Journal tags: revish

Here’s a list of websites on which I have an account and which involve some form of social networking. I’m listing them in order of how often I visit. I’m also listing how many contacts/buddies/friends/connections/people I have on each site.

My Social Networks

Website	Visits	Connections
Flickr	Daily	154
Twitter	Daily	205
Del.icio.us	Daily	4
Upcoming	Frequently	95
Last.fm	Frequently	66
Dopplr	Frequently	96
Jaiku	Weekly	34
Anobii	Weekly	2
Corkd	Infrequently	27
Pownce	Infrequently	22
Revish	Infrequenty	9
Ficlets	Infrequently	4
Newsvine	Infrequently	4
Facebook	Infrequently	59
Ma.gnolia	Rarely	7
Linked in	Rarely	90
Odeo	Rarely	10
Xing	Never	2
Digg	Never	0

This is just a snapshot of activity so some of the data may be slightly skewed. Pownce, for instance, is quite a new site so my visits may increase or decrease dramatically over time. Also, though I’ve listed Del.icio.us as a daily visit, it’s really just the bookmarklet or Adactio Elsewhere that I use every day—I hardly ever visit the site itself.

Other sites that I visit on a daily basis don’t have a social networking component: blogs, news sites, Technorati, The Session (hmmm… must do something about that).

In general, the more often I use a service, the more likely I am to have many connections there. But there are some glaring exceptions. I have hardly any connections on Del.icio.us because the social networking aspect is fairly tangential to the site’s main purpose.

More interestingly, there are some exceptions that run in the other direction. I have lots of connections on Linked in and Facebook but I don’t use them much at all. In the case of Linked in, that’s because I don’t really have any incentive. I’m sure it would be a different story if I were looking for a job.

As for Facebook, I really don’t like the way it tries to be a one-stop shop for everything. It feels like a walled garden to me. I much prefer services that choose to do one thing but do it really well:

• Flickr for photos,
• Dopplr for travel,
• Del.icio.us for bookmarks,
• Upcoming for events and
• Last.fm for music.

Mind you, there’s now some crossover in the events space when the events are musical in nature. The next Salter Cane concert is on Last.fm but it links off to the Upcoming event … which then loops back to Last.fm.

I haven’t settled on a book reading site yet. It’s a toss-up between Anobbii and Revish. It could go either way. One of the deciding factors will be how many of friends use each service. That’s the reason why I use Twitter more than Jaiku. Jaiku is superior in almost every way but more of my friends use Twitter. Inertia keeps me on Twitter. It’s probably just inertia that keeps me Del.icio.us rather than Ma.gnolia.

The sum total of all my connections on all these services comes to 890. But of course most of these are the same people showing up on different sites. I reckon the total amount of individual people doesn’t exceed 250. Of that, there’s probably a core of 50 people who I have connected to on at least 5 services. It’s for these people that I would really, really like to have portable social networks.

Each one of the services I’ve listed should follow these three steps. In order of difficulty:

1. Provide a publicly addressable list of my connections. Nearly all the sites listed already do this.
2. Mark up the list of connections with hCard and, where appropriate, XFN. Twitter, Flickr, Ma.gnolia, Pownce, Cork’d and Upcoming already do this.
3. Provide a form with a field to paste the URL of another service where I have suitably marked-up connections. Parse and attempt to import connections found there.

That last step is the tricky one. Dopplr is the first site to attempt this. That’s the way to do it. Other social networking sites, take note.

It’s time that social networking sites really made an effort to allow not just the free flow of data, but also the free flow of relationships.

One of the highlights of Refresh Edinburgh for me was listening to Dan Champion give a presentation on his new site, Revish. He talked through the motivation, planning and production of the site. This was an absolute joy to listen to and it was filled with very valuable practical advice.

Revish is a book review site with a heavy dollop of social interaction. Even in its not-quite-finished state, it’s pushing all the right buttons with me:

• The markup is clean, semantic and valid.
• The layout is uncluttered and flexible.
• The URL structure is logical.
• The data is available through microformats, RSS and an API.

There’s some really smart stuff going on with the sign-up process. If your chosen username matches a Flickr username, it automatically grabs the buddy icon. At the sign-up stage you also have the option of globally disabling any Ajax on the site—an accessibility option that I advocate in my book. Truth be told, there isn’t yet any Ajax on the site but the availability of this option shows a lot of forethought.

Also at the sign-up stage, there’s a quick’n’dirty auto-discovery of contacts wherever there’s overlap with Revish usernames and your Flickr contacts. This is very cool—one small step toward portable social networks.

One of the features dovetails nicely with Richard’s recent discussion about machine tags ISBNs. If you tag a picture of a book on Flickr with book:isbn=[ISBN number], that picture will then show up on the corresponding Revish page. You can see it in action on the page for Bulletproof Ajax.

Oh, and don’t worry about whether a book has any reviews on Revish yet: the site uses Amazon’s API to pull in the basic book info. As long as a book has an ISBN, it has a page on Revish. So the Revish page for a book can effectively become a mashup of Amazon details and Flickr pictures (just take a look at the page for John’s new microformats book).

I like this format for machine tagging information related to books. As pointed out in a comment on Richard’s post, this opens up the way for plenty of other tagging like book:title="[book title]" and book:author="[author name]".

I’ve started to implement this machine tag format here. If you look at my last post—which has a whole list of books—you’ll see that I’ve tagged the post with a bunch of machine tags in the book:isbn format. By making a quick call to Amazon, I can pull in some information on each book. For now I’m just displaying a small cover image with a link through to the Amazon page.

That last entry is a bit of an extreme example; I’m assuming that most of the time I’ll be just adding one book machine tag to a post at most, probably to accompany a review.

Machine tags (or triple tags) is still a relatively young idea. Most of the structures so far have been emergent, like Upcoming and Last.fm’s event tags and my own blog post machine tags. There’s now a site dedicated to standardising on some namespaces—MachineTags.org has a blog, a wiki and a mailing list. Right now, the wiki has pages for existing conventions like geo tagging and drafts for events and book tagging. This will be an interesting space to watch.