28th
The @oo5 black hole
At the moment @oo5 is a black hole. You review stuff, it gets sucked into oo5.whatiminto.com and then… nothing. I’ve been pondering this problem since I started the project.
For me, reviews are more permanent snippets of communication than standard tweets. They’re also more structured. I wanted to be able to store them somewhere - and in a way - that would make them easy to get at later. So my first priority was to appeal to people like me: people who wanted a permanent record of what gigs they’ve seen, movies they’ve watched, places they’ve eaten. Out of Five could be a micro-micro-blog derived from Twitter, and promoting Contributors to the main navigation was intended to promote this.
I also wanted to make that data as easy to extract and reuse as I could. People with a certain degree of technical expertise might want to pull their reviews into their own websites or applications. To those ends, I made sure that RSS and XML feeds were available for all the useful URLs to anyone familiar with RESTful resources. I also marked up the reviews as microformats to give anyone with the will another axis of access.
What I haven’t done yet is establish any real value for the rest of the world. If you’re not a compulsive obsessive diarist, a programmer or a blogger then what’s in it for you?
Adding some form of recommendations seems logical.
The most obvious way of doing recommendations is by using your social network. I can get your friends from Twitter and tell you what they’ve been reviewing… But it’s Twitter and you’ve probably seen their tweets already. Result? Not very compelling.
The scariest is working out a mathematical recommender. “People who liked the same stuff as you also liked…” The catch is that I’m not really a programmer and maths has never been my strong suit. That said, a quick flick through the Programming Collective Intelligence book has turned up a vector space algorithm that I could port. Interesting.
The simplest would be to send out a chart every week. If you mostly review films I could post you the week’s top films that you’ve not reviewed, for example. It’s simple, which is good but I wonder how much fun it’d actually be for people. Would it make it worth your while? I’m not sure.
At the moment I’m coming down on the side of simplicity but I would absolutely love to be able to recommend someone something that they found genuinely interesting. Hmmmmmm.
