I like finding shiny new things -- one of the many similarities between myself and the common raccoon. Brian Oberkirch's blog, Like It Matters, is my new favorite shiny thing.
In a recent post, Brian rattles off 11 features he'd like to see on the 'next' social platform.
1) Open ID/BBAuth support to minimize need for another login.
2) Import my peer group (or at least make recommendations based on other services the way 30Boxes does).
3) Contact recommendation. If you see that a bunch of my friends have a contact I don’t have yet, suggest that person to me. “Maybe you should know this person?”
4) Import my profile (can you grab an hcard or hresume and start from there?)
5) If I don’t have an existing social network or profile, allow me
to build a semantically rich network that I can use as a base for other
networking apps (XFN for example).
6) Super simple ‘friending’ (I like the way Vox lets you hover over a photo and add someone with one click)
7) If it makes sense, allow for location awareness.
8) Plan ahead for multi-mode experiences. The mobile version shouldn’t feel like an afterthought. IM, widgets, email, SMS, mobile browser, start page modules. Run the table.
9) Make it simple to slurp things in & out of the system. Use the standard stuff we’re all using to publish a gob of content everywhere. You don’t need your own codec (unless you’re evil; are you evil?). As much as I love the Facebook friend updates stream, I’d like it more if I could watch it as a feed. Again, Vox makes it easy to get to your photos and videos. Not so much to get stuff out of there, but they make import simple.
10) Event integration.
11) Custom dashboard. Netvibes for networking. Give me some modules I can arrange as I like.
Comments