Social Networks Turn the World Upside Down

While developing Farmfoody.org over the last two years, we came up with a very similar idea independently. Most sites designed to help you connect with local organic farms require you to search for farms in your locality. We thought that people shouldn't have to search for stuff, it should come to them automatically. If you wanted some fresh locally grown tomatoes, instead of searching for for farms with tomatoes for sale in your area, you just check your own profile to see if any of the local farms you are friends with have tomatoes available. This might be through a map of local farms or through a farm you have become friends with that has put out a bulletin about their new tomato crop. We decided that a social network was the best way to direct and filter this information to the consumer and enable them to make unexpected connections with farms and foodies whose interests and connections mirror their own. People could explore the world of small independent farms and the people who love good food.

The strange thing about comparing Myspace to Facebook is that they are almost opposite worlds. One is completely open with everything literally hanging out all over the place and the other is completely closed without much showing, like an iceberg. Facebook is a set of private networks without any need for the public to be involved or view their content. This could also be true for Myspace. There is really no need for Myspace profiles to be public any more than Facebook. Except that people and musical groups for example use their profiles as public faces, as advertisements and ways to communicate with the public beyond their circle of friends. There really is no way to search Facebook for user criteria other than as a person. One Myspace there is nearly unlimited criteria about the person and their interests to search. Our site, Farmfoody.org will have to seek some balance between these two.

When I go to Digg, I am presented with stories that have been voted to the top. "Voted on by who?" I ask. Every Tom, Dick and Harry? I find sites like Digg (or kuro5hin, Slashdot and other pioneers) filled with content moderated by voting systems unsatisfactory because I do not know or trust who voted on them. What I think would be a better solution is to receive content other people belonging to the same group think is important. This is the facebook model, which could be extended to all kinds of information. I would be much more likely to use a Digg-style site that showed me all the feeds or stories my friends found interesting than a general news site. Why not use the Google Reader model within this context?

Why not take it further? Why not build a site where people read RSS feeds and then share them within a social network instead of the public? Then I could see what my friends think is worthy of sharing. They could vote on the "interestingness" of items in their own feeds and profile and these could be automatically displayed in my profile. Any content they contribute could be monitored from my profile. Any number of layers and methods could be used to "mashup" the content appearing in my profile, either for public or private consumption (depending on the orientation or facing of the site). The social network is a way of utilizing the implied stamp of approval friends give to filter content. Instead of randomly searching about the web or looking at content voted on by idiots. I believe we will see more of social networks being used to filter content.