Blabline (www.blabline.com) is designed to be essentially administration-free. In order to achieve that feat, some radical approaches are used for the site:
1. Instead of extensive and around the clock customer support, Blabline has no customer support at all and no contact information available on the site.
2. Moderation of user-generated content can often require a lot of manual administration. Blabline has a moderation functionality called nuke™ which allows users to delete other users' messages. This removes the need for administration of user-generated content.
3. The Blabline Terms of Service states that the user agrees to use the nuke function for deleting messages that violate the Terms instead of reporting the abuse. This eliminates the administration needed for handling cases of violation of the Terms.
4. Blabline does not have any APIs available for third-parties, which removes the need for the policing job needed to ensure that the APIs are used legally by third-parties and in accordance with the Terms.
5. All services Blabline offers are free which eliminates all the administration of user payments.
6. And Blabline is kept independent and is free from administration of business deals, contracts and agreements with other companies and organizations.
All these somewhat controversial things remove most of the administration that is usually needed for websites like Blabline, so that the site becomes more like a tool than a service for users.
May 23, 2010
December 22, 2009
The next social level
Baboons are very social primates. They form societies based on hierarchies, where each member has a network of friends and family members. The social capacity for baboons and other primates is limited though, in that the social network for each member only contains a small number of friends and family members.
We humans have a social model similar to the other primates. Despite our intellectual capacity, our societies are still functioning, from a basic social perspective, on a level that is not much more advanced than those of other primates. Like they, we too only have small cliques of friends and relatives, while the rest of all people are 'strangers'.
With the Internet and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, our personal social interactions have started to expand. However, this expansion is still based on the same age-old primate model of friends and relatives. Even if you have hundreds of friends on a social networking site, more than 99.999% of the rest of all people in the world are still strangers to you.
Image from Wikipedia Open Content.
Today's social networking sites are modeled after our existing social infrastructure. This model is basically a carbon copy of offline social interactions moved into the Web. It's like in the early days of the car, when most people still used horses for transportation, where the first cars looked like horse wagons, without the horse.
Blabline (www.blabline.com) is a web-based chat that targets social interactions as a complement to the usual network of friends model.
We humans have a social model similar to the other primates. Despite our intellectual capacity, our societies are still functioning, from a basic social perspective, on a level that is not much more advanced than those of other primates. Like they, we too only have small cliques of friends and relatives, while the rest of all people are 'strangers'.
With the Internet and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, our personal social interactions have started to expand. However, this expansion is still based on the same age-old primate model of friends and relatives. Even if you have hundreds of friends on a social networking site, more than 99.999% of the rest of all people in the world are still strangers to you.
Image from Wikipedia Open Content.
Today's social networking sites are modeled after our existing social infrastructure. This model is basically a carbon copy of offline social interactions moved into the Web. It's like in the early days of the car, when most people still used horses for transportation, where the first cars looked like horse wagons, without the horse.
Blabline (www.blabline.com) is a web-based chat that targets social interactions as a complement to the usual network of friends model.
November 23, 2009
Rebranding on the Web
Blabline (www.blabline.com), is a web-based chat designed with a strong focus on rebranding.
Rebranding is a means through which a product or service developed as one brand is marketed or distributed with a different identity. On the Web rebranding is commonly seen in relation to websites like Facebook and Twitter where many websites, applications and services have been built around APIs provided by the original sites. In this way, rebranding on the Internet is more than just repackaging of the original brand.
Instead of only expanding a brand through adding more functionality to the original website, rebranding on the Web makes it conducive to grow a service by third party developers plugging in new brands or existing brands to other brands. In this way whole networks of brands are formed on the Internet by making use of rebranding.
Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google Inc., has said that brands on the Internet are built customer by customer. With rebranding, brands can in addition to that also be built brand by brand. One example of this kind of rebranding is TweetDeck, a personal browser that plugs in to brands like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.
The most common form of rebranding on the Web is via APIs and web services allowing third party developers to create new products and services around the original brand. Blabline uses a different approach than providing things like APIs and web serves. By remaining strictly limited to the core chat service, Blabline opens up the possibility for other brands to develop new services around chat topics and related content and functionality, in a way that is free from extra service agreements and other business entanglements.
Rebranding is a means through which a product or service developed as one brand is marketed or distributed with a different identity. On the Web rebranding is commonly seen in relation to websites like Facebook and Twitter where many websites, applications and services have been built around APIs provided by the original sites. In this way, rebranding on the Internet is more than just repackaging of the original brand.
Instead of only expanding a brand through adding more functionality to the original website, rebranding on the Web makes it conducive to grow a service by third party developers plugging in new brands or existing brands to other brands. In this way whole networks of brands are formed on the Internet by making use of rebranding.
Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google Inc., has said that brands on the Internet are built customer by customer. With rebranding, brands can in addition to that also be built brand by brand. One example of this kind of rebranding is TweetDeck, a personal browser that plugs in to brands like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.
The most common form of rebranding on the Web is via APIs and web services allowing third party developers to create new products and services around the original brand. Blabline uses a different approach than providing things like APIs and web serves. By remaining strictly limited to the core chat service, Blabline opens up the possibility for other brands to develop new services around chat topics and related content and functionality, in a way that is free from extra service agreements and other business entanglements.
September 12, 2009
Blabline - Chat in Microblog Format
What is the result of combining a chat and microblogging? Blabline, a web-based chat in microblog format is one answer to that question. With a limit of 160 characters per message and presentation of messages ordered by newest first, Blabline is similar to a microblog with real-time capacity.
The main difference is that on Blabline, messages are presented per topic instead of per individual user as in ordinary microblogs. Another difference is that there are no functions for following users. Instead topics can be added to a personal list of topics.
Blabline is deliberately free from things like ratings, post counts and user ranking. And users can change their username at any time, which allows users to take on many different identities. In most other social media sites, the username is fixed for all times.
Since Blabline uses Google Accounts, no sign up is required for users who already have a Google Account. Only an initial Blabline username is needed when signing in for the first time.
Moderation of user-generated content is often a big task in social media. Blabline solves this problem by offering a functionality called nuke™ which allows users to delete other user's messages and temporarily block them from posting messages in a particular topic.
The main difference is that on Blabline, messages are presented per topic instead of per individual user as in ordinary microblogs. Another difference is that there are no functions for following users. Instead topics can be added to a personal list of topics.
Blabline is deliberately free from things like ratings, post counts and user ranking. And users can change their username at any time, which allows users to take on many different identities. In most other social media sites, the username is fixed for all times.
Since Blabline uses Google Accounts, no sign up is required for users who already have a Google Account. Only an initial Blabline username is needed when signing in for the first time.
Moderation of user-generated content is often a big task in social media. Blabline solves this problem by offering a functionality called nuke™ which allows users to delete other user's messages and temporarily block them from posting messages in a particular topic.
May 16, 2009
Free Ties in Social Networking
People today often use short messages (SMS) instead of calling each other on their cell phones. They recognize that a phone call is the old-school way of communication and that calling another person is usually more disturbing than sending an SMS message which doesn't require the other person to be on constant alert, obediently prepared to directly answer every phone call.
The current trend on the Web is that social networking is gaining momentum. Like SMS messaging and e-mail, social networking allows users to be freed from the burden of having to be on standby like when receiving phones calls. Yet even social media can become a burden with many friends to keep in contact with almost on a daily basis.
Therefore, one prediction to be made is that there will be an increased demand for social networking sites where the burden of 'sticky' personal ties is lessened. We should expect an increased market for services which allow more free social ties on the Internet.
The current trend on the Web is that social networking is gaining momentum. Like SMS messaging and e-mail, social networking allows users to be freed from the burden of having to be on standby like when receiving phones calls. Yet even social media can become a burden with many friends to keep in contact with almost on a daily basis.
Therefore, one prediction to be made is that there will be an increased demand for social networking sites where the burden of 'sticky' personal ties is lessened. We should expect an increased market for services which allow more free social ties on the Internet.
April 12, 2009
Blabline's Nuke Function and Moderation in Social Media
In social media, moderation of user-generated content becomes a heavy task when website traffic increases. Websites are usually accessible 24/7 and visitors can publish content at any time. And if a website allows posting of user content in several languages, the task of moderation becomes even more difficult.
Since social media is steadily increasing in growth, moderation will likely become a more and more automated process. Just as search engines today for example usually have computers rather than humans generating search results, moderation of social media content could increasingly be done by computers.
The problem is that user-generated content is generally too complicated for computers to understand. To really be able to detect abuse and illegal content, the computers must be almost as intelligent as humans. In the future advanced AI algorithms may be up to the challenge but today moderation in social media remains to a large extent dependent on human supervision.
An alternative approach to moderation is Blabline's nuke™ functionality which allows users to delete other users' messages. Instead of being a centralized form of moderation, the nuke function makes moderation of user-generated content to become distributed among all users. This special form of moderation is hardly suited for general administration of social media, but it's a step in the direction of tackling the problem of being able to manage moderation of user-generated content 24/7, in different languages and independent of traffic growth.
Since social media is steadily increasing in growth, moderation will likely become a more and more automated process. Just as search engines today for example usually have computers rather than humans generating search results, moderation of social media content could increasingly be done by computers.
The problem is that user-generated content is generally too complicated for computers to understand. To really be able to detect abuse and illegal content, the computers must be almost as intelligent as humans. In the future advanced AI algorithms may be up to the challenge but today moderation in social media remains to a large extent dependent on human supervision.
An alternative approach to moderation is Blabline's nuke™ functionality which allows users to delete other users' messages. Instead of being a centralized form of moderation, the nuke function makes moderation of user-generated content to become distributed among all users. This special form of moderation is hardly suited for general administration of social media, but it's a step in the direction of tackling the problem of being able to manage moderation of user-generated content 24/7, in different languages and independent of traffic growth.
March 30, 2009
Google App Engine and Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing is a term that refers to running applications such as websites on a computer infrastructure provided as a service rather than having the applications run on dedicated servers. The 'cloud' offers dynamic scalability which in practice typically is achieved by having the computing power, application services and data storage distributed over many servers.
One advantage with cloud computing is that a website for example can let the cloud take care of scaling up computing power and data storage depending on traffic and information load.
The traditional way for websites has been to start using one server and a single database, like the popular LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and a scripting language such as PHP). This works well for most websites as long as the traffic remains within a certain limit. If the traffic increases over this limit however, this solution is not easy to scale. The task of distributing the traffic to several servers and databases is far from trivial.
Google App Engine offers cloud computing for websites in a simple and efficient way. The service is free up to a limit and the cost is low for increasing that limit to cope with increased traffic to the website. There are limitations, such as the limited set of database functionality provided compared to relational databases for example. Another drawback is that the data is stored on Google servers which may be against the policy of many companies. On the other hand, letting the Google infrastructure taking care of the data storage removes the burden of having to manage storage scaling and backup of data.
Although not suitable for all websites, Google App Engine offers a scalable and cost-efficient alternative for many websites, and cloud computing is something we likely will see more of in the future.
One advantage with cloud computing is that a website for example can let the cloud take care of scaling up computing power and data storage depending on traffic and information load.
The traditional way for websites has been to start using one server and a single database, like the popular LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and a scripting language such as PHP). This works well for most websites as long as the traffic remains within a certain limit. If the traffic increases over this limit however, this solution is not easy to scale. The task of distributing the traffic to several servers and databases is far from trivial.
Google App Engine offers cloud computing for websites in a simple and efficient way. The service is free up to a limit and the cost is low for increasing that limit to cope with increased traffic to the website. There are limitations, such as the limited set of database functionality provided compared to relational databases for example. Another drawback is that the data is stored on Google servers which may be against the policy of many companies. On the other hand, letting the Google infrastructure taking care of the data storage removes the burden of having to manage storage scaling and backup of data.
Although not suitable for all websites, Google App Engine offers a scalable and cost-efficient alternative for many websites, and cloud computing is something we likely will see more of in the future.
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