
Business Idea: Online Community Integration - mdemare
http://philip.greenspun.com/business/online-community-integration
======
DanielBMarkham
This is an idea that I've had for years, and the opportunity is so ripe the
damn thing about writes itself.

In fact, without reading this, I just asked HN if anybody else would be
interested in collaborating on something just like this.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=896015>

Aside from the business opportunity, it gets down to who owns your friendships
and your communications with them, you or some service? I say that that the
farther away we get from each user owning his own social network and
correspondence the farther we're going towards another monopoly situation that
will take drastic action to fix. So this isn't just a business idea, it has
some serious roots as well.

~~~
cschneid
A side project our company (Citrusbyte) has been working on is OpenFriends
(<http://getopenfriends.com/>). It is an universal friending system, which
then can be subscribed to by various services (myspace, facebook, forums).
We've been busy with our day jobs (consulting), so we haven't had a chance to
polish it quite as far as it could be but your comment about users owning
their own social network immediately made the connection in my head. Check it
out, and shoot any feedback my way.

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rythie
This is essentially what we have been writing at friendbinder
[<http://friendbinder.com>] for a couple of years now. There are also a number
of other systems attempting the same thing. One of the key issues is lack of
standards in the APIs and RSS/Atom are not designed for this.

~~~
beza1e1
Hey, i like this. It looks like a cheap copy of Friendfeed, but it is what
Friendfeed should have become. Friendfeed focused on lifestreaming instead of
aggregation. I'd just need Tumblr integration and i could ditch Friendfeed.

Way to go!

~~~
rythie
FYI, as it happens, it's not a copy of anything, friendfeed didn't exist when
we started. It's just taking us longer because we don't have ~10 ex-googlers
working on it.

Your right it's what FriendFeed should have done/become, though for some
reason they didn't.

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jlees
_The only non-standard challenge presented by this project is the need to
develop screen-scraping regular expressions for individual online communities
that are run on custom software._

My spider-senses are tingling. I don't like the sound of this one bit.

I do like the sound of aggregated community, though, but here's an interesting
question: how many communities is the average real person part of, these days?
Aren't half of them on Facebook now? Plus, doesn't Google Wave.. sort of..
provide an alternative? Or maybe that could be the ultimate destination, the
viewer if you will, on this stream of aggregation.

~~~
mrshoe
I'm starting to see the beginnings of an new trend here. Since Google Wave
does everything and replaces everything on the internet, I have a feeling that
all new startups and business ideas will garner the response, "Doesn't Google
Wave do this already?"

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nopassrecover
I think I must have missed something. This doesn't seem like a new idea at
all.

The existing methods are described as either RSS or one giant site (ala
Facebook) and the solution is described as a giant news aggregator (with some
social based filtering) coupled with each community site integrating OpenID.

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bokonist
I've wanted something quite like this. I want to be able to discuss any topic
with a group of thoughtful people. Most communities instead restrict solely by
topic. Basically, I want the old usenet back.

I'm not sure if the best solution is to scrape a bunch of communities, or just
create one central site, that becomes so powerful it sucks in all the
great/people conversations (eg wikipedia).

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davi
comments on the article at the author's blog:
[http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/10/21/why-cant-i-
che...](http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/10/21/why-cant-i-check-all-of-
my-online-communities-on-one-page/#comments)

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hxa7241
It is not until half way through that one realises . . .

> "The only non-standard challenge presented by this project is the need to
> develop screen-scraping regular expressions for individual online
> communities that are run on custom software."

. . . that the whole idea has a notable form: a simple, mundane problem,
hiding a big, hard problem. If you could solve the hard problem you would
think you could do much more than help Joe Average with photography and
flying.

> "This can be done on-demand."

It is perhaps a test of one's bias: from a business viewpoint, you probably
would not think anything of it, but technically it is naggingly
unsatisfactory.

It would be a great idea if it found some neat shortcut for the big hard
problem that happened to specially fit the particular mundane problem . . .

~~~
rythie
Create an API, implement it in WordPress, phpBB, moveable type and get
everyone else to implement it - then writing an aggregator would be a lot
easier.

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ojbyrne
Isn't this essentially a more fully developed friendfeed?

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mapleoin
This looks a lot like what <http://ubervu.com> is doing

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cd34
<http://boardtracker.com/>

