Tribe Tips

With anything that grows at an exponential rate, there is a tipping point at which it takes off. Tribe.net hasn't quite gotten there yet, but I'm starting to see signs of something new and different. As I was trying to point out before, it comes down to subtleties.

In this particular case, I suddenly noticed the utility and novelty of the simple fact that you can see to which tribes other people belong. It may not seem like much, but it's actually a big deal. Part of what made Napster (and its successors) useful as a means of discovering new music was the ability to browse other people's music collections. Chances are, if someone's collection contained music that you really really liked and some that you'd never heard of before, the unknown stuff was worth checking out. (c.f. my post on Echocloud)

People on Tribe generally don't list enough musicians, authors, or films to make this sort of cross-pollination work as effectively as it does on a P2P network, but they do list every public tribe to which they belong. Tribes are growing in all different directions, with little centralized planning. The directory is becoming unwieldy, which at first seemed really irritating to me. However, if you poke around your friends and their friends' profiles, chances are you will discover some interesting sounding new tribes amongst ones you're familiar with.

I'm sure that there must be some prior art out there - after all people have been attacking the mailing list/newsgroup/forum/chat room taxonomy issue for a while - but it seems like Tribe has hit on one of the things that will make it special.

Back when I was in college, it was often possible to look at other people's .newsrc file which was a list of the Usenet newsgroups to which they subscribed. At the time, I think that many people would have been horrified if they realized that others could see their subscription to alt.sex.bondage (but then again I wasn't living in San Francisco). It was an unintentional byproduct of a wide-area file system (AFS) and lax unix permissions. It also wasn't useful in the way that Tribe's public group memberships are because a) you often had little idea whose account you were snooping around because you didn't have much context and b) Usenet had a rigidly controlled taxonomy (with the major exception of the alt.* groups) which was a little more self-explanatory.

The free-for-all creation of tribes is sometimes inefficient and duplicitous, but it really doesn't matter when you have your friends' interests to go by. Just like you can't devise a perfect taxonomy for music, you can't devise a perfect taxonomy for social groups or interests, especially when you're dealing with a lot of people who are trying very hard to not be mainstream.

The other part of this equation that I'm looking forward to is the "events" section. Many years ago, Craigslist's events section was a good source of interesting things to do, but it's gotten so big and general that it is too hard to sort the signal from the noise. I've also been subscribed to SFRaves, the Squidlist and Flavorpill. I have found good stuff through these in the past, but frankly I see more promise in the events part of Tribe. In a place like San Francisco where there are so many things to do, option paralysis often sets in.

On Tribe, individual tribe members can post events. Somehow, having a listing for something from someone that you know, or at least have some connection to, makes the event seem more like a party that you happened to hear about in class in college. It may end up being random, it may not be the optimum choice for the evening, but it has a better chance of being worth-while than something picked out of a list in the newspaper.

If I'm looking for a movie I'll probably stick with Moviefone.com or Yahoo. If I want to see all the bands coming to town in the next week, I'll stick with the SF Bay Guardian. At the same time, the Guardian listings are often overwhelming. Smaller more offbeat things are better handled by something like Tribe. If you're looking for a low-key weekly event at a club or bar, the Guardian or lists like SFRaves are often out of date. They publish the same weeklies all the time and don't have the bandwidth to check up on 100's of events that change all the time even though they're conceived of as ongoing concerns. As long as Tribe events aren't ever set up to repeat, real people will have to post them, and that makes it more likely that the events are real. Since you can see who posted the event and how they're connected to you, you also have more info to go on when planning your social calendar.

I'm not expecting Tribe to become perfectly omniscient but I can definitely see the opportunity to take advantage of your friends and their friends when it comes to finding new groups and things to do.

Comments

[Lenny Turetsky]

i like what you said about the ad-hoc nature of newgroups and tribes.

hierarchy is the way to manage complexity.
but anarchy lets complexity manage itself.

you also make an excellent point, i think, regarding setting permissions on who could see what i subscribed to.
i wouldn't want to make the app too complex, but ...
chmod 640 ~/.newsrc # is just too restrictive

/LT>