edit Initial Idea for a Facebook Application

Imagine wiki functionality right in your profile. You can have your user-page load up right away and there is an edit button for any of your friends to edit your user-profile. Perhaps you can also set it to go to your organization instead of your user profile, but I think that would be less popular.

edit Public vs. Private

We then have a choice in how we allow users to edit. Either we provide them with their own unique wiki user-space, so an article they create for Harry Potter would be stored at AboutUs at (facebookuser-name) Harry Potter, or we connect everyone together so it would go straight to the Harry Potter article. Disadvantage of a commons is that is harder to organize and the individual can't exercise complete control; advantage of a commons is that you benefit from the work of others and you can discover communities within the wiki. I like both ideas. On one-hand I could imagine a bunch of people using a personal wiki as a interlinked journal, their web of experiences, books, etc.; it would also allow people to create an entry like Beach House or Weekend in Astoria (stored as (facebookusername) Beach House) that I don't think would work if we use a combined namespace. This way my friends who were at Astoria can come in and edit the article through facebook. On the other hand, I like the idea of bringing people together through wiki and working as a larger community. We would need to have a debate about which version is more practical and creates the most value.

edit Concerns

• What do we do if we move to a log-in to edit model? People might not bother to create an account just to edit their friend's facebook widget, on the other hand it reduces abuse cases.

edit Possible Solution

• Allow both public and private wiki functionality. Possibly two brackets to link to a public page such as Harry Potter or three brackets to create a private page such as My Weekend at the Beach.

edit Competition

So far we would have first-mover advantage. Wikipedia has an application, but it is just wikipedia in a facebook shell which is really inconvenient.

edit Dev Perspective

Talked to Stephen and Jason today and they think implementing a facebook widget with mediawiki is suicidal. We should instead build flash implementation into topsoil and move forward from there. Sounds like this version of the widget is tabled for another 2-3 dev cycles.