I was reading Scott Westerfeld’s Bogus to Bubbly, a companion to his Uglies Series, yesterday, and I loved the reputation system he used in the fourth book, Extras. I wondered… what would happen if everyone who’s publishing in the internet had a face rank? If the awesome “layer” system is implemented over these feeds, and every individual has one.
The more I think about it, the more everything clicked into place. Everyone (almost) does have a feed in the web, but the problem is there’s no central repository of feeds. Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Picasa… all of these are feeds- and I think the solution is Google Buzz. You can connect everything to buzz and it will aggregate all your data into a single, personal feed.
Optionally, you can kick a feed item (yours or not) by adding some text (not less than 50 words, or else it will just become a comment) or some media (pics or video) into it. This will become a Foreground layer (mentioned by Ren Machino in Extras) and if other people has also kicked the same feed item (determined by URL), then those will become the background layer (sorted by facerank, of course).
But how would you compute the Faceranks? Every time someone clicks anything from your feed (a link, a story, a comment, whatever), it counts towards your face rank. The feed clicks expire and after 3 days though, because news gets old (kicked story clicks expire after 7 days). Also, only the clicks from your first 50 feed items count, plus your first 50 kicked stories- this means you can’t just go crazy with your feed because it will push down the news with clicks, but you can’t stop posting when you’re at the top, because your famous stories will start expiring clicks.
And what better platform to deploy the app than on a mobile phone? (Until eyescreen technology becomes viable, at least)
Internet + FaceRanks = The Interface. I wish I had the time to code this up :(
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