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.

The second front we have to deal with, is on the output side of YoWhassup. What do I mean with this? Well, first you have to undestand another basic design principle: YoWhassup hast the target to be the one place for all your facettes of your identity. Your business identity, your private identity, your local and family identity. You might not want to share your private life with your business partners and you might not want to share your business contacts outside your company. So how can you accomplish this?

YoWhassup goes a natural and simple way to put you in control: Every contact, every information that comes in from one of your lifestreams and every information you generate yourself is asked to be shared with one of your networks: with one simple click you decide if you keep a contact secret, public, or share it with e.g. your professional network. The same way the RSS feed of the local newspaper you read might be also interesting for your family, but not for your business contacts. And your private post about fishing in the Amazonas river should only appear in you fishing buddies network, not on your professional profile.

This sounds like more brainwork for the user first, but you get used to it quickly and it´s really effortless in the end.

You say “you mentioned a profile, is this public?”. The answer is: you not only have one profile, you have a separate profile for every network (professional, family, local, …) and you can choose for every profile if it´s public or not. Full control. Easy handling. Profile pages stuffed with microformats and FOAF and that way machinereadable. You even get one OpenID per profile and can separate your usage that way, depending on the sites you visit, but without loosing central control of your identity (identities).

If you think this is too geeky, rest assured: I’m gonna cover the topic OpenID in a separate post.

Huhh, as this post is getting longer and longer, I think it´s time to teak a break and leave the rest for some other posts. Just to give you a preview and keep you curious, these are the topics I will deal with, referring to Richard MacManus “10 Future Web Trends“:

Part II: Once more semantics - this time it´s about tagging: partially auto-generated, partially effortless integrated into your micropublishing. There are a lot of smart social things you can do with this, the most obvious is a fully automated del.icio.us kind of service.

Part III: Artificial Intelligence - the brain behind the scenes brings a new level of comfort into social networks: At YoWhassup you get connected (if you want to) based on what we learn from your activities, you do’nt have to be active yourself anymore and search for likeminded people and resources (anyway you can do that if you want).

Part IV: Mobile - this means sending and receiving YoWhassup updates from your phone, but also enhancing the information you get based on semantic data - your geolocation! Again thsi has to be effortless and pure fun to use.

Part V: Attention Economy - YoWhassup is the first site to consequently bring all your personal information together in one place. This is also true for your attention data. How we do this? Keep tuned, this is a killer!

Part VI: Web Sites as Web Services - we´re really into this topic and try to publish our API already during our private beta.

Part VII: Personalization - this is really what YoWhassup in the end is all about: giving you, the user, the right information at the right time and place. And this not only means filtering out the crap, but also detecting new, trustworthy, important and interesting people, news and knowledge that help you live your life with more comfort and ease.

You see, YoWhassup covers at least 6 out of ten future web trends from Read/Write Web, that´s a good percentage for a new startup I think . Just to mention: You can take for granted that two more points are covered without being explicitly mentioned - online video can be integrated in your incoming or outgoing lifestreams at YoWhassup and also rich internet apps can be build on top of our API.

So keep tuned for more to come!