FLOSSUsabilitySprint1107/brainstorm/SocialBrowsing

User Goals for Social Browsing

• Link sharing
• Synchronous browsing
• Feeling of connectedness
• Put Firefox in the center of your social communications, takes over the roll of address book
• Hard to track all of the different places that people have information on the web
• Expand your group of friends

General Brainstorming

• Ability to bookmark people

• Bookmark people you don't know but have common interests
• See who else is browsing the page you are viewing at the same time, have real time conversations
• Bump into your friends and contacts online (bunch of privacy concerns)

Specific Ideas Based on User Goals

Link Sharing

• Drag links to people
• Context menu send to friend
  • On links
  • On the location bar
• See what your friends have looked at while you browse (pull instead of push)
• If we have a link sharing database we could do collaborative filtering
• Distributed digg

Sharing meta content about pages

• Why have online sticky notes all failed in the past?
  • People want a local copy of their notes
  • The notes need to track the content, if a news story isn't on the front page anymore, the notes need to move to where the story is.
  • Lack of message threading
  • Either too few people for communication, or way too many
• Show your friends notes first
• Look at related pages based on shared tags

Synchronous browsing

• Similar to yuuguu
• UI similar to iChat av content sharing

Feeling of connectedness

• • This means a lot of different things to different people
  • General sense of life, seeing houses lit up at night. You are reading a story about saving the whales and feeling depressed that no one cares, but realize that there are 10 million people reading the article right now.
• Flash mobs forming based on content encountered online (article about saving the whales leads to everyone decided to donate at the same time). What is the window of time, asynchronous versus synchronous.

Put Firefox in the center of your social communications

• takes over the roll of address book
• Hard to track all of the different places that people have information on the web
• What if your openID page render nicely in the browser, which you can "bookmark", and get an RSS feed of updates. This includes all of their personal information, like various social networks they use, im screen names, flickr and youtube profiles, etc.

Expand your group of friends