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Joss Whedon's "Dr. Horrible"

From someone that won't make it happen

Here is what should happen:

• Feeds and feed items need to be taggable privately, and organizable by friends and globally.
• Feed items need to be prioritizable by interest and priorities must be fluid. Essentially, a very robust search feed.
  
• Feed items need to be filtered for commonality so that the same item from multiple sources are properly aggregated and attributed.
• Socially, the model need to be way more sophisticated than friend or not friend. I want the ability to mark comments and posts I like and the more I like someone’s comments, the more their feeds are added to my feed, preferably, based on my prioritization. This is not to exclude the ability to specifically assign someone as friend, just augment it.
• No new site should not support OpenID. Every site needs it ASAP.
• Comments should be threaded.
• Everything has a permalink.
• Everything editable is versioned.
• Comment delegation. A distributed comment system where all of a user’s comments are saved at a user-specified remote site. They can be duplicated if there is a method for managing updates at any location. (not really scalable but I love the idea).
  

friendfeed is so close to what I’ve been wanting.

On the nature of the social aspect of the net

To more accurately respond to this requires more than 140 characters at a time.

My argument is simply that the social aspect of the net should more closely model how humans build (and destroy?) relationships. It is an organic process in that, I don’t see someone and think, “friend”? No, ok, then “fan”? The process of building relationships online isn’t that much different than it is offline. As Jill put it so nicely “To me, friendship feels the same online and offline.” This isn’t to mean that the net as a whole should duplicate human relationships. But, to me, an organic approach to building online relationships makes for a better online experience.

striatic says *”… because i don’t really know any of you.”* .. the prerequisite is an earnest interest in the other person, not physical proximity.

There was no mention of proximity making the difference in whether I know someone or not. After all, I did say ‘I don’t divide people as “RL know”/”Net know”.’ The point I was making was that plurk says Only add REAL friends to your friends list.

striatic says *It should be natural, [like] in real life.* if it was like real life, we either wouldn’t need plurk, or we wouldn’t need real life.

That is the comment that prompted by response about mutual exclusivity.

nicerobot disagrees. online and offline should compliment each other. they are not and should not be mutually exclusive.

I think it’s clear that “either/or” means exclusive. Either I use plurk or I remain in real life. I can’t combine the two and still expect online to resemble real life.
The continued discussion seems to revolve around this issue moreso than the original issue of “friend” versus “fan”.

striatic thinks in order to complement each other, they have to be different.

Although I said

nicerobot agrees w/stiatic. they are are different in the fact that online is not offline and offline is not online.

I don’t actually agree. The comment was meant to exagerate the fact that I actually don’t think there needs to be any difference to be complimentary. I think it’s simple to prove? 1 + 1 = 2.

striatic was n’t saying they should be mutually exclusive to begin with, anyway. different, not divorced.

I already addressed this. “we either wouldn’t need plurk, or we wouldn’t need real life” is a statement of mutual exclusivity given the context.

striatic thinks plurk’s friends/fans system is more honest. no one on myspace has 9000 friends, but many have 9000 “friends”.

This is approaching my point all along. 9000 “friends” implies 8975ish fans, some, over time, may become real friends while some friends may drop from real friends. That is, it’s organic. Or maybe a better term is fluid.

striatic says the internet is popular precisely *because* it is so crude. on a variety of levels. if it was refined, it wouldn’t work.

The converse of that statement is exactly as meaningful:

the internet is popular precisely *because* it is so refined. on a variety of levels. if it was crude, it wouldn’t work.

The problem here is that my use of “crude” refers to the simulation of relationships by means of crude concepts. Being restricted to “friend” and “fan” is a crude simulation of human relationships (which, by the way, is what social sites attempt to model.) Also, conflating a refinement of plurk’s social model to a refinement of the internet iteself just doesn’t make any sense. Additionally, correlating “crude” with “refined”, in this context, is simply wrong. A more appropriate correlation might be “crude” versus “robust” or “accurate”. As in, you can calculate a crude estimation of the area under a curve using simple arithmetic or an accurate calculation using more robust mathematics.

striatic says people here are jockeying for literal “karma” points, so they can do this:  .. and you’re calling the contact system crude?

Yes, it is crude regardless of existence of other unrelated, crude features such as karma. And, for the record, I’ve stated my issue with karma from the instant I saw it.

All in all, my point is easily summed up by noting that, altough striatic and I now have an online relationship by the simple nature of our discussion to and fro, it can not be modeled, at least in my opinion, simply as friend or fan. I consider striatic neither, though he is also not no one to me now.