The Horizon

Social networks have been at the top of the totem pole in terms of what’s cool in the world of web technology. Most websites and webapps have begun to add elements of social networking through comments, discussions, messaging, and content categorization and rating. There are sites now like Ning that allow people to create entire networks around any kind of idea they want. Ning has caught on fairly well and there are now active communities such as Blog365, Indiepublic, and my fledgling New Left Network. So Ning provides a really excellent and chic way to create and organize people into a network.

Over at Bricabox, the idea is to create the same atmosphere and implement them in a beautiful way but for content instead of people. I personally think the idea has a lot of potential. There is a similar engine out there called Pligg that allows for Digg clones. While Pligg has a lot of potential in itself, Bricabox is set up to be more open to any kind of content aggregation and categorization. (Check out the Mashable article here.)

I played around with the platform this morning and found it a rather compelling tool. I have been working out an idea about semantic news for a while now and I thought I would attempt to try and implement it in Bricabox. I ran into some problems with it but this is understandable. My ideas around semantic news have some potential to be a fairly radical launch. I don’t expect a product that just launched to be capable of some of the interactions I am looking for. But in the process of twiddling with it I did find it really capable of working with social content. It has a lot of customization that is possible and with a little bit of bling and intuitive design concepts they could mass market this. It doesn’t require a lot of work to figure out but I know that most muggles will find it fairly difficult.

All in all though I greatly enjoy the idea and implementation and I strongly suggest taking a peak at it and it’s capabilities. Here is a little video intro from their frontpage: