There’s an interesting debate unfolding around in the social networking space. It’s a debate as to whether or not the “friending” that is taking place in social networks like Facebook or Twitter are actually adding scalable value. Considering the fact that Facebook’s algorithm, elegantly called EdgeRank, is one that is driven by real time signals, your news feed probably resembles a tight knit group of friends. This means, you may only see the actual news updates of at the most, 5 or so friends.
The problem here is that you may actually have hundreds, if not thousands of friends on Facebook yet not see a single update from over 95% of them. This seems to be the problem that Teethie is wanting to solve.
Nina Khosla is the brain child behind the concept of Teethie. And what Nina wants to achieve is “friending” and “following” those who we are willing to show more than a base level of cordial social behavior towards (read more about she defines this). Nina is a 22-year-old designer and entrepreneur who went to Stanford to study product design. She’s a high school drop out, a ski racer, and is now working on the social blogging platform called Teethie.
Perhaps Facebook has it right though. The algorithm that drives Facebook’s news feed is more about artificial intelligence, robots determining relevancy based on interactions and actions you (or anyone) has taken. So with Facebook, you could have 5,000 friends, but based on the people you are physically interacting with on a regular, consistent basis, your news feed will be ranked accordingly to give more of an emphasis on these people. Isn’t this, in effect, achieve a highly vertical presentation of the most relevant people in your life, those you are actually interacting with? The simple answer is “yes”, but I think there is much more left on the tablet to figure out.
Teethie is not yet launched, so I don’t really have anything to go off. But Teethie is going to attempt to provide the solution that social networks like Facebook and Twitter fail to solve – create highly vertical social networking circles made up of people who are more than just cordial, brief interactions.