Lifestrea.ms Blog

Richard MacManus excellent article “10 Future Web Trends” inspired me today to start a series on articles to share my thoughts along with the development of our new startup YoWhassup.com. I hope it´s interesting for you to get an insiders view and see which pros and cons we’re going through while designing such a complex service. On the other hand it’s also an experiment with which I hope to get some very early feedback - even before launching the beta.

Richard covers a lot of thoughts I had in mind while designing YoWhassup.com. Let´s step through one by one:

I. Semantic Web

I studied semantic web projects for a long time now and there were always 2 reactions of mine: Euphorical while hearing of a new project for the first time and disappointed when having a look on the outcome later on.

The problem is, that semantic web projects have been much to academical for a long time with techniques like FOAF, SparQL, RDF etc. The idea of “lightweight semantics” like MicroFormats has changed this a lot and I have decided to drive adoption forward by using MicroFormats on all public accessible profiles and pages.

This is not only a step towards a semantic web, but also to a website that is its own API. Everybody can build his own applications on top of the MicroFormats that are embedded in YoWhassup pages. It’s also a step into the direction of Open Social Networks where users can import and export their data freely.

Based on these ideas the design challenges for YoWhassup are on two fronts:

The first - we have to make it as easy as possible for the user to get his social network to work on YoWhassup too. So what possibilities do we have?

The import of XFN tagged links (as it is possible with Twitter), doesn´t help a lot, because we do not get your friends email and that way have no chance to contact your friends and tell them that they are part of your new network on YoWhassup.

The import of hCards would work, if there was enough adoption yet and if people would be willing to put their email on a public accessible page. My tests have shown that this is simply not the case - most people seemingly fear to get spammed, and of course this really is a big problem.

So I decided to go for another possibility: email. What is your preferred tool to communicate with your friends, your business contacts and even your family far away in your hometown? Email. The real evidence is, that YoWhassup should make your life easier, help you on getting things done and not overwhelm you with even more information and even more so called “friends” that you’ve never met and that are only gathering contacts like other people are gathering bonus miles. With this intention in mind your email contacts are perfect for giving you a head start on YoWhassup. They are your real social network!

The technical solution works like this: You have the choice to import contacts from Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. And if you really want to go with it, you can also import from Orkut and MySpace, Facebook coming soon.