Sunday, December 7, 2008

Status Updates Grow Up

In honor of the awaited release of the Halloween emoticons for status updates I have decided to put down in writing my very geeky thoughts about how status updates need to evolve.

Ok first off most users get status updates all wrong. The question is
"What are you doing right now ?"
If users realized this, updates would be pretty boring and filled with the same old "updating my mood" status
What users really want to tell you is what they just did. So most updates take the shape of
"Relaxing after winning a 5k marathon"
Mood: Triumphant
So my 1st thought, being the queen of activities and all, is
1 Why are people always bragging - lol
and
2 These are loosely coupled activities ! We can do so much more

Let's kick Twitter and Facebook's ass

How ?

With metadata. Easy

We should have a menu of possible things a user will feel like updating their status with.
It would have to be a easy to use UI with adorable icons (yes more, more, more icons) of "unplugged activities" like shopping, partying, reading (fine), going to the movies, whatever

Not only that but this is a social site. Most users are not that big of losers that everything they do is alone. Let's get that good looking control we have for choosing friends (which now displays real names - woot) and put it to good use.
I want to be able to say:
Monica went to dinner at Chaya with (click-pick) "Matt"
Matt would obviously be a link to my boyfriends profile

And this would be shown on my activities stream to my friends next to a little plate/fork/knife icon
Oh yeah and by the way Chaya should be a link to the actual restaurant portal on MySpace. I don't know a ton about MySpace Local but sounds like that is what it is for.

And here is the final killer effect. When Data Availability gets released and a user orders a book from Amazon we can automatically raise these loosely couple activities like "bought a book" and make the user feel like we are doing them a favor !!

social coder

My photo
San Francisco, California, United States
Open Web Standards Advocate