Replacing social networks with ad-hoc networks
Sunday, April 6th, 2008One application for the new stream feature in Grazr is the ability to create ad-hoc networks. Social networks like Facebook or Twitter require people to explicitly join and pick their friends. An ad-hoc network can be assembled spontaneously from any group of people, and followed only when needed. Here are some simple examples I built today. I attended the Boston Media Makers meeting in Boston today, and decided that it would be an interesting group to follow. I don’t need to keep track of their postings every day, so subscribing to their feeds in a feed reader or friending them in a system like Facebook doesn’t make sense, but I would like to be able to catch up on their activities before going to the next meeting. I passed around a signup list and asked everyone to write down their blog URL and Twitter names. It only took a few minutes to assemble the reading lists in Grazr and merge the results.
