You should have some text on the linked site that says how long the video is. A lot of people are going to look briefly, see no apparent description of what you are doing other than the video, and move on. Telling them the video is only 33 second makes it more likely they'll look.
On the other hand, there is nothing in the imagery in the video that actually helps understand what you are doing. All the useful information in the video is in the audio. It might be worth spending the two or three minutes it would take to make a transcript and put that on the site, too.
>It might be worth spending the two or three minutes it would take to make a transcript and put that on the site, too.
Did it myself, because I despise being forced to watch/listen to A/V without being given a choice to read the transcript.
My (slightly inaccurate, you'll be able to tell where) transcript of the homepage video follows:
Facebook and Twitter are crowded places, your mom/sister/etc are all there. It feels like you're on a big stage talking to an audience.
In real life there are social circles where we're comfortable. Circular uses (a?) new algorithm to build your social circles from your existing data. The conversation is bounded within the circle. Only people inside can participate, so you can be who you really are.
You asked if you should continue working on this. Based on your site, and video, it's hard to say. I really have no actual idea how the site itself is going to function, or what it's actually going to do.
Honestly I'm skeptical. The idea of auto generating groups from pre-existing data isn't particularly new and I'm confident that with enough work it can be done reasonably well.
But once you've done that, then every time I post a status update (or tweet, or whatever you end up calling it I'll be forced to consider which circles(s) I want to share with. This significantly raises the cognitive burden of an update.
Unless you've got a really clever solution to this problem. In which case you've got something very interesting indeed and you should definitely keep going.
If you set up a bayesian filter to classify the status update as you type, that would be pretty rad. Then you'd just have to make sure it's classified correctly before you hit submit.
Or just have different sections/tabs for each of the detected cliques (detecting cliques is a (edit: somewhat) solved problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory) ). It'd be the onus of the user to name the cliques, with a suggested default of what others in the clique have named it.
The thing I'm worried about with "public" cliques is that you need to worry about excluding people. What if someone you don't want wants to join your clique?
I'm thinking they wouldn't be public to the world - only to those in your friends list within those cliques.
That way if someone you don't want joins your clique, it shouldn't matter - if you're not friends with them.
Cliques should, ideally, correspond to smallish social circles. Such that you can easily monitor and make sure the right people are ending up in the 'right buckets.'
For example, excluding family and co-workers, I have two primary groups of friends. Those in my neighborhood, whom I know based on locality, and those scattered around the city, whom I know (and know each other) through mutual interests. One has nine individuals (with more - about 5-10 who are acquaintances, but not truly friends), and the other has eight individuals (with more - again, about 5-10 who are acquaintances).
Maybe I'm a-social or something. But. There is no overlap between these groups. I've introduced a few in one to a few in the other, but there's no reason for them to gel. They probably aren't friends on Facebook. Using cluster analysis, you could easily partition my groups of friends & acquaintances out.
Can you give an example of what kind of situation might confuse this system? What if it took further demographics into account as vertices with directed edges (whereas friendship, in the graph, is an undirected edge), such as age group, gender, location, employer?
I would assume that status updates only travel one hop on the graph, so that even if someone becomes a part of one of these clusters, if you don't have an explicit connection to them your status updates cannot be seen by them.
You could further weight the edges by how often you communicate with each other via the service.
What would probably happen - and pure conjecture here - is that you would be exposing your status updates to either the boundary of a cluster (you are on the outside of the cluster, with a few connections in), or to most of the cluster (you are in the center of the cluster, with many connections in it). Situation one is more likely with friends (unless they are very isolated friends indeed), while situation two is more likely with family and co workers. Likely, you (and perhaps your spouse) would be the only people in your family network that have direct connections to people in, say, a drinking-buddies network. Unless members of your family are also drinking buddies.
I think there are two different issues: 1) sharing sensitive information with the wrong people, and 2) sharing types of information with people who don't care to read it
I think the first issue is solved by defaulting to a smaller circle, like Path or like I would expect Google Circles to have. Most of the people I know who use Facebook intend 80-95% of their updates to the same circle of friends, and would only do a full broadcast when asking for information or promoting themselves.
For the second problem of people receiving your more mundane messages as unwanted, tools should provide more advanced relevancy or even manual filters on the receiving end.
I think anything more complex than these solutions is overkill.
I actually think it would lower the cognitive burden: often enough I want to share something geeky, but then need to weigh that off against the non-tech followers (= increased friction).
No idea if the whole circles concept will succeed though.
Yes, you should. It's much needed. How you do it will determine your success. I've got my own ideas around this, and played around with it minimally last weekend. The first person that gets this right and can execute will win big.
I think everyone's relying on clever implementations that require people to "just try it out" and give it a fair shake to be convinced that it's better technology. No one will give it a fair shake, why should they when Facebook works fine for most people? There's also no attempt at breaching the chicken-and-egg problem of joining a new social network while one's friends are all still on the old one. I'm not saying I have a solution, but I think most people are looking at the wrong problems.
I'm not sure I follow. Isn't that a problem with any market where there's already a dominant player? You're saying that rather than coming up with a better solution, people should be thinking about better ways to get people to sign up?
Why would I use this Facebook thing when MySpace works fine?
Why would I use Reddit when Digg works fine?
Why would I use OkCupid when Match.com works fine?
Why would I use an iPhone when my Blackberry works fine?
You could really make waves if you made a way to better organize your friends visually.
Option A: People's icons as little boxes that I can drag around. Make a venn diagram for groups. When you friend people, you select their group(s) by dragging their icon to the right circle/shape. A video/slideshare by google on here a while ago showed how friend groups and cliques were more varied than just one big group. Play off that concept and let people create their own boxes.
Option B: Create a pseudo-tree of connections. Play to people's egos and show them at the center of the tree. Make the neighboring vertices be groups and let friends branch off the group. The pseudo part comes in when people are repeated within groups: either repeat them as vertices on the tree or have more than one edge coming off. I prefer the later, as it would make for a cooler tree.
But really, whatever you make will be better than facebook.
Also, probably should never let other people see a person's groups. It could cause severe problems socially.
I, along with the rest of my team, created the same concept back in 1998 and by the year 2000, we were averaging between 14 million and 20 million pageviews per day which, even in this day and age, is still a decent amount of pageviews!
But that's the internet -- everything old is new again. The old. Then new. Then...
The concept itself is trivial and not exactly new. It has been around for ages in a form of private areas on BBS'es (remember those?). It is implementing the concept in a way that compares to Facebook - that's where the challenge is.
Also, realistically speaking, the chances of making people switch away from Facebook are really low, even if Facebook shows an astounding lack of foresight and does not roll out a circles-like paradigm really soon. People are lazy and Facebook ties are sticky. Those who are not on Facebook are not there for privacy reasons, so they aren't likely to flock to your service either.
So it all depends what you want to get out of the project. In any case, if you can and decide to continue, it would be a great learning experience on all fronts - from technical to design to marketing - I can guarantee it :)
Facebook did try to implement something like this with their updated Groups functionality, but it still hasn't caught on. There's definitely a wide open gap for somebody to make a usable circles-like social network, but it would probably need to use the Facebook social graph as a starting point to gain any traction, and would probably want to aim for an exit strategy that ends with either Google or Facebook buying them out.
I tried working on a similar idea a couple years ago, but dropped it because I couldn't find enough of a draw to make even myself switch over from Facebook to my network, let alone other people. I wish the OP best of luck in executing this idea better than anybody else has managed to yet.
I would say something Google isn't launching because they can't execute well enough but are still very interested in is the perfect idea to keep going with.
Personally, I believe the secret to social circles is building mechanisms to allow users to better control their current social networks, as opposed to hoping for wholesale migration.
Is part of your plan to allow people to continue to use their existing services/graph, and trying to slowly move them more into your network?
Without a data importer, there seems to be an initial conditions problem, not just from a user acquisition standpoint, but from an algorithmic standpoint. How can it use network analysis to infer cliques when starting with such a small/sparse/nonexistent network?
Maybe you could add this to Diaspora. It may be burgeoning, but it's open source and does have users. Also, how does this differ from Diaspora's aspects?
That said, yes! There is definitely a need for it.
I've also started working on a similar concept. My approach to this problem is to use context based LISTSERVs. The goal is to help make social sharing relevant by targeting both interests and "social roles".
On the other hand, there is nothing in the imagery in the video that actually helps understand what you are doing. All the useful information in the video is in the audio. It might be worth spending the two or three minutes it would take to make a transcript and put that on the site, too.