Harry and Andy have been trawling the WWW, and in our firstĀ ‘background research’ post, we share with you some recent news items relating to our project. We are currently analysing existing similar tools to our project idea, and we will post the first of our findings in the next post.
Facebook rolls out ‘interest lists’ (12/03/12)
Facebook reveals a new feature which allows users to subscribe to ālistsā of interests created by Facebook; allowing them to filter their news feeds so they see stories from Facebook pages related to specific types of interest.
Thoughts: something like this could be incorporated into our site ā users could create their own personlised list of tags of similar interests which could be used to filter posts from their friends, e.g. all FPS video games tags under one list and all sports video games under another.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/9134205/Facebook-rolls-out-interest-lists.html
OurPangea is Constructing A New Perspective on Interest-based Networking (06/03/12)
OurPangea wants to create a new interest-based social network. āThe underlying structure ofĀ OurPangea.com is intended to give its users a simple and engaging experience that allows them to share the interests and activities they love with the other people in area, creating mini-groups and communities in the processā.
Thoughts: Their vision appears to be the same as ours, so the idea is not entirely new. How their website turns out could be very interesting.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/03/06/prweb9251515.DTL
When Will Social Search Engine Volunia Deliver its Quantum Leap? (14/03/12)
Volunia is a āsocialā search engine. āWith Volunia, users will be able to see from the SERP if other users connected with the website are online and actually engage in live chat about the page. Rather than seeing personalized results based on which of your social contacts have commented on or posted about a topic, Volunia opens the doors to actually meeting new people associated with a result.ā This could be a very interesting way for people to talk with others who share the same interests.
Thoughts: There seems to be a growing trend in new projects which want to create social networks based on peopleās interests.
Interview with Jack Dorsey (29/12/10)
Interview with Jack Dorsey
Kevin rose, the founder of Digg and one of the investors of Twitter had an interview with Twitter founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey. During the interview, they talked about the history of Twitter and Jack’s personal interests. Kevin asked an interesting question to Jack about how Twitter could filter out specific information. For instance, If someone is only interested in the tweets about technology Jack posted, how the irrelevant tweets can be filtered out of that user’s timeline.
Thoughts: Currently, the timelines of users in social networks are chaotic, especially the ones in Facebook. Many updates from friends in real life, for example, “The hanover is so bad”, are not interesting. If a social network can filter specific information based on users’ interests, the timeline will be much more readable and valuable.