Interesting guide to building social services featuring “implicit social discovery”, the pattern behind del.icio.us, Flikr, and Webjay.



The service we build will let you:

1. Publish observations or ‘stuff’ onto a website.

2. Categorize it variety of ways.

3. Pivot on yours or others observations to discover other related topics or persons.



Our work will be modelled on newly emerging services including del.icio.us, Flickr and Webjay . The code itself will be a rewrite based on what I’ve learned from developing Thingster and BooksWeLike over the last year.



Social content services have a strong emphasis on implicit social discovery. Users use these services to organize their own content for later recollection. But since the services are public, other users can peek into the collective space, and discover similar items, topics or persons. We’re going to look for opportunities in this project to stress the ‘synthesis’ aspect of social discovery; to escape from the pattern of curated collections managed and presented by one person.


It’s cool to see features become patterns become platforms, and I love the ‘implicit social discovery’ label.

[Many-to-Many]