One of our ongoing discussions in Huminity is where is social software heading (office, phone, IM, walks… yes it’s one of the favorite discussions).
As expected we are very interested in this space and our RSS readers do a great job After long debates we came up with the following model:



As can be seen we try to live to how we believe social software and networking has and will evolve

We combined Blogs, wikis, social networks, IM, chat rooms, visual maps not just because these are cool features but since all these features completely interconnect into a social ecosystem. Members and none members can navigate from one person to another, enter friends blog, see who their friends are, read their blogs, leave a message or invite them to chat, search-path between themselves… each step with one click of a button, in a way like a computer adventure game when each zone holds unique information and a door to another adventure.

May it be a GREAT year for you your family and friends! Peace health and prosperity to all

The Huminity Team

Lots of people asked how we made the mosaic... we used Andrea Mosaic great freeware mosaic creator .

After a long and quit development period, the time has finally come to launch beginning of next week, what is in our opinion the most developed and fascinating Social Software on the Internet today – Huminity Version 2. The major features we are adding are:

1. Location based user profile – users can search for people that are located NEAR them. We like the online world but believe that people should also interact in the physical world and knowing who is near you can help a lot achieving this goal for those who are interested in the technological side this is done with the help of GEO-IP.
2. Blogs – each of Huminity members will have a personal Blog! Easy and simple posting with easy picture sharing for all our users. Huminity is a social software… and idea sharing between people is a big part of it. The blogs we integrated are based on the amazing b2evolution blog – just like the blog system running this blog.
3. Huminities (Clubs) – Part of social life is belonging to a group – now people can join groups or create new ones in Huminity. People can see all other members of the group, what they wrote, who is on-line, chat with each other or work together regarding items that interest the club members.

All of these with addition to the current Instant Messaging, Social Networking, and visual maps of connections make Huminity the fullest social-software application on the web. Not only a full social suite of applications, but also a console that for the first time interconnects and brings together the whole online social experience.

Current users – no need to worry… Huminity auto-upgrade will upgrade all current users clients so you can enjoy the new version!

The new Huminity “zoom out” maps are finally on the web! We like it so much it now replaces our home page

As can best be described as the first “Google of people & social networking”, users can see a wider view of their social network by entering their email to the catchy URL www.huminity.com/map=email@domain.xxx (an example… there isn’t such a user )

The visualization engine used is touchgraph (open source Java applet). We first saw its implementation in the google browser. The way the maps were drawn was amazing and we knew that the visualization engine would be great with our social maps. Now that we implemented it we see that we were not mistaken..

We believe in simplicity and that sharing knowledge brings greater value for all – So we added a clean search GUI to give people the power to access all the maps.

Social networking evolved today .

Common sense is a very deceptive instrument because it imparts characteristics from one field to another – just as most people have a very hard time believing that a heavier stone will not fall faster than a lighter stone. But what about connections? The intuitive judgment based on common-sense and basic laws of physics/ mechanics will imply that “a chain is as strong as it’s weakest link” as suggested in this recent article about VisiblePath’s concept… intuitively, it makes sense, but, as said earlier – common sense is a very deceptive instrument…

Why not “a chain is as strong as it’s first link” since the first link is bound to have the most goodwill to help, but if it is weak, then obviously nothing will come out if it. Or on the contrary, maybe it is “as strong as it’s weak links” as suggested by Mark Granovetter in his 1983 study and somewhat doubtful by Joi Ito … Or maybe “a chain is as strong as it’s last link” since the last link is the key to reaching the target, but if it has a weak connection and scarcely knows the target person, then obviously nothing will come out if it…Maybe the strength of a chain is determined by the strength of the node in the middle which holds the chain together on both sides… and maybe there are more alternatives than we can imagine…

In Huminity, we did not go in the path of VisiblePath to scroll over a person’s e-mails and determine the strength of connections with any person in their rolerdex based on amount of mail sent and received, firstly because we think it’s private but functionally we think it adds noise rather than value. We didn’t go in the path of Spoke to determine the source of connection to each person on the rolerdex (work, school, etc) since we think it’s irrelevant in the most important aspect of finding available paths.

Basically, we took the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach, and it brings pretty good results. Anyone can search all available (non duplicative) paths to anyone, and then determine how to approach the person. Maybe the first link was the important one, and maybe it was the last one. One thing is for sure – social networking is an art, not a science…

This was even funnier than the last time. We went out for a walk (Oren and Nir) to breath some air and clear our thoughts. When we came back, the daily user registration looked as if it was connected to a fire engine

we looked at the log file and it reminded us of a former incident looking at the referrals we came up with this:



The globes article was great. Bootstrapping Huminity was more than a challenge… it was an adventure… and fun… and still is

This story is a bit similar to the /. story. We noticed a sudden increase in hits from my.yahoo.com and it’s sub domains. Going to my.yahoo.com did not show any link to us. The educated guess was that users writing about us caused the hits. Blogs write about us, livejurnal has a lot of links to Huminity.... but this traffic was different – its frequency and mass was, lets say, higher

Using Michal's my.yahoo.com account and selecting possible content types came up with the following discovery:

Yahoo software editors have chosen Huminity to be featured in their daily pick

We had a feeling this might happen this week. After all slashdot.org did bring some users and their friends, and their friends and... you know how it works

To be on Cnet’s download.com top-50 most downloaded software is quite an achievement after all it’s the Internet’s #1 download site and a barometer to the most popular software on the Internet!

Why do most people prefer a desktop e-mail client rather than web-mail? Why do they prefer a desktop chat / Instant Messaging software rather than web-chat? Why do they prefer desktop file sharing software rather than warez websites from which they can download any digital file? 

On the other hand…

Why do the same people prefer a web-based search engine rather than a desktop multi-search engine? Why do they prefer web-based comparison shopping rather than desktop tools? 
It seems that nowadays, we have everything both web-based and desktop based… but where do applications succeed as web tools and where do they succeed as desktop applications? When do people prefer a web-based system and when do they prefer a desktop application?

IMHO, there are 3 guidelines here:

1. Complexity – the more features there are to an application, people are more likely to prefer a desktop application where they can do various functions, save files, change preferences, etc... 
2. Autonomous wizard – when there is an autonomous wizard or agent involved, like periodic checking of mail, on-line friends that joined or serving and receiving digital files, the more likely that people will prefer a desktop application rather than opening every day a website and keeping it refreshed. 
3. Stickiness – web-sites lack the stickiness of desktop software (e-mail, IM, file-sharing, RSS, etc..), and whenever a user wishes to stick with something, he/she are more likely to use a desktop software rather than open and refresh a web-browser all day. With web sites a user gets in and gets out. The browser is not considered a “one task” specialized application but more of a scrap board. If you want a specialized tool you go for software solutions (even blogs which are considered pure web have blogging software tools for the heavy blogger. 

Building a web-based social networking site is relatively easy from any aspect – technology, fast implementation and relatively very low resources needed. One can easily see this by the growing number of such sites. However, building a desktop software is not an easy straightforward task at all, especially when the network is also needed to be built, like in IM and file sharing - it’s not just replicates of web servers. The architecture behind Huminity is by far more complex than meets the eye. It took us a year and a half to build it all. 

So why did we choose desktop?

1. It provides stickiness – In Huminity, people get notified whenever one of their friends joins, or when someone invites them to chat. It’s more “social” than just going over people’s profiles. In Huminity you can go over a person’s profile and TALK to that person, so the gratification is immediate.. The real time communication between people is the glue of society.
2. It provides graphical representations through the use of local computing power. This eliminates the latency problems that web-based services suffer, without even having such graphical representations as Huminity does.
3. It enables adding features not all accepted well in websites, like chat, chat-rooms, skins, bookmarks, sounds, different kind of social maps, VoIP, personal blog , notifications, etc… some taste of our current and near future additions
4. It’s a 24*7 application – see your friends, their friends, who is connected to who, search a path to a person, visualize it, chat with that person. Get to the next stage of social conduct – all the pieces of the social web finely clear and helpful for all.

Hype aside, social networking implemented right is the most powerful tool created to date. It gathers around it every social activity one can imagine – dating, business, selling, buying, renting, job seeking… you name it, it should deliver. But it has to be implemented right first. And doing it right means a very low churn rate and value added– after all, it’s “social” networking. If it isn’t sticky for all people, then it’s simply another forum with a few “market makers” …