I got some great feedback during Thursday’s Science Fair. Apologies in advance if I missed mentioning your name and feedback, some of my notes were a little illegible. Please leave a comment to capture your thoughts.
The terminology “Stream” is no good and confuses everyone. Describing the project as a stream editing and publishing platform is a non-starter. More work needed here.
On the other hand, people would get excited about specific use cases such as a Mozilla profile page or research topic page.
Luis Villa was excited about the possibilities of giving people control over their online identity.
zwol had some ideas around deployment from version control systems instead of tarballs to help user’s keep their installs patched.
Guillermo Movia thought that sudoSocial was just like Feedly and that he should be able to search content for items. I really enjoyed Guillermo’s lightening talk and thought his graphitti Add-on idea is in a very similar spirit to sudoSocial… which is to get more Designers involved with creating the web.
Ryan Snyder liked the idea of owning your own data and suggested pushing the project towards the direction Tantek Çelik has gone with his blogging engine.
Anant Narayanan had a cool idea for people to create FamilyStreams by linking together sources from various family members, so they could keep in touch.
Lucas Adamski responded to the idea that sudoSocial is a middle ground towards MySpace and liked the idea that people can completely control the look and feel of their profile.
Atul Varma visited for awhile (which is an honor) and we did a bunch of brainstorming. We talked about how his “daily edition” tool could be re-built on a platform like sudoSocial. He brought up Howard Reingold’s work around having non-programmer students use Yahoo Pipes to create radars and dashboards. He championed the idea of pushing client side elements into sudoSocial to increase hackability. We discussed his Tweetblog experiment.
A common theme was that the name sucks. Join in and help name it. A related issue is that I’ve learned that it’s much better to talk about concrete use cases before talking about building a platform.
I wonder if the introduction shouldn’t focus on very specific ideas:
- A Mozilla profile page that you control
- A Homepage Elixir (drop in replacement for homepages)
- etc
The science fair hosted several other Drumbeat projects and it was a good chance to discuss the Drumbeat model.