MentalDrain
Originally published on macresearch.org, around 2009. Reproduced from the author's archive; some links may no longer resolve.
Ad Hoc Online Communities with Mental Drain
Imagine being able to join any online community by simply typing in its name. Technologies for forming online communities are still dominated by forums, news groups, and mailing lists; joining online communities is still a painful process, with each group requiring a unique account. Even after you have signed up, reading the content stream usually requires a visit to multiple destinations (eg email, web site, news reader).
RSS Readers began a shift to a single resource for all your lists, but RSS is not a social tool: it’s a one way street, not a community. You can download all you like, but you can’t post your own thoughts in an RSS reader.
Twitter is in the process of supplanting instant messaging by making it trivial to subscribe to the stream of messages posted by other individuals. The content stream that you receive is dictated by the people you have chosen to follow. This certainly constitutes an online community, but it is one based on who is posting, not what they are saying. What if you want to hear what Stephen Fry thinks about Macs, but couldn’t care less about his tweets on Blackadder. Twitter is personality based — which is fine for what it is designed to achieve — but the noise to ratio mix is high if you are after useful information, rather than just banter.
I’ve been contemplating this on and off for several months. It recently occurred to me that what is needed is a Twitter-like service focussed not on ‘who’, but ‘what’. Rather than subscribing to posts from particular individuals, you would subscribe to posts on certain topics. Each topic would effectively represent an ad hoc group or community of interested individuals, and each individual could be subscribed to as many topics as they like. Your own personal stream of content would comprise of all posts on topics of interest to you, regardless of who posted them.
I decided to build a web site with this end in mind, and the result is Mental Drain. I’m convinced that Mental Drain — or a service like it — could revolutionize forums, news groups, and mailing lists in much the same way that Twitter has revolutionized instant messaging.