Fwd: More on couchsurfing

(sent to my web 2.0 class)

Folks-

just wanted to give you a heads- up. I got 4 friend invites on CS so
far- the way couchsurfing is geared, it tries to establish the
authenticity and nature of the relationship- in part because you are
making recommendations about strangers staying with other strangers-
so the quality of the references matter.

As such, i'm asking you to not take it personally if I put you as
acquaintances instead of friends. I know XXX from several previous
interactions. I had Morgon in a class a year ago - YYYY and I have
had several conversations outside the class thru other media- I've
spent some time on Skype with ZZZZ. So each relationship is different,
and emerging. This will also allow you to see the variety. Obviously,
i'd like to be friends with everyone, and hope we do get a chance to
meet in person (perhaps at the NC3ADL starting this weekend? Or the
NCCIA immediately thereafter? Or the League in Baltimore at the end of
the month?).

In addition, couchsurfing is one of the few sites that encourages you
NOT to recommend people to join if you don't think CS is for them
(i.e. people who are not interested in travel or travellers, or
meeting new people, or hosting or being hosted by strangers). I don't
know you guys well enough, but it's a very rich site in the way it
uses social media, and as I've said before, very much ties the real
world to the virtual.

Please, as you look at this, and other sites and tools, compare them.
One thing that should become immediately obvious across many of these
applications is the ability to:

Customize a profile, including links to other sites, other people, and
icon/photos of self
Way to contact people via profiles, including messaging/mail service
Link to friends/others
Uploading of photos and/or videos
Creation of and joining groups, and the ability to treat those groups
as listservs
Tagging (the future- web 3.0 - the semantic web)
The ability to invite others to associate themselves with you
(friending?) and/or join
The ability to scan other applications for connections.

When I think about flickr, blogger (and other google tools),
couchsurfing, facebook, twitter, ning, and linked in, they all seem to
have MOST of these elements- so then we have to ask, what makes them
different. You can put photo albums on flickr, or facebook, or
couchsurfing - so why one over the other? Yet they all originate with
very different purposes in mind.

Part of your job is to understand the similarities and the
differences, and know when they matter, and when they don't.

--
D.I. von Briesen
God is Greater