Seesmic Blog

In and earlier post I had talked about how the menu broke often for me. Well, now it is time to report that I haven’t had any trouble for days with the menu, and not only it, it is updating automatically

Now, this could be a couple of things. I have installed the SDK for Flex as I’m learning it now, and in there you get a debug version of Flash 9, and perhaps this updated version simply works better. And I am of course on Linux, which can be nutty to deal with, especially on new software like Flex.

So yeah! It is updating automatically, as I am sitting here, I see new videos dropping in that were posted, ‘just now.’ This is a totally new thing for me, and I like it, so forgive me if this has been happening for you the whole time.

Great job Johann, on the whole, things are looking much better.

The menu system, some out loud thinking. Clearly the current set up is not scalable. You say there are hundreds of people on Seesmic now, even 1000, but obviously not everyone is posting regularly. The more people that are posting, the more we miss. I’m friends with the people I want to hear from, so that part works great. Clearly my videos are in MyVideos, and the shows are in shows. It is the public timeline that is problematic. And my friends videos are going to be hard to keep up with when more of my friends are on here and posting videos.

So I’ve been thinking about how to fix this, and the answer seems to me to be tagging. This is huge in new media today because it helps answer the scaling problem. So the system I propose and open up for discussion is this: the creator of the video adds tags. Which I believe are there now, but are not being used yet.

The second part of this is how to extract the videos we are looking for from the river of videos. For that I think there needs to be an option where we can put in our interests, and can go to a menu tab that shows us the videos with tags that match our interests and also gives an option to search for whatever strikes our fancy. What this accomplishes is that if you make a video about cycling, and someone has put down that cycling is an interest of theirs, they will get your video. Additionally, if someone is looking up videos about cycling, they can search, but they don’t necessarily want to always get videos about cycling.

Also, to tackle the problem of threading, my thoughts on that are to have an icon on the videos that are in a thread and when you click on the icon, you get a list of the entire thread in the menu in reverse chronological order. If there were an API or plugin capability, I would build it right now, but in that absence, all I can do is talk about it here and on Seesmic.

Finally, and I’m not sure if this should be part of the tagging, (maybe using hidden tags, thinking about it technically) or maybe be its own category, but I would love to see the ability to see the people and videos from specified geographic areas. And don’t just limit it to my geographic area. I may have interests is seeing videos where my sister lives, or I may have an interest in India after @pistachio recently was there. So additionally to geographic, I also want to see organizationally organized people and videos. And again, this may seems logical on the surface that perhaps hidden tags or non editable tags are the way to implement this, but if I’m interested in, or are a part of Team In Training or even if I work for a company, I want to see other people that are part of those organizations if they claim to be a part of that group. The other obvious application for this are the new clubs that Seesmicers are talking about from the running club to the beer club.

So to recap this thinking out loud:

Also, don’t forget, if you have something to disucc, bug fixes you want to expound upon, or feature requests, please visit my Seesmic forum at forum.seesmic.com.