Gwen met Jared one day during art class. Jared worked with a guy named Tyler. Tyler’s sister is a good friend of Gwen’s. While each one of these individuals are different, each of their stories dynamically interconnect. History is nothing but a set of overlapping stories that make up the interconnected web of a person’s life.
A while back I was considering the place of history on the internet. Wikipedia covers “important” and “popular” stuff as well as some “big names”. But what about the little guy? What about Gwen and Jared? Is their history not important?
What about taking a person’s history and slapping that fat and happy “social” buzz word onto it? What if we took the concept of a person’s history and combined it with the functionality of wikipedia based on the permissions of something like the extensive friend framework of Facebook?
That is, what if every time you mentioned Jared in your profile, it sent a message his way notifying him of his mention in someone’s story of history? If he accepted, that story would not just be in the original person’s history, but in Jared’s history too since he was involved in it.
This is what I call a social history web. The connecting and building of all people’s history who were involved with a specific story. Below is a visualization of how that might look.
- “How Nathan met his girlfriend Sara” is a story written into my (Nathan) history. (Last name’s excluded in this case, but would be included realistically).
- This story pings Sara, letting her know there is a historical story that involves her. She accepts this story and it’s added to her history: Now this story overlaps both our histories.
- Someone writes a story about how “Sara gets a job”. Nicole is mentioned in this story.
- Nicole accepts this story as part of her history.
You can see how this repeats. Blogging, in my opinion, is still very much in its infancy. As such, I could see this easily evolving from blogging or being integrated into something like Facebook as an application.
Really cool idea. However, Nicole got me the job, not the other way around :p