Ask HN: Best way to share information

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7086320

by davidy123 • 13 years ago

1 6 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Over the years a number of open concept link sharing sites have come and gone, like Flock and ShiftSpace, not to mention closed sites like Google's page wiki, Diigo, etc that died or haven't really taken off. These sites help organize content by tags and commentary. I know I'm not the only one who ends up with browsers full of tabs with helpful information I want to retain, yet bookmarks are vastly inadequate. I could take the attitude that if it's important I'll find it again, but that's not always true, and a collaborative site could help discover and shape really useful content. How to tag things is part of the problem, but it carries a solution in how to link tags.

Is there something inherent about these types of sites that dooms them? Or with new peer to peer technologies (WebRTC, offline browser functionality, peer to peer storage) is there likely to be something smarter than Facebook for use by a large number of people? What works and doesn't work about these types of sites?

dclara4• 13 years ago

I have the same concern about link sharing and more broadly information sharing for many years. I came across some social bookmark sites, such as del.icio.us, diigo, Pinboard, etc. Although some of them has millions users, tagging and stack are still not easy to use.

So I worked out my own solution based on the research and investigation on this domain for a long time. Right now, I'm reading the book from David Siegel: Pull - The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business. It covers various aspects of how to make web a meaningful community with common standards.

However, lots of previous efforts are not that successful, due to the difficulties for the industry to accept one standard. For example, in the book publishing industry, publishers, distributors and retailers all have their own catalog structures. When librarians want to classified all the books into a standard catalog, they failed again.

This told me that never pursue a common and standard catalog for any industry, just like the fact that there is no common product SKU list for the UPC classification. As long as we can organize the information in a de facto format to meet user needs, it should be good to go.

So I've published the beta site BingoBo.com for people to comment and have free trial. If you are interested in it, you can get more information from the Kickstarter project here: http://kck.st/JNqv8z, my blog site: http://bingobo.info or contact me at danmark.clara _at_ yahoo.com.

davidy1232• 13 years ago

your site isn't at all about open collaborative sharing though, especially with "patent pending," sheesh! how would any of the good ideas of the semantic web work if it were all patented?

dclara4• 13 years ago

Initially you were talking about "the best way to share information", right? BingoBo provides an efficient way to meet this kind of need. You also mentioned about the peer-to-peer solution which might be possibly helpful in resolving this type of problem. BingoBo has it built in.

Maybe it's too much for you to get the whole idea of BingoBo in the first place, so you feel like pretty frustrated. BingoBo is a platform to help users and businesses to share and save useful information which meets your initial request in your original post.

Now you are talking about "open collaborative sharing", this is a different topic. If you read the book from David Siegel, you can find the existing Semantic Web solutions are not successful. They are trying to pursue common standard and make collaborative sharing. But it's hard for the industries to follow due to the high cost and difficulties to adopt.

We have to face the reality. Semantic Web has a good intention, but only the solution with business value will have customers on the market.

Patent pending is to protect the technology and unique solution BingoBo worked out during the passed years. It does not stop anybody from sharing information. Especially, it helps various kinds of people to participate in the sharing effort instead of building by itself. It's not a closed platform.

This week I'm going to introduce the distributed computing architecture and how BingoBo applied it. On Fri. I'll unveil the software package for our tech folks to download and play with in order to quickly start a local sub-site to get the ball rolling.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. I'll be happy to discuss with you.

dclara4• 13 years ago

ShiftSpace.com domain name is on sale now.