So judging by the jillion hits that my Flock article last night engendered, the hypemobile for Flock is in high gear. In light of that, I thought I'd lay down what I would want to see from a social "browser" as opposed to a social search engine.
With only a few hours or so to weave the concept into my existing wish list, I would want a social browser to track, store, relate and browse in a social context. Currently browsers allow tracking only on a value-free link basis. You store your bookmarks, often without even keywords. The browser might keep track of passwords and form items and other trivia, but no real social capital.
A social browser would treat browsing as a constantly updated tour of things that are important to you and your various social worlds. For me these would include digital music, IP law, the topology of the internet, the topology of thought, many authors, and many friends / colleagues / personalities who help shape what I'm interested in or thinking about at a particular moment in time.
This can happen a myriad of ways. Tools to leverage and integrate the infrastructures laid out by LinkedIn, FOAF, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Google, etc. could go a long way to creating a browsing experience that allows rapid exploitation of the wisdom of the crowds we self-select.
Being able to cross reference professional LinkedIn contacts with the blogs to which they subscribe on Bloglines might be interesting. Being able to track asynchronous conversations that roll through blogs of interest would be nice. Being able to use tagging as a community thumbprint - so a community can create their own daily digital to-be-read lists. You come in and there are 15 articles chosen by people you are involved with sitting in your in box. You read them and you are up on the conversation.
Is all this possible already? Certainly. The individual elements allow you to kluge together any of these. But there is certainly no social browser that allows simple integration.
So, here's to hoping.
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