Over the past few weeks the talk about using WordPress as a platform has intesified, especially with the release of Prologue. This has really got me wondering how far you use WordPress to replace all those social apps that have become so popular.
If you’ve known me for a while you might know that I have a thing about de-centralised, self-hosted services; I have had ideas in mind for a long time about chaining blog searches, i.e. when you search my blog, it also connects to my friends blogs that I think are related and provides some of their content, and so on.
I have an idealised view that perhaps in future we won’t need people like Google at all, and while that may be just a pipe dream I do think there are some areas where that can be reality.
One of my major gripes with all of the social networking sites is that popularity seems to be the be all and end all. While it adds weight in some areas it also means that the really interesting stuff often gets lost. I have never found Digg to be even remotely useful for example.
By decetralising these services so that you plug into your friends bookmarks, and aggregate those, perhaps the worst aspects of the existing sites will disapear.
Imagine your own version of Digg, featuring links from the people you hold in the highest regard and ignoring the trolls and the unwavringly one sided.
This is obviously a very speculative post so far, but I do intend to explore this area more over the next few months, hopefully with some examples I can let everyone have to play with.
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Dan
I had never thought of that – good point
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Andrew Rickmann
Dan, you are probably right; the question then is whether speed is more important than relevance.
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Dan
I find sites like the MySpace, Bebo etc to be so restricting, and often incredibly slow and unreliable. – They very often don’t charge the end user for the service, so have no obligation to provide a fast, or reliable service. – I’m just developing my first plugin for Wordpress, so am a little new to all of this – I love the idea of our sites communicating with each other and removing the need for search engines, however I don’t think our sites will all compare notes half as fast that google returns searches?
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Miriam
I also prefer the self-hosted version of these social media sites. As another blogger pointed out, when we create content on these other services, we are basically propping them up, and don’t actually own our content.
I prefer to have my content in one place under my control, if possible. I also hope to try to put something together with Prologue.
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Andrew Rickmann
Oops, thanks for pointing that out. I even checked it when I was writing it and still got it wrong.
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Moses Francis
I like your centralised idea thing, looking foward to what you come up with.
btw it’s “prologue” :)