Dylan Greene dot com

Part 1 - Community and Contacts

One of the important concepts of Web 2.0 is community. The problem is that there is no method to integrate all of the Web 2.0 communities we now belong to.

When I meet somebody I want to keep in contact with I need to add their contact info to most of the these systems:

1. Outlook Contacts for email.
2. MSN Instant Messenger for IM.
3. GoogleTalk if they don't MSN IM.
4. Skype if they don't use MSN or Gtalk (AIM is for kids!).
5. LinkedIn for business contacts.
6. Cell phone for calling on the go and knowing who's calling me.
7. MySpace if I want to pretend to be hip.
8. XBOX Live Friends List if the person is a gamer.
9. Subscribe to their blog if they have a blog worth subscribing to.
10. And if I wanted to do this right... add this person as a friend on TagWorld, Flappr, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Consumating, Friendster, Orkut, Yahoo 360, Tagworld, and a dozen others I'm forgetting or leaving off on purpose...

Web 2.0 was supposed to make my life better! Now I spend more time managing my friends and contacts than talking to them. Half the people in my Web 2.0 communities I no longer remember who they are or why I added them. The problem is that we have too many collections of contacts to manage and they communities are not working together.

The Web 3.0 Fix:

One community system to rule them all!

I envision a decentralized contact storage network for storing our contacts. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and small companies would all offer this as a free service. Use the one you trust the most, with the best UI, or run your own service, it doesn't matter.

For each contact we describe how we know that person [friend, co-worker, family, customer, school, common interests, met at conference, etc] and who can see them [just friends, just co-workers, everyone, nobody, etc].

You choose which services can see your contacts, and what types of contacts they can see. Maybe you don't want the people you MySpace just because they had a nice photo listed as business contacts on LinkedIn.

Some cool benefits:

1. One place to add and store our contacts.
2. When we get an email from somebody we don't recognize, our email programs will inform us how we know that person using information from LinkedIn, MySpace, or any of our others services.
3. When joining a new service, instantly add contacts instead of manually finding them again.
4. Services without communities could use this to add community features without more work for the users. For example, Amazon could show recommended books based on what your friends are buying.

Who is building this?

As far as I know, nobody is. If you know otherwise, let me know!

With all of the hype behind Web 2.0, my hope that people aren't thinking this is the answer, the end game, the best that we can do. This part one of a six-part series. I will describe problems with Web 2.0 and how they can be fixed. Look forward to radical new ideas, insider interviews, and heavy usage of bulleted lists.

- dylan

A friend IM'ed me this:

Heck yeah! I have no idea what the book is about, but in my opinion the best reason to buy a book (vs library) is for how it looks on the bookshelf. With art like this, it should make a fine addition to even the most particular of literary collections.

Click for the full image.

No Amazon link yet - according to the author it won't be out until this summer.

The screenshot to the right is from a brand new Lenovo N100 laptop (formally IBM) .

Why do hardware manufactures ship machines with such abuse of the Start Menu?

"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
- New Yorker, 1943

I hope Windows Vista gets a major overhaul in this area, and not just a way to search this mess. Companies should be disciplined for littering our Start Menus like this.

Look - a sexy consumer device that doesn't try to look like Razr or iPod. Is boxy the next new thing?

Now only if they'd the silly trend of black-and-silver trend almost all cell phones and laptops have today. Black-and-silver has become the fake-woodgrain of the '00's.

The feature list is mighty impressive too. I don't know if this will ever come out in the US.

Wondering what Microsoft is showing off at Mix 06 in Vegas this week?

Thanks to a friend at Microsoft you can watch it live:

Watch Mix '06 Video Stream (Windows Media)

Not seeing anything? Check the schedule for the next session.

My friend strongly recommend tuning in at around 11:30 PST (2:30 EST) for an unexpected and very cool demonstration from Yahoo.

If you miss the live video stream then check out the daily re-caps from the Mix 06 blog.

Who says all the cool new web stuff has to happen in the San Francisco area? Tomorrow evening I'll be attending DC 2.0, our own local unconference on the next generation web.

Some local companies that will be represented:

• CollectiveX
• Near-Time
• Blogdigger
• SMBLive
• ZiWiki

Time and place:

Mar. 15, 2006
7 to 10 PM

Mintz Levin
12010 Sunset Hills Rd
Reston, Virginia 20190
Google Map

There's still time to register.

They didn't allow cameras so this is from my cell phone.

On Monday I'll be attending an event in DC hosted by President George W. Bush. He will be speaking about defending democracy against terrorism.

Any suggestions on questions I should ask, assuming they let us ask our own questions without approving them first?

Real-life Simpsons Intro...

A friend sent me a story that was mostly true, but some details were changed. I found this out through the urban-legend-busting site Snopes.com.

We've all seen a blog entires about stories that seemed real enough but were actually urban myths, totally made up, or originally posted on parody news sites.

Here's my idea: A tool that automatically looks up content on resources like Snopes.com and lets users know when something they are about to email, post, or share is not real. It would work behind the scenes, the same way anti-phishing and anti-virus software.

A tool like this would help make all of us smarter by reducing the amount of fake information clutter we run into every day.

I already have an idea for version 2: political spin detector. Of course there have to be several different editions of that one depending on which resources our users trust for their information.

Here's my "Why didn't I think of that, I could have built in an hour" site of the moment:

http://www.listible.com

The idea is that anyone can create any list they want (like Amazon's lists), and anybody else can add to it, and everybody can thumbs up or thumbs down the items in the list.

Add a few more features and this could be a real winner. I hope to see an easy way to show lists on other sites, like blogs and myspace. I also hope they add something with location, so making a list such as best local Chinese takeout would be a cinch to find rather than trying to guess the tag. Today with tagging, location is very difficult. You might need to search for DC, WashingtonDC, DCMetro, a zip code, or who knows... And finally, as Dave Winer might ask - Where's the OPML for these lists?

I created two lists to see if people add to them. You might recognized the sites I put in there.

http://www.listible.com/list/best-sites-for-college-students

http://www.listible.com/list/best-free-blogging-sites-and-services