Yesterday, maybe driven by a kind of nostalgia, I had an idea and submitted it to the wisdom of crowds on FriendFeed. I called it the SMA: Social Media Algebra. What I wanted, and hope someone will help me build it is: a formalism, a mathematic formulation of social media notions ; a theory.

Why? To be honnest, I admit that I currently don’t have any precise clue on how to fomalize this idea, and make it alive, but what I’m sure of is that with a set of mathematic tools we can all innovate, and most important of all: be able to demonstrate things, and understand social media behaviors without all the intense arguments of literature-ish discussions.

Is the SMA doable? Yes, SURE it is! Will it be useful, I bet so. Will you help? Tell me :)

Then, I saw dozens of people setting up profiles on SocialWhois, probably due to his and other tweets and to the article by mashable. So I'm late (as usual) but I hope I'll explain in some words what is SocialWhois, and why it really matters.

Popularity is NOT Value

I bet many people already hate me because i'm always repeating this, but what makes something worth attention is what YOU are looking for. I mean, we people, are driven by our interests. That's not a bad thing, no, really. We have centers of attentions ; things that matter to us. And these interests are different for everyone. Thus, if you're really looking for valuable information, you'd better find it from people who do care about it. Popular people are just people like you and me, and their interests aren't obligatory yours! And that's what I tried to demonstrate with SocialWhois. Because Talk is Cheap…

Personal Interests are THE Value

Do you remember that blog post by Loïc?? Well, I'm one of those who believe that this is wrong and sadly both Twitter and FriendFeed (and almost every social network) implements people recommendation algorithms based on popularity. Now, tell me, how can Loïc help you with a python problem? I don't know if Loïc knows how to code with python. Do you? Another example: Our good old Robert Scoble likes Eminem, yes he really does! But for a jazz lover like me, can I chat about Coltrane with Robert? Yes, I can, because Robert used to be (and still is, I hope) a jazz lover too!

See what I mean? This is the better social media i'm talking about: Finding and interracting with people who are likely to share your interests, exchange experience, fun, learn new stuff… Robert is popular, but that's not the reason why I like the guy. I like him because he is really a nice man, and his interests happened to be mine too! (i.e tech, geeking…)

Seriously, what's SocialWhois?

Ok, so SocialWhois is a tool to find and share fun with people who share your interests! That's it. It will help you find what people are interested in, find people who are interested in different topics so you can follow them on social networks, discuss about things that matter to both of you. And that's what makes it fun!

SocialWhois is about everything but popularity. You'll think that it's hypocrisy or irony, but I (SocialWhois' creator) am not popular on SocialWhois! And guess what, I like it that way! Really :) In fact, on SocialWhois, no one is popular. Social media is not represented by a pyramid of big guys with tons of followers in the top and the rest of us in the base. No, SocialWhois could be described by a graph of people sharing interests. You can navigate in the graph and discover new faces, and the way this graph is being traversed is different for everyone of us.

You can see what SocialWhois can do for you in the about page and the Faqs. And if you still have some questions on how to setup things or just wonder how to use it. Please feel free to leave a comment in my SocialWhois Public Inbox or join us in the SocialWhois FriendFeed room. Your questions and suggestions are very welcome!

Finally, i'd really like to thank everyone who helped me with feedback, suggestions and support! The project took me about a month and was launched very early, but overall I think that the reactions are fine so far. Now, it's time for a features-marathon!

Remember my last post? “How can I help you?. So, yes it worked for me and I’ve been able to give some of my humble help to some people already and I liked it a lot!

So guessing that many people share this idea, and are willing to help if anyone asks. We’ve started a room on friendfeed and it’s working madly well! You’ll be surprised by all the skills and the good and kind hearts out there! Really!

Please —and I beg you, come and join us, because EVERYONE knows SOMETHING about SOMETHING and that SOMETHING can help SOMEONE.

No catch, no strings attached, I simply want to help in coding stuff be it: markup, style, design, python, php, linux…

Why am I doing this

Believe me, I am not bored, I actually rarely get bored, I always have something to do. If it’s not for a client, then it’d be for fun. But I really want to give some help for free, weekly. Don’t look for the catch —there isn’t any.

How to ask me for help

You can send me an email, a tweet, or meet me on friendfeed :)

I’ve been among the people over friendfeed to request filters based on interests, because even if some people like the noise —all the noise— I myself don’t. So I put my “money” ( fbrunel one’s actually, whom I thank so much!) where my mouth is and made NoiseRiver.

NoiseRiver is a web application based on the friendfeed’s API that aims to extend friendfeed with some notions like: interests and neigborhood. You still have all the flow that is in friendfeed but the flow is, from now, on colored. Green meaning that you’ll probably like the entry and red meaning that you’ll probably hate it. Yes it’s almost like feedego :)

The first minutes of the launch were some of the most stressfull minutes I lived in my coder’s life. I’ve had to fix bugs and issues so quickly with everyone complaining about “404 Not found” errors. Believe me that was… hard!

Finally, I can say that NoiseRiver is usable right now, and you can already give it a try with your friendfeed’s nick and remote key.

Of course this is just the begining and NoiseRiver will, I hope, be allways a wok in progress. So your feedback, your suggestions, errors reporting, and features queries are all welcome ! Join us in the NoiseRiver’s room