I had a meeting in Trondheim with the developers of Urørt today. I shortly introduced the topic of social navigation and gave them a copy of my draft thesis. I described the architecture of a potential prototype implementation – from the server side to the client side. Then I introduced my proposal for a new social navigation design.
The proposal was basically to make a news feed or friend feed as one can find in Facebook. It’s been my experience that such a feature is a good way for users to comprehend what the latest interesting things of a web site is. The navigation enabled by such a feature is social, passive for the advice provider, and indirect. In addition data for such navigational designs is already available scattered throughout Urørt.
The guys of Urørt had thought of maybe implementing such a feature, but it was not on the top of their priority list. Even if they decided to do so they could use my work for input, and having two competing implementations should not be harmful.
When designing such a feed of recent activity it’s important that it remains potentially relevant for users. In Facebook’s implementation one sees only activity for the people one have befriended. Urørt has no notion of friends (though such a feature could possibly be implemented in the future) but it enables users to become fans of certain bands. To make recent activity relevant for Urørt one could then either:
- provide information about the recent actions of the bands one are a fan of, or
- provide information about the recent actions of users who are fan of a band oneself is a fan of.
Which solution to use is both a social and a technical one. Chances are that you don’t know a certain person which happens to be a fan of an artist in your fan list. This could become annoying. One would at least have to annotate descriptions of actions with what band the relation is composed of:
Eivind Uggedal who’s also a fan of Someband listened to “Somesong”
While I’ve not researched it yet, an solution where one follows fans of similar bands as in ones own fan list could be difficult to implement. It’s certain that such an approach needs more parsing and HTTP requests than just a “actions of bands one are fan of” approach.
We discussed whether I should develop for the standard or beta version of Urørt. The user studies conducted by SINTEF was conducted on the beta version and this version was expected to be released as a new standard version within a couple of days. Therefore my prototype work will be based on the now beta, but soon to be standard version of Urørt. The new features of this version that could be of interest to me is the introduction of band blogs and RSS feeds of certain data.
The developers of Urørt told me that they could provide certain semantic structures for data or use certain class names so that my HTML scraping could be more safe, easy, and stable. I’ve told them that I would try to get by with what the site provided me now, and later request them to add such features. They were very open for input on how to better structure some of the data and how they could leverage Microformats to a greater extent.
We decided that I’d start to implement a news/friend feed and report back to them as my work progressed. Implementing a “barely working” prototype should not take to long. But since this done in relation to my master thesis the code have to be written in a sound way, be safe, and well tested.