Personal Learning Network
Social networking for creativity boost
Web app for tracking inspirations and random prototyping with people on the Internet.
People use this app to get inspired from diverse pool of strangers, publish inspirations (photos of personal notes and clips of other website's text/images), collect inspirations and save them into public boards, synthesise inspirations into prototypes and collaborate on these prototypes within a board.
It works like this: I login and follow topics. I get content recommendations. I save what I like in my personal profile (just like on Pinterest boards). Moreover, I can add long-form text and images to each board to summarise my inspirations and showcase early stage prototypes as a synthesis of my inspirations. People who are on my inspiration boards are notified to discuss what I did with their posts (how I was inspired by their posts to form my idea and create a prototype). Moreover, those people who are inspiration sources to me are encouraged to collaborate and build on my prototype.
// How would these recommendations be generated? //
everything I post on this social network, I tag with a label (like a I choose a category for each blog on my site).
e.g. if I post about "an idea of a digital diary", I tag it with "note taking". if I post about "an idea of a garden office", I tag it with "work from home" and "architecture". and so on.
this way, people who are interested in same topics discover me.
side thought: people will need to be introduced to a good practice of labelling their posts when starting to use the app, so that they get good recommendations and attract the right followers.
// a social net, for prototyping? //
yes, making social networking more meaningful. people follow others on Twitter, Instagram, etc for a purpose of "consuming information" and often not doing anything about it.
but true learning comes when doing something with that information. and true connection is made when collaborating with a follower on a project. so, this would be a place to get to know people closer by prototyping things.
also, typically, people get into a project stage after months/years of meeting online, but tech could speed up "a process of let's get to know each other by creating together".
// People use this app to get inspired from diverse pool of strangers, publish inspirations (photos of personal notes and clips of other website's text/images) [...] in public boards [...]
Sounds like network of personal boards. So, profiles. It's what social nets had since early days, but they didn't focus on prototyping. So, would this be, in principle, a social net, for prototyping?
// [...] I get content recommendations. [...]
How would these recommendations be generated? Being that recommendations are essential part of the success of social web service providers, even Google, YouTube, etc., the quality of recommendations is the reason why something succeeds or not. For example, Peter Diamandis had recently launched FutureLoop, which does essentially nothing but recommend news. The recommendation engine may be essential, but without specifying how it would do those recommendations, it may be hard to judge how would this network evolve / succeed.