Communities’ websites should use FOAF profiles to help users managing their online persona

Frederick Giasson

The social software industry (Web 2.0?) is the new buzz on the Web today. New virtual groups and communities are emerging everywhere at a terrific pace and users generated content websites are becoming the norm.

To create these communities, supporting websites are creating advanced user profiles to try to connect their users based on their interests, relationships with other people, projects involvement, etc. Recently I talked with some of my clients about their projects and each of them needed some type of user profiles into their system. Some user characteristics changed from one system to another but the core characteristics were always the same: name, homepage, geo localization, interests, etc.

It is really great, but as a user of these systems, something is bothering me with all these social websites: I always have to create a user profile, spending my time to create and update it when it changes. For example if I have to change my name (do not worry, it is not in my plans!) then I have to login into each of my user accounts, and change my profile accordingly. It is so boring that people just do not do it: they initially create their profile and forget it after.

The thing is that profiles do not grow-up with the user: the user’s interests will change in the future, but not the profiles’. Eventually the difference between the user and his profile become so big that the profile become a person of its own (okay, I admit that the concept of virtual-re-personification of a profile is weird).

Considering that, I tried to resolve the problem with the next generation of Talk Digger:

 



(Client on the image to enlarge it)

 

  1. Bob have a website (a blog?) on a web server with its own domain name (bob.com). Each month he has to make some changes to his FOAF profile because he gets new interests in life, work on new projects, etc. Considering this, he edits and changes the FOAF profile hosted on his web server accordingly.
  2. The updated FOAF profile is then saved on the web server and available to anyone connected on the Internet.
  3. Bob also have a Talk Digger user account (that is also a FOAF profile). Each week Talk Digger will check if Bob changed his FOAF profile, and if Bob changed it, then Talk Digger will update Bob’s Talk Digger user account accordingly to this new information.
  4. The new information is saved on Talk Digger and all the Talk Digger users instantly have access to that new and updated information about Bob.
  5. Bob’s FOAF profile hosted on his web server and Bob’s Talk Digger user profile are synchronized and reflect the changes in his persona.

 

What is really cool is that Bob do not have to care about his Talk Digger user account. He only has to change his FOAF profile hosted on his web server and within a week the changes will appear on Talk Digger.

It is cool with Talk Digger, but thinks about it if all the “communities’ websites” that Bob is subscribed to would do the same thing? Bob would not have to think about his users profiles scattered around the Web and he would be sure that all his information would be up-to-date.

This is exactly what the new generation of Talk Digger is doing right now and it is working quite fine. Users can import their FOAF profile into Talk Digger and then Talk Digger will crawl their profile once a week or so. That way, in two clicks, they created their Talk Digger user profile with their personal information and do not have to bother with updating their Talk Digger user profile anymore.

The advantage for communities’ websites by using FOAF profiles is that it is becoming the norm to define users’ profiles on the Web. Millions of Internet users already have and maintain their FOAF profile. But the real advantage of FOAF profile is that they are defined using RDF. So a user could extend their FOAF profile as infinitum using different vocabularies and then creating a more-than-human detailed profile. Then communities websites would only retrieve the information they need (or understand) of that profile (one website could only need his interests and another one only his connections with other people but both information would be available if they eventually need it).

This is what it is all about: helping people to manage their online persona. That way they will not have 20 different descriptions of themselves scattered on the Web as time go on.

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Interviewed by James Durbin

Frederick Giasson

James Durbin has interviewed me sooner this week about Talk Digger. You can read the interview on recruiting.com: “TalkDigger Interview: Frederick Giasson”.

You will possibly learn some new things about Talk Digger, about my vision of the future of search engines and about my professional life.

Enjoy the reading.

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Some screenshots of the next generation of Talk Digger

Frederick Giasson

Recently I wrote some things about what I am currently working on for Talk Digger in some of my last blog posts. One picture worth 1000 words, so I will save time by posting 2 screenshots of that next version (generation?) of Talk Digger.

Before getting a look at them, please have in mind a couple of things:

  1. These screenshots are taken from the prototype web site.
  2. This is just a snippet of what is going on.
  3. I post these screenshots to let people know about what I am currently working on, hoping having feedbacks to improve it.
  4. More information about this new version will follow in the next weeks/months.
  5. Beta testing accounts will be available in a couple of months.

I will not describe everything on these screenshots. I will let them talk by themselves. What I would like is that you write a comment to describe what you think is going on. That way, I will know if users “intuitively” know what it is all about or if what I have done so far is a total piece of crap. It’s a sort of test and experiment.

So let me introduce the idea behind this new development, and after make your mind with these two screenshots.

As you probably know, Talk Digger is: a new way to find, follow and join discussions evolving on the Web. So you have three elements: (1) finding discussions, (2) following discussions and (3) joining discussions.

With the current version of Talk Digger, users get stuck at step one. These new improvements to Talk Digger will let its users to go ahead with the step two and three.

With these new features, Talk Digger will become a social platform that helps people to connect with other people that follow the same stories (the premise here is that people that follow the same discussions will also have some personal and professional interests in common). It will also become a search engine of its own, and not only a meta-one.


Tracking page


(Click on the thumbnail to enlarge the screenshot)

Conversation page


(Click on the thumbnail to enlarge the screenshot)

Some people could wonder why I make these screenshots available. They are not a state secret?

Fortunately they are not. Since the beginning, Talk Digger evolved with the ideas of its users. The only thing I hope is that it continues that way and it is for that exact reason why I am posting them today. I hope having your feedbacks and your first impressions about what I have done so far.

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Bookmarking discussions using Del.icio.us and TalkDigger

Frederick Giasson

I just discovered some new behaviour from Talk Digger users while I was analyzing the server logs. I found that some users (intentionally or not) are using Del.icio.us not to bookmark Talk Digger’s website, but to bookmark discussions Talk Digger has helped to discover.

How does this work?

1- Someone finds an interesting page somewhere on the Internet and wants to know who else is talking about it. To demonstrate, let’s take an article of the Washington Post called Bush Speaks Out for Rumsfeld.

2- They copy the URL of that web page, and then go to

http://www.talkdigger.com/?dig_url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401649.html



That way they start a search to find the discussion evolving around that piece of news, using Talk Digger.

3- Finally they copy that URL and bookmark it using Del.icio.us. That way they only have to login into their Del.icio.us user account and click on the bookmark to see the discussion they are “tracking” using Del.icio.us.

It’s great that users are sharing with the Del.icio.us community their interests for a particular piece of news (website, blog, etc) by tagging it with different tag names. Then other people from the community can save that same bookmark and start following the discussion too.

If you read my last blog posts about the future of Talk Digger and what I am working on right now, you will probably find out that this is the same idea that is behind the sort of “portal” that I am developing for the “next generation” of Talk Digger.

The purpose of the “portal” will be to help users find other users with the same interests while following a specific conversation that is beginning to evolve on the Internet. The premise of the idea is that people with similar interests will find each other by checking and displaying which users are tracking the same stories.

For now, what is really interesting is to see how users of two totally different web services can use them in conjunction to answer one their persistent needs.

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