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Evolving the Social Network

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the somebody-will-get-this-right-someday dept.

arantius writes "An article on BottomQuark points to a new development: Here's a story about a new start-up Huminity, referred to as the technology of the year. The software they produce combines instant messaging, chat, and social networking. After burning through over $30k of personal funds, the team has now raised millions for their company. We've heard about Friendster recently, but somehow this seems more interesting." Jamie adds: Social networking was in the news recently because this patent apparently covers much of it. It was bought for $700K by the two underdogs and may be used to beat up on Friendster. Don't worry, the guy who wrote Slashdot's friend-of-friend code doesn't think we're affected :)

8 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. performance by kaan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If Huminity can beat the performance (or lack of it) for services like Friendster, I'd give it my vote. I think I have 14 people in my "friends" list on Friendster, and a Personal Network of nearly 400,000, and it is almost entirely impossible to do just about anything within the service. Sometimes, I can't even login without a browser timeout. Huminity might be able to do really well if they can get decent performance, or even just perceived performance through the use of caching tricks, saved data, etc.

    1. Re:performance by dspisak · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Tribe.net works because its database servers have not yet come close to getting 1M+ users on it.

      Any database backend works at that small a scale, its once you go past the .5M-1.0M+ range where database backends start to become really important for these kinds of sites.

  2. Network of friends = useless? by 192939495969798999 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How does knowing whose friend is whose help me make friends? Really, it is just a complicated, expensive way of saying, "here are some people. Maybe you'll get along, maybe you won't, but your friend knows them."
    In reality, if I don't have many friends, I won't have many friends of friends, and if I have a lot of friends, why would I need this service? Therefore, it will end up a network of 1:1 connections.

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  3. Social cost of not having social appraisal by Space+cowboy · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Hasn't some fairly high-profile company (MS ?) recently dumped online forums as too risky to have on their books ? In an ever-more-litigious society you have to wonder how it'll pan out if it turns out 'drugrunners-R-us' have been using you as a common carrier. Are you really a common carrier ? Really ? Sure ?

    The problem with "recommend a friend" is that it's too close to "recommend a fiend" for comfort. You really have no web of trust - it's all what X says about A says about C ... K.

    I'm just about the most anti-regulation-on-the-net person you'll meet (ask my MP :-) but cigarettes in the UK carry large signs saying things like "You will die early if you smoke these cigarettes". It might be useful to require at least a passing familiarity with the dangers to anyone (not just the kids :-) using these sites.

    By the way, I realise that 99% of the forums our there are perfectly benign. I'm happy with that. It's the others I'm a little concerned over. That passing familiarity might in fact help those who stop their children from using a computer because "it's dangerous". It's not. But you don't walk down a street late at night dressed in not very much if you're a woman. The internet can be a very dark street, and not just for women.

    Simon.

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    Physicists get Hadrons!
  4. Patent is bogus by cameldrv · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I really don't think Friendster is going to have a problem, as it is virtually the same product as Sixdegrees was in 1997, except Sixdegrees didn't have the dating angle.

  5. Something else by bigjnsa500 · · Score: 1, Insightful
    What bothers me is that all this technology is slowly forcing us to stay inside, away from human contact.

    Whatever happened to taking the dog for a walk and talking to woman? Do men and women of today feel the only way to talk is hiding in some online forum? Are we slowly turning into a milky white skin-toned people?

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    This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
  6. No thanks. by tomzyk · · Score: 2, Insightful
    1. I've never heard of a piece of software that does this sort of thing, and wonder why it would ever exist in the first place (other than just for the novelty of it).

    2. Even if it is just for fun, why are they charging you to search through it?
    All features of the Huminity software are completely free apart from the "Search Path" using free-text, which is provided at an economical yearly subscription price of $28.

    3. If they can't even create a website that can be viewed in anything other than the latest M$ browser [ditto for their DEMO], I don't think I'd trust their software running on my computer anways.
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    Karma: NaN
  7. Obviously these guys don't spend much time online by 3rdParty · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Quote from their website: " We believe the Internet's greatness is the interaction it brings between people " Spend a few days browsing forums, and even post to a few, and you quickly realize there are a lot of people out there you have no need to get to know better. If you need the processing power of a gigahertz processor to make friends, you are in a world of trouble once you step away from your computer. Just MHO.