ChelseaGirl Jul 03, 2008 03:32AM <compares> it to a musician she knows. Hs indie band'd CD was playing in a record sore and turns out the girl working there knew him too...
ChelseaGirl says Jul 03, 2008 03:32AM the girl said, "EVERYBODY knows Pietro! one might also say, EVERYONE knows striatic
striatic was Jul 03, 2008 03:45AM thinking more that he knew too many people, not that too many people knew him.
Vanlal says Jul 03, 2008 03:50AM You can choose to un-follow certain plurkers. They remain your friends and tey can see your private plurks but you won't see their streams
clickykbd Jul 03, 2008 05:42AM /me wonders if stri is staring at extremely long logs in SocialThing. heh.
Courtney P feels Jul 03, 2008 04:43PM knowing too many people is a new social problem introduced by the internet age.
Courtney P says Jul 03, 2008 04:44PM Although it enables us to keep up with more people, it's also hard to keep up with so many people! Also, it causes tons of distractions.
pzriddle asks Jul 03, 2008 09:46PM what negative dollar value bkerr would assign to knowing one more person
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 12:15AM why don't services have better tools for following large groups of people in meaningful ways?
clickykbd Jul 04, 2008 06:30AM I think the only approaches i've seen are in the data-visualization arena... and usually they just feel like toys and less than useful.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 07:20AM the solution isn't in the visualization so much it is in weighting the information by relevancy and importance.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 07:22AM for example, imagine if everyone had five "points" per day, to spend marking their own plurks as "cool". all other posts would be "neutral"
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 07:23AM you then use a threshold to present a manageable amount of information to the reader ..
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 07:25AM depending on the amount of noise, sometimes the neutral posts make it through the filter, ones with "cool" points always would though.
striatic thinks Jul 04, 2008 07:26AM there are a lot of different ways to handle it beyond "self ranking" .. that's just a start that isn't some visualization based toy.
Vanlal Jul 04, 2008 07:55AM How do you define cool? Setup word filters? Anything that mentions beer or breasts is automatically cool?
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 08:31AM no. you define what your own cool posts are. it's dead simple. people weight their own posts using a limited allotment of points.
GreyArea thinks Jul 04, 2008 08:41AM but what if I actually would have liked another post of yours? (and miss it because of the filter)
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 08:47AM without such a system, you'd miss it because it'd be lost in the total volume of posts anyway.
GreyArea says Jul 04, 2008 08:49AM not necessarily. It might leap out at me because of a word or a phrase. But now, it's hidden unless I do something to "view all" etc
GreyArea says Jul 04, 2008 08:49AM I frequently scroll through my plurk timeline and stop when something interesting flashes by.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 08:52AM that's essentially random, and people who do very few plurks are drowned out by people who do many. punishing casual use isn't good.
GreyArea says Jul 04, 2008 08:53AM No. You THINK it's random. But I'm picking the ones I like. With your system. I'd be forced to look at what someone else likes.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 08:53AM you can still reward active users, since even their "non essential" plurks will get read by low density subscribers.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 08:54AM you're looking at what the person saying the thing would most like you to read. that isn't bad.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 08:55AM in real life, plurk would be like everyone in a room either yelling at the top of their lungs or being completely silent.
GreyArea says Jul 04, 2008 08:56AM You were the one that pointed out the other day that online doesn't have to be an analogy to real life
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 08:58AM it doesn't have to be, but attention is, ultimately, zero sum. that's all this addresses, and it as true online as off.
GreyArea says Jul 04, 2008 09:03AM The assumption you're making here is that sheer volume will take away more of my attention.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 09:06AM it does have to be. more is more. i mean, you end up with this at a certain point:
Vanlal Jul 04, 2008 09:23AM It'd be interesting to weigh in plurkers that one routinely responds to and vice versa. i.e. if you exchange plurks more often with X she ..
GreyArea says Jul 04, 2008 09:27AM OTOH, we could be back at striatic's argument. More volume = more interaction, hence smaller folk drowned out.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 10:01AM vanlal, that punishes lurking. you might be interested in something without feeling the need to respond.
striatic thinks Jul 04, 2008 10:02AM it'd be a good idea for an app or service that's specifically focused on interaction and is willing to sacrifice lurking.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 10:08AM another problem with that is that you'll end up with the same stuff from the same people over and over.
striatic thinks Jul 04, 2008 10:12AM a self ranking method can actually promote diversity by compensating for homogeneity when it becomes an issue.
striatic thinks Jul 04, 2008 10:14AM filters are less important on plurk, where people want a firehose to the face, and more applicable to facebook..
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 10:14AM since both casual and hyperactive users have to coexist in that space.
Vanlal Jul 04, 2008 10:16AM I don't think anyone really wants a firehose to the face. Sure, all the A listers do but they don't really listen even to themselves
Vanlal Jul 04, 2008 10:17AM Filters are essential in any social interaction. More so with plurk, than Facebook , where everyone has a firehose and isn't afraid touse it
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 10:35AM people firehose you on facebook all the time with app invites and photos and all kinds of stuff. they firehose you without even knowing it.
Vanlal says Jul 04, 2008 10:37AM Let me restate - Everyone wants to firehose everyone else in the face. No one wants a firehose in the face.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 10:41AM i'd say most people don't, actually .. the problem is that the only way to deal with this currently is to make fewer posts.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 10:41AM and then you're over-run. you've effectively ceded the network to the blabbermouths.
GreyArea says Jul 04, 2008 10:46AM the people with the app invites, the blabbermouths are the same people who constantly fwd emails to everyone. Simple solution: plonk!
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 10:48AM there's a social penalty for plonk, so people don't do it. also, it's a baby/bathwater situation.
GreyArea says Jul 04, 2008 10:51AM With your analogy, I could choose to stand in a crowded room listening to everyone yelling. Or I could pull my friends out and talk to them.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 10:51AM we have page rank, decent spam filters, personally targeted context sensitive ads .. and yet social networks are still simple directories.
GreyArea says Jul 04, 2008 10:52AM As you pointed out, the ideal situation is to weigh relevancy and importance. How you do that is the real problem.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 10:52AM i'm talking about moving from yahoo version 1.0 -human edited web directory to the sophistication of page rank. it's a similar leap.
GreyArea says Jul 04, 2008 10:53AM Your method gives too much importance to user-selected importance. Like search engines only looking at meta tag keywords.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 10:56AM that's a poor analogy. unlike meta tags, there's a limited currency. and social costs if you lie.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 11:00AM besides, right now users select importance by choosing to say something or not.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 11:01AM and people already do what i'm talking about .. posting the most important stuff to a blog, somewhat less important stuff to twitter
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 11:02AM but you end up having to post and follow multiple services which is inelegant and annoying.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 11:03AM plus the blog might not even hook into the social network .. lame.
GreyArea says Jul 04, 2008 11:05AM Your original problem was for A service to have a better tool to follow a large group of people. Multiple services is another ball game now.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 11:08AM not really. people are trying to use "more services" as a way to better break up large groups of people .. i'm saying that doesn't scale.
striatic says Jul 04, 2008 11:09AM that's why we're seeing thing like friendfeed and social thing crop up .. but they need to solve the original problem as well, and aren't.
clickykbd Jul 04, 2008 09:06PM speaking of monopolizing my social network. (just caught up on the whole thread). haha.
clickykbd Jul 04, 2008 09:07PM FriendFeed is at least allowing you to "like" entries... and providing views sorted by likiness.
clickykbd Jul 04, 2008 09:08PM But it's not self ranking, nor is it a very smart algorithm... popular posts with many contacts still trickle up and causal users down.
striatic thinks Jul 04, 2008 11:33PM this is all because SF wants to be LA soooo badly, it feels the the need to create all these model train set sized star systems.
adonoho Jul 05, 2008 12:53PM Constraints increase signal versus noise. When a plurk costs you money, as it does on my phone, I think carefully about who I follow.
striatic thinks Jul 06, 2008 04:40AM self ranking would be useful for browser vs. mobile alone, potentially. pushing only the most important stuff to mobile devices.
