Requests and Future Thoughts

The more I use Biznik the more I appreciate it for the clean design that has been implemented and I try and hone my thoughts on improvements that will not distort that but continue to build upon. Please don't take anything I say with mal-intent. I know great things are coming and the technologist in me loves to refine and iterate.

Login

While it's more geeky it's coming along quite nicely, what about OAuth implementation. Does Biznik use hcard/microformatting?

Community Signups

When a new user signs up, if you know their zip/city go ahead and put them in their community. While it is easy to change many don't realize it's even a necessity.

Personalization

I would like to see a few more personalization's appear on your profile.

There are so many graphic data-stores we use, flickr, photobucket, picasa, etc, many of them have api's, I'd love to share some specific tags of my flickr feed.

The previous idea could also bridge other video media's too. Have a Blip, Youtube, UStream, Mogulus feed?

How about bringing in some further social media's like my twitter or plurk stream? Or this could be simplified by just allowing a few more RSS cached streams of choice.

Article Creation Previews (writing in my text editor w/ markup gets cluttered after a while.. I really need to see if it's aligning right) Draft Saving (Craft the articles anytime, anywhere) Ability to add Pictures/multi-media (Imagery is part of my life, many articles I have in my head would like more media for substance.) Some html is ok, what exactly is ok? img src? or just b/em ideas?

FAQs

Think about turning some of this over to a community driven wiki. Maintain your core concepts yourself but then let the community help to add to it. It took me a while this morning to dig out where exactly I could get Formatting Help since it was not in the FAQ and the button is not on all posting pages. The HTML question above can be resolved by that as well. Leverage crowd sourcing when you can, you've got some great members here that dig in.

Future Thoughts

These thoughts are just me casting my techno-vision forward, not necessary to implement, but might be cool if it was given thought.

With GeoLocation become more and more prevalent utilize the hooks in something like Yahoo's Fire Eagle to bring us closer together. If I'm on a trip to NYC or Seattle and Fire Eagle knows it because Dopplr knows it, show me some upcoming events or people I might want to contact when in that location.

Other Cities, the concept is a rough one to me. It changes your location, it doesn't deliver information from those cities as is what I think in logic. Think about having these action generate more localized information within a user determined, or predefined radius, 500mi? Clicking on them shouldn't move you but tell you something. I love Seattle but I live on the East Coast. Show me populated places around me. Atlanta, Raleigh, Columbia, etc, based on either users, events, activity, something.

Above all try and not recreate the wheel if you can help it. Save yourself time by leveraging other networks and the upcoming thoughts on the shared web. Expose hooks, and hook into those things exposed.

So these are some thoughts I've had after a few weeks of really digging in full tear. I'm looking forward to the communities growth and the next evolutions.

-andy