Click here for the demo of tribescape

Hello Charles,

Thanks for your interest. I would try to illustrate events and thoughts that led to conceptualization of Tribescape.

As Meredith Morris of Microsoft Research[1] puts it “Collaboration on information-seeking tasks is actually quite commonplace.” I second her opinion. I think asynchronous participation, ready-made groups and a suitable distribution channel are essential components of collaborative search.

I hope the term “distribution channel” made you think for a moment. As a contributor you would want your findings to be received and viewed/reviewed by your peers ASAP. Yet as a recipient you would prefer some alert and then browse this resource at your own convenience. Look no further because Twitter is here! Twitter’s platform or should I say “communication and distribution channel,” does exactly this.

You search the web from Tribescape (currently Google results)

* Select your recipients from your twitter followers, and
* Share your findings as direct messages.

In the meantime,

* Twitter has already sent an alert to all your recipients,
* You browse this result whenever you want or depending on your urgency, and
* Your finding was archived by Tribescape*

All messages i.e. results are appended with shortened Bit.ly urls, which has its own benefits. Users could track overall popularity of results and response of group members.

Width and depth of collaborative search is overwhelming. Lot of exciting utilities could be added to this service. Few obvious features would include – creating and saving work/project groups, rating/voting, stats charts and  tweeting your finds. More advanced features would include – keyword sharing, task splitting, contributor ranking and recommendation and advanced visualization [2, 3].

This version was released on July 1, 2009, so it’s just the beginning. I hope users would find this app useful and I would let users decide its future course. I would want it to be a mainstream search tool, but somehow I sense that groups of users like college students, small developer teams and enterprise teams would find it more useful.

- Dhruba Baishya
http://www.tribescape.org/

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/merrie/collaborative_search.html
[2] http://www.springerlink.com/content/b44888j184765051/
[3] http://www.actapress.com/PaperInfo.aspx?PaperID=31147&reason=500

*Initially I tried to make it a database-free application, where all resources will be stored in Twitter cloud. Unfortunately twitter won’t allow you to retrieve more than 100 direct messages..

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