No, I am not being paid to plug this site. To be honest, all of what I said above is not meant to be taken seriously. I came across this site while I perused my RSS subscriptions. I found out about this site through TechCrunch. I just went to the homepage of the Friends of Family site. I have no intentions of trying this service.

I do find this interesting. I think most families are pretty cocooned in this day and age. I am not sure how most people my age find community. My community revolves around my church family. But at times I do not feel as connected as I would like to. The daily grind of just managing life with 2 now 3 kids does not leave me a lot of energy to be proactive about setting up time with other families. My wife and I have been a part of a small group with some other couples with small kids. That could be a challenge finding a babysitter from week to week. And now the group is splitting up because several of the families are relocating.

Interesting where this post went. I started out just mentioning a new social networking site and now I am pondering being involved in community. I think there is more I could say. But I will save that for another time.

I encourage you to visit Kathy’s article on the Creating Passionate Users blog. She has an interesting chart that shows the scary similarities between group therapy and Web 2.0.

The del.icio.us lesson

• Personal value precedes network value
• People rarely do things for the “good of the network”
• Del.icio.us, though providing very cool tagging features, is mostly about a single person remembering items for later.

His third point resonates with me because that is how I use del.icio.us. I think it points to the fact that Web 2.0 is really about helping individuals accomplish their goals. Recommendations are helpful when they help me accomplish what I want.

Joshua has some other interesting observations or lessons on what we have learned so far about leveraging the Web.

Joshua Porter did a seminar on Web 2.0 and here is my summary. He talked about it using different themes he has identified.

• Information Remixing — He showed us housingmaps.com which is “mash up” of Google Maps and Craig’s List. Information remixing takes previously disparate information and ties them together in new ways that are more useful.
• Architecture of Participation — We looked at del.icio.us. This theme takes one person’s activity and makes it a useful tool for others. Del.icio.us allows a user to enter bookmarks and then tag them with different categoried that are useful to that person. Then I can look to see what others have put under those tags. It is collabortive filtering that takes personal info to help others find valuable content.
• Social Networking — Flickr and Netflix would be examples of this. This theme deals with sorting information based on who I am and who my personal authorities are.
• Interfaces — This theme deals with making new interfaces for content through what are referred to as APIs or Application Programming Interfaces. One example is Andale which uses information in eBays database to help those who sell on eBay become better at it. Here is a description from their website, “Andale Research is a power tool that can boost your sales every day. By helping you uncover the secrets to successful selling on eBay and formulate winning pricing strategies, it can show you how to sell more and maximize your profits on every sale.”

I thought Joshua did a good job of trying to make the concept of Web 2.0 a little easier to understand.