For those curious and for those looking for a startup idea, I’m going to describe my plan for Arbital 2.0. In short, it’s Tumblr for mathematicians. You could use it as a blog, but it’s really a social network. What makes it radically different is the ability for one person to create and own multiple topic-centered channels. (One big issue I see with FB is that it doesn’t scale well with the number of friends. With most friends I only want to talk about certain specific topics. But FB is broadcast-to-all by design.) On Arbital 2.0, I would be able to post about improv, Rick and Morty, AI, scuba-diving, and all my other interests to different channels. People could subscribe to the channels they were interested in. So if you never wanted to listen to politics, you wouldn’t follow people on their political channel.
For what it’s worth, Google Plus has basically this under the name “Collections”.
Maybe relevant: I periodically hear jokes about nobody using G+ but actually I know a few people who are still using it to this day and they are all mathematicians except for gwern.
Someone needs to clone Google Plus and give it a different name. Or Google could just give it a new skin, tweak a few features and relaunch under a different name...
All those features of filtering are only helpful when there’s enough posts of people one follows in the first place. That doesn’t happen by starting a new Google Plus clone or a new skin.
Thank you for the post from me as well!
For what it’s worth, Google Plus has basically this under the name “Collections”.
Maybe relevant: I periodically hear jokes about nobody using G+ but actually I know a few people who are still using it to this day and they are all mathematicians except for gwern.
And calling gwern a non-mathematician almost feels incorrect… even though it’s correct :).
Someone needs to clone Google Plus and give it a different name. Or Google could just give it a new skin, tweak a few features and relaunch under a different name...
All those features of filtering are only helpful when there’s enough posts of people one follows in the first place. That doesn’t happen by starting a new Google Plus clone or a new skin.
Huh!! 2015, no less. I’ll check them out.