The what-it-does thread
* users add nodes (entries?), these represent milestones or events
* view your own timeline (strand?) or where your timeline intersects (time & space) with other users
-- this is where the E. Tufte stuff comes into play
* users create multiple strands for different entities
-- do users collaborate on entities?
-- one user, one entity or is it one-to-many? how does myspace work?
* IMPORTANT BUSINESS MODEL --> MISSED CONNECTIONS
-- people get laid by making an entry "2007-03-31 01:00:00, WonderBar, Allston, MA" "Me: wearing jeans and an untucked dress shirt. You: the hot cop that busted me doing coke in the bathroom." (How is this not like http://newyork.craigslist.org/mis/ ??)
* Isn't there something like a Google/Blog mashup out there?
* I'm not sure it should strive to be like Wikipedia... what do we care if the date of Paul Simon concert in Central Park is off by a month? Or if eighteen users make entries for it but only twelve are "connected".
* It could also be used for planning future events, sending automated birthday reminders (Yahoo! sez Joe Grillo has a B-Day on April 5th).
-- Aren't there a plethora of Web 2.0 calenders and stuff out there?
*Maybe not wikipedia, but at least the ability to hyperlink to other pages easily. I think you're right, though: if everyone says it was September, then it doesn't matter when it was.
"Oh yeah, I was at that concert too! Bitchin' show, man!"
"Wow--you were really a loser in junior high, weren't you?"
"Hey, is it OK if I use that photo of you for my school project on '70s hairstyles?"
<a href="http://www.truthserum.org/images/2007.03.11_traniwreck/">But this kind of more basic (non-flash) slidey bar might make more sense.</a>
The bottom part has dates going back and forth...
Am I correct in assuming that strands are parralel-by-subject lines, and threads connect similar events by user?
This may be difficult... Are you interested in seeing when everyone else in your circle or all users have read a specific book? I can make an entry for when I read a book (some entries have durations, some entries are milestones) how do I search for other entries of the same book? I guess we rely on users to tag the entry with title and author information and/or create a meaningful subject line.
Again, if we try to conceive of a data model and attribute beforehand, we will fail. Better to let these things evolve lazily.
Comments on events/entries/milestones. Allow people to share events/entries/milestones.
Anyone can enter past events/entries/milestones. Subscription service to enter future events (which is evite.com or mypunchbowl.com.... nevermind).
Subject line?
Although, we are interested (or we think we should be interested) in events/entries that tie one user's timeline/strand/thread with another's.
The tie, intersection?, is interesting too... Would it be neat to see the "flow" of a book, LP, mountain summit, across user's strands?
Similar interests/milestones would help users to search for each other/might get you laid.
Each user has one line. Events or entries on the line are tagged with: "book, John Irving, World According to Garp" or "album, music, Nation of Ulysses, Thirteen Point Plan to Destroy America".
You search for "book" to get versions of each users line (or each user you are a contact of or each user that has public entries tagged with "book"). Then you might see a bunch of parallel lines. Search for "World According to Garp" and you'd see one line and all the intersection points would lead you to other user's entries.
Since netizens of rs.n are reluctant to use freetagging to describe blog posts and prefer forum categories, maybe the categories should be enforced.
<a href="/tagadelic">But this stuff is cool!</a>
--When the "music" strand is one of the ones opened on the screen, scrolling to a given point in your life will activate a sound file, playing the music you were listening to closest to that point in your life.
--Some strands contain only quantitative data (or, to put it differently, some tags can only be applied to numerical-data nodes). User can then call up graphs plotting variable x against time (sales of one's history-of-punk book on Amazon, say, or the daily temperature at one's backyard thermometer) or scatter plots showing variable x against y (say, the number of miles one jogs each week against one's mean systolic BP for that week).
Help, anyone?
Comments are attached to nodes rather than to strands, but they should all have the tag "comment" so that the user can then view them as a strand in parallel with and synchronized with the series life-events they pertain to.
Replies to comments and comments-on-comments exist on threads, which aren't part of the same visualized timespace as the strands; one would have to call them up in a separate window by clicking on a particular comment node.
So, you can click on the user's Empire box to see comments on it, and to cross-reference everyone else who says they saw it that month.
I think we're saying the same thing.
C'mon Chippy, tell MF (and 10D and everyone else) what the idea is, so he doesn't feel excluded.
<img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/169/440928620_816999f099.jpg?v=0">
<img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/176/441883397_c55bb8f0a7.jpg?v=0">
This shows it with optional duration-view feature turned on, so the residence in different houses is more easily visualized. Labels have shifted to middle of each tenancy.
Also, added "Scale" button. Viewers can select a view in which each tick-mark represents a decade, five years, a year, half a year, or a month. Someday (maybe on the premium package) this gets extended in both directions: fifty years, 100 years, 500 years, 1000 years, 5000 years for the sake of historians and geologists, and a week, a day, half a day, and hour, half an hour, a minute, thirty seconds, and one second for the sake of wedding planners, NASA launch directors, and choreographers.
Possible new bell/whistle: The representative photo gallery. Users upload photos and tag them (a la Flickr). But rather than appearing as nodes on one's "friends" or "pets" strands (or whatever), photos tagged "gallery" appear only in the photo gallery--a band of images at the bottom of the screen. Each time the user selects a given combination of ordinary strands
for viewing--say, "Houses" and "Friends" as in the waxworks above--the gallery will (if you have it turned on) randomly select one image from each time interval (say, five years as in the waxworks above) that is tagged with one of the appropriate tags; if the user uses the "Scale" button to zoom in on a smaller portion of his or her life, the gallery will recompose itself with images from correspondingly smaller intervals, if they're available.
Does that make sense?
Something like this, for instance. Or is this too busy?
<img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/196/441954008_f833675385.jpg?v=0">
I still like the idea of being able to juxtapose two or more themed timelines. Haven't seen that from other sites yet.