This past week was a productive week in social software. after last week’s disasterous meeting, where we couldn’t agree on a topic, we stripped down the idea down to the bare minimum and started over. I led a session where we though extensively about our project and our interests. We created a bug list and really tried to find some common ground. We began meeting a bit more frequently, though I had to change the meeting one night so derek and i could see the yanks lose to the sox in game 6. grrr. well it’s just baseball!
anyway once we met, last thursday night, we talked about flickr and what we liked. immediately, we all realized the commonalities and shared interests we all have in the project. we all started shooting out ideas left and right and quickly we figured to move on the idea.
we mapped out what we liked and everyone liked my proposal of using basecamp. i just updated it to the personal account, 9 bucks a month, complete project db control. it’s almost like the ProjectDB that we made at TIS. (ah, i do miss lotus notes). Flickr works as it allows people to quickly share images with others, add comments, and add layers of meta data on top of exisiting photos. sounds great right?
Well our idea is that while the broadcast aspect of Flickr is interesting, it’s still broadcast. We want to make Flickr more interactive by pushing the idea. We plan to add games, friendly competition, and group effects to the app. What happens when we introduce a game like Word of the Day where people compete to take photos that best represents the word of the day? Say the word of the day is happiness, what happens when people submit all sorts of pictures that they think emotes happiness? How will people tag these images? How do people build relationships based on these pictures?
These are all questions that we aim to answer. I’m building my PhotoFrame, which will be an avenue to display these pictures. I’ll post pictures of the hardware design in my materials blog. Bickr, it makes Flickr better by extending the idea of group photos, comments, competition, and more.
