Making the site

So the deadline for my project is nearing. Do you suddenly start cleaning your room when the pressure is increasing? Well I have that sometimes, now my room is still a mess, but I have that urgency to write a review on Cambrian House. Probably the best thing to do, is to get it out of my system, so here it goes:

What is Cambrian House?

Cambrian House is launching there site today. The quickest way to learn about their concept is by letting them explain it. Quick version; the crowd chooses what to build and build it as a crowd. The product can be anything that can made online.
There is a leaderboard where the ideas are ranked. This is based on a IdeaWarz, where two ideas battle against each other.

The problem

Update: They just added new features today, so perhaps my whole piece will be obsolete within one day . I’ll have to check out these features later.

The problem is that the leaderboard is not doing such a good job of picking out the best ideas at the moment.

Why is this a problem?

Besides the problem that the whole concept of Cambrian House is based on filtering concept using the wisdom of crowds, a far-from-perfect leaderboard is bad for the motivation of the troops that send in the new ideas. Why would they contribute to a site that will not recognise (their) great ideas.

What is causing this problem?

The reason the leaderboard is not (yet) working as it should is because people who are voting are mostly also the people who are sending in the ideas. They have a conflict of interest, they obviously want to promote their own ideas.

So what’s the real problem?

The real problem is not the conflict of interest and the gaming that comes with it. It is tempting to tweak the rules of the game (make voting down possible, let people be accountable by voting with your name and not anoymously), but the more fundamental problem lies in the first part of my short analysis; the people who are voting are mostly also the people who are sending in the ideas.

Critical mass

Cambrian House is based on crowds and it needs to become bigger to function well. If the crowd is big enough the gaming of the system will become negligible. Maybe they get some good publicity as they launch the site (out of beta), and I hope they do, but that doesn’t solve the main problem. It is a problem of motivation; why would I vote on an idea?

Where is the value?

People who use Digg or Reddit can vote on news items and that works really well. The reason people go to these pages is not because they want to vote, but because they want to get news. This brings the traffic. A small percentage of these users feel like it’s only fair to credit the source and vote the story up.

The site as to have value for people who are not contributing. Even better would be if the sites gives the users extra value if they contribute to the site. This article explains why people tag, it’s because they gain value for themselves.

Helpalot

For my project I too have the potential problem of gaming and critical mass. The advantage I have is that the contributions are valuable by themselves. This combined with the existing social links and interest people have in charities brings a reason for people to visit the site.

Social is good

Cambrian House also have some social aspects they are developing step by step (agile). Also, they are stimulating people to spread their ideas on their blogs (btw, check my ideas). I think this contributes to the social cohesion of the users, the accountability and it will draw in some new visitors. But that might not be enough.

Direction of a solution

To fix the system they need to find a way to either make the voting more interesting (valuable to the visitors), or they have to find a way to add value to the ideas people are sending in.

Focus

My tip would be; focus not on bad guys but on the value you can bring for the good guys. I’m sure they’ll fix the problems. They seem to have a creative and flexible team that is up to the job.

Back to work

Great, now that’s out of my system, it’s back to work for me!

promotional link to join the site

my profile on Cambrian House

My idea for social network site for blind people

The Helpalot project is about finding charities you like and can trust. How do you know if you can trust someone online? Opinity is a website that’s trying to give an answer to this question.

First let’s quote the site to explain what Opinity does:

“1. Why should I use the Opinity service? What are the benefits?

Using Opinity’s services, you can build a trustworthy identity that can easily be communicated to others online. Your Opinity Reputation Profile can contain a rich portrait of who you are, what you have done, and what others think about you. You can choose to have your information verified. You can verify ownership of online identities, blogs, and even book authorship. In the near future, you will also be able to verify the details of your education, work background, and other elements of your personal history. Note that this process is under your control. You choose what information to give and verify. Also, through reading other Opinity users’ profiles, you can find out about others before you interact with them online or offline. And if you have already had an experience with someone, either online or offline, you can write a review and let others know about your experience with that person.”

They offer a solution to the fragmentation of your digital identity, where you have to rebuild your trust and credibility on every new site you join. Is this a problem that needs to be solved? Yes, but not for everyone. In my case it might be useful, I’m now joining a large amount of social network sites for my research. In most cases you are probably using a couple of these sites for a longer time and don’t have any problems using them.

You might have the problem of having to log-in on all these different websites and like something to centralize this process. But Opinity will be another one of those sites you have to log-in. This leads to the main disadvantage of Opinity; it takes a lot of time to set it up.

Still I think it’s a good idea and they might become really successful. I don’t use E-bay myself, but I when I would, I’d love to know a little bit more about the the person I’m buying from. For Helpalot I think it would be a good idea if you could easily connect to (a site like) Opinity.

They are in Beta and their site needs some small fixes to make the use a bit more smooth. They where not able to check every site I have a page on, they didn’t even let me claim my Hyves or Frappr page without verification. Still, it has potential, so I’ll keep it in the back of my mind.

You can take a look at my profile over here:

Researching (social network) sites brings me to use a lot of sites and have a lot of personal pages on them. Squidoo is the latest: www.squidoo.com/helpalot.

So how about this Squidoo?

Let me explain Squidoo using their website:

“We have built a new online platform and community that makes it easy for anyone to build a single page–called a lens–on a topic, idea, product or cause he is passionate about. These lenses in turn help finders get unique, human perspectives instead of computer-selected and often irrelevant search results. Not only can Lensmasters spread their ideas, get recognized for their knowledge, and send more traffic to their Web sites and blogs—they could also earn royalties.”

Ok, first off, it looks great and is easy to use. The sign-up was smooth and managing is probably as easy as it gets with this amount of flexibility. It’s nice you can easily donate (only a few) charities using this site. A fine job by the people of Squidoo.

I haven’t used Squidoo to search for information yet, but I can tell I’d love to have their team working on Helpalot. My friends know that I’m easily annoyed by commercials, but even the slight commercial taste it has is not really annoying me. The only negative thing I found so far is the name. Squidoo is hard to spell and I have no idea what it means, perhaps this is because I’m Dutch.

Squidoo has some elements I intend to implement on Helpalot, but it’s still very different. Helpalot is purely for charities and people who want to do good. It’s about finding the charity that works for you. You can start your personal page and link the charities you support, write evaluations and much more.

Concluding; Squidoo looks like a great website to learn from.

For researching, I made this www.frappr.com/helpalot site. I didn’t set it up for Helpalot support, but feel free to join the Helpalot group on Frappr if you like.

So how about this Frappr?

Frapper stands for Friend+Mapper. It’s a social network site that is focused on geographic location. From their site:

“Frappr is an online tool that lets you map out the city where you live, work, vacation, or anything else! You can then share your unique URL with friends and find out where the rest of them live and work in relation to everyone else. It’s great for keeping in touch with friends, families, and groups! You can also share photos, private message them, or leave comments on their MyFrappr homepage.”

Having no logo yet, I don’t really have the right to judge a beta project, but I think they could use some help with the logo, then again, Ebay has the same look for it’s logo (ugly) and it’s doing fine. But let’s not judge a book on it’s cover. It actually is a really nice to see the location of the people in a group/your network. Somehow it makes them more like real persons and less like just a name.

You can place a map of your group on your site. People can see who is listening from where to a podcast for example. It’s a nice feature and leads to more people using Frappr. At least that’s the way I found Frappr.

It makes sense to a map like on Frappr for the Helpalot project. It might be nice to view a map that shows your connected friends and charities. Also in searching it would be great if possible. I visited animalrescuenetworkmap and found out it was a little bit difficult for my browser to keep up with scrolling, while this group has 444 members. So I figure as a search tool to show every charity in the world, that might be asking too much of Google Maps (I’m assuming Frappr is using Google Maps).

Concluding; It looks like a beta product (and it is), with little design, but it has some strong features. It was in my plans to use some sort of map for searching, but using Frappr, I found a new reason. A location is not only a search tool, but it helps in building a mental picture of a person and his/her context. It’s a feature that can help make a social network feel a little bit more social.