Thoughts on relevance and precision sharing in social networks
The internet and social networks connect us in fascinating new ways. We all agree on this. Opinions, suggestions or questions can be broadcast to hundreds and thousands simultaneously. This is a good thing — it democratizes the world and it lets good ideas, memes, great content and opinions spread.
However: We are currently sharing with shotguns. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook encourages shouting and sharing to everyone, as if all the people in your life — your colleagues, aunts, former classmates or random internet followers — have anything in common. For the most part, this creates noise and an excessive amout of updates on everyone’s newsfeed. This in turn, makes valuable information or images drown.
As our friend and following-lists are growing, our social networks are filling up with noise and content that does not matter to us.
How can we solve this? Can we choose sniper-rifles instead? Is is possible to envision a system of sharing, where everyone has a newsfeed filled with relevant and interesting content, curated by their friends and extended virtual network? I think it is.
What do you really care about when you friend or follow someone? On Facebook, it might be the actual content of their lives. (On a sidenote, we see that Path have already started adressing the information overload in social.) On Twitter, it might be because of people’s interesting articles, videos or opinions. Fair enough. But everyone is not interesting all of the time. And if you’re interested in graphic design you’ll need to subscribe to a lot of people before your Twitter feed gives you any real insight into graphic design as a topic. Which in turn also means lots of unrelated noise.
So what if we could break it down to topics? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could connect to people through common interests instead? It would be a new way to spread things online — not to everyone at once but to people who really care.
These are thoughts we started out with when we started building Kontribit. A fundamental choice we made was making the users share in relation to specific topics, not from their persona directly.
We have envisioned and built Kontribit as a combined personal-and-group archive/bookmarker and social network. When each user collect stuff they like into different topics, they’re also sharing that content to other users on the network.
Each user can collect great content from the internet by themselves or in small groups with like-minded individuals. While they collect content they love, they are also doing the heavy-lifting of organizing all of the content. Other users can follow collections on topics that they find interesting, and are in fact outsourcing their surfing to other users that they trust to find quality.
We believe that content is best shared between small groups of people with similar interests who curate for each other or the world.
The result is an always relevant newsfeed, collected by people you trust in their respective fields.
