A Facebook Supported Online Parliament

I just came across this interesting idea on TechCrunch.

Jon Evans: Is Facebook Finally Going To Do Something Interesting?

An online parliament would be nice. The administrator would invite people or keep the voter pool open. The online parliament would allow for the holding of elections and subsequent debates.

Say I run an organization that has 500 members. I would use the Facebook Online Parliament to get all members to join, and then to hold elections, and to hold subsequent debates. The debate of course would include the organization's budget.

The election process has the nomination process. Say there are five offices and 30 people running for each of them. The organization should have the option to hold a run off election between the top two vote getters.

I think it would be fun. It would be great. It would make some serious noise if Facebook were to make it possible to do this at large scales. How about being able to do it for an organization with 10,000 members? Or a country with half a million people? Or, god forbid, a country with 50 million people? The election commission of the country would have to put together an official list saying these Facebook members are voting citizens. That would be a challenge, but a much lesser challenge than is the putting together of the current offline voter lists. They leave out too many people in the first place.

This would be huge.

This is not Facebook Groups. The Facebook Online Parliament would be a whole different ball game, a different magnitude altogether.

I hope they nail this by the next F8 Conference.

This online parliament would be great for democratic organizations where each person is one vote. Something different would have to be built for corporate organizations. Facebook should go ahead and built that too.

Buy Asana. Integrate it into Facebook. Add features.

The Facebook Revamp Is Heartwarming

Image by bsimser via FlickrEarlier I listened to a few tunes that Facebook informed me my friends had listened to and it was a good experience. I greatly liked it. And I am also noticing that Facebook now does a much, much better job of letting visitors to my page see all my activities. You get a time stamp next to each action on my part. It is now so much easier for anyone to stay in touch with me.

The subscribe thing is the best thing Facebook ever did. I don't think you should be one person to your friends and another person to your fans. And we all deserve to have a few fans.

I have not fully experienced the full set of new features, but I am reporting here to say the new Facebook has had a good start with me. It has been so good I might even seek out and watch the Zuck keynote. I already watched the Zuck parody that preceded it. Mark Zuckerberg, funny guy.

The HTML5 Whimper At F8
Facebook New Look

The Facebook Search Engine

Image via WikipediaNo surprise there. The whole idea behind the like button has been to take over the web. Mark Zuckerberg made it very clear in his speech at the F8 conference that that is what the like button was for. Just like Facebook should be your primary place online, the like button should tell you where to go instead of the links that the Google engine depends on. That was the hint.

GigaOm: Facebook Ramping Up The Social In Its Search Engine: The new feature is the latest step in rolling out the network’s social-search engine — which could become a competitive threat for Google and other traditional search companies, as more users turn to recommendations from their networks instead of those determined by algorithms.

What has been giving me headaches for months and months now is as to why Facebook will not make it possible for me to search my own wall, and that of my friends. If I could I might be able to use my Facebook wall as the repository of links I might want to visit later on. That would be a huge incentive for me to share more links on Facebook. That in turn would make Facebook searches even better.

GigaOm: Is Facebook's Social Search Engine A Google Killer?: one of the company’s goals was to use the resulting behavioral data to power a social search engine — one based on likes instead of links .... more than a million websites — including some highly trafficked sites such as The Huffington Post — have integrated its features, and 150 million of the network’s more than 400 million users “engage with Facebook” in some way through external sites every month. ...... Being able to search for recommendations from close to half a billion users could be very powerful..... since Facebook’s Open Graph protocol is theoretically an open standard, there is the potential for Google to use that to pull in the network’s results in the same way it uses Twitter’s API ...... gave the network a relatively puny 2.7 percent share of the U.S. search business, but still put it ahead of AOL.

The human part is when I press that like button, which I do all the time. (Hello Mark!) The machine part is what Facebook does after I have already pressed that like button. The human part was when someone placed that link. The machine part was Google making sense of the link. There are clear parallels.

All Facebook: BREAKING: Facebook Now Displaying All Liked News Articles In Search Results: based on two things: the number of likes and the number of friends who liked that object ..... shows how important Facebook’s Open Graph is to the future of the company. ..... the content displayed “is only available for articles shared by your direct friends (not globally to all users on Facebook).” Additionally, “This is not surfaced to you based solely on number of ‘Likes’ for the article.”

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