Niche social networks face a very difficult challenge when it comes to user discovery. Much of the user to user interactions on such networks are serendipitous. I find someone interesting by chance because their photo was on the home page and I happened to notice that we share interests. Perhaps I found one of their blogs posts interesting or someone I follow is following them and a by chance clicked on a profile photo.

The most common method of arranging users on a main member page include featured, recent, newest, popular, most active, most recently updated, most recently commented and alphabetical. These pages will typically include paging. I find it amusing that MySpace includes paging - try getting to the end of hundreds of millions of users 20 people at a time. Popular and active are interesting methods of sorting in that they rely on a typically unknown algorithm to determine ranking. What makes you active? What makes you popular? Can a user game those systems to ensure they show up near the top?

HumbleVoice includes "Today's Friendliest". That is a fun one most likely calculated based on the number of friends the user managed to acquire that day. It would be really cool if it could measure your attitude. I'd like a site that showed biggest jerk, nicest hair, etc. Base it off of their web presence and automatically make judgements about the user.

Mixx gives their users badges. They reserve a specific section of their member search page to display users with specific achievements. By doing so, if users care to show up on that page, they encourage gaming of the system in a positive way. For users that want to be popular or show up on that page there is then a prescribed method for gaming the system to move to the top, but by doing so it benefits Mixx.

The smaller networks that focus on a specific niche - bird watching, scrapbooking, mountain biking, baking, etc usually don't have the kind of cash flow required to develop sophisticated search systems. Most often they are at the mercy of the platform they are using. Whatever is built in is what they get. Some are better than others. I'm not sure I have a great solution in this space. I'm including screen captures of various user searches from the sites I've examined.

As a side note Tatemae (I and Joel) are working on a user recommender that will analyze a user's online presence and use it to help you find people who might be of interest. I don't know how well it will work, but Joel's really smart so I expect it to be fabulous.

Here's the pictures:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I get that I can connect with old friends and I like that. I can track the daily actions of people I haven't seen in years by watching the constant stream of attention metadata. It's kind of a social pornography. I can watch. I don't have to engage or put any meaningful social effort into the interactions. I think that is the addiction people have to Facebook. You know when your friend is furious with their kids. You can see that an ex boss/girlfriend/bff etc just experienced something rotten and feel the disgusting elation of another human being's misfortune. There's a constant stream of photographs of vacations, parties, pets. It's as if you've just gotten sucked into the Smith's slide show hell all over again but the benefit is that you can get up an pee anytime you need to.

My problem with Facebook isn't that I don't enjoy feeling like I'm a part of the biggest social gathering in Earth's history. Instead, my network has become diluted.

I'm connected with family, new friends, old friends, old work colleagues, business contacts, random stalkers etc. It's like everyone I've ever known is gather in one room and so every time I sneeze I'm worried that I might get boogers on someone since Facebook is tracking that.

The reality is that the real world consists of social bins. We seek out and interact with different individuals based on social context. It's not that we dislike someone (or maybe we do). It's not that we don't want to be friends or that we have secrets. Instead, we don't really want our business contacts being bother with the details of a local get together. We don't always want our neighbors to know about our business deals. I used to love that I could reap the benefit of constant contact with hundreds of people that I've interacted with over the past 20 years without putting much effort in. Now, my concern is that so many people from so many social bins are always listening that I fear appearing stupid so I say nothing. You can't defriend someone even though Burger King tried to make that simple. Not sure how I'd feel about that excuse. Dear friend, you are worth less than a really crappy hamburger.

I think this is the weakness of general purpose social networking tools. They lack social context and thus are exposed to the cycle I outlined above. No one is there so the network isn't valuable. Friends are there and the network has value. Everyone is there and the value of the network dissipates until the value is diluted perhaps to a point where it is worthless again.

Don't take this to mean I have withdrawn from the network, but don't be surprised I don't join anyone's mafia wars or send out the obligatory comment on a birthday. Instead, I'll be there. Watching. Silently....

The code is currently running on:
Teachers Without Borders
Youth for Habitat (English, Turkish)

Get the source on GitHub

Roadmap by Feature

• Develop a site wide news system that let's admins push news from member blogs or groups to the home page. In addition, group managers should be able to push news to the group home page. It would be nice to be able to attach news items to the various widgets so they can highlight specific member or group news items in various locations on the site.
• Make it possible for site admins to filter / push images to the home page.
  

• Let users upload files to their profile.
• Files can be shared with other users or groups
• Enable google docs integration via an open in google docs link
• Enable integration with Amazon S3
  
• enable online conversion of documents into html
• enable collaborative editing of document within the site via fck editor and juggernaut
• Let users to upload files to there projects (just officers or all the members - depend on the permission that the officer gives)
  

• Develop a site wide content search system
• Figure out a search members system. Part of the improve members page process.
• Enable recommendation system. Suggest users that are interesting
• Let users import their contact lists from GMail etc. Use that to search for potential friends
• Let users search for each other via skills or interests
• Improve the groups listing page. Allow for featured groups. Make groups discoverable.
  

• Improve group home page
• Enable file upload directly into groups. Files uploaded here should remain attached to the user doing the upload but be automatically shared with the group. (and give synchronization editing on these documents - like google docs).
  
• Let group admins send email to all members
• Integrate forums
• Add voting/survey mechanism to groups
• Analyze bookmarks shared by group members. Pull in rss from those pages.
• Use recommender to suggest other interesting content
  
• Add events to groups
• Calendering
• Ability to create an impromptu event via SMS. Let users respond via SMS
• Send out reminders via email, IM or SMS
• Add ability to pull in posts(from member's external blogs) or news stories (from member's internal blog) into the group automatically based on tags
• Permissions
• Define roles:
• Pledge - User who has requested to join but not yet received approval
• Observer - User who has joined but cannot participate
  
• Member - User who has joined and can participate
• Manager - User who can can change role of other members except the creator and other managers
  
• Creator - User who can change the role of anybody
  
• Alumni - User who once belonged but who wants to be listed but no longer notified
  
• Banned - User banned from the group who cannot rejoin without admin approval
  
• Creator and managers can specify:
  
• Default role for new members
• Whether or not joining requires approval
• Whether or not the group shows up in the group index
  

• Activity Feeds - Redo activity feeds so that they don't
  have to render by pulling object data from the database every time.
  Instead it should be outputing html with perhaps some simple text
  substitution for the user name, friends etc - like the facebook api
• Add ability to invite someone to a group right from their profile
• Fix portfolio integration with eduCommons
  
  
• Add user stats and integrate with Twitter
• Pull in posts from a user's blog
• Pull in bookmarks from user's delicious
• Fix flickr integration
• Consider other services that might be worth pulling in that express a user's identity (make the site more fun)
  
  
• What does it mean when I click the x next to a feed item?
• add ability to rank people automatically by there posts and efforts they put on the site.
  

• Send out more notifications to users via email.
  
• Let them know when a comment is made.
• there are changes in groups
• there is friend activity
• new messages are received.
• Adding permission system - and let the user to avoid this messages if he likes to.
  

• Build out static page system
• Add zip file upload to add large numbers of files quickly
  
  
• Enable FCK editor
• Enable CMS for users
• Integrate file and photos so that a user can insert their stuff into a new page
  
  
• Enable CMS for groups
• Enable Send2Wiki like functionality for CMS pages
  
• Add Juggernaut to allow for simultaneous editing of files
• Add ability to attach assignments and/or quizzes to content
• Will need a way to gather responses
  
  

• Enable theming engine so that the site is easier to deploy for 3rd parties
  
  
• Create a default theme.
  
  

• Add blogger or moveable type API so that users can add content from a standard blogging utility
• Enable integration with Google docs via this mechanism. Users can publish from their Google docs directly to the site
  

• Add SMS capability so that the system can send out alerts to members.
• Let friends SMS friends
• Enable SMS for groups
  

• Enable Google Translation integration
• Get volunteers to translate the site into multiple languages
  

• Build admin system to let users control site settings
• Let admins send out newsletters or SMS alerts to all members of the site
• Let admins monitor and ban users or content
• Let site admins choose a theme for the site
  

• Generalize profile system so that any fields can be added/remove
• Integrate new profile system with Salesforce
  

• Modify friend relationship system to use follow, friend and mentor
• Add a direct link for accepting a friend to the friend request email
• When click on request link, change immediately to sending request... to indicate activity
• Provide a quick link for getting back to looking at people
• Add the ability to request friends from the profile index page (people you know well

• Make home page photos display in a light box when click on
  
• Improve experience. Let users and groups upload photos into galleries.
  
• Integrate with Amazon S3
  

• Hook link sharing into alexa images so we can show a screen shot of the website a user has shared

• Use juggernaut to add chat functionality

• Examine each page for usability.
  

• Add ability to create an xml site map for crawlers
  

• Remove dependency on prototype. Use only jQuery to reduce script size.
• Clean up stylesheet
  
• Fix broken tests.
• Add new tests as we review code

• Ensure every field where a user can input data is sanitized to prevent xss
  

• Look at ways to easily deploy the site via cap to providers like Morph
• Enable backup of database via rake task to Amazon S3 (perhaps automate via a background task)
  

• Are gravatar's causing us to be sluggish?
• Set up multiple mongrel processes
• Set up 3 subdomain asset hosts
• Analyze and optimize queries on each page
• Use Rails caching
• Asynchronously load non-essential stuff

Back to the iPhone. The phone has wifi. There is a sweet SDL available. Here goes. Build a rich 'intro to the virtual me' application. It can be as simple as I am Justin. I am a Ruby programmer. I would love to meet other Ruby programmers. Make it easy to store a number of profiles then when you attend a conference or social event set the profile most relevant to that setting public. Others in the wifi grid would see this along with the profiles of everyone else participating. Press the friend invite the other person gets a friend request - a virtual business card exchange. Add scheduling into the application so that ad-hoc meetups can be arranged. Throw in Twitter and blog integration so that you can follow what your new friends are saying and you have a powerful social exchange. The network can be formed anew for each event you attend and archived online to a social service. For the contacts you hit it off with you can become friends on Facebook, follow each other on Twitter, or add each other's blogs to your aggregator. Nerdy engineers rejoice. Now even the introduction can be virtual. No more of this messy, inefficient offline human interaction.