovery along social graph weights is about making media relative to the user.

An image or video from some random person that has people I’ve never heard of in it may interest me little, unless it has something exciting or scandalous or funny in it. However, if I’m related to a person in the picture, or I’m friends with the person, then this media becomes that more real to me, and it has a certain relevance to me. However, there is a lot of media out there, and I will tend to use an application more if I tend to encounter more information relative to me when using it.

Someone feels ownership of media by either being portrayed in the media, or by having a creative influence on the media.

People by nature are very interested in themselves, and they take a keen interest in their own works. If a person feels some ownership over a creation, they tend to spend more time involved with it on some level. A photographer manages their portfolio, a foreman checks on the house he is building, and a gardener tends to their garden. The creative outlet is parental in nature, as our creations are in some ways our children but in meme form in some respects.

So we wanted to take the creative ownership aspect, and then take the discovery along social weights aspect, and create an entity that had strong influences from both. However, a floe needed to be simple and its creation needed to be from an implicit nature, creating more value from the network effect in the process.

Therefore, we decided that a floe is a person’s own unique “channel” of information broadcast by themselves and their immediate people they follow, or their friends. We would really like this to be based on the open social graph, but its not ready yet, so we’re working with a basic asymmetrical follow method for now. A floe gives value in that it contains not only a user’s unique creations of media, but also includes their peers work as well, so that their channel is always syndicating the content of the people they follow, or their peers. If I go to Josh Lewis’ blog with his floe.tv player embedded in it, I may see his content as well as Joe Whalen’s content, as Josh follows Joe, and in this case, this is very relevant to me since I also know Joe, but I didn’t know that he created new content last week.

So now that we’ve established the basis of what a floe is right now, let’s take a look at where we want to take the concept as we feel we have more to add to it.

The next evolution of a floe is to allow producers to share floe.tv media assets with one another. For example, Josh Lewis may share his wedding photos with just me, or everyone on the site. Then I could take those photos and some video of his wedding that I might have, and make a small show documenting his wedding. When his asset shows up in my program, a small credit link will show up over the player indicating who controls the asset and will link to its home page. With this mechanic, at the program / show level we are now mixing content from multiple producers and creating new value on the fly, not only syndicating programs between floes, but also media between programs. Viewers can not only discover new shows, but also can discover new individual assets in the process.

This creates social discovery of media along social graph lines but in a different way,  because now its more of how the asset is presented and used in the program which creates an evolution of the social discovery technique. So we’ve taken the base case of the floe, with the follow technique, and will evolve it in a “n+1″ manner.

The next phase we will implement is linking in assets via XRDS-s + OAuth from ourside data containers such as flickr, myspace, and facebook. Again, we are taking our previous “n+1″ evolutionary step, and evolving it further as we move towards a WRFS-like data linking mechanic.

We will show a syndication link / “courtesy of” link over those assets providing a direct href back to those sites, providing better quality social media search along social graph lines, and in a visual manner. So now we won’t just be composing data inside floe.tv’s walled garden, but we will be linking in data from all over the web, and also sending pageviews back to those properties as users continue to have a more robust social media discovery experience. In recent years, hotlinking an image or video tended to be viewed as a hostile act, but as time goes on, we feel that driving not only traffic to a site but traffic that is more likely to have a relationship or feel ownership of the media. This will give data providers a much better return on their investment as the viewers will tend to be much more involved with the media they came to view, raising the potential for a more cohesive user experience.