Playing with dolls
During December I’m playing with dolls! Stardoll is a community where little girls (and boys) can play with “paper” dolls. As a user you create a me-doll that resembles (or doesn’t resemble) you, then you dress and accessorize your doll. Other than that, Stardoll has the common functionality found in most communites.
Judging by this description, Stardoll may not seem like the most interesting community out there. What puts it very high up on my list of places to work at is their 45 million users. 45 million!
I mostly do front-end there, but it’s extremely interesting to get an insight in all the technical details of such a large community and to see how they work; the server setup, release cycles and getting a feeling of the place and the people there. I really love my job, but I think my me-doll looks a bit grumpy?
Experimenting with social web
I’m really excited about all the fun ideas I’ll be able to build once I quit my full time job and start freelancing (it’s only a few weeks left now, weeeee!).
When I was a student a few years back, I had time to build feminetik.se (a feminist community) together with Josefine Alvunger. We didn’t do it for profit, we just had a vision. feminetik.se was our baby, and even if we listened to the users to some extent regarding smaller features, we basically did stuff our way.
Today I wouldn’t choose to work quite like that. feminetik.se never reached any larger amount of members, even if the ones that were there were quite productive (the forum has over 300 000 entries today). There is so much to learn from those years, some things we did right, some could’ve been more optimal. That’s a whole other blog entry (or five) though.
Now I’d like to build a website where the users participate in creating the site from start and a few days back I got an idea from a brilliant Facebook group where users give stuff away to each other. They simply post entries to the wall saying what they want to give away and where the item can be found. And this is not just an easy way to get rid of old stuff, it’s a whole culture of recycling and environmentally aware people.
There are sites doing this on the web already, but they’re mostly simple forums. I want to build on the social aspects of this:
1) Geo-tagging of the objects making them easy to find on a map
2) Not use categorizing like at “Blocket”, instead use tagging. I haven’t solved the issue of being able to browse through objects planlessly yet though.
3) Enable follow ups, for example letting users post pictures and stories of them using the object (”Look here is my daughter playing in the sofa you gave us!”, “Here I am at a party in your old dress!”).
4) Make it easier for people with similar interests to find each other. For example, maybe all latte moms and dads in the southern part of Stockholm would like to have a meetup for swapping old children’s clothes?
5) Use existing technology. Google App Engine, OpenID, Facebook connect etc.
I pitched the idea in the Facebook group, which has 5000 members, and people seemed very positive and enthusiastic. Some even offered to help out! This is still only an idea, but there seems to be an interest for a site like this and it’s perfect for me to use as a playground for a while. We’ll see where this leads, I’ll blog continuously if I decide to start developing this site!
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