The Social Wave Blog by Sheldon Chang

It’s here. It’s finally here. After too many delays after delays, I’m happy to announce the release of Social Wave 1.0. Its gone back to the drawing board many times after I felt like I was simply falling in the trap of following in the footsteps of the much trumpeted social networks like Friendster and Tribe. Had I decided to take my ideas and expertise to a sponsoring organization, Social Wave may have ended up following an over-beaten path as a proud clone of a now withering concept. Luckily, I decided to keep Social Wave entirely in my own hands.

Social Wave won’t ever fall victim to the fate of being the hot and hip thing one day and an aging afterthought the next. I’ve intentionally modeled it after the time tested social structure of the physical community. It may not sound quite as sexy as the ideal of a virtual online community of like-minded people around the world interconnected to produce the social structure for the next “x” number of years, but then again the work of building real communities constrained by the limits of social and psychological scale will never grow old. There are no also-rans the work of creating real communities that you can see, feel, and touch.

As I finish up with some follow-up work to the release of Social Wave 1.0, I’ll be turning my attention toward generating some local publicity for it in and around the Campbell area. You can help me get a head start by telling friends who live, work, or play near Campbell about Social Wave. People who live and work far away from Campbell are welcome to come check it out too as guests, but at this time, services are only tailored toward people who spend a lot of time within 10-15 miles of Campbell, CA.

Thanks to everyone who’s been kind with encouragement and help getting Social Wave to this point. Unfortunately in the course of developing this project day unto night for the past six months, I’ve lost touch with many of you. I’d like to hear what you’ve been up to and I’d like to invite you to help me see this off to a vigorous start. Come on back to some events and take a moment to be active online. Your involvement has been instrumental so far. I could really use it now.

Ok, without further ado, here’s Social Wave Campbell: http://campbell.socialwave.net.

Sheldon Chang

In the month of March, it appears that two giants of finding stuff on the big global Internet has decided to shrink down and put a lot more emphasis on finding stuff at the local level. Is this a sign that we're starting to see the Internet as just another channel for communication rather than as the big global medium that we've been touting it as? According to one of the two referenced articles, it says that "A lot of times when people are looking for something, they want to do it on a local level...This is a core search promise."

Yahoo puts local content on the map | CNET News.com

Google goes local | CNET News.com

I gave both of these localized search interfaces a spin. Their addresses are http://local.yahoo.com and http://local.google.com. The advantage goes to Google at this early stage even though Yahoo's interface is considerably more developed. That's exactly the problem though. Yahoo's localized search interface is closely tied to CitySearch which I find to be somewhat useful, but it's always been a relevancy challenged tool for me.

I tried looking for coffeeshops in both of the interfaces and got different results in both. The Yahoo/CitySearch results were particularly bizarre. Do a search for Coffee in the town of Campbell, CA and in the top five you get Motel 6 as a coffee spot. Mmmmm, there's nothing that perks you up like really bad tasting burned Motel coffee made with rusty water. A lot of the Yahoo results were irrelevant and looked like there had been some unusual manual categorization work to influenced the results. I did find the two most important results coming up on the first page though.

The Google results were far more interesting. They not only pulled up the two big local coffeehouses that any respectable cafe directory must be able to show, but it also found one not as well known coffeeshop in my town. What was particularly exciting about the Google results was that it also included "related search items" for the business that was found. For the most part, there's not a whole lot of good related content to business listings unless that business has its own website, but in some instances it matched the name of the busines to someone's blog entry or to what would otherwise be a long buried review of the coffeehouse from a small local paper.

Google appears to be on the smarter track. By matching up content to mere business listings, they make the Web work better for people interested in using it for local purposes. As a Web designer, I hope this signals a boom for Web designers working for small local business owners. The way I see this, it could either be a great enabler or a killer for a project that I'm launching called Hometown Merchant Network, which is kinda like online dating for businesses. Loosely put, it's an online mall of local merchants with the purpose to introducing local merchants to their most likely source of sustenance, the local residents.

My problem with CitySearch is that I rarely find enough content that I want about a place even after I find the place that I'm looking for (which is more than a challenge than I want it to be). CitySearch has a built in ratings and reviews module which in theory should provide it with a killer edge against a technology like Google's that merely matches a name with random hit or miss content, but anyone who's tried to make use of the CitySearch reviews has had the experience of being frustrated by the feeling that you just can't count on the reviews. You don't know who the people are and all too often you can smell a vindicative ex-customer or some other bias in the opinions. An unmoderated reviews system in which people are mostly anonymous is trouble.

St. Patrick's day was on a Wednesday night this year and my town of Campbell, CA had a little downtown party. My town has a popular Irish pub downtown, but it's not a particularly Irish town. It just knows a good opportunity to stimulate downtown business when it smells one. St. Patrick's Day parties in Campbell weren't always the norm though, they only recently began to make it a more official event. Before, downtown was festive, but mostly due to the effects of one popular Irish pub.

One of the reasons why I moved to Campbell was because it really seemed like a town that knew how to have a good street party. We're a town of around 40,000 people, who might otherwise seem like a sleepy collection of misplaced Midwesternites. A friend of mine describes Campbell as a weird little community of Mayberry in the heart of Silicon Valley. I judge that she's not that far from the truth.

People come out for the weekend Farmer's Markets and they really came out for the St. Patrick's Day party and it wasn't for the alcohol. Some people just came out to mingle, people watch, meet up with friends, and eat nasty festival food. I noticed one particular merchant who really seemed to take advantage of the extra foot traffic to get people to hang out at her store. The store is Radio Daze Collectables, a throwback novelties and collectables store that eBay couldn't quash right in eBay's backyard.

The owner of the store, Marji Gilmore, had strobelights set up to draw people to her recessed shop at the end of a courtyard of closed shops. Outside she had set up patio chairs and umbrellas especially for the event. She was providing just an alternate social scene for people who wanted to get away from the crowds and the noise. As a special diversion, her store and all its interesting items would provide considerable amusement to any bored companions waiting for people to come on out of the crowd.

With a little more community coordination, these sorts of things could become a culture of events within events. This is like a resturant putting an ad up in a movie theater to encourage patrons to go eat there after the movie's out. The two go hand in hand. A community that has a stable online interface could easily use it to plan alternate social events so that main events truly can cater a little something for everyone.

Not every small business can afford to get enough advertising to benefit from the promotion of big events, but just about all of them should be able to do something to make it more marketable like Marji's store. Add a little Internet word of mouth and those efforts may go a long way.