Bringing the “social” to social networking

We as a user normally sit in the centre of our social networking universe.

Thtat leads us to a few problems:

• there is a huge amount of information, that come down onto us
• we have a various of social platforms, that takes plenty of time
• if we want to collaborate with others, we do not know, what he know

To be the head of our own universe and communicate with more or less digital friends and followers, always trying to bring some order to chaos doesn’t sounds a lot “social”.

What if we start some projects together? Fix some bikes, grill some vegetables or make a new app, in the “real” or “digital” social life?

As you can see, some of the main problems of todays social networking can be solved:

• The members can act as a filter, to filter all the waste of informations, that are not needed for the specific project
• new qualities, like “skills”, “time”, personal “knowledge” enter the stage
• and mainly a project it is about sharing, caring, communicating and interacting, which are essentials of our social being

What apps can be used in our social media platform?

There are an unlimited variety of apps, that can be added in our platform.

The basic plugins of social networking as there are by facebook, twitter, rss-feed and some blog sites can be sure to be in the first version of our platform. this enhance the connectivity to other social media platforms.

Second are the tools of business and community collaboration like statistics, to-do-list, note, callendar, voice-chat etc.

Also the possibility of full-sharing datas, medias (like videos, photos etc.) and documents can be mentioned as a capital step to our connectivity-network. it could be realized in implementing other platforms like flickr,dropbox,skype,youtube and openoffice for documents. Maybe it will be possible, to edit documents live and online.

Another main function will be the creation of knowledge-databases to share with friends like wikipedia. The structure of mindmap can focus an easy and intuitive way to get into knowledge. Cooperations with platforms like wikipedia can be possible.

There are a millions of other possibilities. Feel invited to think of some 🙂

Small preview of the final tool!

You can see here a small preview of some of the functions of the final version:
create a bubble, insert an app and connect other bubbles to a network.
You can use the programm in your browser or as an app at your mobile device.

The preview was built by our Designer in order to show first ideas of design and functions to an interested audience.

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How it began

The idea began end of 2011. At this time i was thinking about a network of people who creat there own space but in real. That means they would have a little pice of land and can decide, what is built there. I planned with a community of a few hundred people. (see for that the project-page:http://socialvillage.lima-city.de (in German).  For that venture we needed a plattform, which integrate tools of organizational management, process developement and social networking. That kind of platform did not exist.

Our first idea about it was, that if we create a platform, it will be project-based not people-based like all the other plattforms.
That is because the focus in our network is an activity not the jabber of many people.

Second is, that in our village-project we need a lot of categories, like a business-category, a science-category, a main-category, a landscape-category etc. And this categories will hace some under-categories.
But at first, not we, but the people’s needs and acticitiys creates the categories, there are not fixed (they come and disapear with their need):

That reminds us to the structure of mindmap, which helps uncategorized notions to be organized in a system, that is very close to our way of thinking.
So we started to combine the social-network-idea with mindmap.

But the third step was, that we would need some advanced tools, like to-do-lists, chats, picture-sharing, vote-tools etc. to develop a usable working surface for a community who plan to develop a real village.-> The apps came into it. With that little tools, we have the opportunity to create simple programs in all kind of ways to solve mostly all problems of developing, organizing and deciding in a social community.

In the end we realized, that this is not just a tool for this projects, it could be the tool for a lot of social, private and economical projects, that need a good structure of communication and exchange of information in one plattform in a very intuitive and brain-friendly design.